What is Justice? Part 4: Justice is Good

People want justice. As I noted in the first essay in this series, justice is a consistent them in American public life. We demand justice. We lament injustice, and we portray perpetrators of injustice as villains.

None of this is peculiar to Americans. Nor is it merely conventional. We don’t happen to want justice because we’re Americans. “Justice” is not something we made up. We want justice because we are human beings and God created human beings to act justly. Justice fulfils our given nature and satisfies our reason. Injustice does violence to human nature, to human communities, and reason rightly condemns it.

Certain things are good for us. Knowledge, beauty, friendship, life and health are good for us, whether or not we happen to prefer the. Ignorance and confusion, vulgarity, alienation, sickness and death are bad for us, even if we happen to prefer them. Justice directs us to act in such a way that we help other achieve knowledge, beauty, friendship, life and health. And it directs us never intentionally to destroy those goods, as by defaming others, defacing public places, killing and maiming, and performing other inherently wrong actions.

Human beings want justice because justice is good. It is rationally desirable. Someone who acts justly is better off than someone who acts unjustly, and the people around them are generally better off, as well. Justice is not a matter of personal preference or opinion. Justice is not subjective.

Nor is justice merely a matter of right or rules. Justice precedes both rights and rules. Indeed, rights and rules are evaluated under standards of justice. We think rights and rules are worthy of our obedience to the extent that they are just, which is to say to the extent that they promote the common good of all. Justice is neither individualistic nor legalistic.

As I have explained at length in one of my books, a right is not essentially an entitlement. A right is a direction for right action. The purpose of a right is to impose on each of us a duty to act justly toward the right-bearer. A right is not about what I am owed but rather what I owe others. A right is understood by its correlative duty, which is a duty in justice. And a right is contrasted with a wrong, which is an act of injustice, understood as wrong by looking at the requirements of justice. Justice cannot be reduced to rights. Rather, rights are derived from justice.

Justice also cannot be reduced to rules. People who try to reduce justice to rules are legalists. Legalism is not justice.

Some people follow a particularly insidious form of legalism which identifies justice with the will of a superior or sovereign. Sometimes the sovereign is a human being, sometimes it is a caricatured divine being. This form of legalism is known as voluntarism because it identifies right and wrong with the arbitrary will of some superior being or supreme power. According to this view, you should obey the sovereign’s will because he is sovereign, regardless whether the sovereign wills what is good or bad. It’s not up to you to second-guess the sovereign, nor to evaluate his commands according to reason and the common good.

Sovereignty and power are just only insofar as they are exercised for the good. A “god” who wills evil is not the God who orders all things for the good, and is not worth worshipping. A human sovereign who wills arbitrarily also does not deserve our obedience. A just ruler coordinates human actions for the common good.

The point of justice is to render to everyone what they are due as a matter of right. What we owe others just is their rights, and the point of their rights is their flourishing, their well-being, our common good as fellow human beings. Justice is what is good to do.