Injustice, Arbitrariness, Beliefs, Material Existence, Justice
John Locke famously defined injustice as “being subject to the arbitrary will” of another person. That means one person taking any action that affects another person without taking its effects on that person into account. As Immanuel Kant put it, it is people treating other people as merely the means to some end. We commonly think of it as one person ‘using’ another. Societies are unjust if the governing authorities are free to act arbitrarily or if the principles upon which the governance of society is based are arbitrary.
Locke’s famous book was published in 1689. He was involved in the struggle in England against the doctrine of ‘Divine Right’ of monarchs, the claim that they could only be on the throne because God willed it and therefore they had to answer only to God for any acts they committed.
According to that doctrine, they did not have to answer to any authority on Earth for any act committed, for any reason or no reason at all. Seriously. It took centuries of violent struggle to rid Europe of that doctrine.
Sacral religion as the basis for governing governance was replaced in Europe with ideology. The intention was to get arbitrariness, therefore injustice, out of the governance of the governance of society.
The inventors of ideology looked to the (then) emergent field of science. They beheld that, unlike religious beliefs, the findings of science were universally true for all human beings. They realized that for society universality was the antidote for arbitrariness in the governance of governance. Borrowing from science, they equated secularity with rationality, rationality with objectivity, and objectivity with universal truth. The whole of that transitive construct was summed up in the word ‘reason’.
Alas and alack, they messed up. Ideologies, it turned out, are simply secular religions. They are based on beliefs as surely as all sacral religions are. So using ideology — any ideology — to govern the governance of society is as arbitrary as using any sacral religion for that purpose must be — and therefore as unjust.
[I must make a special note related to Karl Marx. He used the word “ideology” to emphasize the “materialist” nature of his intellectual project. I see him as a failed materialist who was in fact a radical believer in equality.]
Back to science. The findings of science are validated by observation within material existence. If ideology was a wrong turn, an ethic to govern the governance of society that follows from observation within material existence— what David Hume famously termed an “ought from is” — would be universal, would it not?
I have developed such an ethic. It follows from the observation that human beings have no choice but to effect choices (i.e., choose among perceived alternatives and take action to bring that choice to fruition). [I have worked out its implications for individuals, the political process, and the economy; if curious, it is summarized in a “5 min read” here in Medium.]
Yet, that is not enough for the universality justice requires. Any person can deny, with utter sincerity, the validity of any observation within material existence of any other person or persons, whatever their numbers or their status might be.
On the other hand, universality was invoked to mitigate arbitrariness. All beliefs of all people are intrinsically arbitrary — from the point of view of any other person. That is to say, why this person or that person accepts this or that belief is beyond rational explanation. It is an extra-rational process. That is not to say beliefs are irrational; they are simply beyond the capability of the rational faculty to explain.
The rational capacity we experience as human beings within (perceived) material existence is all we have to relate our experiences of that existence to fellow humans within that existence. The extra-rational nature of beliefs therefore makes beliefs arbitrary, not only from the point of view of all other people, but from the perspective of the very material existence in which we find ourselves.
Observation within material existence, however, is not arbitrary from the perspective of material existence. From the perspective of the observer, it is inextricably a part of that existence. Therefore, the ethic of justice that I developed, following from the observation that human beings have no choice but to effect choices, does not have to be universal. It is by its nature non-arbitrary — for people who accept the validity of that observation. On the other hand, who can deny its validity?
Any being living in a society governed by that ethic who claimed that the observation from which that ethic follows is not valid would, from the perspective of all beings who accepted its validity, be effecting a choice (in choosing to utter that claim), thereby proving to be human. That person would therefore be entitled to the protections of that ethic while at the same time being justly subject to the laws of that society.