Cases like Natasha O’Brien’s trigger a sudden, disturbing voice in the collective consciousness – The Irish Times

Regular readers of Joe Humphreys’ excellent Unthinkable column may be disappointed not to find him here, pondering as usual. I’ll keep the site warm for a few weeks while Joe is away and continue the conversation. After all, there’s a reason philosophy is so important, and why philosophers are rarely a hit at parties. Philosophy requires us to say the hard thing – that the right choice is not always obvious. It is ultimately fed by doubt, which is a necessary prerequisite for wisdom.

As the philosopher in the rumpled shirt at Dave’s birthday party will tell you, there are no settled questions. If we have certainty – if we are absolutely sure that we are right – then we are not open, and without openness we can neither learn nor be sure that we know what we claim to know. Asking questions in good faith, knowing that the answer is not immediately obvious, is not only important for staying sane in a world of overconfidence. It is the foundation of any just society.

Doubts have been at the root of the consternation and public outrage since Cathal Crotty, a serving soldier, left a Limerick court after receiving a three-year suspended sentence. He had beaten a young woman named Natasha O’Brien unconscious in an attack on a Limerick street in 2022. The verdict came at a time when the issue of gender-based violence is particularly sensitive. Two days earlier, Women’s Aid Ireland had reported the highest rate of violence against women ever recorded. Outside court, O’Brien said: “This is not justice.”

In the case of the horrific crime committed against O’Brien, whose fortitude was exemplary throughout, many people, especially women, want justice. But justice itself is elusive – we notice when it is absent, often because that absence affects us emotionally. What exactly justice requires, however, is less clear.

Most political philosophy since John Rawls’s 1971 A Theory of Justice has been concerned with the concept of justice. He focused on ideal theory to determine the principles and structures that would govern a truly just society. Rawls was well aware that he did not live in a just society any more than we do, and argued that to create the conditions for justice, we must first determine principles that shape an ideal society without knowing anything about what our own place or status might be in it. He called this placing ourselves behind a “veil of ignorance.” The goal is to maximize fairness and independence from bias.

Those who wish for an Irish legal system that is more responsive to gender-based violence may not realise that it would be particularly helpful to look beyond Rawls’ veil of ignorance. And this is where doubt comes in.

In an ideal world, what should we strive to do to overcome the discrepancy between gender-based violence and our sense of justice? Perhaps justice should ideally be done behind the veil, as Rawls suggests. Or perhaps we should lift it entirely, because people are different and context matters.

Should we advocate for harsher punishments for acts of violence by men against women? If so, does that mean that violence by women against men is less reprehensible? If we imagine that society is systematically patriarchal and misogynistic, does it follow that men are to blame on both of the above issues? But if that is the case, do we risk seriously curtailing women’s agency and giving men disproportionate power? And of course, for those who believe that the entire rotten justice system is patriarchal, there is no point in adapting or changing it. It would be like putting a cool new spoiler on a burned-out Honda Civic. A completely broken system would need to be replaced, and this creates new problems. New doubts.

We generally assume that the rule of law is sacrosanct – that it establishes not just legal truths but moral ones. Cases like O’Brien’s provoke a sudden, unsettling voice in the collective consciousness. The voice of doubt. Ireland reacts with unease to the misguided certainty of a system that meant justice meant Crotty left court with a suspended sentence, and that produced a judge who interpreted the law in a way that might protect Crotty’s career.

This certainty makes our political and legal systems rigid and unchangeable. Philosophical doubt is valuable. It allows us to create space to imagine systems that reflect our values ​​and to think with new eyes about what justice means.