Justice: An Inner Dialog

by Jeff Treder

I’ve been chewing some more lately on the subject of justice, and have decided to objectify my inner conversation through a three-way dialog.  One of the participants I’ll call Righty, another Lefty, while I myself will serve as a sort of moderator.  All of the views expressed are ones that make sense to me; I can understand why someone would hold them.  As will be seen, I agree with some more than others, for reasons which will become clear as we go along.  

Jeff:  To consider the subject of justice, let’s take a clear-cut and serious example.  A man kidnaps, tortures, rapes, and murders a woman.  Afterward a man, allegedly the same, is arrested and charged.  There is eyewitness and DNA evidence against him, along with other strong circumstantial evidence.  There is little if any doubt that he did it.  If true justice were done in this case, what would be the outcome?

Righty:  Well, what does justice mean?  In my view it’s a moral concept having to do with what a person deserves or merits.  Wrongful actions inherently deserve hurtful consequences, just as right actions deserve praise and reward.  Ultimately this concept is rooted in the moral character of God as Creator and Judge of the universe.  It may survive the loss of belief in God, but I think in that case it will inevitably be weakened and compromised, continuously and increasingly.  As for your malefactor, justice dictates that he should reap what he has sown.  If he were a thief, he should be compelled to repay what he has stolen.  As a rapist and murderer, what he deserves is to be put to death.  The only question is whether his death should be easier than his victim’s or similarly painful.

Lefty:  Tortured to death?  That’s barbaric!  Anyway, you’re glossing over some serious issues here in your rush to judgment.  Our juridical axiom of “presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt” exists in order to protect the innocent from the overweening power of the State or the frenzy of a lynch mob.  The trouble with capital punishment is that it forecloses the question of doubt finally and forever.  The only standard that could justly sentence a defendant to death is “no doubt whatsoever,” and I don’t think it’s humanly possible to establish absolute certainty.  Even confessions can be false for any number of reasons.  And as for your thief, since you brought it up, what if he stole a million bucks and blew it all in a long Vegas weekend?  How could you make him repay?  Working on the road gang for minimum wage?  At $10 an hour it would take him 30 or 40 years to repay the million, all of which time he’d be living at public expense.

Righty:  Yes, just exactly why I think—

Jeff:  Whoa, we’re getting sidetracked here.  The thief is an interesting judicial problem, and maybe we can look at it later.  But let’s get back to our murderer.  Righty, what about this matter of the impossibility of establishing his guilt with absolute certainty?

Righty:  It’s an important consideration, I admit.  And since I believe in God, I am assured that this rapist/torturer/murderer will get exactly what he deserves in eternity, just as soon as he dies, whether that is sooner or later.  As Macbeth observed, however, “in these cases / We still have judgment here.”  Even if God is going to deal with us justly in eternity, we shouldn’t use that to evade our social responsibility, as I’m sure even Lefty will agree.  Now, I fully understand the “absolute certainty” argument against capital punishment, but I don’t agree with it.  If the jury is unanimously convinced by the evidence as far as is humanly possible—that is, if they are humanly certain—that he is guilty as charged, then he should be executed.  Notice that this raises the bar higher than “beyond a reasonable doubt” while still not requiring godlike certainty.

Lefty:  I take your point but I don’t agree with it.  Condemning someone to death does amount to playing God, for all your hairsplitting.

Righty:  No, it’s doing our human best to give the convicted man, his victim, her family and loved ones, and our society what they all deserve.  It’s making our best approximation to divine justice, which is what I think we’re supposed to do.

Lefty:  Since you’re so fond of divine justice, why not pay attention to what Jesus said:  “Do not judge lest you be judged.”(Matt.7:1)  “Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone.”(John 8:7)

Righty:  You’re quoting those out of context.  The first one has to do with personal relationships, not public justice.  The second one came when Jesus was interrupting a lynch mob—well, a stoning mob, anyway another kind of injustice.  Context, my friend, context!

