No Place for Rain
The western world has nearly come to the conclusion that hell is probably unpleasant. At least the previews of the last fifteen years have shaken us out of a smug dismissal of the possibilities of hell. No amount of evidence can move any man to an admittance of the certainties of hell, since hell, like heaven, is a supernatural thing that must be believed until the doors swing open for the investigator who demands first hand evidence. Still, the previews are as convincing as intrinsic evidence can be in such a matter. For in these past fifteen years whole nations have adopted the habits of hell as first principles of personal and national activities. Injustice, and its inevitable climax of hatred of God, have been paraded with pride and praised for their obvious and immediate successes.
Until recently, we have taken injustice rather lightly, perhaps because we have thought of it in terms of disparate acts of burglary or business acumen. When it appeared on the stage of the world as a fixed habit, a vice, men found it hard to believe their eyes; surely, such stark evil could not walk nakedly through the lives of men shamelessly, without embarrassment, with no attempt at secrecy. It took the unmistakable evidence of concentration camps, murder kitchens, dying testimony of hulks of battered eyewitnesses who testified with their bodies as well as their words, to convince the men of the West that the foulness of this vice was poisoning the world that had been Christian. But this, as we learned in the slow way of incredulous men, was only a beginning; the kindergarten level of the science of evil was initiated in Nazi Germany. The graduate level was reached only after the world writhed in agony from its contacts with the tots who had learned so quickly and so eagerly. Now the western world is slowly coming to realize that the masters have taken over behind the Iron Curtain, with no intention of limiting their fundamental principles of injustice and hatred to the territory already besmirched by the soot from the fires of hell.
We are shocked by flagrant injustice, superabundant even for vicious goals. Political slavery, police terrorism, mock trials cluttered with the harvest of torture, murder, imprisonment, flagrant and barefaced falsehood, nations disappearing under our very eyes and human beings by the thousands snatched into a mysteriously evil oblivion; these things have shaken us badly. Such extremes go beyond any assignable purpose except sheer malice. The hand we lift in protest is, we notice, trembling; for such loathsomeness does more than turn the stomach of a man. We are not yet looking through the open doors of hell; but the preview is almost too much for us.
It is a badly needed comfort to look about the part of the world still left to us and breathe its air deeply. Here, thank God, things are different. Every detail of the comparison of the two worlds is flattering, and we begin to think of ourselves as angels of light girding for battle with the powers of darkness. Almost, we thank God that we are not as the rest of men. Here is a battle of absolute fundamentals, a basic opposition of love and justice to hatred and injustice; and we are on the side of the angels. So we begin to muster our forces, particularly our moral forces since this is ultimately a moral battle.
At this point our vigorous righteousness begins to ooze away. Not that we are any less revolted by the reign of the vice of injustice; but we are bewildered by the paradoxical condition of the world of the West. That flattering uprightness, so long considered a kind of inheritance, fares badly when we bring it out of the shadow of assumptions into the pitiless glare of close scrutiny. Perhaps our mustering of forces will have to be much more than a call to arms.
Certainly our most superficial glance reveals a plethora of unjust acts. But, then, every age has had its share of individual, isolated, sporadic injustices. Even though our age may have a somewhat more abundant supply of these, this is reassuringly balanced by the lack of evidence of any wide-spread infiltration of the vice of justice. Perhaps we are guilty of some diabolical mistreatment of others, but at least we do not go about such things with a devilish malice; the very next day may find us crowding the hours with angelic ministrations of thoughtfulness and mercy. Well, then, where is the difficulty? On one side you have a world plague-ridden by the vice of injustice; on the other, an absence of that vice, as far as the evidence can show such freedom from vice. The difficulty lies in the fact that there is also practically no evidence of the presence of the virtue of justice!
