Justice, the Most Unpopular Virtue

by Charles Bruehl, D.D.

The surest way to incur disfavor among men is to remind them of the obligations of justice. Exalt justice in a general fashion and you will have the enthusiastical applause of the public with you, but attempt to set forth the specific and practical demands of justice and everybody will turn away from you. Concrete justice is the most unpopular virtue, and the uncompromising preacher of applied justice shares in this unpopularity. Why the universal dislike of this virtue? The reasons are quite easy to understand: on the one hand, the requirements of justice are of a very definite and exact character, and, on the other, the demands of justice impose themselves with an unequivocal imperiousness. Justice can be measured. It is not elastic and refuses to be stretched. There is a clearness and precision about the duties of justice which the requirements of the other virtues lack. Man has a dislike for duties which are determined on an objective basis and in which there remains no scope for subjective sentiment and personal preference. What is just, man owes to a definite individual, it concerns a definite object, it has to be rendered under definite circumstances. He has little choice about the whole matter. He cannot even take much credit for fulfilling his obligations of justice, for in doing so he does nothing more than he is bound to do. In this respect there is not much glory in justice. One may boast of his contributions to charity; one will hardly boast of paying his debts. Whilst the objective nature and the restrictive narrowness of justice are displeasing to man, he resents still more its unyielding sternness and the finality of its dictates. Justice must be accomplished. Even if delayed, the duty must be performed. No escape, no evasion, is possible; no substitution is acceptable. Years do not obliterate the claims of justice. The unjustly obtained goods, however long they may be in my possession, do not cease to clamor for their rightful owner. Tears do not wipe out debts, and alms do not compensate for dishonesty. Injustice always has inconvenient consequences. It is not annulled until reparation and restitution have been made. Considering these unpleasant properties of the virtue of justice, we have no difficulty in understanding why it is so thoroughly unpopular, and why men make every effort to evade its clean-cut decisions and its irksome demands.

This attitude arises out of the fact that justice represents the most fundamental opposition to selfishness and self-interest. It stands as an emphatic rebuke against all kinds of arbitrariness. It asserts a certain basic equality of men. It makes the unmistakable claim that even the highest owe something to the lowest, which it is not in the power of the former to determine according to their good pleasure but which is fixed in the very nature of things. To accept the fact of a fundamental human equality, and to admit that others have well-defined and inviolable rights, is painfully galling to those who are in power. An interesting illustration of this perverse human trait is the mentality of the benevolent and paternalistic employer who is charitably disposed towards his employees and even anxious to do something for their welfare, but who insists on doing it in his own way. He will establish clubs and recreation centers for his workers; he will build libraries for their use and engage in other spectacular schemes of benevolence ; but the one thing he ought to do he cannot bring himself to do–that is, to pay them a fair and adequate living wage. Kindness he will heap upon them, but elementary justice he denies them. He is astonished that his employees do not appreciate the things he does for them, and that in spite of all his efforts on their behalf they are ungrateful and dissatisfied. He forgets that men first of all want justice, and that no substitute for justice can ever render them thoroughly content. Paternalism flatters the employer and gives him a delightful feeling of superiority. Plain justice would destroy this agreeable sensation and put him on a footing of equality with his employees. It is not benevolence the worker desires but justice, for justice acknowledges his rights and recognizes his basic equality, whereas paternalism denies him what he holds dearest and offends his human dignity. We would not for one minute make it appear that the ordinary employer is a grasping individual who is entirely devoid of sympathy for his workers and has no interest in their welfare; he will in many ways manifest his kindness; but in one thing he frequently fails, and that is the essential thing, justice. Justice honors a man, and it is difficult for the superior to bestow on the inferior this special honor. It is a fatal mistake which prevents understanding between the employer and the worker. It is far easier to be a benevolent employer than a just one. Benevolence without justice cannot bridge over the gulf between the employer and the wage-earner who has become conscious of his rights and his dignity. In the long run, it will breed a deep-seated and powerful resentment.

