This I Believe

I have faced injustices directed against me; most people have, I’m sure. I might be able to tell you a few things about jerks, bullies, and generally irritating people, who usually find it amusing to make the socially awkward person angry. But to equivocate my mild feelings of irritation with most of the evils perpetrated in this world would be ludicrous. I have never seen the law leveraged against me, or stood the bigotry of my neighbors, or faced injury to life and property, or watched my people be systematically exterminated. No, what drove me to be so engrossed with justice and its subsidiary notions of morality, judgment, and punishment was not any failure of justice in my own experience, but rather a sense of societal duty that has grown upon me in recent years. This was not always the case. There was a time when good and evil were the rules of the grownups I abided for the sake of avoiding trouble.

I suppose that, even while I was young, I thought that justice was something that ought to be pursued as an end in itself. Yet what I took to be just were precepts taken from the people who made the rules—my parents and my teachers. It would not be until I approached adulthood that I asserted my moral independence. For if men and women recuse themselves from defining their own morals, they ought to recuse themselves from passing judgment as well, since they would apply a standard of morality that is not their own—a standard they cannot truly believe in if they have not made it their own—and render any judgment, by definition, ill-advised.

I have taken the task of making justice my own, and if we are to have fair and equal justice, then our framework must be universally applicable to all individuals under any circumstances. Reason and logic, detached from the differing biases and perspectives of conflicting entities, should be the building blocks of any universal framework of justice. To some extent, rational justice is possible, given a set of principles to build it off of. Yet it is these principles that undermine a truly universal justice, for any such principle proves itself to derive from sentiment, not reason. For these basic premises of justice—such as the rights to life, liberty, happiness, private property—man can still question and doubt—why should, for example, life or liberty be sacred, or why should anything be sacred at all? There is no self-evident truth in ethics, and thus, there can be no absolute morality. The notion of justice—at least fair justice—is absurd.

And yet, despite the inherent flaws in rational justice, I cannot help but to continue searching for moral answers. I hope a philosophical breakthrough might resolve justice’s fundamental flaws, but I confess I am driven, in the pursuit of moral definition and application, in the pursuit of justice, despite its absurdity, by nothing more than naive optimism—I am driven by the faith that there is a distinction between good and evil, and that we might judge here on Earth for the moral redemption of mankind.