37. JUSTICE

[Editor’s note: I find it helpful to translate JJ’s term “a form of life” as “a script.” A script is a plan for a sequence of behaviors—a script as it is used in drama is a perfect example.]

     In a reflection in my Third Installment, I argued that justice is a moral notion with a hollow center, much like the notion of "a common good."  I realize now that my criticism was inspired by a peculiar difficulty.  Clearly, the longing for intimacy generated a distinctive form of life whose language could be used to process experiences in ways that transformed the longing into a realizable quest.  But I could not see how justice could be transformed into a form of life with a realizable purpose.

    As I analyzed the workings of references to "a common good," however, I became aware of profound differences between this notion and the notion of justice.  As a moral notion, justice concerns relationships between and among detached individuals.  (As a form of life, intimacy focuses on intensely personal interactions.)  In Wittgensteinian terms, its functioning can be compared to a rope woven from many strands, with no strand running all the way through, and, therefore, as a word whose meaning depends on its use in a form of life.

    As a word laden with many meanings, justice encodes a cluster of moral notions which function as principles designed to structure relationships between and among detached individuals, including impartiality, equality, fairness, rights, common decency, and mutual respect.  Taken separately, any of these strands can be used for very different purposes.  Affirmative action provides an example.  To promote the program, proponents argue that those who have been systematically disadvantaged by the prevailing social (power) structures deserve the special consideration needed to provide them with equal opportunity with those who have long benefitted from the system.  From this perspective, affirmative action is a matter of justice.  But opponents of the program counter that those deprived of positions awarded to the so-called disadvantaged are victims of reverse discrimination.  And since any sort of discrimination is unjust, reverse discrimination is unjust precisely because it denies equal opportunity to those who are better prepared to fill the position.

    In its own right, the fact that a moral notion can be used for very different purposes is hardly surprising.  Love provides a paradigm example.  The language of love enables lovers to transform a longing for intimacy into a realizable quest.  But seduction is also a form of life, and seducers use the language of love for very different purposes.

    In this vein, I came to see that the meaning of justice depends on its use in a form of life.  On the one hand, echoes of a language of rights in appeals for justice render its use in the quest for deepening intimacy counterproductive.  Intimacy calls for vulnerable self-revelations, not moral judgments or self-protective strategies.  But there is also a need for moral notions which address issues arising between and among detached individuals.  And in this arena, radically different ways of using justice can be seen in the uses made of the strand in the notion developed in the language of rights.

    An analysis of ways that individuals invoke the right to freedom of speech illustrates the point at issue.  This language was generated in response to the dramatic emergence of a sense of self in a culture still dominated by the previously unquestioned assumption encapsulated in the dictum, vox regis, vox Dei [the voice of the king is the voice of God] .  Kings were kings by divine right of birth, and submission to their dictates was submission to the will of God.  As the language of rights developed, however, the meaning of politically recognized rights was increasingly determined by the purpose of the language-user.  In this vein, many individuals in the United States today regard the right to freedom of speech as a personal possession which must be jealously guarded and vigorously defended.  In effect, they use the invocation of a right to freedom of speech for two purposes, one, to render themselves invulnerable and, two, to justify a refusal to enter into a respectful dialogue concerning the point at issue.  Quite obviously, if everyone shared this belief, we would dwell within a litigious society akin to Hobbes's war of all against all.  But the meaning of this right is very different if it calls me to defend your right to speak freely because I can trust that you will defend my right, if I, too, am threatened by the powers-that-be.  Here, a language of rights calls us to stand together, in a shared vulnerability.

    In this vein, I suggest that justice as a moral notion can be used for either moral or immoral purposes.  It functions as a moral notion rather than a rationalization of a will to power when, and only when, it is used in a political discourse whose moral import is indebted to a language which respects the personal dimensions of human experience.

    As I show in detail elsewhere, this language calls for passionate, vulnerable, respectful and faithful interactions.  In a political discourse which grants priority to the personal over the impersonal, this call differs in degree, but not in kind. 

    To illustrate the point at issue:  I am passionately committed to Lincoln's insight that the United States is a society conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all are created equal.  Consequently, I espouse an understanding of the language of rights which evokes a passionate awareness of shared vulnerability which in turn evokes a passionate rejection of the belief that rights are somehow personal possessions to be jealously guarded and passionately asserted.  And this stance of shared vulnerability forces me to be respectful of positions I abhor, and I hope that I will respond faithfully to the call enunciated in the reconstitution of the American enterprise first formulated so succinctly by Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address.

    In this Address. Lincoln dared to insist that the enterprise is as full of peril as of promise.  In so doing, he implicitly centered political discourse in the prophetic tradition which demanded that citizens nurture a sympathetic imagination which enables them to hear the cries of those who are oppressed, dispossessed, marginalized and silenced by the prevailing power-structures and concentrations of power in the hands of the powers-that-be.

    In a moral discourse designed to promote the quest for a fully human and uniquely personal existence, the language of intimacy enables honest searchers to hear the cries of pain from their own depths and from the depths of others.  It also reveals that an economic system which promises the full gratification of desires for those who commit themselves unreservedly to its dictates can ignore the price paid by children in less developed countries who must work long hours for barely subsistence wages.  Ideologies have that effect on true believers.

    In sum, though I cannot find a way to derive a form of life with a realizable purpose from justice as a moral notion, the cluster of concepts and principles it encodes do voice moral protests against forms of life whose rhetorics assume that a metaphor of power and judgment rather than a metaphor of intimacy endows them with moral authority.