Jeff:  All right, you two aren’t going to agree on this, but I think you’re both making good points, and at least we’ve clarified where you both stand.  But Lefty, what about this matter of “just deserts”?  Do you think that some kind of absolute justice exists, whether or not it’s rooted in God’s character?

Lefty:  I’m rather agnostic when it comes to absolutes.  They may exist, just as God may, but I don’t think we have any reliable way of knowing that they exist or just exactly what they are.  As the philosophers like to put it, we humans are inescapably contingent beings (I’ll sidestep confusing the issue with “absolutely contingent”).  Our knowledge, even at its best and fullest, is necessarily incomplete and imperfect.  Our mental awareness and acuity appear to be evolving along with our physical form, but evolution is an extremely gradual process.

Jeff:  So there’s no such thing as absolute justice?

Lefty:  Not in our world, at any rate.  We do our best according to the moral understanding we have developed over the centuries.  Overall, I think our understanding has steadily improved, extremes and aberrations like Nazism and Communism notwithstanding.  The world over, it’s safe to say, our sense of justice today is far more refined and enlightened than that of, say, the Babylonian or Roman or Mongol empires, or Europe during the middle ages.

Righty:  Sorry, that’s self-serving nonsense, because without any absolutes, you have no benchmark by which to measure moral progress.  What does “more refined and enlightened” mean if it doesn’t mean progressing toward some defined goal?  If it means nothing more than that’s how it seems to you, then it’s merely a matter of opinion.  I’ve no doubt that the Romans or Mongols would have preferred their brand of justice to yours, and who’s to say which is better?  What does “better” mean when there’s no benchmark?  Moral relativism may give some people like yourself comfortable feelings of superiority, but those feelings rest on a will o’ the wisp.  

Lefty:  Sorry (back at you!), but the truth is that all our feelings and judgments rest on a will o’ the wisp.  Your precious absolutes are the ultimate mirage.  We humans make it up as we go along—always have, always will.  Our ability to conceive of perfections and absolutes is simply an indication of the extent to which our minds have evolved so far.  To be able to imagine something, however, in no way establishes that such a thing actually exists.  Unicorns!  Leprechauns!

Jeff:  Excuse me, but aren’t we wandering from the subject?

Righty:  Not at all.  He’s saying we have no grounds on which to judge and punish our rapist creep except that we—we enlightened ones, that is, or maybe even we the majority —don’t happen to like what he did.  It offends our moral sense.  What moral sense is that, you ask, and where did it come from?  Well, it just evolved along with the chimps, or as Lefty here puts it, we just made it up.

Lefty:  Rinse out your sneering tone of voice and I’d say that you, even you, have managed to get it pritnear right.  Given, as I believe, that your Ten Commandments or whatever other absolutes you may prefer are just as “made up” as every other moral idea that humans have ever come up with, you have stated my case fairly enough.  Prior to the Enlightenment it was almost universally assumed, in the West at least, that kings rule by divine right and judges (the king’s appointees) judge according to divinely given rules.  That was the theory; the practice was even worse.  Since the Enlightenment we have generally understood that human societies are the result of a social contract, a contract that works better when people enter into it knowledgeably and willingly.  In earlier times, and still in many places today, the contract was effectively limited to a small elite of the rich and powerful.  The spread of democracy is the cure for that disease—not a perfect cure but the best we have.  Only to the extent that democracy—of the people, by the people, and for the people—flourishes, only to that extent can we achieve any meaningful social justice.

Righty:  Eloquent, but even Lincoln believed that genuine justice must be grounded in God’s character and supremacy—see his Second Inaugural Address.  Democracy is fine, I’m all for it, but true justice can only be manifested in any society, democratic or otherwise, to the extent that we adhere to divinely revealed moral absolutes.  Get into that relative ethics quagmire and you’ll find some crafty defense lawyer having his way with a morally confused and debased jury, while a liberal judge smiles and nods, and your torturing, murdering thug gets off with a highly flexible prison sentence, thank you very much.

Lefty:  Divinely revealed?  Has the separation of church and state just become unseparated?

