THE ETHICS OF JUSTICE

The question whether Justice as-such, in the sense of law enforcement, is moral (obeying the law is “good,” even if the law itself is “bad”?) or amoral (which removes the ethical inconsistency of the previous clause), leads us to a curious paradox, hidden in the phrase the ethics of justice. On the other hand, should one admit that justice is amoral, why on earth should such an arrangement then be pursued at all?

Was the justice system of the Third Reich “good” for a majority of citizens of Hitler’s Germany, at the same time as it was manifestly bad for the minority, and for an overwhelming majority of other nations? In order to determine whether a justice system of an individual country is “good” or “bad,” we must go outside the experience of a single country, appealing, in the final analysis, to what can be ideally termed “ideal justice,” or, in practical terms, to the elusive concept of “international justice.”

Yes, the solution to this paradox lies in the very nature of International Justice deriving its soundness from the common morality of its pledged covenanters, becoming a sort of international “morality by consensus,” the closest thing to God’s Law that is conceivable in the otherwise laic reality of our world of two hundred Caesars. It is perhaps this excellent international multiplicity of earthly Caesars which creates the necessity for all of them to appeal to a higher authority, and, in this need, an opportunity to rediscover our common God as the Judge, and thus to return a mutually acceptable religious morality to the concept of Justice.

The idea of a common global justice for the future, which is what I have been driving at, all the time, in the course of this prolonged discussion, is a direct appeal to the common humanity of the major world cultures, whose religious differences must not obscure their basic ethical commonness which alone can translate into the universal social application, and promote both the desirability of “World Peace” (as a properly defined philosophical concept), and its practicality (as its most important application).

Yet even justice based on commendable religious morality is a very complicated thing. Religious zeal with the best intentions on the part of the believers can easily translate into a gross injustice. International justice must not be entrusted to a majority rule, or be a church decision, for that matter. It must be a joint product of an enlightened international body, an elite group, which is competent enough to allow individual veto right among themselves… Difficult, but not impossible! There is already a workable system of international law in existence, and so the point is not to invent a new system, but to dramatically improve on the existing one. It is quite clear, for instance, that the issue of capital punishment, being conspicuously unresolved to anybody’s satisfaction, within the existing international justice system, complicates the emergence of ethical justice, where a consensus may exist as to what law is “good” and what law is “bad.”

But the bottom line here is that a truly moral person must always prefer a Don Giovanni to a Tartuffe, albeit with the reservation that both of them are still sinners. We must dispense with all that useless wishful thinking, regarding the voluntary conversion of a hypocrite: there can be no Ideal where hypocrisy rules… After all, the Ideal belongs to the Faith, and not to the Practice. Memento communismi!