Simionas Blog Post 6

    At the conclusion of her essay, Professor Berg presents that when addressing the “legitimate worry about the proliferation of bright lines, in some cases the solution is also the proliferation of bright lines,” but by removing arbitrary bright lines for better bright lines (18). She outlines how in this case, the bright lines can make our judgement more reliable when they are more precisely targeted. However, she also takes note of the possibility that “if we keep refining our bright lines over time, we’ll start to lose the advantages that led us to adopt those bright lines in the first place” and having rules with a million exceptions would lose its practicality and helpfulness (18).

    The next question then, would be finding the balance between helpful bright lines and overly specific bright lines. I would assume that people may try to counter Professor Berg with the impossibility of finding this balance, of finding the perfect threshold for the amount of bright lines we should have. However, to this I would point back to a similar discussion we have had with Tommie Shelby’s chapters in Dark Ghettos. Shelby often discusses a threshold of justice that should be experienced in a society, but never actually defines that the threshold. He also uses both the language of threshold and degree when it comes to describing the justice experienced in a society, and how that changes our interactions with the law. However just as Shelby doesn’t give a clear threshold Professor Berg does not give any sort of exact threshold of how specific of bright lines there should be. However, the acknowledgement of the existence of a threshold has value in itself. If you can at minimum determine which side of the threshold you are on, you are able to start moving towards the direction you need to be in. In societies where there are clearly too few, non-ambiguous bright lines, you first need to start moving in the direction of having more so that you can even start to debate if the bright lines are enough, let alone too much.  In this sense both Professor Berg and Tommie Shelby have navigated the waters of ideal and non-ideal theory to suggest the next steps towards justice without needing to perfectly define the ideal thresholds of justice experienced, in Professor Berg’s case in regards to the amount and kind of bright lines used in society.