Idea of justice as a social trap for Russia

This article is a result of its authors’ participation in the round table “Justice and Lawmaking” of the subproject “Ethics and Law: Mechanisms of Mutual Influence” of the HSE project “Applied Ethics” in the State Duma on December 1, 2021. The article considers social issues associated with the justice institutions, which are conditionally named institutional traps (an economic term). The authors focus on how these ‘traps’ work in contemporary Russia and how it is possible to get out of them. The article presents the contemporary discourse on social justice, which is characterized by a variety of concepts and a wide thematic field, and provides a definition of the institutional trap modified for the article’s tasks - a combination of social institutions, which being implemented leads to the results radically different or even opposite to the expected when designing such institutions. The authors argue that a trap is a result of the institution or a combination of institutions created to ensure justice of a certain kind or in accordance with a certain idea, when such an institution or combination leads to both justice (or other comparable public good) and clear injustice. This is a trap for society, because its expectations are deceived, and for the state, because it gets new social problems to be solved. The authors believe that what makes institutions an institutional trap is not only the fact that they do not cope with their tasks, but also do not meet social expectations determined by the system of previous values or inherited from it. The authors conclude that institutional solutions (creation of new institutions, modernization of existing ones) do not guarantee the desired result; we need a single educational program for promoting justice and mercy (taking into account cultural differences), which would explain their fundamental importance for society and its every member.