Kamal Ghorui
Human society today is highly evolved. From the age of hunter-gatherers, when people lived and worked in small groups for immediate survival, human beings have gone on to build elaborate institutions, legal systems, states, economies, and technologies capable of addressing extraordinarily complex challenges. In this sense, humanity has demonstrated immense collective intelligence. It has organized itself on vast scales, created structures of governance, codified rights and duties, and emerged as the most dominant species on earth. Given such progress, it seems reasonable at first to believe that a system of equal justice could one day be achieved.
Yet this expectation depends on a difficult assumption: that human beings will use their collective intelligence to produce moral equality rather than advantage. While societies may be highly advanced, individuals within them remain deeply driven by self-interest. Human beings are capable of cooperation, but they are equally capable of manipulation, selfishness, and exploitation. They create rules and laws because order is necessary for survival, stability, and coexistence. But they also search for ways to bend or selectively apply those same rules when it benefits them. Human existence thus appears marked by a persistent duality: exploit and avoid being exploited. Rules are accepted as necessary, but rarely embraced without calculation.
This makes the idea of equal justice deeply problematic. In principle, equal justice means fairness, impartiality, and equal treatment before the law. In practice, however, law is never applied in a social vacuum. It is interpreted, enforced, and institutionalized by human beings who are themselves shaped by greed, fear, ambition, prejudice, and unequal power. As a result, even where justice is declared universal in theory, it is often unequal in experience. Wealth, influence, class, caste, race, gender, political access, and social status frequently shape who can use the law, who can evade it, and who is crushed beneath it. A society may proclaim equality before law while reproducing deep inequality through the everyday functioning of justice itself.
Even the argument that societies should continue striving toward equal justice may itself be too idealistic. Who, in reality, has the power to move society in that direction? Not the powerless, because they do not control institutions, legislatures, courts, enforcement mechanisms, or the production of public legitimacy. The actual capacity to reshape justice lies largely with those who already hold power—political elites, economic elites, dominant social groups, and institutional authorities. But here lies the central contradiction: if such actors were to genuinely strive toward equal justice, they would often have to surrender some of the very privileges that make them powerful. They would need to submit themselves to stricter accountability, reduce their capacity to manipulate outcomes, and dismantle advantages from which they materially benefit. Power, however, rarely acts in ways that weaken itself voluntarily.
As a result, what is often presented as a commitment to justice may be little more than a veneer. Those in power may speak the language of equality, fairness, rights, and reform when it is politically useful, morally fashionable, or necessary to preserve legitimacy. They may create legal reforms, symbolic gestures, commissions, and public declarations that project the image of moral seriousness. But when equal justice begins to threaten entrenched privilege, the commitment often fades. Reform is delayed, diluted, redirected, or reduced to performance. What appears to be moral progress is often a management of dissent rather than a transformation of the system.
In this sense, unequal justice is not merely an accidental failure of the system; it may be one of its operating conditions. Systems of law and governance often do not exist to abolish hierarchy entirely, but to regulate it, stabilize it, and make it appear acceptable. Justice then becomes less a lived reality than a language through which power legitimizes itself. Rights may exist formally while remaining inaccessible in practice. Law may appear neutral while being enforced selectively. Equality may be endlessly promised while indefinitely deferred. The ideal of justice survives, but often as rhetoric rather than reality.
And yet the picture is not entirely one-sided. Advances in technology may make it increasingly difficult for the powerful to preserve this veneer as easily as before. Technology is not inherently moral, nor is it usually created with the goal of promoting equal justice. It can, in many situations, deepen surveillance, intensify control, and generate new forms of exclusion. But technological developments can also unintentionally increase transparency. Digital records, mobile cameras, social media, data analysis, leaked documents, online archives, and rapid communication can expose contradictions between legal ideals and institutional practice. Acts of discrimination, corruption, selective punishment, and abuse of authority that might once have remained hidden can now be documented, circulated, and scrutinized on a much wider scale.
In earlier times, power could more easily rely on secrecy, distance, delayed communication, and control over information in order to sustain the appearance of fairness. Today, that control is more fragile. A single recording, data leak, digital trail, or viral testimony can puncture carefully maintained narratives of neutrality and justice. Patterns of inequality can also be tracked and measured with greater precision, making structural injustice more visible than before. In this sense, technology may move society somewhat closer to equal justice, even when it was not designed for that purpose. It may not transform human nature, remove hierarchy, or eliminate self-interest, but it can make it harder for power to conceal its own uneven operation.
This does not mean that technology will deliver equal justice. The powerful can also capture technology, manipulate information, spread disinformation, and build new systems of surveillance and control. The same tools that expose injustice can also be used to reshape appearances and produce fresh illusions. Technology, therefore, is not a guarantee of equality. But it does introduce a new tension into the older relationship between law and power. It can erode the secrecy that allows unequal justice to masquerade as equality. It can widen public visibility and create pressures for accountability that were previously much weaker.
Therefore, a system of equal justice may never be fully attained, not because humanity lacks intelligence or organizational ability, but because human societies are structured by a deep contradiction between moral ideals and material interests. People need justice enough to invoke it, but often desire advantage too strongly to realize it fully. The powerful, especially, have little reason to create a system that would bind them as tightly as it binds others. And yet, developments such as technological transparency may constrain their ability to maintain the old veneer indefinitely. Equal justice may remain unattainable in its purest form, but the capacity to expose unequal justice may grow.
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