Righty:  Ah yes, the celebrated wall of separation.  Bill of Rights, right?

Lefty:  No, my tricky friend, the phrase comes from a letter of Thomas Jefferson.  But it has become accepted over time, particularly through Supreme Court decisions, as the cornerstone of our understanding of the first amendment’s establishment clause.

Righty:  Let’s see.  The first amendment reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.…”  Jefferson’s statement about a wall of separation between church and state was made in an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut.  The Baptists had heard a rumor that the Congregationalists, another denomination, were going to be established as the national religion.  This was alarming to people whose forbears had emigrated in order to escape persecution by the established Church of England.  Jefferson made it clear in his letter that the meaning and intent of the separation was that the government would not establish a state church or otherwise legislate anyone’s religion.

Lefty:  And likewise no religious group could call the shots in the political arena.

Righty:  Correct. No shot calling. But that doesn’t mean having no voice or no influence.  Free exercise!  The main thing here, though, is that your “cornerstone” of our understanding of the establishment clause exists only in this presidential letter.  It has no constitutional basis, in spite of the efforts of some modern jurists to twist freedom of religion into freedom from religion.

Lefty:  Religion is essentially a private thing, a matter of individual conscience.  It should be kept separate from the arena of public policy, both to protect religion from government interference and to protect public policy from sectarian wrangling and “faith-based” legislation—a prospect whose possibilities one shudders to imagine.

Righty:  Your thinking is seriously confused, as usual.  Religious beliefs, like political opinions, are both private and public—privately formed and publicly expressed.  (In both religion and politics, of course, some people are more expressive than others.)  Everyone has religious beliefs.  Even atheism is a religious belief:  “no God.”  Everyone, in other words, has fundamental presuppositions about the nature of life and reality.  These beliefs may be vague, perfunctory and unexamined; they may be adopted uncritically from one’s family or social group; but every mentally competent adult has them.  They are basic to our humanity.  Furthermore, our moral ideas depend directly on these fundamental beliefs.  The Buddhist’s moral thinking is based on his Buddhist worldview, the Christian’s on his Christian worldview, and the atheist’s on his atheistic worldview.  Even legislators legislate according to their personal moral framework, which derives from their basic beliefs.  In this regard, private and public form a seamless, unbreakable continuum.  I too get nightmares about faith-based legislation when the faith is godless and therefore morally ungrounded.

Lefty:  No, no, it’s you who are confused.  “Faith” in this context means belief in some unseen, unseeable, supernatural realm.  The secular person, whom you stigmatize by the loaded term “atheist,” simply bases his thinking, his worldview as you put it, on the world we can all see, hear and touch, the empirical world.  This is the worldview we all share in common; it unites us, whereas religious beliefs, just because they are intangible and untestable, tend to divide us.  This secular, empirical worldview is foundational to modern science, with its incomparable success in increasing human knowledge (exponentially) and enhancing human well-being.  And because this secular worldview is what we all have in common, it’s what our public policy ought to be based on.  Basing public policy on sectarian religious beliefs would lead in short order to chaos, lunacy, and probably civil war.

Righty:  No, no, NO!  You don’t see it, do you?  You’re saying we all share your secular worldview, but most emphatically, brother, we don’t!  Well of course, we all perceive the same natural world—we do have that in common.  But that doesn’t define my worldview or that of most human beings.  There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your (secular) philosophy, Horatio.  From my point of view, you’re walking through life with blinders on.

Jeff:  OK, OK, all this is pertinent, I realize, but we do need to bring the focus back to our alleged malefactor at some point.  As a Christian, I agree with Righty that the secular (or atheistic or agnostic) worldview is just one among many, that it too is based on a belief system, and that it has no grounds for privilege in the public arena.  Until quite recently natural science was based on a theistic worldview, and even today many scientists are theists.  But what does all this have to do with the question of justice as it pertains to the man in the dock?

