There is a word we use so frequently it has almost lost its meaning: justice. We carve it above courthouses, invoke it in speeches, go to war in its name. We have international courts, war crimes tribunals, human rights frameworks, and a sprawling architecture of legal instruments designed to ensure that it prevails.
And yet we watch, in real time, as cities are bombed, civilians are killed, and the architects of those decisions attend summits, give press conferences, and remain entirely at liberty.
Something has gone wrong. Not recently, though it feels urgent now. Something structural, and at scale, rooted in how we have built our ethical and legal frameworks.
Law and justice are not the same thing
This seems obvious. Lawyers know it. Philosophers have said it for centuries. Yet public discourse still conflates law and justice.
Slavery was legal. The dispossession of indigenous peoples across colonised continents was legal. Apartheid was legal. The Balfour Declaration – promising land that Britain did not own to people who did not live there, without consulting those who did – was legal. Legality is what the powerful codify at any given moment. Justice is older: a human sense of what is proportionate, fair, and decent that no statute created or can fully capture.
The gap between them is not a flaw. It is often the point. Laws that appear to constrain power are frequently written by those holding it, with sufficient loopholes to ensure that it remains unconstrained in practice.
The just war and its corruption
The philosophical tradition of the ‘just war’ – running from Augustine through Aquinas to modern humanitarian law – is a genuine attempt to apply ethics to war. Its criteria are demanding: just cause, right intention, last resort, proportionality, reasonable chance of success, legitimate authority. It does not claim that war is good, only that, under some circumstances, some wars may be less wrong than the alternatives.
The war against the Nazis met most of these criteria, though the alliance with Stalin required a moral compromise – understood by Churchill and Roosevelt at the time – which was later made increasingly uncomfortable by the cold war.
Iraq in 2003 met almost none of these criteria. The weapons of mass destruction were not a mistake but a fabrication – a deliberate corruption of the ethical framework meant to prevent such wars. Blair and Bush did not abolish ‘just war’ theory: they performed it for the media. The consequences were predictable, and predicted: mass death, regional instability and the rise of ISIS from the wreckage.
Gaza now fails the same tests so comprehensively that the International Court of Justice, not given to dramatic language, has used the word genocide in its provisional rulings. Courts do not such terms carelessly.
Nuremberg’s promise and its limits
The Nuremberg tribunals were, genuinely, a radical moment. For the first time, victors sought to hold the defeated to legal account, establishing that some acts are crimes regardless of orders or domestic legality.
It was imperfect from the beginning. Soviet judges represented a state that had signed a pact with the regime on trial. The Allied bombing of Dresden had killed tens of thousands of civilians.
Victor’s justice is still justice of a kind, but it embeds a hypocrisy that remains unresolved: war crimes must be prosecuted, but in practice only those of the defeated are.
The International Criminal Court (ICC), established in 2002, attempted to move beyond this with a permanent, independent tribunal not dependent on victors’ politics. It was important, and almost immediately undermined by those most likely to need its jurisdiction. The United States never ratified the court. Russia withdrew. Israel never joined.
The ICC has indicted Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu. Both indictments are serious. Neither man will be tried unless they enter a state willing to arrest them. That is unlikely. The court can name the crime. It cannot reach the criminal.
This is not a design flaw. It is the system working as the powerful intended: enough law to manage smaller conflicts and weaker states, not quite enough to reach the most powerful and their allies. Donald Trump, who has overseen the dismantling of international norms with gleeful enthusiasm, might by certain arguments be considered a war criminal too – and already faces domestic charges. Whether any of this leads to meaningful accountability remains uncertain.
Where ethics went
Ethics did not vanish. They were privatised.
We scrutinise personal behaviour while exempting systemic action. A politician can support a war that kills hundreds of thousands and remain respectable. A benefits claimant who lies goes to prison.
Aristotle would recognise this. He distinguished between personal and political ethics and argued that one cannot exist without the other. A society that tolerates systemic injustice will corrupt its members. Donella Meadows made the same point in systems terms: structure drives behaviour. Put good people into a corrupt structure and the structure usually wins.
The question is not how to make individuals more virtuous – though that helps. It is how to build structures in which ethical accountability is not optional, where consequences are visible and decision-makers have to live with the results.
Small is beautiful, and perhaps smaller still
EF Schumacher’s argument – against excessive materialism and meaningless growth – was ethical as much as practical. Human beings can only grasp consequences, responsibility, and accountability within a limited range. Beyond that, decisions become abstract, and abstraction is where ethics go to die.
The CEO does not see the river his factory is poisoning. The minister does not meet the refugee their policy turns away. The distance is moral as well as physical. Scale insulates from consequence.
Murray Bookchin made a similar argument in political terms. The municipality is the basic unit of genuine democracy, because it is where politics becomes personal, where decisions affect people, where accountability has a face.
Benjamin Disraeli, by contrast, helped construct an empire at the opposite scale. Making Queen Victoria Empress of India was a characteristically sly manoeuvre: flattering, strategic and symbolic. It was politics as spectacle, power made glamorous. We are still living with the consequences.
The evidence that smaller works
This is not theoretical. Evidence exists, imperfect but instructive.
Britain’s devolution has worked rather better than expected. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have made different choices, from free prescriptions to land reform to education. While not every choice has been right, they show that there is no single correct answer for different communities with their own histories and geographies. Importantly, they legitimately organise themselves differently and are held accountable for the results.
Canada’s federal system holds together vast geography and cultural diversity through continual constitutional creativity. Its engagement with First Nations governance, though incomplete, is among the most serious attempts anywhere to return power to a human scale.
The Nordic countries succeed not simply through generous welfare, but also through high social trust and strong local government with real fiscal power. Swedish municipalities raise and spend their own taxes. Finland devolved education to teachers and municipalities, removed central inspection, and trusted professionals to do their work. The results were extraordinary.
New Zealand’s Wellbeing Budget, under Jacinda Ardern, was even more radical. It shifted measurement of success beyond GDP alone, factoring in health, belonging, and environmental considerations. It did not survive political change, a reminder that structures revert to old patterns unless the underlying paradigm shifts alongside them.
Switzerland’s eight-hundred-year-old cantonal system provides perhaps the clearest proof: multiple languages, strong local autonomy, extensive direct democracy, and centuries of stability without suppressing diversity.
The principle behind these examples is that subsidiarity: decisions should be made at the lowest level capable of making them effectively. It is the formal embodiment of Schumacher’s intuition.
The structure that makes ethics possible
I have previously argued that language and identity are used to protect power from accountability. Here, my contention is that our ethical and legal frameworks appear to constrain power but are carefully designed, at the critical points, not to.
The thread connecting them is scale. At global and national levels, power is largely invisible, consequences are largely unfelt by those who cause them, and ethics are largely decorative. At smaller scales, consequences become imperfectly but genuinely visible and accountability becomes possible.
We do not lack ethical frameworks or legal instruments. The Rome Statute, the Geneva Conventions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are serious documents embodying serious thinking.
What we lack are the structures that make ethics operational. Structures that close the distance between decision and consequence, power and accountability, those who give the order and those who bear the cost.
Such structures already exist, albeit in pieces, imperfectly: Nordic municipalities, Swiss cantons, Canadian provinces, devolved governments, First Nations experiments, New Zealand’s wellbeing framework. They are not utopias. They are working prototypes.
The question is whether we have the will to learn from them before the scale of our current systems makes learning impossible.
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