We are brought up short by the astounding suspicion that perhaps we are living in a society that subsists without either the vice of injustice or the virtue of justice, a kind of social vacuum which is in itself a contradiction in terms. The vice of injustice makes a desert of society; the virtue of justice is the green of the valleys. But here we have some anomalous thing that is neither life nor death, desert nor fertile land, a society peopled by neither the just nor the unjust. If the Lord makes His rain to fall on both the just and the unjust, then here is a land in which there is no place for rain! Perhaps this astounding suspicion will give way before a fuller mustering of facts. But it is unsettling enough to demand thorough investigation. If, as a result of such an investigation, the incredible social vacuum should prove not only worthy of credence but inescapably a fact, if the suspicion should be confirmed, or any part of the suspicion, then the logical consequences of it must be looked at squarely. That may be as unsettling as the ominous miasma of evil that slowly spreads from the East; but in no other way can the radical and immediate remedies be found. Without such remedies, it is futile to talk in terms of mustering forces against injustice from a land barren of justice.
For our consolation, let us first attempt to establish our freedom, at least on a national scale, from the vice of injustice. Let it be admitted at once that this does not imply a denial of, or a blindness to, the unjust actions of the men of our time and our country. On the contrary, an open confrontation of the facts of injustice will facilitate our understanding of the gratifying fact that the vice of injustice has not as yet made its domicile among us.
The men of the West are undoubtedly guilty of injustice. It may be argued, and to a considerable degree of probability proved, that injustice has had a flourishing time of it since the last war. That, however, is not particularly relevant to our problem. We are interested in seeing the fact of injustice and the bearing of that fact upon the existence or non-existence of the vice of injustice. There is among us, as there has always been among men, a steady output of the sweaty, vulgar type of injustice from the labors of men who roll up their sleeves and go at injustice as a means of livelihood. These men are the professed criminals; their unjust acts are the openly criminal offenses that keep prisons crowded: acts of murder, of theft, of assault, of rape, kidnaping, and so on. These are the open enemies of society, the outcasts; they are not, of course, ever admitted to the drawing rooms of the better families, let alone invited for a quiet week-end. Then there are the increasing injustices perpetrated by men with no desire to risk the prison exile of the criminal but with every desire to share the quick returns offered by unjust methods. They are sure they do not belong in society but are even more sure they do not want to be cast out of it. So they pull and tug to get their hulking dishonesty into the garments of respectability, never looking comfortable, but stubbornly insisting that they are within the law, or at least not as yet apprehended. Their dishonest products are such things as the flourishing trick of charging a man for his need as well as for what he purchases, the fake "bonus" plague which demands totally unauthorized extra payment for railroad tickets, hotel rooms, apartments, houses, automobiles; and finally for food, clothes, cigarettes, in wide open black-marketing. This class will include all the gougers who prey on the helplessness of men and the weakness of law whether the gouging be effected in sharp business deals, shady legal tricks, or the "honest grafting" through political, economic, or labor offices. It is, you see, a shade safer and somewhat less violent than the racketeers' high-priced "protection"; but not one whit less unjust.
To complete the story of actual injustices we must face the perfumed brutalities which have become delicately respectable. These are now taken for granted in the most select circles; easily topics of general conversation, and frequently enough matters of boast or of congratulation. For the most part, these injustices have crashed the gate to social acceptance by changing their names and being patient enough to let us get used to their presence. Take, for example, respectable murder. Instead of hacking a child to pieces we perform a craniotomy; in place of abortion, read therapeutic abortion; rather than kill the ill or aged, practise euthanasia. The foreign words are so confusingly long and so pleasantly melodious; not nearly so shocking as the vulgarly clear words like stab, hack, kill. In this way, the marriage contract has been eliminated; monogamy has been replaced by polygamy and polyandry in the best families. Mutilation of women for reasons other than disease is routine in hospital practice where religion does not raise a protest, while mutilation of men has gone to the point of legal approval on a wide scale. But be sure you call these things by names like hysterectomy and sterilization; we must have melody with our injustice. The list of respectable injustices grows year by year; the hardworking professional criminal may eventually find it necessary to appeal to the police for protection of his field of labor, but then by that time perhaps even the police will have gone respectably unjust. At any rate, there can be no challenge to the presence of unjust acts in our time.
