Justice – Week 2
Where I reflect on the dialectics of justice and love, the role of the judiciary power as a social inhibitor, and the difficult need to balance past, present and future needs.
It’s standard Christian dialectics. Does justice stand in contrast to love, as a rigid set of rules set against the gentle warmth of forgiveness and affectionate shape-shifting? Or is justice the backbone of love, holding the disjointed parts of our world in mutual order? My perspective on this is strongly coloured by personal experience.
As I reflected through the week, justice entered my family through divorce, where it took the place of love as a binding agent. From the age of eight, I was a witness to my parents debating their mutual rights and obligations: who was to blame and who should pay for what. Through my childhood and teenage years, I was regularly reminded that my mother got money ‘for me’, and should use it ‘on me’. She wasn’t paid to be my babysitter. Of course, as I was also reminded, I would prefer the parent who bought me toys to the one who paid for my food, clothes or hairdos. So who should pay for those? And who deserved my affection? Instead of spontaneous emotions and gratitude, I was trained to think of intimate relationship in terms of fairness and duty.
Things got worse when my father moved to a different city. Both my parents were keen that we should maintain a regular bond, but sharing the cost of commuting brought up debates and resentment, like those archipelago states or cross-river jurisdictions that want a stable connection across their territory, but bicker about who should pay for what. As I remember, my father paid for my trips back and forth, but regularly reminded me that, in all fairness, he should only cover half. My mother found it fair that she should not pay anything for it, and could I please remind my father to make his bank transfer. To keep the system working, I learned the art of holding back: listen to both sides, reserve judgement, and let things drop.
Those childhood memories were the background of this second engagement with justice. On my first week, in an attempt at decolonising my brain, I traced the ripple effects of material abundance around me, and quickly found myself contemplating exhausted soils, endangered species and communities deprived of their ancestral commons. It was brutal. On Week 2, I followed a friend’s advice and took a different approach, connecting to source in the spirit of gratitude. Every day, I took stock of the material things around me and traced what made their existence possible, then mentally voiced a word of thanks. This had a palpable effect on my mood. Crossing Princes Bridge, I felt held by the world. So much beauty, so much comfort, so much I received. It also brought a sense of reciprocal duty. Isn’t it fair that the tradies maintaining those roads, and all the people coordinating the works in beautiful Melbourne, should be well compensated for their efforts?
Social justice acts in favour of the downtrodden: homeless people, minorities, climate refugees, future generations, post-colonial nations and indigenous people. If we want our societies to thrive, or at least hold together, we must balance the excesses of power, and tend to the neglected elements in our systems. This was the drive behind my attempt at mental decolonisation. One week in, a change of attitude towards gratitude, and my perspective shifted. Sure, we must look after the poor and correct the lingering consequences of past violence, but what about the people who take care of our shared modern? Dinner table conversations in my extended family came back to mind – the usual complaints of small business owners and independent workers. Why should I support the poor, or the bureaucrats who clearly do nothing to solve our social problems? Can’t they get a proper job? Shouldn’t I enjoy my hard-earned cash? I’d rather give it to those who curate a joyful world for me, the tradies who fix the roads, the pastry makers, and the makers of pretty things I can buy for my home. In short, I found myself feeling more gratitude for those who ‘contribute to society’ – the strong and healthy who produce and repair material things we can touch and enjoy – and found myself siding with them. They’re so much easier to love than the downtrodden and the resentful, who complain about the lingering consequences of distant oppression, or all the terrible things coming in the future.
Which is probably why we need to keep the dialectics of love and justice front of mind when passing judgement, or balancing resources and rewards.
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In his essays on Ujamaa, the socialist model of government that he trialled in post-colonial Tanzania, Julius Nyerere repeats that people will be people, and a good society should not be designed for angels. At about the same time, in his novel Island, Aldous Huxley described an enlightened South East Asian society, where the main focus is on making citizens more rational and ethical. It’s standard governance dialectics: work on the system or the people?
