Since at least the ancient Greeks, there has always been a difference of opinion between those who, on the one hand, say justice is outside and apart from the reckoning of individual human beings, that it exists as a fundamental aspect of the cosmos; and those who, on the other hand, say it is essentially a human contrivance and exists only as a utilitarian preference of individuals or states.

Justice for Plato is a quality that resides in the very nature of world, and our own view of what it is was neither here nor there, except as it conformed to the judgment of the cosmos. This is the view of natural justice, the kind of justice that exists outside and apart from any particular human or state.

But the other view was known even by Plato. In his dialogues The Republic and Gorgias, we find Socrates arguing with Thrasymachus and Callicles who believed that "might makes right," and that what is just is determined solely on the basis of who is the most powerful. This is the view that justice is basically a human invention. This was the view of the Athenians during the invasion of Sparta, in their confrontation with the Melians, who were faced with the reality of the Athenians' overwhelming power. The Athenians, as Thucydides relates it in his Peloponnesian War, informed the Melians that they should surrender or face annihilation: that the only justice was the reality of Athenian power.

Some people think the view that justice is "constructed" is of modern origin. But the constructivist view of justice—and, in fact, of all morality—is not modern at all. Constructivism as it is applied to ethics is a clear denial of Socrates' belief that justice inheres in the cosmos, and an affirmation of Thrasymachus' and Callicles' idea that individual humans or their governments (as collections of individual humans) derive their own ideas of right and justice.

The only difference between Thrasymachus and the constructivists is pretense. While Thrasymachus was in no way embarrassed in championing what is ultimately the selfish view of justice, constructivists veil their own equally self-aggrandizing view of justice as the product of reason. They believe morality is the end result of a rational process in which humans themselves reason from the knowledge they already have to a "rational" view of justice. The authority of the constructivist position derives, not from assuming any view of justice outside the human situation, but from the integrity of the process used to justify it.

An essentialist rejects this view of justice. Christian ethics, which is essentialist in character, views justice not as the product of some abstract reasoning process, but as an inference from what a human being actually is. What is just—or what is morally right in any sense— is closely tied to what man is. And this consideration completely changes our view of justice.

How men are treated is only one side of justice. How men act, in justice or injustice, is another. If we are created in the image of God, how each one of us should be treated is surely important, but it is also important how we act in the treatment of others. An unjust act is not only unjust to the person who is mistreated; it is injustice toward the person engaging in the mistreatment. Any unjust act is not only unjust to person to whom it is done, it is also unjust to the wrongdoer himself.

If St. Augustine is right that justice is the ordering of the soul (a soul made in the image of God) then in the act of harming another person, we harm ourselves. We have not only done an injustice to another, but we have also done an injustice to our own soul. Furthermore, since we each possess a soul created in the image of the Creator, we have done an injustice to the Creator Himself.

The constructivist view of justice presumes we can come to a view of ethics through our own reckoning and tries to produce an ethics of its own devising through the process of human reasoning. But it doesn't contain within itself any way to confirm that its reasoning process is correct. The essentialist view (at least the Christian one) simply goes back to the question of who we are, and from there concludes what is just or unjust. And since who we are is tightly connected with how we are made, we need only go back to the pattern upon which we were made, which is outlined both in the explicit Revelation of our Author, and in two millennia of reflections on this reality by those who believed it.

 

Martin Cothran is Provost of Memoria College and editor of The Classical Teacher magazine.

 

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