1 – Justice and its limits
Justice is a virtue of the will and specifically concerns operations, i.e., relationships and interactions. Justice is about regulating or rectifying our relationships and interactions. A good life must take heed of justice, not least because one of its fruits is peace, yet, notably, a good life will not be satisfied by justice alone, and it is a perilous peace. Indeed, there are other virtues that, when taken together, may make justice harder to judge, or difficult to satisfy.
Courage, for example, concerns grave difficulties the difficulty posed by death, which Aristotle says is the most terrible of punishments, because it puts an end not just to one good or two goods, but to all goods. Loyalty to a person, group, or cause can conflict with justice when it leads someone to protect wrongdoers. Humility might discourage someone from asserting their rights or demanding what’s fair, out of a desire to avoid conflict or self-promotion. A humble person might accept mistreatment rather than fight for justice, allowing inequity to persist. Patience might delay justice unnecessarily. For example, tolerating ongoing oppression in the hope that things will “work out eventually” can perpetuate harm rather than pushing for immediate rectification.
Unlike these other virtues, which primarily shape personal character or behavior, justice is social, and directly addresses the moral order of individuals within society, ensuring fairness, giving each their due, and maintaining balance in relationships. It gets us beyond control and manipulation by taking relationships and interactions between others, first, as given. It is a moderating influence on the other virtues, the “virtue of virtues” as Aristotle put it, because it ensures other virtues are exercised in balance, that is, with other virtues, and with other people in our lives with whom we interact, ensuring that we act in a way that’s appropriate and responsible – reason-giving, reason-taking – on the basis of what we share, what we owe to one another. In this sense, it is a ‘cardinal’ virtue, because without it, no society is possible.
Justice as objective reality
The givenness of these ‘circumstances of justice,’ as the empiricist philosopher David Hume called it, is that we are manifestly born into relationships – all of us. Some might wish it were otherwise (solipsists), or simply declare that it weren’t so (madmen), or might instead simply focus on the concerns of the unconditioned and sovereign self (liberal moderns),but these ideas inevitably come into conflict with the most basic, brute reality: you are born as the child of these parents. You are born as a citizen of this nation. You are born, as a speaker of that tongue. For many of us who were brought to the baptismal font in infancy, you were in effect born a member of this church. And the associations go further still. We’re all teammates and classmates and workmates. You choose to be with only some of those people. But you are dependent on some one or other for something.
There are various goods around which we congregate, which draw us to interact. We’re all of us moving towards oases, or away from deserts. And so then the question is: how do I live well with those with whom I drink, and those with whom I merely share the well? Justice is part of the answer to that question, but the beginning of myriad other problems, like who is responsible for maintaining and guarding the well; what happens when a fight breaks out, or the water is poisoned, etc. etc., ad infinitum.
Justice as divine image of rational relationship
Having established that we’re all related in virtue of the fact that we are endowed with human nature and that we are necessarily social and political animals sharing finite resources, what kind of animals are we? We are, as Aristotle put it, rational animals. Further, according to Scripture, we are beings created “in the image and likeness of God,” a Trinitarian, relational God, in whom the virtue of justice inheres. We are made from communion of God the Father as Progenitor, God the Son as Logos or Reason (ie., the Rationale) and God the Holy Spirit as Relationship; and we are made for communion, with God and all the way along and out into the social and political world, with our fellows. So it’s communion from top to bottom, from start to finish. We are called to image the Trinitarian God in the myriad and manner of relationships and interactions we have with our neighbours, to whom each is due honour and respect as a temple of the Holy Spirit and bearer of the divine image.
Justice concerns the other as other. I come before him or her recognizing a likeness to my own nature, but I deal with that other individual as another, i.e., another. This ensures that I render to another just that: his due, what he is owed, that to which he has a right (as a human bearer of the aforementioned divine attributes).
Duty and Indebtedness
In effect, by virtue of the fact that we are constituted as we are, in relationships, for interactions, we have claims upon each other, either by virtue of the relationship itself or by virtue of the interactions. Whether we resent it, ignore it, flee from it, deny it, or wholeheartedly undertake to satisfy these claims, is what we mean by the circumstances of the virtue of justice. We need to recognize and then ratify the relationships and interactions and it’s justice that permits us to come to recognize others as having legitimate claims upon our will.
Some examples: you owe your parents honour, a kind of piety, even if they’re objectively bad people. You owe God religion, because he’s your Creator and your telos or final end, regardless of whether you like that. (CS Lewis talks about the time during which he denied the faith before he reverted. He said “I knew God had made the world and I resented him for it”). In interactions, you come before another person recognizing a likeness to your own nature, but justice requires that you respect that person’s otherness, their personhood.
