Most people presumably begin to think about morality and justice when some profound injury occurs, either to them or to someone they care about. For me, it started with something much more mundane: the Academy Awards.
Although I’ve always been a lover of classic movies, I never understood people’s emotional investment in the Academy Awards. Why does anybody care who wins? Unless you work in the higher levels of the film industry (in which case you’re probably not reading this blog), you’re not personally acquainted with any of the nominees. You have no financial stake in the studios that may benefit from the increased ticket sales that accompany a win. Most importantly, if you’ve seen any if the nominated films, you already know what you think of it, so the fact that it wins an Oscar — or doesn’t — isn’t going to affect your assessment.
At first I guessed that it was just a matter of validation. If you thought a film was great, it feels good to know that other people — particularly the presumed experts — share your opinion. If a film you hated wins the award, you have the satisfaction of being able to look down on those idiots in Hollywood who don’t recognize rubbish when they see it.
But that theory doesn’t go far enough. I began to notice that much of people’s agreement or disagreement with the Academy’s decisions isn’t based on comparative rankings of films and the people who make them. Instead, their reaction seems to have a moral component — that such-and-such an actor or director deserves the award, based on who they are and what they’ve done. In other words, it seems to be a matter not of taste, but of perceived fairness. In matters both significant and insignificant, we have a primal need to feel that justice has been done.
Justice, for me, has always been a tricky concept. When a human being has been killed, we call for justice to be done on their behalf. Strictly speaking, however, that’s not possible: The only real justice would be for the victim to be given back the life that was wrongly taken, but we don’t have that ability. So when people talk about justice in a case like this, what they usually mean is that the killer should be punished. But what does the punishment actually accomplish?
As I already mentioned, it doesn’t change the actual situation; the victim remains dead. Incarceration is unlikely to prevent the killer from killing more people, since most murders result from a unique set of circumstances that are unlikely to recur. Punishment of any sort may perhaps deter other people from killing, but the effectiveness of that deterrence is questionable — after all, this killer wasn’t deterred by the fact that others have been punished for similar crimes.
No, when we want to see a killer punished, it’s not about the punishment having any practical value. It’s about some innate feeling of rightness — the knowledge that a wrong has been done, and that wrong has to be compensated for somehow. The wrongdoer has to suffer in order to bring the moral universe back into balance.
It’s a sense that exists in all of us. As children, when we’re scolded or penalized for something we know we didn’t do, our immediate reaction is, “That’s not fair!” And the usual parental retort — “Life isn’t fair” — doesn’t fix the hurt. If life truly isn’t fair, then something is fundamentally wrong. It’s supposed to be fair.
Where does that innate sense of justice come from? Why is it so strong that we don’t take it to be merely an abstract concept, a way to interpret the world, but something essential about the world? I can’t think of anything else — with the possible exception of love — that so powerfully feels like it pre-exists us.
This is generally where religious faith enters the picture. For many people, the objective and essential rightness or wrongness of things is something established by God. As someone who doesn’t accept the existence of what I call the God Guy — the anthropomorphic figure who has ideas, feelings, and opinions about what each of us ought to be doing — I was always dismissive of this view. But the older I get, the more I have to believe that this sense of justice is not just something housed in our brains. If our sense of what’s fair is only a figment of our neurons, then there’s no such thing as justice; there are only ideas about justice.
Much about my upbringing left me with a dislike for — and often downright antipathy toward — anything religious. For reasons I’ve alluded to elsewhere, those feelings gradually faded, and I began to recognize that our existence incorporates more than can be sensed or analyzed. I can’t say that my spiritual side is very broad or deep, but the one thing that feels undeniable to me is that there is a sense of rightness woven into the universe. We can go with it or against it, just as we can swim with the current or against the current, but either way, it’s there. If you want to call that rightness God, I have no problem with that.
I’ve long admired the distinction the Quakers make between God’s will and self-will, and their view that the only way to give the former precedence over the latter is to cultivate a quiet mind. Learning to engage in a meditative practice has given me the chance to separate myself from my own self-importance, even for just a moment, and to feel which way that current of rightness flows. Any time I think I know what’s just — whether so-and-so should have won the Best Director award, or whether so-and-so ought to be locked up for life — I have to recognize that it’s likely just my ego talking, and that I need to open myself to the wisdom that lies outside of me. That recognition has value in itself, even if it usually doesn’t leave me with the answers that I crave.
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