Susan Petrilli

Justice, fairness and juridical perfectibility

Abstract Aristotle had already underlined the importance of the relationship between justice and equity (a term I interpret as synonomous to fairness), which he analysed in great detail. Equity is the term which in the English translation of Aristotle’s works corresponds to epiekes (Greek). A starting point for my paper will be Aristotle’s considerations on the relationship between equity and justice. In English we have “equity,” “impartiality,” “fairness,” “equitableness”. Do we distinguish between these terms? is there any difference? In what follows I discuss equity, or better the relation between equity and justice, treating equity and fairness as the same thing. According to Aristotle equity and justice are neither completely the same nor generically different. If they are different either the just or the equitable is not good; or, if they are both good, they are the same (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. V, Ch. 9, 10, p.u20061019). Briefly, we could make the claim that equity (fairness) corrects the tendency that characterizes justice towards abstraction, impartiality and indifference, which in fact constitute the condition of possibility for justice to obtain. Equity opens to singularity, to unreplaceability, to uniqueness, shifting justice from the relation of indifference to the other, to the relation of unindifference to the other, to each and every other considered in his or her absolute unrepeatability.

Synchronicity and Responsibility in Semiotics

Abstract The synchronic vision is the expression of conscious awareness of the present situation, a totalizing vision capable of gazing at all of life responsibly, at all semiosis over the planet. John Deely’s vision of synchrony’s inevitable seepage into diachrony is connected with the fact that we are members of the societies of human animals who first engendered a “community of inquirers focused on the action of signs”. Deely reconstructs the pathway that from Saussurean semiology leads through Charles Peirce, Charles Morris, and Thomas Sebeok to the new “science of signs” conceived, recovering Locke, as the “doctrine of signs”. Insofar as the human animal is a “semiotic animal” he or she is capable of metasemiosis and therefore of knowledge and control. Consequently, the human animal, a semiotic animal, is also susceptible of responsibility: responsibility that concerns not only the human world and the possibility of the future of anthroposemiosis, but rather all of semiosis, all of terrestrial life, “Gaia”. Insisting on the interdependency, in semiotics, between synchronicity and responsibility, Deely evidences the specific task of semiotics, which is a task that is reserved to the semiotician as such.