Justice and Instinct

I quoted Coetzee recently on the subject of justice. In that post I was most interested in whether there are concepts that are too subjective to possess a Platonic form. Perhaps it is not necessary that justice be mathematically absolute; perhaps a lower standard suffices: that the accused accept his society's definition of justice. Coetzee may be suggesting this in Disgrace:

"It was a male. Whenever there was a bitch in the vicinity it would get excited and unmanageable, and with Pavlovian regularity, the owners would beat it. This went on until the poor dog didn't know what to do. At the smell of a bitch it would chase around the garden with its ears flat and its tail between its legs, whining, trying to hide...

...there was something so ignoble in the spectacle that I despaired. One can punish a dog, it seems to me, for an offense like chewing a slipper. A dog will accept the justice of that, a beating for a chewing. But desire is another story. No animal will accept the justice of being punished for following its instincts."

I recently read an engrossing New Yorker piece about the Mazoltuv Borukhova case. She certainly seems to be refusing to accept the justice for following her maternal instincts.

I also think it's interesting that Coetzee thinks it best to use animals to describe justice (the donkey in Waiting for the Barbarians and the dog in Disgrace). Coetzee may think animals do not self-justify the way humans do.