Natural vs Social Justice

The ancient Greeks made both a conceptual and an ontological distinction between φύσις and νόμος, physis being the natural physical (and biological) world and its laws, and nomos the human world of society and its laws.

How are physis and nomos related? How should they ideally be related? Should nomos derive from and reflect physis? Or should the laws of nomos be different, even "better", than those of physis? (Related question: Is "civilized" ethically better than "savage"?)

One of the most ancient long-lasting human behavioural archetypes, continuing even today, is the phenomenon of humans imitating nature, observing and using the natural world as a model for how we design and run our human world. How do we build our housing? How do we grow our food? How do we clothe our bodies? In almost all domains of human activity - art, agriculture, music, mathematics, architecture, engineering, medicine... - we have traditionally turned to the natural world looking for paradigms to imitate, emulate and be guided by. An argument can in fact be made for there being a very fine line between our "imitating" nature and our "harnessing" nature, frequently both simultaneously occurring, e.g. agriculture, riding horseback, wearing fur, burning wood, damming rivers, using plants as medicines, slaughtering animals etc.

Within this very broad theme of physis vs nomos is one particular, critically important and fundamental question: Should we use the natural world as role model for social justice? Should we construct our ethical cultures and legal systems based on our observations of how the natural world functions? Or should we aspire to ethically "do better" than nature?

If "nature taking its course" might result in (for us unacceptable magnitudes of) cruelty, suffering and unfairness (some newborns dying within 2 weeks, other humans flourishing for 40 years or more), is this because nature is unethical, or is it because our "civilized" notions as to what constitutes ethical rightness, goodness and fairness are in fact both unrealistic ("unnatural") and misguided?

Adding to this, if it is the case that nature simply operates according to principles of cruelty, suffering, unfairness and other what we consider to be unethical laws, how can we possibly justify any of our convictions that our own ideas of social justice are better? Any such attempts at such justifying might likely be framed by our own nomos ethics - a closed loop...

If we inductively observe how natural justice and social justice appear to operate, and compare their similarities and differences, we might arrive at conclusions such as:

Natural justice appears to operate on a principle of might is right, embracing aggression and promoting differences, inequality and inequity, i.e. divergence towards a decentralized diversity (of species, of groups and of individuals).

Social justice, on the other hand (at least in our modern social democratic societies) operates on a principle of fairness, charity, discouraging aggression and promoting sameness, equality and equity, i.e. convergence towards a centralized uniformity ("everybody - individuals, groups, even species? - equal under the law") and mitigating differences (which are often seen as unfair): support the disadvantaged, hold back the advantaged.

Are we on the wrong or right track when it comes to our fundamental axioms of social ethics and social justice?

Last but not least, what should our meta-relationship to nature be? To answer this, should we use physis or nomos ethics? If the human species continues to apply "nature's laws" to its own treatment of nature, will we humans (not) end up increasingly monopolizing, overpowering and ultimately killing nature (and as consequence ourselves too - is self-destruction [not] one of the principles of nature?)? Or should we better shift over to our notions of social justice when dealing with the natural world, such as acknowledging "rights" of earth's minerals, rivers, forests, mountains and wildlife, aiming to support, strengthen and protect all of earth's most vulnerable and endangered flora and fauna while mitigating the powers of earth's most advantaged (namely ourselves)?

Again, how can we be so sure that social justice can be ethically superior to natural justice? And what arguments can possibly be made to counter all human ethics that are based on "might is right", "win-lose" and "unfairness is okay as long as we win"?

Photo: concept Alan Woo, execution ChatGPT