As was previously defined on this column, the polarization of American politics has seeped into the methodology of the Supreme Court, thus afflicting it with an almost strictly political outlook on its own foremost ideal, justice. All legal decisions by the Supreme Court are necessarily made to be political ones by this conflation of the ethical (the concern of the Supreme Court) and the ideological (in this instance, humanism). One of the pervading contemporary political, moral, and metaethical frameworks through which Supreme Court decisions are both internally made by SCOTUS justices and externally viewed by American society is humanism, thus making the doctrine integrally connected with the understanding of what justice is in the United States, how it is reflected in societal systems, and the manner in which it is defined.
Commodification
The notion of commodification as a necessarily existent feature of Capitalistic (i.e., Western, American) systems has its roots in post-Hegelian political thought, although it was first expounded upon as distinctly cultural by the Critical Theorists of the 20th Century, notably Adorno and Horkheimer. With respect to noumena such as justice, commodification is the subordination of both private and public realms (ideas) to the logic of capitalism (polarized political and cultural institutions). In this logic, such things as friendship, knowledge, and even abstraction itself are understood only in terms of their monetary value. In this way, they are no longer treated as things with intrinsic worth but as commodities. The idea of justice, something now deeply ingrained within social and political institutions, has become but a product of the market, something to be dictated by fluctuations within the political, cultural, and economic mediums and establishments. The commodification of justice occurs in its relegation to something quantifiably equivalent, a feature of the moral plurality. After commodification, justice is stripped of its inherent value and is only viewed consequentially, as both the existence of justice and its usefulness lie strictly in the value they provide to society. This societally defined value can take the form of moral, economic, and cultural capital, although the central principle of the formation of a product is commonly embedded throughout.
Humanism and Roe v. Wade
Of the most dubious events surrounding the Supreme Court's 2022 reversal of the Roe v. Wade decision and the consequent stripping of the federal protection of abortion, the public "doxing" of the home addresses of the five Supreme Court Justices who voted in favor of the reversal exemplifies the application the principle of the equality of thought as absolute and as a necessity in humanism. This culmination of anti-elitist (opposition to a political elite, that is) sentiment reflects drastic shifts in the way that Americans interact with the highest purveyor of justice, the Supreme Court, as well as the broader concepts of justice and “a just society.” Regardless of the actual political or legal validity of the decision or humanism itself, the generally “humanistic” response to the ordeal represents an increasingly prominent view among the humanistic politic that justice is something based on dialectical consensus and a majority-accepted morality, especially through equalizing, democratic discourse. The desire of American mainstream political humanism, notably among individuals without technical knowledge nor legal expertise, has become the challenging of the parameters of justice as established by the doctrinal basis of the Supreme Court and to reframe it into almost completely political terms. Humanism commodifies the concept of justice as a virtue in its assumption of the equality of human experience, knowledge, and what can be broadly expressed as “opinion.” Defining justice as something societally defined or interpreted is thusly anti-idealist, as it moves the concept away from the Aristotelian conception of justice as a virtue. Justice is increasingly becoming something that now exists to serve political and cultural systems, rather than something that exists for the value of itself.
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