Note: This post is not an official part of the “Justice as Conditionals” series and represents a lesser version of the concepts in it.

I don’t believe that something can be unjust unless someone has been told not to do it. This doesn’t mean it can’t be immoral; a man raised in the wilderness’ kicking a baby is certainly immoral. Rather, I simply believe that the realm of Justice involves interpersonal informing of intent.

To be even clearer, I claim that the fundamental building block of a system of Justice is what I call a Conditional. For the most basic example, consider two people, one of whom believes that the act of staring is wrong or, at least, that they do not like it. The other person cannot be called unjust for staring, then, in the absence of anyone to have told them it was wrong. The person who desires not to be stared at can then make provide a Conditional: “If you keep staring at me, I will stop you, whatever that entails.” The starer now has information to act on, knowing that some options are more preferred by the other person and that that person and their intentions are relevant to the starer’s own preferences. In other words, the Conditional allowed the preferences of the Conditional’s owner to be shared, to an extent dependent on the conditional, by the person to whom the Conditional was extended.

But what preferences may be shared through a Conditional? In a word, anything. One way to look at this is to believe that Conditionals have nothing to do with morality. However, another way makes the assertion that anything worth supporting with any conditional is important enough that it may be considered morally desired, at least in practice.