Our whole civilization is a fundamentally asymptotic project. The same way that artists, scholars, and athletes are never satisfied. It’s the human condition.
That said, your claim that
morality has no place in a justice system
is such a basic misunderstanding of the entire point of human civilization, I’d be curious to hear what you think we’re doing when we debate and pass laws.
Yes, it does mean there was an injustice. Any discrepancy between the moral outcome and the legal one is an injustice. Civilization is the struggle to reduce or reconcile that massive dichotomy.
The morally ideal outcome for rapists is instant death. That’s impractical (since it would endanger victims, for instance, and make people upset). So we have optimum alternatives.
You’re misinterpreting my claim. The optimific outcome, the one that results in the most moral good, is the death of the rapist. Literally. If a law of the universe caused rapists to be instantly struck dead, this would be best.
The different normative question of what we should do (by definition, morally speaking) is also a practical one, exactly as you said.
The purpose of my original claim is to highlight the distance between the morally optimal outcome (simpliciter) and the justice system.
Valve is a company that garnishes 30% of all video games sales. It doesn’t matter what their corporate structure is at that point. It could be two guys with buckets on their heads and they’d make bank.
Sometimes we use technical jargon to say something that we later realize is fairly simple. It might be obvious in retrospect, but still require thousands of years to understand, during which time the technical language is essential.
Anyway, other times we just need new words for new concepts. You can’t contemplate what you cannot name. Even the smartest humans are stupid by default and ordinary language is outstripped by our intellectual ambitions.
New concepts require new words. They also relate to each other in interesting ways, which have names, too.
Alternatively, if I ever wanted to assert something more complicated than the weather I’d need to re-build the entire conceptual framework from scratch using small words and pictures.
There is no “fantasy,” just indifference. I have no clue what everyone else is doing, but I didn’t fight my way from homelessness and into college “to get a job.”