Such benevolence, if carefully analyzed, will reveal itself as an unconscious self-deception. It is nothing but a well-masked and finely disguised escape from justice. How it arises as an inadequate substitute for genuine justice but fails to effect social peace, is well described by Professor Francis Greenwood Peabody in the following passage : "Or–to turn the same story round–suppose that an employer, ignorant of the real instincts and ambitions of his employees, introduces in his business a spurious though well-intended form of generosity. He feels a touch of that breeze of industrial fraternity which has sprung up in our time, but it does not really stir his nature to a new life. He wants to keep his self-respect, but he wants also to keep his profits. He looks, therefore, for ways of combining the service of God and the service of Mammon. Thus, he may seem to himself to be generous when he is in fact only patronizing. He provides homes for his employees, but under terms which limit their liberty; he adjusts wages with what appears to be liberality, but under conditions which irritate and restrict; he counsels thrift and simplicity, while his own domestic life remains ostentatious and vulgar. Is this merely a commercial phenomenon, bounded by the business in which master and man meets? On the contrary, this halfhearted service has its effect all along the line of the social movement, to hinder advance and create distrust. The instinct of the home in working people protests against a home that is not one's own; the self-respect of the wage-earner refuses to be patronized; the commercial maxims of the employer cannot teach what his private life denies; finally, the man who had fancied himself earning the gratitude due to a generous philanthropist finds himself, to his own great surprise, responsible for industrial dissatisfaction and revolt."¹ Subtle are the ways by which men try to elude justice, and incredibly sophistic the arguments by which they manage to divest their injustices of the appearance of wrong.

St. Francis of Sales, who knew the capacity for self-deception in man, remarks how carefully the examination of conscience steers away from questions of justice. Here is the point where man does not care to probe too deeply. The same Saint, who had a wide experience in dealing with souls, likewise observes how rarely men accuse themselves of violations of justice. It is the sore spot which no one likes to touch and from which instinctively we turn away the attention of the scrutinizing eye. The prophets of old relentlessly expose and condemn the worldly-wise ways by which the Jews sought to get around the demands of justice. Again and again Jehovah through the mouth of His prophets declares that what He wants is justice, and that He is weary of the hypocritical evasions of justice practiced in private and public life. The incense of holocausts could not bribe the Lord of Justice to overlook injustice and oppression of the poor. In the New Testament the Lord condemns with His own lips the dishonest subterfuges by which men cover up their injustice: "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you devour the houses of widows, praying long prayers. For this you shall receive the greater judgment."² This fundamental hypocrisy which prompts man to substitute something else for the plain duties of justice finds the severest and most uncompromising condemnation both in the Old and the New Testament. But this hypocrisy, as experience teaches us, is a common fact among men. It certainly is not unknown in our days. More than ever men close their ears to its imperative demands, endeavor to weaken its authority, and try to distort its clearest requirements. We need not be surprised that at present it is so difficult a task to give a clear outline of justice, because men for so long a time have labored with great diligence to obliterate all definite lines and taken no end of trouble to make injustice assume the appearance of justice. Even now an enormous amount of intellectual labor is directed towards the purpose of frustrating justice and giving moral sanction to unjust practices which have solidified into social customs and institutions. Not only the practical preacher who urges the application of justice in life will have to travel a very rough road, but even the theoretical exponent will find the path he treads an exceedingly thorny one. The former, of course, has incessantly to battle deeply ingrained habits of selfishness which it is difficult to uproot. The latter enters not into an unexplored region in which no trails have been blazed, but rather into an inimical country in which false guideposts have been set up in order to mislead the traveler. The geography of justice has to be almost completely reconstructed; the existing maps drawn by economic liberalism are entirely valueless. The language of justice, particularly that of economic and social justice, will sound to the ears of a large number of our contemporaries like a foreign tongue; even its ABC has been forgotten and must be relearned.

