We can borrow other scientific models for mapping routes towards the establishment of Justice. Let's borrow a biological model.

Let's compare Justice to health, and crime to disease. In a healthy body, the smallest units work together with common genetic goals to accomplish the result of the larger being. A healthy body is not fraught with its cells and components attacking and destroying each other.

Likewise, a healthy society is made up of smaller units (people) who are not attacking and destroying each other. Let us assume that just as a healthy human body is a natural and attainable event, a healthy society is a natural and attainable status quo.

Long ago, the causes of physical disease were a mystery. The discovery that episodes of destruction to cells and to systems were caused by virus and bacteria was a breakthrough. With this discovery, the importance of hygiene and sterile procedures was recognized. This made people much more capable of responding well to contagious disease.

Let's try on the idea that crime is very much like a contagious disease. We know that a person is predisposed towards displaying destructive behavior after they have been subject to the same destructive behavior. Our hypothesis can be that people catch violence from being exposed to violent behavior.

If this is so, it becomes dramatically obvious just how useless threats of punishment are for preventing destructive episodes.

Suppose I have measles. Suppose we believe it is a choice that I make, and not a disease I have caught through no fault of my own. Suppose we know nothing about preventing the spread of disease.

Are you going to prevent contagion by merely threatening me? Do you think I can choose to make the little dots go away, using effort and will power?  Or will I just use my efforts to conceal the signs of disease, and in so doing actually increase the overall risk of contagion?

In dealing with contagious disease, mandates and penalties are only useful if we learn enough about measles to design effective vaccination, and then set up a feedback loop to indicate if inoculation has taken place. Using mandates in this way, measles can become the rare exception instead of the norm.

So, how would we go about designing an inoculation against the diseases of criminal behavior in people?

Let us first think about some types of crime.  A simplistic definition of crime has been to say that crime equals disobedience to "laws." This disobedience is truly criminal only if we presuppose that the "laws" make some kind of sense.  We have been noticing that they often don't.

But suppose the rules we set up do make sense, being designed upon true knowledge of the nature of the contagious disease that is crime. If we truly designed rules that do eliminate tendencies towards crime, it would be criminal to ignore and defy them.

Or, perhaps "criminal" is not really a very useful term. Perhaps a more correct description of people who stubbornly refuse to prevent destructive episodes is foolish, ignorant, or unwise.

Let us consider the ideal situation of dealing with people who are aiming to be other than foolish.  Let us suppose that people have some basic intelligence.  Let suppose that people are willing to be informed and are flexible in their response.

Can we make rules that are so easy and appealing for intelligent people to follow that we can even prevent all incidence of the bad experience that is penalty?  As engineers, we would strive to do away with enforcement altogether.  Is there a positive way to set up for compliance with non-destructive ways?

We now have a system of reality that says: "As a rule, we clobber people who don't do it our (sometimes impossible and usually ineffective) way."

Can we move to a system that says "As a rule, we have such useful and comfortable ways that most everybody chooses to use them, seeing that the results are so obviously good?"

It is entirely possible that people comply with any rule to the exact extent that they share as a conscious goal the end and means that are implied by the rule, modified by the extent to which they feel capable of making a choice.

Suppose we want to improve the rate of compliance with a particular rule within any given population. We do this by improving consensus, by way of better education. And we act to enhance empowerment by creating clearer, more available good options. And neither of these has anything at all to do with punishment or enforcement.