The Foundation of Justice

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We tend to get Justice backwards…Many people think of justice in the sense of 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.

Justice Safeguards relationships. Plato says that an unjust person   is more to be pitied than the one who suffers injustice. Why? Because the person who commits injustice is damaging, in a sense burning bridges between every other person. And therefore, the unjust person, by mistreating others and failing to fulfill your obligations, committing acts of injustice and therefore cutting off relationships with other people, the unjust person becomes trapped in the misery of self isolation, in the misery of self isolation.

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?

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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 human 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 in the image of God with an immortal soul and every person is invited by God to share in His divine life, that is what makes them different, that is what makes them valuable, that is why they 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.

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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.

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There are two foundational points to remember.

All Human Persons have rights because All were created by God in His image with an immortal soul and all are 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 grandpuppies” right, 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.

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Justice demands that we recognize the value of all other human persons – but I think it also should cause us to reflect on our own God given worth, for if we don’t believe we are of value we probably wont treat others as valuable. The biggest lie of the devil is that you are worthless until you create your value – that we must achieve something or appear some way to have worth. This is a lie straight out of Hell - that if you don’t achieve this or if you don’t appear like that – then you will be useless, invaluable, unloved – that is all a lie.

But we cause ourselves all kinds of anxiety by trying to prove our worth. For a lot of folks the only thing between them and the bottomless void of worthlessness is the net woven of their own achievements. And those cords keep fraying and snapping, their achievements keep getting obsolete and wearing out, which means they must be constantly tending to that net, fixing up the old ropes and adding new ones. They have to make themselves matter, all the time. The most arrogant, self-promoting person you know is desperately trying to save his own existence from slipping into the dark night of irrelevance.

Do you see from where your value comes? It has nothing to do with your gifts, achievements, performance, beauty, or moral goodness. Your value comes from God! He created you, hand-crafted in single batches, a one-of-a-kind masterpiece. Then he put His divine life in you and made you his kid. Then to save you from eternal loss, he was willing to suffer what was just described above. Why would God go to such inconceivable lengths? Because you are worth it. He made you that way.

You don’t need to worry about making yourself valuable. God gave it to you. Nothing can take it away.