Justice, Impartiality, and Bias Theme Analysis

The king’s administration of justice rests on a principle not unlike that held by Western civilization, namely, that justice should be blind, impartially administered. However, the king pursues this principle to its logical extreme: in his kingdom, rather than use judges or juries, “the decrees of an impartial and incorruptible chance”—in the form of a public arena in which the accused must choose between two doors, and depending entirely on luck will end up marrying a beautiful lady or be devoured by a hungry tiger. Luck alone determines punishment or reward. Of course, it is true that chance or luck can’t be biased or emotionally manipulated or bribed like human judges can, and in this sense the king’s method is absolutely impartial. However, we might argue nonetheless that chance has nothing to do with justice: after all, in the king’s public arena, a vicious murderer might open the door to a lady, while an innocent person might open the door to a tiger. Even though punishment and reward are impartially rendered in these cases, it is safe to say that they are not justly rendered.

It would seem, then, that no justice system can be absolutely impartial: for justice to be rendered at all, human beings who are by their very nature susceptible to bias must render it. The story investigates this proposition when the princess finds herself in a position to pass judgment on her lover, the young man, who has been accused of a crime and made to face the trial of the public arena. The Princess, in this case, has found out which door in the arena leads to punishment (the tiger) and which to reward (the lady). Yet just as chance is absolutely impartial, so is the princess absolutely biased and deeply conflicted in her interests. On the one hand, she loves the young man and despairs at the thought of his bloody painful death; on the other hand, the idea that her lover should marry another woman enrages her with jealousy. Given this, she seems just as incapable of rendering justice as pure chance would be. However, if absolute impartiality, such as that offered by chance in the arena, and passionate love, such as the princess’s for the young man, both compromise justice, where is justice to be found in this world at all? The story does not answer this question.