@BonzaiDuck, I've never seen it put that way, the majesty and sanctity of conscience for mankind. If I'd had that notion I may have applied to law school. I got a good enough score on the LSAT (without having done any prep at all, I just took it at graduation in math). But I feared that becoming a lawyer would ruin my conscience, not develop it. What I knew about the practice of law was pretty much what one gets from popular culture, in which lawyers are typically portrayed as hired to represent clients who want above all to win, generally any way they can. I had no role models to contradict this dire concept. There were no lawyers in the family, I didn't know any, never did. I know one lawyer now but have never discussed anything with him relating to the practice of law!
Reading your bolded text I was reminded of this quotation:
"All our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike - and yet it is the most precious thing we have." - Albert Einstein
Perhaps Einstein was wrong.
No, I don't think Einstein was wrong. The CSI investigator and a good detective follow science, logic and facts. Yet, note a quote from an epidemiologist pertaining to the COVID crisis: "Nothing in science is absolutely certain." Science is an asymptotically progressing approximation to reality -- we go from Isaac Newton's physics to Einstein's Special Relativity -- a much closer approximation for certain phenomena.
Remember this?
"In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the police who investigate crime, and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories." [Followed by the sound Richard Belzer calls the "Doink-doink".]
I couldn't bring myself to be a criminal defense lawyer, because their objective is to get a "not guilty" verdict even for those they know to be guilty. They have as their job the concoction of even the most improbable circumstances in a sieve of possibilities with the smallest, most unlikely odds of having occurred, and then to argue that such circumstances are grounds for reasonable doubt. So I would've been better suited to either CSI or detective roles, or a prosecutor.
I scanned through the posts on this thread, and discovered that I had posted the screenplay quote from "Oxbow Incident" somewhere else. So here, I offer again the book paragraph together with the movie-script excerpt. It was the movie-script which troubled me, because it seemed to confound God and God's law with secular law, and you can see how Van Tilburg Clark sorted it all out, while the screenwriters muddled it up.
[The book]
" . . . Law is more than the words that put it on the books; law is more than any decisions that may be made from it; law is more than the particular code of it stated at any one time or in any one place or nation; more than any man, lawyer or judge, sheriff or jailer, who may represent it. True law, the code of justice, the essence of our sensations of right and wrong, is the conscience of society. It has taken thousands of years to develop, and it is the greatest, the most distinguishing quality which has evolved with mankind. None of man's temples, none of his religions, none of his weapons, his tools, his arts, his sciences, nothing else he has grown to, is so great a thing as his justice, his sense of justice. The true law is something in itself; it is the spirit of the moral nature of man; it is an existence apart, like God, and as worthy of worship as God. If we can touch God at all, where do we touch Him save in the conscience? And what is the conscience of any man save his little fragment of the conscience of all men in all time?"
[The movie]
"A man just can't take the law into his own hands and hang people... without hurting everybody in the world... because then he's not just breaking one law, but all laws.
"Law is a lot more than words you put in a book... or judges or lawyers or sheriffs you hire to carry it out. It's everything people ever have found out about justice... and what's right and wrong. It's the very conscience of humanity. There can't be any such thing as civilization...unless people have a conscience...because if people touch God anywhere...where is it except through their conscience? And what is anybody's conscience...except a little piece of the conscience of all men that ever lived?"
Perhaps the movie director or screenwriter didn't like the introduction of the word "evolved", which suggests "evolution". Or perhaps they simply wanted to pander to the confused notions of a public who want to insert Moses and his tablets into the significance of secular law. It is true that religious commandments serve as a basis for secular law, and I suggested that the common features of all religions may be the basis for secular law -- an intersection of them all.
Remember the Tea-Party-Trumpers and their assertion that Muslims wanted to institute Sharia Law in the US? It cannot happen, if aspects of Sharia Law do not intersect with morality of Christian, Hebrew, Sikh, Buddhist, atheist and agnostic alike. They are two different things: one you follow in your daily practice as a individual trying to get to Heaven; the other you follow as a citizen complying with the foundations for preserving order in the nation-state of the here and now. But either way, they demonstrate the human conscience.
IfI may suggest my reaction to the bolder above which I find beautiful and wonderfully profound, what I hear in it is that justice is the intention of the will to love, the will to love in its highest form. Thanks for that post. I feel that will in you and that makes me happy.
I don't know if I'm so touchy-feely about it. If you look at the great ideological conflicts of our time, they focus on two concepts: Freedom, and Justice. One could argue that Marx and then Lenin had an interest in economic Justice, or that such aspect of Justice in general defined their belief-system. Yet everyone, through time and everywhere as a rule hungers for some kind of Justice. The man in the January 6 mob told the news-reporter that "They want to take away our freedoms!" Yet, he was part of a lynch-mob, seeking to hang the Vice President and possibly murder the speaker of the House. And as I may already have said, another man in the mob noted that "the courts don't help us!" He and his colleagues probably think that all decisions about Justice are simply the reflection of one or another political group, or that there is no immutable standard of Blind Justice in the Law. They must have been socially promoted to high-school graduation.