Poetic justice

Reader question:

In this headline – Buffett: Bank woes² are 'poetic³ justice' – what does "poetic justice" mean?

My comments:

Let's read the story first. It is as follows:

TORONTO (Reuters, February 7, 2008) – The woes in the US financial sector⁴ are "poetic justice" for bankers who designed and sold complex investments that have since gone sour, billionaire investor⁵ Warren Buffett said on Wednesday.

The head of the Berkshire Hathaway Inc group of companies also played down worries about a credit crunch⁶ by saying that recent interest rate cuts mean low-cost funds are readily available... Buffett, one of the world's wealthiest people, appeared to see irony⁷ in the fact that many of the banks who marketed complex investments which have now crashed are bearing much of the fallout.

"It's sort of a little poetic justice, in that the people that brewed⁸ this toxic⁹ Kool-Aid found themselves drinking a lot of it in the end," he said.

...

Got the picture?

Now, definitions. First, justice. Justice in the ordinary sense means eye-for-eye, tooth-for-tooth revenge or punishment. In the court of justice, for example, when the judge sentences a murderer to death, we say it's justice being served.

Poetic justice, on the other hand, is the sort of karmic view of events by the artist. Or simply, it is justice in literature – in which good conduct is usually rewarded with good while evil is rewarded with evil. In The Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio（聊斋志异）, for example, every good character in every tale is always rewarded (with good) in the end, no matter how tortuous¹⁰ the path. This ability, or tendency, or freedom of the writer to interpret events this way is called poetic license¹¹, which, by the way, merits a column in its own right.

Anyways, the idea of poetic justice originates from Aristotle's Poetics, in which the Greek philosopher explains is view that poetry should be superior to history in that it show what should occur (what's morally right to have happened) instead of merely what does occur (what actually happened).

In short, what Buffet¹ was saying was this: Those maverick¹² bankers who had created an environment that led to the sub-prime loan crisis are now forced to drink their own poison. They are being punished for their own crime, figuratively speaking, of course. They deserve it. It serves them right.

Or still in other words, what goes round comes round.