True Justice - Just Truth

The concept of justice is larger than punishment. (1) It underlies our very approach to reality and human life, and is shared by all peoples throughout history and across the globe. It could truly be called "universal". Every person has an idea of what is just and unjust, whether their ideas are correct or not. Throughout history, the responsibility of governments - tribal chieftains, kings, emperors, senates, theocrats, etc. - has been to ensure justice for the people. (2) The effectiveness or faultiness of their carrying out this duty is independent of the duty itself, afforded to all leaders by the source of their social office - the people, without whom they have nothing to lead. Even if a leader is revered as divine, arbitrarily supreme, or exempt from any moral standard, their faults ignored for some time, they are still called to enact justice. Yet, despite the universality of the concept of justice, it seems little understood and often presumed without any real study of its nature or purpose, as could also be said for government itself.

If punishment is seen as the sole purpose of justice, its central or exclusive meaning, one must ask: can a condition be just without any violations or imperfections, without injustice? Yes. (3) A good always precedes a negative - without prior justice, injustice could not occur. But punishment depends on injustice - in a state of pure, complete justice, punishment would be unnecessary. So, then, what is justice?

Justice is inherently connected to truth. Truth - reality without illusion, lie, corruption or limitation - is the highest form of justice, and is the standard for what is just or unjust. That which most conforms to truth can be said to be just, and violations of truth are injustices. (4) Truth is the basis of justice, and the human desire for one is directly tied to our eternal longing for the other in their fullness. In this way, justice is little different from morality, which could be said to be the daily pursuit of justice. Just as all people know and desire justice, all also recognize and desire truth, and are all called to a moral life. Through moral virtue, justice takes on a charitable quality, healing humanity of the chains and corruption of injustice in the world, of distance from truth, and generously restoring wholeness to all.

Truth itself, justice itself, are both tied to the physical universe and transcendent of it. While it is a truth that, for example, murder exists in the world, murder can be a moral corruption in itself without the claim of the truth of murder being itself deluded or false. The corruption, illusion, lie or limitation of a fact of life, including the interior lives of people, cannot also corrupt the truth that the fact occurs. The truth of the meaning of murder is true, pure, real, even though murder itself is immoral and corrupt. The meaning of something and its deepest nature - the truth of something - cannot be changed or obscured by the moral quality of the thing, or how well we know its truth or factual attributes.

While the sensory attributes of life can be known by the senses and scientific experiment, truth can be discerned only through reason. The material cannot determine truth beyond the simple fact of its own occurrence and existence. Truth is the abstract meaning and deepest nature of fact. Truth and fact are intrinsically tied. However, as the nature and meaning of the universe, truth precedes and transcends fact, without abandoning or contradicting it. For example, a physical human being cannot evidence his/her spiritual soul by examination of a person's physical, biological attributes - the soul must be reasoned, abstracted from human behavior, our interior lives, and reasons beyond ourselves. While the facts of the human body, its biological parts and systems, can be flawed or misunderstood, changing the factual character of the individual's bodily composition, nothing can alter the veracity or character of truth. These very philosophical ideas may seem irrelevant to a discussion of justice, but in order to understand justice and properly apply it, one must understand truth, without which justice has no purpose and no standard.

Even though the fact of murder is evident, the truth of murder goes beyond the sensibly evident fact of its occurrence. The truth of murder is its deepest reality, its meaning beyond its immediate effects and motivations. Without interpreting murder as truth, with reason, it cannot be viewed as anything more than the biological termination of an organism, with no larger moral, legal or spiritual consequences. Without consideration of truth, justice is replaced by rule of power and utilitarianism. (5) All truths are connected, just as all parts of the physical universe are ultimately connected. Murder is a violation of truths. It destroys the truth of life; it abuses the truth of human free will and power; it violates human dignity, inalienable human rights; and it contradicts the truths of peace, equality and freedom necessitated by the nature and dignity of the human person. Without rationally, philosophically interpreting the meaning and nature of the human person, none of this can be recognized beyond mere sensations of conscience too easily violated.

In modern law and even philosophy, truth is often tentatively dismissed or safely ignored. It is seen as too arbitrary and debatable to be a standard for any practical social system or worldview. (6) Yet, this perception presupposes two beliefs: the universal consideration of truth, and the idea that anything debatable or controversial cannot have any real worth or validity. While the first is certainly true, it is treated as an assumption used, paradoxically, to cut off the very thing it evidences: the universality of truth, without which no one would know or consider it. The second is an emotional attitude used for the sake of safety, and not without good reason - history shows us the danger of arbitrary applying ideologies and personal convictions as if they are absolutely true. But errors in understanding and applying truth does not discount truth itself, or its importance. Further, this second standard is applied exclusively to truth. Why are the dangers of science, politics, economics, or anything else not treated similarly, as reason to dismiss the thing itself? Perhaps it is a recognition of the supreme importance of truth - which should not inspire anyone to dismiss truth, but rather to pursue it diligently and even passionately until it is finally grasped in its full and essential purity, ever growing in wisdom and application.

