What is Justice? Part One: What Justice Isn't

Americans want justice. Our young people march around demanding it. Politicians promise to deliver it. We pledge allegiance to a flag that symbolizes a Republic which provides “liberty and justice to all.” At school, at work, at political protests, at the polls, on the Internet, in the movies, and on the news, justice is the first and most urgent priority.

Justice even pervades our leisure time. The National Football League and National Basketball Association celebrate players who are making “change” and promoting “justice.” Symphony orchestras now have staff members whose job it is to promote “equity” and “justice.” We see message about justice when we ride a bus, turn on the television, drop our kids at school, or buy gear for a camping trip.

At times, it seems that we worship justice. The government of the United States has an entire Department of Justice. Its lawyers (and thousands of other lawyers) daily go to work in enormous buildings that look like temples. As they enter, they pass between tall columns, through enormous doors, into vast halls sparingly decorated with the iconography of legal justice: plaques inscribed with quotes about the rule of law, statues and portraits of judges and jurists, and Lady Justice, blindfolded, holding her scales. The facades of those temples are adorned not with a cross, crescent, or Star of David, but rather with symbols of justice: Moses displaying the Ten Commandments and mythic figures sitting in legal judgment.

Americans seem to be obsessed with justice. But we also seem to be confused about it. Some people think justice requires us to have more law; others think it requires less law. Some people think justice is a right to be left alone; others think that justice requires regulations and mandates to govern every aspect of our lives. We hear that justice requires us all to be more the same in some respects—how much we earn, which experts we obey—but it requires us to be different in other respects—how our families are structured, where and whether we worship.

So, justice is important. But what is it?

Ask any three Americans what justice is and you’ll get five different answers. We seem to be divided by a common ideal. When people approve of the latest jury verdict or court ruling to capture the attention of media elites, they exult in justice. When they disapprove, they insist that we have (in the words of a powerful person who swore an oath to establish justice) “a lot more work to do” in order to make justice “more equitable.”

We hear a lot about “social justice.” But most versions of that idea are anti-social and unjust. They divide us into tribes and assign approval or blame not according to our choices and actions but instead according to our skin color, sex, religion, annual income, or geographic region. Depending on who is adjudicating the “social justice,” some people turn out to be inherently unjust as a result of being born in the wrong skin, the wrong body, or the wrong family, and there is nothing they can do to be justified.

We also hear about “economic justice,” “racial justice, and “environmental justice.” But adding adjectives to justice doesn’t seem to get us any closer to it. Indeed, it seems to make the problem worse. If “environmental justice” requires the government to impose regulatory burdens on businesses in poor communities—to shut down coal mines and small manufacturing operations, for example—then it seems to conflict with “economic justice.” If “racial justice” requires affirmative action policies that discriminate against certain racial minorities in favor of other racial minorities then justice eats its own tail.

And yet people still want justice. They say so all the time. What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now! Who’s in the way? Some other group for whom the particular justice that we demand would be an injustice.

It is difficult to avoid the inference that justice simply means “what I want.” And increasingly, we don’t want the same things. Indeed, we have mutually-incompatible goals. Read a newspaper or turn on a news program and you will learn that:

• justice requires more freedom for abortionists; justice requires more legal protections for unborn human beings;

• justice requires that criminal laws be enforced without regard to race; justice demands that we enforce fewer of our criminal laws in the neighborhoods of racial minorities;

• justice requires more economic freedom; justice requires more government redistribution of wealth and resources.

Justice means so many different and inconsistent things that it seems to mean nothing at all. Yet we can’t seem to get by without it. We long for it.

I have good news. Justice does mean something. Like gravity, justice is not a matter of personal opinion or subjective preference. Like beauty, justice is difficult to define precisely but also universal and rationally desirable in itself. Like other virtues, justice does not always emerge to view right away but it always fulfills us when we achieve it. It enables human beings to flourish.

Justice is rational. Justice is good. And it is good for everyone, whether they happen to want it or not, whether they agree with it or not.

Furthermore, we can achieve justice. We’ve done it before. We abolished slavery throughout Christendom (twice!), won civil rights for racial minorities (twice!), and defeated totalitarian regimes in Europe (twice!).

We can do it again. But to achieve justice we must first understand what it is. We must learn how to recognize justice before we can bring it about. We can follow those who abolished slavery in the sixth through eleventh centuries, and those who re-abolished slavery in the nineteenth century, and those who led the victorious movements for equal civil rights in the 1860s and again in the 1960s, and those who defeated first the Nazis and then the Soviet Union. We can follow them if we first go back to the original sources from which they drew intellectual resources and moral resolve.

In a series of posts over the next several days and weeks, I will answer the question, What is justice?. I will examine justice in the same way that I teach it to my students, and as the great champions of justice have learned it throughout the centuries. I’ll ask a lot of questions. And I will look for answers in the writings of the greatest philosophers, prophets, saints, jurists, and public intellectuals who have thought about justice through the centuries, and who motivated and informed all of the great achievements of justice: Aristotle, the Psalmists, the prophets of Israel, Cicero, Saint Paul, Justinian, Saint Thomas Aquinas, the common-law jurists, John and Abigail Adams, Abraham Lincoln and Harriett Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass, Robert Jackson, and Martin Luther King, Jr..

I’ll quote those great heroes and heroines of justice, but I won’t leave you alone with them. I’ll break down their basic concepts into bite-size bits. And I’ll illustrate their ideas about justice with contemporary examples.

My goal is to make the idea of justice both helpful and accessible. I hope you’ll read along. And please share your questions and comments on my public Facebook page.