Descartes Discourse On Method

Justice is a manmade concept, a product of morality and the human condition that doesn't exist outside of our social norms. In Descartes Discourse on Method, it is obvious that justice cannot have been imparted by a divine being because it is so lacking in perfection, and it wouldn’t have survived the exponential flurries of mitosis that crafted this world from a molten orb. Nature is not considered fair or just by our standards, and natural selection, as explained in Darwin’s Origin of Species, is a process we have been struggling to halt in favor of preserving life for decades. A manmade concept is an idea that only humans can possess and understand. It is something considered beyond the rest of the animal kingdom, and often characterized

According to passages in the Bacchae and Discourse on Method, it cannot. As I mentioned in my introduction, Descartes talks about an idea of a being more superior to himself who he names as God. Because he knows he is imperfect, he deduces that the idea of perfection was, “…put in my mind by a nature that was really more perfect than I was, which had all the perfections that I could imagine, and which was, in a word, God (22).” If God is perfect, than why would he have imparted such a flawed justice system? You could argue that He gave us a pure idea of justice to begin with, and our sinful minds corrupted it, but that contradicts Descartes’s logic. If we can imagine perfection and a perfect being, then it follows that we can imagine perfect justice as well. Anyone who has seen the news recently knows this is not the case. There are obvious and preventable biases that are always at work in our society. Racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, and many other discriminatory factors influence “justice” enough to discredit the idea that a perfect being created moral phenomenon. What if we stepped away from monotheistic deities and looked at, say, Bacchus? He is obviously not a perfect being. In the Bacchae, his whole purpose is vengeance against the mortals who refuse to accept his status as a God. While our justice system is imperfect, it is not modeled to exact revenge against wrongdoers. Instead, it aims to protect society. This means it cannot have come from any of the hot headed, petty minded Greek Gods either. In the Bacchae, the king of Thebes refuses to believe Bacchus a God: “You know that Cadmus makes his grandson, Pentheus, king, with all the kingly prerequisites; that Pentheus opens war on deity in me, wards me off his sacrifices, cuts me from his prayers…” Bacchus’s brand of justice involved driving Pentheus’s mother insane so she tore