An Introduction to Justice

An introduction to Justice

We tend to get Justice backwards…Many people think of justice in the sense of vengeance or what is owed to me. Then we turn a virtue into a self-centered principle. Justice is the virtue whereby we give everyone what we owe them. When we do this the result is great relationships. Therefore, Justice is the virtue that preserves the good of relationship. So let’s begin by reflecting on who we want and need to have a relationship with and then by asking the question: am I giving to God, my spouse, my kids, my elderly parents, friends, my boss, employees, colleagues, clients or patients, teachers or students what I owe them? 

If I go through the list of people I want a good relationship with I can pretty quickly see where I am not giving what I owe them, what they deserve and this can be a pretty important place to make a change of life. 

Justice safeguards relationship

Plato says the one who commits injustice is more to be pitied than the one who suffers injustice. Why? Because the person who commits injustice damages or ruins all his relationships, burning his bridges between every other person. And therefore the unjust person, by mistreating others and failing to fulfill his obligations, committing acts of injustice, cutting off relationships with other people. The unjust person becomes trapped in the misery of self-isolation.

Humans are social by God’s design, we need one another, we need family, friendship and companionship to be happy. That is why solitary confinement is one of the harshest punishments and worst forms of torture. 

Too often we treat people as a means to an end. If you are like-able and useful then I’ll treat you better. If you are a hindrance to me, I’ll treat you worse. We each fail in justice for a reason. What is yours? Can you identify and admit it? Are you willing to change? 

The foundation of justice

The foundation of justice is that we owe other persons something; we have obligations towards them, and they can have something that is due to them. 

That is an important concept because other material objects are not like that. 

You don’t owe anything to a rock. And yet we must be just towards other persons.   

There is something that sets persons apart from all other material things. There is something qualitatively distinct about persons which is the foundation of Justice. What is this qualitative difference? All Human Persons were created and invited by God to share in His divine life, therefore all human persons have rights.

The fact that God has given every human dignity and rights that must be respected can be known by reason alone. But sin diminishes sight and humans tend to forget this truth.  Jesus Christ alone teaches that all people are equal and must be treated with justice. The more a culture turns away from its Christian roots the more likely it will exploit, enslave and kill others. In his new book, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, the atheist historian Tom Holland documents well that without Jesus Christ, we would not have rights and live like barbarians. 

What sets human beings apart

We must recognize that human beings are radically different from lower creatures, if justice is going to make sense.

We know this is true from human history because every time one group of people wants to commit systematic atrocities, systematic violations of justice against another group of people, what do they do? They always deny the group they fear and hate are persons and identify or associate their victims with some class of animals. Take for instance the time of slavery, what did they do? They took great pains to present people of African descent as being a kind of livestock, a kind of animal. They realized it was necessary to de-personalize the class of human beings they wanted to exploit by first categorize them as animals. This is what the Nazis did to the Jews. Sadly, it was what the Jews did to the Gentiles before that by calling Gentiles, all non-Jews, dogs. Why? Because we know instinctively that animals are not the subjects of rights. We know that animals do not impose moral obligations on us. Every group of people who want to exploit or destroy another group must first deny they are persons to justify their injustice. That is precisely why a baby in the womb is not a person in America but the property of the woman. That is the only way to justify the unjust taking of the innocent persons life. 

Two foundational points to justice

There are two foundational points to remember.

All Human Persons have rights because All were created and invited by God to share in His divine life. What that means is if you deny the existence of God, then you remove the basis of human rights and then you can justify treating others any way you please. You can use them, exploit them, kill them, do whatever you want to with them because there’s nothing special about them.

Secondly, we must recognize that human beings are radically different from other creatures. What that means is that those little bumper stickers you see, “I love my grand puppies” that sort of thing, all these different cultural moves that we have made to make animals seem to be on par with human beings, those aren’t just annoying, those aren’t just irritating. Those are actually fundamental attacks on the foundations of justice because, once you treat dogs like humans it's only the next logical step to treat human beings like dogs. And that’s precisely what’s gonna happen, right? We’re very likely to continue to treat human beings the way breeders treat their animals, we eliminate the ones that we don't think will work for us. And that already has happened and is happening. Any time you put animals and people on par you are shaking the foundations of justice.