Real Justice, and the Living’s Easy
ethically easy, that is
It might be the case that in human history more has been said and written about how we humans should live our lives than any other topic. Nothing ever written or spoken makes living ethically easier than real justice does.
Understanding why ‘real justice’ is what justice must be is perhaps not the easiest thing. Get down to the ‘minimum condition of justice’, though (the fourth paragraph below in this little essay), and there we have a handful of absolute prohibitions that allow us to see clearly and easily what we must do to keep from acting unjustly.
Real justice is the approach to justice in which the ethic of justice follows from the observation that human beings have no choice but to effect choices (choose among perceived alternatives and take action to bring that choice to fruition). That makes choosing integral to being human, beginning with choosing whether/how/to what extent to be involved whenever any choice is being effected.
So to act justly, to recognize others as fellow human beings, we must respect the capacity of all other people to choose for themselves whenever we are involved in effecting any choice — whether for ourselves or on behalf of any other person, or business, or the government, or society as a whole: no end ever justifies acting unjustly. (Inevitable cases in which one person can legitimately override another person’s capacity to choose, such as parent/child, boss/subordinate, teacher/student, etc., can easily be taken into account.)
To fail to respect the capacity of other people to choose for themselves is to deny their status as fellow human beings. Such conduct cannot be justified without claiming some knowledge that is outside of material existence, i.e., a matter of personal belief. Such knowledge is always perfectly valid for any who believe it, but never necessarily valid for anyone else. To act on the basis of such knowledge is to privilege personal, radically subjective knowledge, which others can only accept as valid by taking the believers’ world for it, over the knowledge, equally available to every human being, that choosing for ourselves is integral to being human.
A requirement to respect the capacity to choose of any people who might be involved in any way when anyone is involved in effecting any choice might appear to be a paralyzingly onerous ethical burden, but it only requires, at a minimum, refraining from killing, harming, coercing, stealing, or manipulating in our relations with other people in effecting any choice. Anyone not doing any of those things is being just enough. On the other hand, what moral code encourages doing any of those things?
That ‘minimum condition of justice’ is what makes living justly according to real justice so damn easy.
Take, for instance, lying. Morally, lying is wrong. In real justice, lying might or might not be unjust. Telling the difference is easy.
One reason why lying is morally wrong is that it can be manipulative: people can use lies to get people to do things they otherwise would not do. In real justice, that is the only reason why lying is unjust. Any other form of lying, such as falsely complimenting a friend to help that person to feel better or complimenting a host on the how the place looks even though that person’s taste is plainly hideous, is not unjust.
It can be the case that always telling the truth is better in the end. As bad as the friend or the host might feel upon hearing it, the truth, even if it were harsh, probably would set them free in some way. Still, so long as a lie is not intended for the personal gain of the liar — such as a false compliment to get sex — it is not unjust.
There are other ways of manipulating people, and some of them can be difficult to discern, much less define, but we know when we are being manipulative — or would know, if we would ask ourselves that question. Likewise, we know when we are killing, coercing, or stealing.
That leaves harming. Harming is the most difficult of those prohibitions too dissect. How can we know if we are doing harm to another person, especially when harm can be psychological and even spiritual?
In the case of psychological harm, we basically have to take a person’s word for it. If someone says we have harmed that person in such a way, then we should apologize and refrain from such behavior in the future.
Spiritual harm is a stickier matter. People can feel spiritually harmed if other people act contrary to their beliefs. If I believe doing such-and-such is morally wrong according to my religion and you engage in such conduct, then from my point of view you are denigrating my faith. To denigrate my faith is to denigrate me.
The thing is, the only way a person can avoid spiritual harm in that way is for all people to live according to that person’s beliefs. That is simply too much to expect. People of faith (of which I am one) simply have to accept that in some ways our beliefs are going to be mocked implicitly by the words and actions of other people. To use words to mock a person’s faith explicitly is a form of psychological harm, and is unjust. If, however, a person is acting justly according to real justice (refraining from otherwise acting unjustly) and a person takes spiritual offense, the person acting justly can justly ignore that person’s claim of being spiritually harmed.
Material harm is easier. Harms of those kind are the reason for a legal system. Such claims — criminal or civil — can be adjudicated in courts of law. Claims of psychological harm can be of a kind that that can be subject to adjudication in a court. Claims of spiritual harm are just too ethereal to be able to take to a court. Courts, to be just, must be houses of rationality. (Beliefs are not — necessarily — irrational, but are always extra-rational.)
All of that does bring us to the issue of the laws and real justice. How should the two be related?
Promulgating laws and their sanctioned enforcement is a function of a community’s political process (i.e., the process of effecting choices for the community as a whole). Real justice requires a democratic political process — one with freedom of political speech (constrained only by the requirements of real justice) and a democratic distribution of other political rights (i.e., any restrictions on those rights are universally applicable and universally applied). [Technically, freedom of speech is not a right, but a condition of justice for the political process; the democratic distribution of political rights is the other condition of justice for the political process; it is its accordance with those conditions of justice that makes democracy the only just political process.] That is the only kind of political process in which all citizens are taken into account, by being allowed to participate in that process (through speech, if nothing else).
A community could have a written convention, such as a constitution, that would include constraints on making and enforcing laws. In that case, laws would be subject to that convention.
Such a document must necessarily be a product of the political process. It can only itself be just if it was the product of a just — democratic — process.
Any law promulgated in a democratic political process that does not itself compromise the conditions of justice for the political process is a just law — so long as the conditions of justice governing the actions (including speech acts) of individuals are not violated by people in the process of getting the laws passed. That includes laws governing the enforcement of laws.
So according to real justice a person motivated by religious beliefs has the right to seek the adoption of laws conforming with those beliefs. A law banning abortion would be one example. On the other hand, it is every bit as legitimate to oppose any law based on any belief — religious or secular, for that matter — to include opposing a law banning abortion.
‘Real justice’ might not be the easiest idea ever to comprehend. It can, however, make living life ethically easier than it has ever been — for individuals and for whole communities.
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More on real justice and the governance of society as a whole: “Alright, Already” (here in Medium, but not behind the paywall)