>>The virtue of justice is a complex and important virtue for several reasons. One is that it
applies to institutions and the political state as well as to individuals. That is a
state can be just or just and any organization with rules governing the association can also
be just or unjust. Often we think that justice is concerned more with what you do than with
how you feel. But I think that there is a motivational or feeling component in justice
as much as there is in other virtues. For instance, when we think of compassion we think
of an emotion that motivates certain behaviors in addition to the behaviors themselves. I
think we can say the same thing about Justice. The emotion that motivates the behavior’s
characteristic of justice is respect for human beings. The reason we should treat people
fairly and tell them the truth and not steal from them is that they deserve it as human
beings. Respecting their status as human persons is the motivation for acting justly and it
is the motivation for laws that enforce just behavior. Aristotle thought that justice is
such an important virtue that he devoted an entire book of the Nicomachean Ethics to discussing
it. He argues that there are two categories of Justice. Distributive Justice involves
dividing benefits and burdens fairly among members of a society. Corrective Justice requires
us to try to restore a fair balance among the persons in the society when it has been
lost. If a member of a community has been unfairly benefited or burdened with more or
less than she deserves in social distributions then corrective justice can be required. Judicial
punishment and court laws would be in this category. Aristotle thought that Justice,
like the other moral virtues is a mean between extremes. It is a mean between someone getting
less than she deserves and getting more than she deserves at someone else’s expense.
This way of describing justice as a mean may seem a bit forced because getting less than
you deserve is not a vice in you, and getting more than you deserve may not be a vice in
you either. But it shows Aristotle’s idea of justice as having to do with each person
getting what they deserve. Each type of violation of justice: lying, stealing, cheating, treating
people unfairly, makes some assumption about what people deserve. Lying is wrong because
each person deserves to be told the truth. But that’s not exactly right because we
don’t really think that everybody has the right to know anything they want to know about
your private life. That implies that there is no private life at all. So I think the
background assumption is that respect for each person entails respect for their need
to know the truth in order to make their own free choices to reach their own ends. Deception
blocks them from acting as a free human being so we are violating the rights as human beings
if we lie to them but there is still an area of information that is none of their business.
Traditionally that led to the distinction between lying and reframing from revealing
the truth. Aquinas was one of the many philosophers who thought it was always wrong to lie but
you need not always reveal the truth. An example of the difference is the legend about Saint
Athanasius in the fourth century who was in hiding from the emperor. Some of the Emperors
guards who didn’t know what he looked like came upon him as he rounded a bend in the
river. When they saw him they said to him, have you seen that traitor Athanasius? Athanasius
reportedly replied ‘He is not far away.’ Thinking that meant that Athanasius was just
a little way up the river the guards hurried on ahead while Athanasius escaped in the other
direction. This story has been told for centuries as an example of a deception that is not a
lie and which is morally acceptable. It worked because Athanasius got lucky, but it seems
to me that Athanasius was unusually clever and the Emperor’s guards unusually stupid.
What should he have done if he was not so quick thinking and he was up against smarter
guards? We might all agree that lying is wrong in general but there might be some hard cases
where we disagree. The wrongness of stealing also has a background assumption of what people
deserve. It is assumed that private property exists and that each person deserves the property
she owns. From time to time that assumption has been challenged, as you undoubtedly know.
But owning your own property is almost universally recognized is something that every human being
deserves and is included in the universal declaration of human rights. Even in those
places where private ownership of land was not permitted theft was still recognized as
a crime because the general principle of private ownership has rarely been denied. The only
issue is how far it extends. Should there be private ownership of mineral rights? In
the US the answer is yes. But in most of Europe the answer is no. Private property includes
intellectual property recognized by most countries but not all. I learned that myself when some
of my books were translated and published in countries that do not pay for rights to
the book. What is the background assumption in the wrongness of cheating? Cheating arises
in a community with rules that govern the distribution of goods and burdens. If you
cheat on your income tax you’re taking less of a burden for yourself, which in turn requires
a greater burden for others. If you cheat on an exam you are taking a benefit for yourself
that makes you appear better than you are relative to other students. The grading system
itself can be unfair and so can the tax system but the unfairness of the tax system or the
grading system is not determined by private judgment. That is something we agree upon
as a community and change as a community. What does it mean to distribute goods fairly?
This is a difficult question. Suppose you are deciding whether to give a scholarship
or award to a student with early home advantages and a supportive social environment and impressive
academic achievements. Or to another student who has achieved somewhat less but had to
overcome more. What is the fair thing to do? I have been in that situation and found it
difficult to decide. If we are honoring someone we have to know exactly what it is we are
honoring them for, effort, accomplishment, talent, perseverance, being a model for others,
maybe all of it but which counts more, perseverance and being a model for others or talent plus
a lot of effort and accomplishment? In the background of fairness there are rules for
distributing goods and burdens that serve the ends for which the community was created.
So fairness applies in the public domain. But does it also apply to charitable giving?
The philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff gave a really interesting talk to the OU philosophy
department a few years ago in which he was asking whether justice requires us to give
to the most deserving charity and to give as equally as we can to all those who deserve
it. Is it unjust to give more to some than to others as long as you give to each as least
as much as you agreed to give? Wolterstorff referred to the parable of the workers in
the vineyard in Mathew’s gospel where the owner of the vineyard pays the same wage to
the workers he hires at the end of the day as the workers he hires at the beginning.
The workers he hires at the beginning are given the agreed upon daily wage but the workers
hired at the end of the day are given much more than they expected. The workers hired
at the beginning of the day complain but he asks them why they would complain just because
he has been particularly generous to others. This parable is very familiar but I mention
it because I was surprised that some people in the audience thought that the vineyard
owner acted unfairly. The story does not strike me that way at all but it makes me wonder
when fairness applies and when it doesn’t. Surely we are not expected to treat everybody
impartially all the time. But we can imagine variations of the gospel parable that seem
closer to being unfair. Suppose the federal government announces on April 20th that people
who file their income tax on the deadline day, April 15th, would get a tax break but
people who filed earlier would get no break at all. Do you react any differently to that
situation? I think so because a tax bonus is not a private transaction, it must follow
the rules determined by law. But fairness does apply to many private transactions. What
if an employer decides to give a bonus to some of her employees but not others? Where
her personal favorites get the bonus and others do not. How is that different from the workers
in the vineyard? I don’t know but I hope to find out your reactions. Do people benefit
from being just? Remember that this was the primary question in Plato’s Republic. To
answer it Plato closely connected justice with the basic good of the human soul, which
mirrors the good of the community. We have not yet talked about the connection between
personal happiness and the thriving of the community in which we live but I think that
to really appreciate the importance of justice we also need to understand civic virtue, the
topic of a later lecture.