Justice and Envy

I feel that at this point it might be useful to rearticulate the purpose of justice: something to protect the individual or the group. If Hume is correct that justice exists because of social constructs, then perhaps Marxist society would be ajust, or at least less concerned with the subject. But could that really be the case? Would people cease to envy other's beauty or charisma in a utopian (Humian) or Marxist world? If we shift the human focus from individual money and work to communal living, would we not learn to envy something else?

We are constantly creating norms of beauty, norms that generally stem from Hollywood, or other wealthy public individuals. This system creates ugly and beautiful people who are born into a world of norms; remove money (for Marx) and those elite few no longer control those norms. So who would take the place? I am hopeful that we would forget about such ideas, but, we would still desire entertainment in the form of movies, books, theater, etc. which must illustrate some ideal or theme. If these entertainment outlets are to be anything more than nonsense, they will portray how society thinks you should and should not act (given that government now controls all entertainment industries). Those forms of entertainment may portray values that not every person is entitled to experience.

The mute person may feel slighted at the notion of music as entertainment, the blind person at visual stimuli, the lower IQ at the large vocabulary used in theater. They could take out their frustration on another human, as that other human is seemingly valued more (and hence have a greater role; both in the government's portrayal of the ideal person and in the most important persons to economic stability). Importantly, note that it is what people conceive the situation to be that creates trouble and not necessarily the way the situation actually is. The only real way to stray from such problems would be to produce entertainment (and government) which is inclusive of every person. There can be no good or bad, only us; we can then hold the worst and best vocalist (and doctors) to be inherently equal, so that the worst vocalist has no reservations about his value in singing. But, it seems that this is just not how the world works. People are envious of their conception of beautiful things. And that is the construction of justice: the protection from envy of fellow human beings. Hume's conception of the utopian society which has no care for personal property still has concern for personhood, pride, courage, etc. We are animals first and foremost, like the apes we are territorial of whatever we can get our hands on, and though reason may allow us to supersede this, merely removing monetary incentives will not sufficiently stifle our nature. Do you ever really not want the best possible mate? And if someone got to him/her first, what would you do? This is the need for justice that both Marx and Hume fail to recognize, what do you think?

Perhaps a counterclaim could argue that we should do away with entertainment, and with it any sort of notion of what we could or should be. We are only informed of the way the world is (note that this is similar to Plato's idea to rid his city of poetry because of its inaccurate representations of the world, which is highly criticized).Aside from this, it seems that norms are here to stay, and though communism may rid our norms of the tinge of money, it does not rid us of human envy. And as I earlier inferred, envy seems to be the root of the most basic possible injustices, not property, and thus justice aims to protect the individual from other individuals.