Justice

What Justice means in shared life

Your neighborhood group is ready to close discussion of a proposal for a shared courtyard. The agenda has a large box for “Decision” and no place for the tenants whose access would change. Someone says hearing them will make the evening complicated. You ask the group to consider their claim before it closes the item. The agenda will need another line; the tenants will need the courtyard for rather longer.

Justice gives…

People have a better chance of receiving what is due to them without repeatedly having to interrupt a celebration of everyone else’s agreement. The decision can become answerable to its effects beyond the people who drafted it.

Finding the balance

Taking a claim seriously is more than collecting a comment and less than promising its preferred outcome. Justice requires attention to what is due and a response that follows from the reasons, even where that complicates the plan.

In ordinary life

Thanks and repayment

Return agreed exhibition deposits as well as giving thank-you badges. Appreciation does not discharge a debt.

An unfinished commitment

Bring an overlooked promise back into a group’s account of what remains to be done.

Nearby virtues, different work

Fairness

Fairness weighs interests and evidence impartially. Justice attends to the legitimate claim that must be addressed in the outcome.

Compassion

Compassion notices suffering; Justice can recognize a claim even when its holder tells no moving story.

Recognizing a counterfeit

A counterfeit of Justice: Inviting people to speak after the decision is beyond change can dress up exclusion as consultation. Say honestly what remains open, and make the response consequential where the group has a choice.

How to cultivate Justice

• Ask whose claim falls outside the agenda as drafted.
• Distinguish an inconvenient claim from an illegitimate one.
• Check that an acknowledged obligation reaches the decision and follow-through.

Try it today

In a modest plan you already help shape, identify an affected person or group whose claim may have been overlooked. Write down what should be considered and raise it only within your role and a suitable setting. This is not a legal assessment or an instruction to confront anyone.

Questions worth returning to

• What claim are we treating as an interruption because it complicates our preferred answer?
• What changed because we said we had heard it?

Choose your practice

The situations on these pages are illustrative. These pages offer ideas for reflection and character practice, not professional advice. Choose practices suited to your circumstances and abilities. You may adapt, pause, or skip an exercise; putting yourself or someone else at risk is not proof of virtue.

Quotations and further reading

Read these passages in their original settings through the source links.

1. Also I mean by honesty, the careful and eager giving his due to every man, the determination not to gain by any man’s loss, which in my experience is not a common virtue.

   William Morris, Hopes and Fears for Art
   The Art Of The People

   Morris’s broad use of honesty includes giving each person their due. The inconvenient claim still belongs in the account when the group would prefer to close it.

2. Of what efficacy are rules of procedure in securing the ends of justice if the moral condition of the people is such that the witnesses generally lie, and the judges and their subordinates take bribes?

   John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government
   Chapter II—The Criterion of a Good Form of Government.

   Procedure cannot achieve its purpose when the people operating it disregard truth and obligation.

3. They fail to be content with the fulfilment of their family and personal obligations, and find themselves striving to respond to a new demand involving a social obligation; they have become conscious of another requirement, and the contribution they would make is toward a code of social ethics.

   Jane Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics
   Chapter I — Introduction

   Addams describes an obligation extending beyond family and private life, the claim at the heart of the common good.

4. Cognition, in short, is incomplete until discharged in act

   William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
   The Sentiment of Rationality, section I

   In “The Sentiment of Rationality,” James connects knowing with action. This short clause introduces a longer argument about practical interests; it is not a claim that action excuses careless thought.

5. This virtue is justice: the violation of justice is injury: it does real and positive hurt to some particular persons, from motives which are naturally disapproved of.

   Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
   SECTION II. Of justice and beneficence.; CHAP. I. Comparison of those two virtues.

   Smith describes the real injury justice addresses, keeping the claim connected to affected people.

6. The narrowness of sympathy which makes it possible for us to impose upon a considerable portion of humanity the galling yoke of inferiority will assert itself in our politics in creating the tyranny of injustice.

   Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism
   Nationalism in India

   Tagore connects exclusion in social life with injustice in politics. The passage asks whose lower standing a group takes for granted when it sets its agenda.

7. In such circumstances their only object is to escape from death, and they are afraid they will not succeed in doing so—what leisure have they to cultivate propriety and righteousness?

   Mencius, The Sayings of Mencius
   Book I, Part I;
   Chinese; English translation by James Legge

   Mencius describes people whose livelihood cannot support their households. A ruler’s expectations must account for those conditions; overlooked claims cannot be assessed as though everyone had the same freedom.

Continue through the catalog