This is in comparison to charity, whose emotion is sympathy, compassion – suffering together –when one comes before the other and says, what if we just live the same life? What if we breathe the same air and thought the same thoughts and love the same things, together as one? While justice is in one sense unitive, it nevertheless is only as a temporary glue between two independent though equal agents. On the one hand, there’s a severe precision to it (the quid pro quo – $4 advertised for croissant); on the other hand, everything is negotiable (“Can I speak with your manager? Your policy suggests that I need only pay $3!”). Seeing the other as other, its aim is merely fairness, respecting the will of consenting parties, whose only requisite emotion is empathy, as it seeks to establish a kind of acceptable equality of perspectives premised on the principle of equality of individual dignity. In justice, there is always a distance however small between the two (We no longer wonder that our modern, globalised& pluralistic world emphasises empathy and neglects sympathy… and therefore mercy)
No Gifts in Justice but is there Justice in Gift?
As Immanuel Kant once said, in life you have to choose between a price and dignity. Under the strict dispensation of justice, which is the interaction, as credits and debts, between independent agents in time and space, there’s no recognition of gratuity or gift, which invites a different order of reciprocity and thereby threatens to undermine the domain of justice.
An anecdote: I remember once when I lived in the Netherlands as a student, I cooked a fancy dinner for my Dutch housemates. At the end, after everyone was very satisfied and immersed in an ambience of friendliness and hospitality, they suddenly and anxiously demanded that I produce the shopping receipts so that they could reimburse me the cost of the ingredients. Instead I suggested that someone else cook a meal the following week, but they absolutely insisted on tallying, to the penny, the price of the food, whereas I was still basking in the dignity of the dinner. I was sorely mistaken about the nature of the interaction. The final nail in the coffin of friendship, I thought, was when I was accused of being an “irresponsible housemate and human being,” because I didn’t retain the grocery receipts for their sakes, in order that they could fulfill their own severe sense of justice! This provoked my indignation, and I reminded them that merely reimbursing me the cost of ingredients, in any case, would fail in justice to adequately compensate me for the work of the dinner – a wholly subjective calculus of which I was sole judge! Justice-seeking in this case produced only bitterness and more indignation.
Ultimately, we cannot save all receipts, and we also recognize, as I did, that sometimes it may be better, say, for friendship’s sake, to tear them up and throw them out. “The law is often a splendid machine for missing the point”, as GK Chesterton remarked. Yet, as we’ve just seen, others, in their own cultural or moral context, may not only disagree, but be scandalized by gratuity, even if it comes clothed in friendship. This points to something paradoxical about justice as well as about epochs: it is always perilous. It should also be obvious that what was going on in the Netherlands is growing all over ‘the West’, and the reason for this should also be obvious – that ‘the West’ is no longer what it was: Christian – the unique realm, albeit flawed, of grace, mercy, gift, subsidiarity, and forgiveness.
Going beyond justice
We humans have a deep instinct to try to rectify injustices, perils and crises, but here’s the problem that St Paul touches upon when he remarks, “The letter kills” (2 Corinthians 3:6). We can’t fix everything within the bounds of justice because not only is justice implacable, but we often make it worse, which is especially bad because it is often by trying to be righteous that we make it worse. Chesterton 100 years ago already observed that a lot of very clever people were writing about progress, and they were very sanguine about the possibility of technology and science-driven leadership to improve our condition estate such that we never again experience anything like want, need, poverty, sorrow, etc. “The modern world calls justice ‘fairness’ and thinks it can weigh it in a chemist’s scale.” (Heretics)
Chesterton undertook to remind the world there is only one principle at work in our humanity that works itself out inexorably, and it’s not a principle of evolution and progress. It’s a principle of division & devolution, and it’s called Original Sin. Original Sin is sanity’s anchor, progress is a pipe dream without it, devolution the risk if we forget it. In Orthodoxy, he ties them: “The doctrine of original sin is the only cheerful view… it alone explains both the dignity and the degradation.” In these circumstances, we can see more clearly that limitations of justice are not in justice, which remains a divine attribute, but in us, as fallen men. “Men demand justice because they are men, not because they are good.”
Conclusion
We know that the one thing that we can rely upon stably to take place in our human experience is for us to come apart and the seams. The message of the Cross is that we are not able to put things back together – to rights, to balance, to fairness – by ourselves. A favorite pronouncement of the 16th century Council of Trent spoke of what we as human beings can lay claim to by our own insights or through our own resources. The council named two such things: sin and falsity. In the pagan world, this is cause for pessimism and futility amongst the weak and ruthlessless amongst the strong. In modern times, it gives rise to revolutionary political ideologies like communism, which decline rapidly into self-enclosed totalitarian systems where injustice and law are barely distinguishable. Yet we all feel a sense of justice, and we see in this our need for something beyond laws, to enable us to not come apart, to not fall into scandals and divisions, and perhaps, to save us. And that thing, which does in no way undermine justice, is love. Back to Chesterton: “Justice without love is a tyrant; love without justice is a fool.”