What is Justice? Part Two: Justice is Truth, Not a Matter of Personal Opinion
In Part One of this series, I observed that we all want justice but we don’t agree about what it is. In fact, when we demand justice we often demand different and even contradictory things. So, we might conclude that justice is relative or subjective. Justice means different things to different people. Each person has his or her own truth about justice.
But that is a dead end. If there are no objective standards of justice, independent of our personal preferences and opinions, then we have no reason to demand justice from anyone. The most you can do is demand that they give you your justice. But if your justice conflicts with their justice, and they have an equal claim to demand their justice from you, then you are at an impasse. You’re stuck.
No one really thinks that. Even the most radical, post-modern, subjectivist, woke critical theorist acts and speaks as if there are objective truths about justice. The demand, Give us justice!, presupposes that there is something to give, something that exists independently of our preferences and opinions, something that we can all understand with our minds and act upon.
And we do understand. And we do act upon demands for justice. By our actions, our commitments, the institutions we build, the speeches we make, the ways we order our communities, we demonstrate that we are pursuing an object that can be known and pursued and achieved.
So, there must be a truth about justice, a truth that does not depend upon our agreement or assent. But what is truth? The idea of truth is itself contested these days. So, before we dig further into the question what justice is, let’s spend some time considering what truth is.
Put simply, truth is knowledge of what is real. Truth is what distinguishes belief from knowledge. I may believe that the sun rises in the west, or that the sun rotates around the earth, but I cannot know those propositions. They are not true. The earth is real, and the sun is real, and the relative movements of the earth and sun are real. If I understand the reality of the earth and the sun then I know the truth about them. If I believe what is not real then I do not possess knowledge of truth.
That’s easy enough. We live in an empirical age. Everyone believes in physical reality. And everyone believes in science. Indeed, Washington bureaucrats and NPR-consuming professionals sometimes capitalize the word to demonstrate their veneration, much like monotheist believers do with the name of God. “Trust the Science!” And out here in real America, far away from the salons of the powerful and influential, people know all too well that physical reality matters, that cows give birth and steers do not, that tire pressure increases when the roads get hot, and that unstable warm air is a reason to listen for tornado sirens.
So, we all agree on at least one kind of truth. Science is real. Science is true.
Science isn’t the only way to know truth. What makes science effective to know the truth about the physical world is the same thing that makes economics effective to know the financial and commercial world, and mathematics effective to know the world of information technology, and linguistics effective to understand language. And it is the same thing that makes jurisprudence effective to understand justice.
The scientific method proceeds on the assumption, taught by Aristotle as an enduring truth, that a thing can be known by its essence. For example, we can know certain things about dogs because there is an essential logic to dog-ness, a discernable set of characteristics that we can expect to find repeated in all of our encounters with animals that have the nature of a dog.
Dogs are mammalian, meaning they are warm-blooded, have live births, and are covered with hair or fur. So, dogs are not reptiles or amphibians or birds. Dogs are domesticated. They are not foxes or wolves or coyotes. Dogs are social pack animals. They are not cats.
People may have different beliefs about dogs. They may identify dogs as foxes or cats. But if we discover that different people have different opinions about dogs, there are least two possibilities. It is possible that there is no one truth about dogs. But it is equally possible that some people are wrong. And if people speak and act as if “dog” has an objective meaning, then it is most rational to conclude that there are truths about dogs and that people who do not affirm those truths are mistaken. They may be confused or ignorant. Or they may believe falsehoods.
The existence of differences need not defeat our understanding of truth. That some dogs are short and others are tall, that some are good pointers and others are good flushers, that some are hairier than others, are not reasons to doubt that there is an intelligible set of things in the world, each member of which is a “dog.” Nor is the existence of non-dog canines a threat to our belief that there are truths about dogs. We can understand the nature of a fox by reference to the central case of a dog, or vice versa, and we can therefore understand two similar-but-distinct phenomena in the world with epistemic certitude.
The social sciences and humanities also take Aristotelean wisdom for granted. Aristotle’s method of inquiry enables us to identify what is most essential or centrally true about some type of human relationship or action. Aristotle illustrated this method in his famous discussion of friendship. Not all human relationships are friendships in a strong or full sense, though many different human relationships exhibit some traits of a friendship. This fact—these differences—need not lead us to conclude that friendship is a mere opinion, nor an arbitrary social construct, nor a discursive regime concocted by extroverts to discriminate against introverts. No, we can understand friendship as a real, natural, and repeatable phenomenon by studying the essence—the core, the center, the focal point—of friendship.
The essence of friendship—the most important truth about a friendship—is that each person in the friendship acts for the well-being of the other person or persons. In the strongest or core case of friendship, each person pursues and acts for the good for each other person, each desires the other person’s well-being for its own sake and not for purely selfish reasons, and each person reciprocates the desire and action for the good of the other.
To be sure, we find in the world weaker examples of friendship, such as commercial transactions, where each person acts for the good of the other only instrumentally as a means to provide the service or item that the other wants for some personal, economic benefit. We also find defective friendships, where some person exploits another person and uses them only as an instrument for individual satisfaction. But as long as we keep in mind Aristotle’s central case of friendship, neither the existence of peripheral friendships, such as commercial relationships and acquaintances, nor the existence of exploitation should make us doubt the possibility of achieving real friendship. True friendship.
Just as there are true friends and false friends, there is true justice and false justice. And just as there are different kinds of friends there are different forms of justice. There is such a thing as “friend.” We can identify a friend. We can distinguish between a friend and an enemy, or a friend and an acquaintance. Similarly, we can distinguish between justice and injustice, and between true justice and lesser instances of justice. We’ll turn to those distinctions in the next essay.