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Introduction: Justice and Public Morality
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17876 |
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MODERN THOUGHT
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3 / 1990 |
1,185 Words |
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Jude P. Dougherty
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The common theme of the essays that follow is "justice." All display an indebtedness to classical Greek Philosophy, in which justice is understood as the personal moral habit of fulfilling one's obligations. Plato distinguished four cardinal virtues: prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice. As a moral virtue, justice is predicated first upon the individual and only by analogy upon institutions and societies. Justice is the habit of paying one's debts, whether they be to the gods, to one's country, to one's parents, or to one’s creditors. Some debts are paid by homage and reverence; others by honoring the terms of a contract. Political entities, like individuals, can be said to be just insofar as they fulfill their obligations to citizens and to other states.
Justice obviously presupposes a knowledge of what is just. Like other moral virtues, it is guided by prudence and by the virtues proper to intellect. One cannot recognize certain debts without wisdom. A just society will be one in which both speculative and practical wisdom prevail.
Undergirding this Greek conception of "justice" is a theory of being and a theory of knowledge. The Greeks were convinced that reality is intelligible and that the human intellect is powerful enough to ferret out the secrets of nature. Nature, both human and non-human was thought to control our thinking about it. Plato and Aristotle were confident that the proper ends of human life could be discerned and that life in the polis could be organized to achieve those ends. This Greek view of nature and to the ends of the polis is far from the prevalent one today.
Alasdair MacIntyre in his book Whose Justice, Which Rationality? Shows that conceptions of justice are based upon and carried in traditions and that these are plural in number. Traditions must be understood in terms of both their socio-historical settings and their quasiautonomous dialectical developments. Tradition is but another name for an argument carried through time, as meanings are defined and redefined in conflict between partisans and between partisans and external critics. It is MacIntyre's point that, given a diversity of traditions there are rationalities rather than rationality, justices rather than justice.
The pressing question is: Are there principles of rationality available to all people? And from this a second question follows: are principles of rationality neutral between traditions? In the West, the common law tradition has been understood as first aiming to promote and increase a shared understanding and allegiance to the goods of the polis and only secondarily as aiming to provide a vehicle for conflict resolution between citizens. Today legislative and judicial bodies are not regarded as places of public debate but as courts of bargaining between individuals. The implications of this shift are significant.
One must recognize that philosophies are at war - with more than just "the American soul" at stake. Ideas translate into action, action that affects the economic order and all that flows from it. Today Christianity has collapsed as a major intellectual force, and the battleground is occupied by two major forces: one, the pragmatic-naturalism, or instrumentalism, that gained ascendancy in the first decides of this century; other, the classical political tradition with roots in Greek and roman antiquity and in the natural law philosophy of the Middle Ages, an outlook that provided the ground for
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