The Importance of Justice

Justice stands out as the most important factor in the proper adjustment of human relations. It is the first and most vital other-regarding virtue, and accordingly of the utmost importance in shaping the social order. This other-regarding or altruistic character is strongly stressed by St. Thomas who writes: "Ex sua ratione justitia habet quod sit ad alterum."³ This we may paraphrase with Mr. Arthur Preuss as follows: "Justice is essentially a virtue that governs man's relations to others."⁴ It is the paramount social virtue, and must enter into all social relations if they are not to be radically vitiated. If the foundation stone of a society is not justice, the entire structure will be sadly out of plumb. That would be exactly the case in our modern society; there is something wrong with the fundamental alignment, and this fact affects the whole social organism. No one will deny that contemporary society can legitimately boast of magnificent works of charity; it possesses splendid institutions to relieve every form of human misery; still, all this welfare work, carried on with unprecedented generosity and on a gigantic scale, cannot repair the ravages wrought by the injustice rife in our midst. Injustice does infinitely more harm than charity can ever attempt to undo. It poisons the very lifeblood of the social organism, and as a consequence brings about a general unwholesome condition of debility. Justice in a sense may be an insignificant virtue with little splendor, but in the social order it must be conceded absolute primacy. To render human relations ideal and perfect justice is not enough, but as long as men live together in society it is indispensable. Justice is the natural corollary of man's social nature, and constitutes the first check on human egotism which inclines man to assert his. own interests without regard for the rights of others. Perhaps it is not necessary to emphasize the supreme character of justice in a general atmosphere of benevolence and charity, but in our days we certainly do stand in need of an emphatic reassertion of the indispensability of this austere and unostentatious virtue. We have so generally succumbed to the charms and loveliness of the glamorous virtue of charity that we overlook her drab and inconspicuous sister; withal, it is this Cinderella among the virtues, unpretentious justice, which puts order into the household and keeps everything in 'the right place. To a great extent we can accept what Professor James Seth writes on this point: "There is the same kind of relation between justice and benevolence in the social life as between temperance and culture in the individual life. As temperance is the presupposition of a true culture, so is justice the presupposition of true benevolence. This logical priority is also a practical priority. We must be just before we can be generous. . . . Most pernicious have been the effects of the neglect of the true relation of priority in which justice stands to benevolence. The Christian morality, as actually preached and practiced, has been largely chargeable with this misinterpretation. Charity has been magnified as the grand social virtue, and has been interpreted as a giving of alms to the poor, a doing for them of that which they are unable to do for themselves, an alleviation, more or less temporary, of the evils that result from the misery of their worldly circumstances. But this charity has coexisted with the utmost injustice to those who have been its objects. . . . It is because we have really given our fellows less than justice, that we have seemed to give them more."⁵ The New Testament exalts charity precisely because it leads to a more conscientious discharge of the duties of justice. St. Paul says: "He that loveth his neighbor hath fulfilled the law. For, 'Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not covet,' and if there be any other commandment, it is comprised in this word: 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.' The love of our neighbor worketh no evil. Love therefore is the fulfilling of the law."⁶ If charity does not contain within itself justice, it is not the genuine Christian virtue so highly praised and so insistently inculcated by Christ and His Apostles. Injustice is the canker corrupting the very heart of modern society, and we must not be satisfied to cover up the inner mortal disease with external applications of charity. Nor must the individual content himself with the practice of works of charity in atonement for his manifold injustices in dealing with his fellowmen. Such hypocritical procedure will make of society and individuals the "whited sepulchers" which the Lord holds up to universal scorn.

Even the old pagans held the virtue of justice in the greatest esteem and looked upon it with admiration. Cicero tells us that injustice is the crowning glory of the virtues, and that on the basis of it men are called good.⁷ The otherwise rather prosaic Aristotle indulges in an outburst of eloquence when he speaks of the excellence of this virtue: "The most illustrious of virtues is justice, neither the rising nor the setting of the sun are as worthy of admiration."

Long silenced by exploitation and oppression, justice in our days again becomes articulate. Men will be satisfied with nothing less than justice, and they aim to obtain it even if the whole since it has grown to dangerous dimensions. The craving for justice which has gripped the minds of men and is nourished by the daily sight of wrong will have to be satisfied and fully set at rest. Men are very patient and longsuffering beings, and hence if the demands of justice will be clearly and honestly expounded they will feel easy until they can be carried out in actual practice. The theoretical declaration of the requirements of justice and the rights of men, however, cannot be postponed with impunity. Outspokenness on this matter is the urgent need of the hour.

Endnotes

1 Jesus Christ and the Social Question (New York City).

2 Matt., xxiii. 14.

3 Summa Theol., II-II, Q. lviii, art. 2.

4 A Handbook of Moral Theology. By A. Koch, D.D. Translated by Arthur Preuss (St. Louis).

5 A Study of Ethical Principles (New York City).

6 Rom., xiii. 8-10.

7 De Officils, I, vii: "Justitia, in qua virtutis est splendor maximus, ex qua viri boni nominantur."

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