Violence, reconciliation, and the justice of God

I MUST BEGIN WITH A CONFESSION: I'm tired of hearing about justice. Of course, this is really not something one should say when one's livelihood includes teaching Moral Theology. I teach at a Catholic university-Jesuit, to be specific. And for better or worse the Jesuits have rediscovered the joy of justice-talk. Since the Santa Clara Conference of 2000, when Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, Superior General of the Society of Jesus, issued his call for the promotion of justice in American Jesuit higher education, the word has been on everyone's lips. Indeed, it has become clear that if you want to propose a new initiative, a new program, even a new course, you will fare well if you can give it a "justice spin." If you can include "service learning," all the better! Yet, while justice is being talked about more and more (on our campus at least), it strikes me that our conceptions of justice are no clearer than they were before, and indeed all our talk simply masks some very basic underlying disagreements about what just ice is and why we should seek it.

Whose Justice?

Absent any agreement about the substance of justice, the term comes to function like a cipher. This may be part of why so many today greet justice talk with cynicism. We suspect that calls for justice are, at least at times, simply arbitrary appeals to the self-interests of some over the self-interests of others. The abortion debate in this country has highlighted the contested nature of justice. In so far as both pro-choice and pro-life positions claim to have justice on their side (couched in terms of the rights of the woman or the rights of the unborn), the argument reflects deep, though often unspoken, disagreements about justice itself. Does justice mean maximizing personal freedom? Or giving each person what they deserve? Or assuring equal distributions? Is it based on rights or results? Does justice require us to support impartial hiring and admissions practices or affirmative action? Is justice "equality of opportunity" or "equality of outcome"? Even an appeal to a supposedly neutral "procedural justi ce" must either smuggle in some substantive description of what mode of life or state of affairs constitutes justice or risk being useless precisely insofar as it cannot help us adjudicate disagreements concerning issues like abortion, capital punishment, or war.

The question of justice has become all the more compelling and complex since September 11. In fact, it has become a matter of life and death. In the face of such horror and evil, what are the demands of justice? If a war on terror is justified, how do we apply just war categories when the enemy cannot be defined as a nation or even as a discreet (and thus targetable) entity? Does justice always demand retaliation? Can there be a just response to violence that does not include violence? Is justice best thought of as punishment or revenge? Is it primarily restorative or punitive? Shortly after September 11, the Bishops of the Episcopal Church called on their flock to "wage reconciliation." But is reconciliation a form of justice, an abdication of justice, or something we do in addition to justice? Again we are forced to admit that our disagreements about the war on terror are not only about this war but about the nature of justice itself. Yet all our pundits (including theological ones) are quick to speak about justice as if we all agreed on what it meant. For instance, in their December 2001 issue, the editors of First Things stated that "the rule of justice is that it is the first duty of the state to protect its citizens." (1) While this is stated as self-evident, it is not at all clear why this should be accepted as a rule of justice. Augustine, for instance, would disagree, since he argued that the rule of justice is that it is the first duty of the state to offer right worship to God. Perhaps the post-September 11 pressure to "take a stand" or to "take action" has mitigated against the patience necessary to ask basic questions. Or perhaps we avoid conversation about the substantive core of justice because we assume such a discussion would be interminable and thus pointless.

I want to suggest that we cannot agree on what justice is, in part, because we cannot find agreement on what goods we hope justice will serve. Justice, like all virtues, requires a context to be properly understood. We must locate it within a story of who we are and what we want to be; in other words, we have to name the goods we seek in common as a people. Further, we cannot think about justice in abstraction from the other virtues that we think necessary to help us achieve the goods we have named. Part of the problem, then, with discussing justice in our current political context is that the on]y good we can agree on is the pursuit of individual freedom. But again, as the abortion debate has taught us, we have no clear means of determining justice when all we can appeal to are conflicting personal liberties.