What Is Justice?
Arundhati Roy has a piece today on guardian.co.uk about responding to the Mumbai terror attacks, including some history and context for the attacks. It’s long, but I do recommend reading it.
Her piece ends with this paragraph:
The only way to contain (it would be naïve to say end) terrorism is to look at the monster in the mirror. We’re standing at a fork in the road. One sign says Justice, the other Civil War. There’s no third sign and there’s no going back. Choose.
But I’m left with a question. What exactly is justice, especially as it relates to terrorism? Roy really doesn’t address this.
Justice is related to the word justify. If you work with type, or if you use word processing a lot, you might have heard the terms left-justified and right-justified before (or simply justified). In this case, justified means the type lines up evenly on one or both sides of the text. The text you’re reading here is left-justified; it all lines up on the left side.
So, justice can also refer to making things line up evenly, or making them line up correctly, the way they are supposed to be. That’s the way I like to see it.
Justice does not just mean making people pay for what they’ve done, and it definitely does not mean taking revenge.
It’s about making things right. So how do we do that?
This post has 3 comments
December 13th, 2008
I’m trying to make things right through helping the poor and suffering around the world while planting social justice churches. I think justice has to do with bringing about equality. With more equality there would be less wars, violence and terrorism. Check out this link: http://www.lovinggodfellowship.org/social_justice_church .
gaj
Greg Johnson’s last blog post..I use to not look forward to board meetings
December 13th, 2008
Interesting question. What is justice. Philosophers have dealt with the question in a number of ways. I’m with you in saying that justice is making things right; making things as they were meant to be.
Plato and Socrates taught that justice was harmony, the absence of war. Perhaps that’s the meaning that Roy was referring to?
Justice is not revenge. No way. No how.
Corina’s last blog post..Christmas(es) Filled With Waiting
December 15th, 2008
I am always interested when people say:
What is [fill in the blank]?
You will almost always end up an infinite amount of questions as related to the original question. For instance, Greg says that he wants to make the world a better place by helping the poor, but this begs the question as to what is poor? He says he plants ’social justice’ churches–which uses the word justice–but what is social justice? He says that justice comes by more equality, but what is equality?
It is also just as tenuous to try and show what Justice is by what it is not. We can say that it is ‘not’ revenge, but then what is it? Corina says that justice “make thing right,” but what is right? What are these right things that we are supposed to be making. I recently wrote a post on language that deals with this subject on the complexities of language.
I think that we find in the end is that justice is almost always defined situationally. For instance, the word poor implies relativity. The only way to define poor is by comparison to yourself.
Danny’s last blog post..The Problem of Definitions
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