While the "justice of truth", the precise correspondence of existence to truth, applies to the entire universe, justice is most often applied to humanity. Thus, in order to understand the proper application of justice to us, the truth of our nature and being must be recognized. Without recognizing our deepest attributes, our invisible qualities of rights, freedom, dignity, identity, etc., human beings deserve no justice and our truth does not extend beyond our factual construction in nature. But, as with nature itself, an examination of the traits of the human person that are not factually evident, yet can be identified by reason, can reveal to us the truth about ourselves. Reason is the tool and the power of discovering and understanding truth. Even truths of faith are understood and, to a degree, grasped in the first place by reason. (7)

To keep this article streamlined as an elucidation of justice, I will presume that the truths of the human person are already accepted: human dignity, human individuality and identity, human reason, human rights, and our capacity to recognize and generate ideas. All of these truths, like truth itself, can be said to be "immaterial". While they are very much real - truly, by lacking the limitations and faults of nature, they are "meta-material" or beyond the material, not against it - they cannot be detected by exclusive material inquiry. They require reason to identify and understand them. Ideas, immaterial interpretations of our interior and exterior experiences, lacking any physical existence themselves, are products of reason, its formulations of truths like justice and morality. (8)

Justice in human society is the conformity of life to the truths of the human person. When our dignity, rights, identity, reason, etc. are upheld, a society is just. The concept of justice is directly related, in human society, to the "common good" - specific goods, positive qualities, that are shared and beneficial for all people within a given group. There can be no common good without truth, the truths of the human person, that which is commonly shared as a good of all people. While the common good can easily exceed the amount of essential truths of the human person, these fundamental "goods" are that which most unites us as human persons and are shared by absolutely all people, globally and historically, and always will be while we remain human. Thus, in order for a society to be just, upholding and protecting the basic truths of the human person as described above, the clearest objective is the common good. (9)

No ideology, even theocracy (as distinguished from "secularist" as the enforcement of irreligion), can adequately pursue the common good of all people in a society. Nations must be "secular", meaning, they must permit and uphold the dignity of distinct human activities and expressions, such as culture, religion, etc., but must place the common good of the truths of the human person above all else. For example, if a specific religion in a society believes that the gay lifestyle is immoral, they should be allowed to express their beliefs democratically, but not to enforce them by violence against others within the society, (10) democratically leaving it up to the choice of the individual. As long as one's beliefs are not enforced violently or in violation of other truths of the human person, freedom permits its expression, both by word and lifestyle. In certain cases, the legality of something does not make its opposite illegal, but declaring it legal merely expresses the government's affirmation of it. Hence why homosexuality and the gay lifestyle themselves should not be illegal, being private choices of the individual (whether right or wrong, similar to matters such as adultery and premarital sex which are not illegal), but declaring gay marriage or civil unions legal would state the government's explicit approval of the gay lifestyle and thus affect the common good.

The exact meaning and implementation of the truths of the human person, the common good, is naturally difficult to determine, as any issue so deep and complex must be. Our interpretation of them is also subject to error, whether intentional or mistaken. But as the source and end of justice, truth cannot be ignored unless justice itself is sacrificed. It must ever be studied and applied, our understanding and implementation corrected over time. No voice should be ignored, no one demeaned or ridiculed for their views. Democracy is one of the highest expressions of justice, allowing for the peaceful discussion of diverse ideas, beliefs, lifestyles and cultures, but even democracy can be abused if truth is not the essential standard for which views in a democratic process are used and applied to society as a whole. Democracy can and should be the means by which a society grows in understanding of truth and applies their clearest vision of truth to society, particularly in legal justice. (11) Indeed, true freedom is not arbitrary power to accomplish any urge we have, but freedom from error, freedom for excellence - in a word, liberty. (12) This is the ultimate goal of democracy, the common good, and justice itself: liberation unto truth.


Endnotes
1 Part 3, Section 2, Chapter 2, Article 8, SubSection 3 2487
2 "Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought."
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (revised edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 3
3 Part 1, Section 2, Chapter 1, Article 1, Paragraph 6, SubSection 4
4 Part 3, Section 2, Chapter 2, Article 8, SubSection 1 2469
5 "Let us say plainly: the unredeemed state of the world consists precisely in the failure to understand the meaning of creation, in the failure to recognize truth; as a result, the rule of pragmatism is imposed, by which the strong arm of the powerful becomes the god of this world." Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection. (San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 2011), p. 193
6  "What is truth? Pilate was not alone in dismissing this question as unanswerable and irrelevant for his purposes. Today too, in political argument and in discussions of the foundations of law, it is generally experienced as disturbing. Yet if man lives without truth, life passes him by; ultimately he surrenders the field to whoever is the stronger. "Redemption" in the fullest sense can only consist in the truth becoming recognizable. And it becomes recognizable when God becomes recognizable. He becomes recognizable in Jesus Christ." Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection. (San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 2011), p. 194
7  "The Church … sees in philosophy the way to come to know fundamental truths about human life. At the same time, the Church considers philosophy an indispensable help for a deeper understanding of faith and for communicating the truth of the Gospel to those who do not yet know it." Blessed Pope John Paul II the Great, Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason) encyclical (September 14, 1998), part 5. Quoted from Father Frank Chacon and Jim Burnham, Beginning Apologetics: How to Answer Atheists and New Agers, 1994-2004, San Juan Catholic Seminars, copyright Father Frank Chacon and Jim Burnham.
See also: "Our holy mother, the Church, holds and teaches that God, the first principle and last end of all things, can be known with certainty from the created world by the natural light of human reason." Catechism of the Catholic Church 36
8 Father Frank Chacon and Jim Burnham, Beginning Apologetics: How to Answer Atheists and New Agers, 1994-2004, San Juan Catholic Seminars, copyright Father Frank Chacon and Jim Burnham, p. 9
9  Part 3, Section 1, Chapter 2, Article 2, SubSection 2 1912
10 Part 3, Section 2, Chapter 2, Article 6, SubSection 2, Heading 5 2358
11 Part 3, Section 2, Chapter 2, Article 4, SubSection 4, Heading 4
2255
12 Part 3, Section 1, Chapter 1, Article 3, SubSection 2 1740