Lefty:  Justice!  I’m glad you brought it up.  Your example is a bad man who is almost certainly guilty of vicious crimes.  In most American courts today he will receive a severe sentence, probably life imprisonment.  Righty’s scenario of a slap on the hand is an alarmist fantasy; the O.J. Simpson case was a rare and unfortunately high-profile aberration, and the problem there was botched police work.  In many countries today our man would be executed for either the rape or the murder.  But I have a problem with such a man being used as the example on the question of justice.  Far more important, it seems to me, are the billions (literally) of people who have committed no serious crime and yet are treated unjustly by a sordid alliance of corrupt governments and wealthy corporations, as well as oppressive religious regimes and entrenched racism.  At least half of the women and children in the world are treated unjustly—what about them?  I call this positive justice, and its gross deficiency is a much worse problem than your example of negative justice.

Righty:  Your idea of positive and negative justice, again, only confuses things.  It’s all justice pure and simple—or injustice.  I agree that many and perhaps most of the world’s people are dealt a bad hand, but whose fault is that, and what do you propose to do about it?

Lefty:  Whose fault!  If your God exists, it’s his fault to start with.  But that’s hypothetical.  The obvious answer, of course, is that it’s the fault of all the corrupt, brutal, self-serving officials along with their pals, the blood-sucking plutocrats.  Political revolution is always a tempting solution, but in practice that usually winds up trading one set of oppressors for another.  As I said before, the spread of democracy seems to be the best available solution in an imperfect world.

Righty:  Two points in rebuttal.  First, when God created the first humans he gave them a perfect world.  Their rebellion and that of everyone since them is responsible for all the subsequent misery.  God, in Jesus Christ, is the solution, not the problem (Bible primer lesson).  Second, I have a hard time taking all your moral hand-wringing seriously for the same reason I’ve already given:  you’re playing tennis without a net, or trying to tell time with no numbers on the clock face.  The clock is round, and how can you tell which end is up?  You can’t.  As you’ve admitted, your idea of morality is that we make it up as we go along.  You think we’re getting progressively better at it, but that’s just your opinion and the opinion of like-minded folk.  Where everything is relative, well, everything is relative.  When there’s no way to orient the clock, Nero’s or Joe McCarthy’s version of the correct time is as good or bad a guess as yours.  Your moral compass says that way is north, and you follow it without realizing that the magnet has failed and the arrow is meandering.  When you give up moral absolutes, the lights have gone out and you’re groping in the dark.  What partial light you do enjoy comes from the fading sunset of the God you’ve stopped believing.

Lefty:  Please, stop multiplying metaphors and tell us what your solution to rampant injustice is, if any.

Righty:  I agree with you that democracy—I would specify the American form of democracy—is the political system which tends to maximize justice and minimize injustice.  And I agree that ours is a very imperfect world where even the relatively best political system will be laced with injustice; but I think I have a more accurate understanding of just why that is.  When people reject God and opt for self-interest, self-aggrandizement and self-righteousness, rampant injustice “follows as the night the day.”  There is no solution apart from repenting and returning to God.

Lefty:  I can hardly believe this.  Are you actually saying that there is no way we can improve our political and social arrangements, and therefore the only answer is to light a candle and murmur Hail Mary’s?  Why that God and not some other—Allah or Krishna or Jupiter?  Religion has succeeded in holding back progress for countless centuries and in many parts of the world still does, and religion is your solution?  Sorry, but you’ve lost my vote.

Jeff:  All right, it’s clear that you two will never be on the same ticket.  I think it’s time for some summing up.  Lefty, I think your heart’s in the right place, but your logic, at least when it comes to ultimate issues, is Swiss cheese.  Righty, I tend to agree with you more, simply because I believe in God as you do.  Your logic is strong, but I wish you could match Lefty’s concern for the injustices (real, absolute) inflicted perennially on the poor and weak by the rich and strong..  If you did, you would be following Jesus more closely.

It has become quite clear that the main thing that divides you two is, as Righty put it, your worldviews.  And the decisive difference there is whether or not you recognize (acknowledge, believe in, take into account, revere) God.  But Lefty’s question is a good one:  Why the Christian God and not some other?