I had a call with my biomimicry friend over the week. We’re exploring a new project, looking at the overlap of ethics, governance and animal societies. In our first chat, we pondered: is ethics a purely human phenomenon, or does it extend to other species? The question prompted me to think of ethics biologically. I started wondering: could we think of ethics as a function of the frontal cortex, filtering inputs and inhibiting instinct. In cybernetic terms, complex internal feedback loops in the brain distort immediate reactions to stimuli, so that the resulting behaviours are not a direct function of natural determinants, but of the unique and unpredictable way that an individual brain was shaped. Education, in that light, is the art of inhibition – and ethics our effort to create better internal feedback loops, detaching us from biology towards greater freedom. As for animals, to the extent that their behaviour is mediated by internal brain loops that are more than pure genetic determinism, we may consider them on the early steps of an ethical spectrum, that is, capable of self-inhibition.
Meanwhile, I followed JD Vance and the Trump administration’s crusade against the US justice system. They were challenging the right of judges to cancel an executive order. Judges are not a mere tool in the service of power, to act as bogeymen for the people or give decrees legitimacy. It’s part of a social machinery that makes humans better by acting as a social inhibitor. Not only do judges deter people from bad behaviour, but they’re a deliberate brake in the governance system. We know the temptations that affect rulers, we know the risk of acting rashly. That’s why we separate powers, so they can keep each other in check. That was at least the wisdom of America’s founding fathers, and Republican readers of Montesquieu, who prefer virtue to domination So who knows, this project of cultivating virtue may be my way of dealing with our governance systems unravelling.
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By the end of the week, I related those reflections to the more concrete ways that justice operates: particularly looking to the past, how it overlaps with the practice of history. In regard, justice must address three questions: truth, logic, and relevance.
Justice must determine whether facts are true. We know most things only second hand. So what are we relying on to figure out the truth? This is where we must consider methods and procedures. Can a testimony be trusted? Is a record accurate and complete? Was there interference in data collection, or breaches in the chain of custody, putting accuracy in doubt? Or in the absence of hard evidence, are there other sources we should look at, and how do they shift our perception of what happened? What can we do to test and curb our own bias?
Knowing true facts is not enough: we must establish relationships between them. Justice involves an understanding of causality. Sure, my client was drunk driving and hit the plaintiff as he crossed the road, but is that really the cause of their lasting back pain? How certain can we be that fact A was the direct and sole cause of fact B? It’s not enough to say that something happened, and then something happened. Enter the wide realm of logic, hypotheticals and counterfactuals. One of my cousins is a criminal barrister who rarely works with innocents. Gangsters and paedophiles have a right to be defended, that’s his stance. Sure, there may be financial benefits for him – but I sense a deeper conviction. When justice is running its course, it’s tempting to side with the victim and look for a culprit to serve as scapegoat. Except, the world is a system, and things have more than one cause. Even salient perpetrators have mitigating circumstances, and the most innocent victim dark edges.
Which takes us to the final and most subjective question: how far should we stretch our understanding of causality. From some perspective, everything is the cause of everything else, so much so that we can never establish any responsibility. As I reflected on this, I was reading about Europe and migration. Arguments often place compassion in opposition to justice – don’t you care about people suffering? But what about justice as balance between interconnected elements. Is it legitimate for people to come to Europe in search of economic opportunity? The answer depends in part on our understanding of history. Question of fact: to what extent did Europe plunder Africa and other parts of the world? Question of logic: to what extent did that plunder offer Europe the primitive capital accumulation that kickstarted its acceleration? To what extent does it have lasting impact on the relative wealth of other parts of the world? Historians can help us think through those questions. But even so, to what extent are those questions relevant? Does inequality resulting from events hundreds of years ago still matter? Or should we consider that there is prescription, and move on?
As we ponder those questions, let’s not forget the dialectics of love and justice: that fairness may be the backbone of warmth and affection, that the strong are often easier to love than the weak, and that when a victim is found, we will be tempted to scapegoat a perpetrator.