You may have heard about a judge in a US youth court who was convicted a few years back for unfairly sending juveniles to a private detention centre. Judge Mark Ciavarella handed out custodial sentences for even the most innocuous offences, such as making insulting remarks about a school principal on social media, or stealing a DVD from Walmart. Kids brought before him were more than twice as likely to go to jail than the state average. It turns out that, in return for convic

Do you consider yourself a fair person? You’re not. Does injustice infuriate you? You yourself are unjust. Do you only give credit where credit is due? Who are you kidding? Are you an accurate judge of character when it comes to other people? Wrong. This is not meant to insult you or throw doubt on your ‘good' intentions. It is, from Nietzsche’s point of view at least, merely a statement of necessary fact. How so? In our last post we explored the delusion of both universal a

Bad news: the universe is not a fair place. Probably, most of us recognise that. We see the good die young. We see the innocent punished. We see criminals prosper and the wicked go on to live long, comfortable, fulfilling lives. Even religious people – those who hold a belief in an unfathomable divine plan and a final judgement when all inequities will be set right - even they wonder at the obvious, sheer, bloody unfairness of things. Misfortune seems to be visited on the und