A god is by definition a supernatural being.  The God of the Bible is, in addition, a being of infinite knowledge and power.  The only way we could possibly have trustworthy information about such a being—the biblical God or any other—is by revelation.  The reason I believe the biblical God is that his self-revelation in the created universe, in human history, and in the Bible itself (that unique and incomparable book) is immeasurably more rationally convincing and emotionally and spiritually satisfying than any other alleged divine revelation.  And, equally, it is more rationally convincing than any argument I’ve ever seen attempting to discredit it on skeptical or naturalistic grounds.

God is also the one who reveals and establishes moral absolutes:  love, mercy, honesty, truth, purity, justice.  Righty’s reasoning about the ultimate futility of a moral code with no absolutes—the endless ambiguities and uncertainty, the self-deceptions, the reduction of moral principle to mere opinion—seems to me unanswerable.  At least I have yet to encounter a convincing response.  How can you orient the clock to tell the time?  How can you navigate with a demagnetized compass?  As Dostoevsky put it, if God is dead, everything is permissible.  Who is to say otherwise, and with what authority?  Big Brother can declare that love is hate and war is peace, and what can the moral relativist reply?  I don’t agree?  I don’t like that?  What he can’t say is, That is wrong.  “Wrong” is a moral absolute.  Even “relatively wrong” is meaningful only if it means “approximating absolute wrongness.”  Another try is to say that we determine our moral standards by societal consensus, but that doesn’t work either, because it merely substitutes group opinion for personal opinion.  Anyway, who besides teenage girls wants to be ruled by groupthink?

The determined moral relativist, I suspect, will finally say something like, “Since there are no moral absolutes (because all alleged divine revelation is actually human imagining), it’s true that the ultimate source of all moral reasoning and moral standards is a person’s own reasoning and standards.  Morality is ultimately personal.  Social morality becomes coherent and workable insofar as people are able to agree on it.  That’s the way it is, and I’m comfortable with it.  It isn’t perfect, but nothing else is either.”

I understand this point of view, but I think it’s philosophically dubious owing to the orientation problem.  It leaves us having to say that Hitler wasn’t evil or wrong, his values were just different from ours.  Which reminds me of that saying, “Different is different, not better or worse.”  It’s a wise saying when the subject is non-moral, like one’s taste in food or clothing—de gustibus non disputandem.  On moral matters, though, it leads to “anything goes.”

This brings us back to our indicted rapist-murderer.  Because Lefty doesn’t believe in moral absolutes, he’s loath to “play God” by allowing for capital punishment.  More generally, I think, moral relativists tend to be uneasy with punishment per se, probably because it’s linked logically with justice, and justice is only truly meaningful when understood as an absolute. “Relatively just” means nothing unless it means approximating true, absolute justice.  Since I do believe in absolute justice, rooted in the justice of God, I agree with Righty’s view that “if the jury is unanimously convinced by the evidence as far as is humanly possible—that is, if they are humanly certain—that he is guilty as charged, then he should be executed.”  I also agree with his explanation that we would thus be “doing our human best to give the convicted man, his victim, her family and loved ones, and our society what they all deserve.  It’s making our best approximation to divine justice, which is what I think we’re supposed to do.”  It’s not a perfect solution, but as both my alter egos acknowledged, it’s not a perfect world.  It is, however, the best available solution.  Since he took a life, he should surrender his own life.  Besides, that way he will never again have the opportunity to harm anyone else, which wouldn’t be the case if he spent 30 or 40 years in prison (at public expense) or out on parole.

In an imperfect world, I agree with both my alter egos that democracy is our best available form of government.  As Winston Churchill pithily put it, “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.”  In a democracy more or less evenly divided between moral absolutists and moral relativists, it will be hard to find any consistent agreement on practical justice, especially in the extreme case of murder and capital punishment.  So the debate will go on.  Which is better than having debate foreclosed by anyone except God himself.