Yet, for the most part, these things do not add up to the vice of injustice in any one individual. The vice of injustice is not easily come at; and its characteristic mark is to be found in the pleasure it gives to the perpetrator of the unjust act. The possessor of the vice of injustice likes to do the unjust thing precisely because it is unjust; he tramples on the rights of others precisely because they are rights of others.[1] It is this characteristic of injustice that is at the root of our abhorrence of the crimes of the Nazi and Communistic regimes; only this explains their boundless cruelties. It is important that we grasp this fully if we are to understand to what degree we ourselves are free or tainted with this vice. It will be worthwhile, then, to give some close attention to the formal nature of injustice.
This vice is a spearhead of chaos, for its work is to introduce disorder into our contacts with others. Intemperance and cowardice make a shambles of the rule of reason in the inner kingdom of a man's soul, turning his appetites into a rebellious horde perpetually locked in violent civil war. Injustice steps outside a man himself to the same goal of disorder and contemptuous hostility, for injustice deals formally and principally with others.[2] What comes to the unjust man himself as a result of his injustice is in a very real sense secondary. Injustice looks primarily to the doing of evil, good is a secondary, accidental thing; and it is this that gives injustice a distinctively satanic flair for the complete disorder and chaos of hell.[3] It is, by its very nature, a bitter, relentless opponent of amicable relations between men and of that basic order which must be the foundation of all human social life. From no more than this passing glance at injustice, it is not hard to see something of the amount of perversion which must go into its formation; since a first condition for this vice is that a man, in some viciously twisted way, should see the evil of tramping on others as an attractive focus for his desires.
There are three general types of injustice, contradicting the three types of justice. The first is a contempt for the common good and is not our immediate concern in this study. Indeed, the world-wide trend today to a greater statism, whether it be by increasing paternalism or an increasing tyranny in government, would seem to argue that the danger to the common good is not to be found in existing contempt for it but rather in a frenzied embrace of it to its destruction. For when the alleged concern for the common good goes to the lengths of overlooking the welfare of the individuals of the community, or sacrificing them ruthlessly to common goals, the alleged common good is no longer either common or good; it is spoiled, perverted, destroyed, as a child is by weakly coddling love that subjects the parents to childish whims. The second type of injustice concentrates on the disproportionate distribution of labors and rewards by those in authority. This too can be put aside for our purposes that we might concentrate fully on that injustice that exists to disturb the balance of justice between individuals.[4]
This injustice between individuals, particular injustice, works in the field of justice and is therefore concerned with an equality in external things, upsetting that equality. By it, a man reaches out to take more goods than belong to him or to bear less evils; which is to say, that he reaches out for someone else's goods and does his best to unload his evils on another[5] The two points to be stressed here are the external, objective character of the injustice committed and the specifying formality of the habit. In the case of temperance, for example, if a man becomes drunk by accident or through ignorance, he is not only not intemperate, he has not placed an intemperate act, for the object of temperance is not an externally established thing; rather its object depends entirely on proportion to the man himself. On the contrary, in the case of injustice, dealing with externally established order, the taking of another man's property is still an unjust thing however ignorant or well-intentioned we may be in putting our hand into his pocket. In injustice, in other words, the act may be materially unjust even though it is not formally so, a thing impossible in the other moral virtues.[6]
The second point to be stressed here is that "a habit (such as the vice of injustice) is specified by the object in its direct and formal acceptance, not in its material and indirect acceptance."[7] It is the primary goal, the end of the action intended by its very nature that sets up a habit as different from all others, not the secondary effects, or the accidental by-products. Injustice always consists in injury to another;[8] for that injury to be a product of the vice of injustice, it must be the primary goal, the thing chosen, that attraction that draws a man into action.[9] Here is the core of the satanic repulsiveness of this vice of injustice, that it finds its complacency in injury inflicted on others; it actually makes a goal of that betrayal of our common nature; the crunch of bones under its iron heels is music to its ears.
It follows from these two considerations that not all unjust actions are the fruit of the vice of injustice, though there is never any question of the objective injustice of an action whatever the driving forces that brought it into being. There can be unjust actions which are not from injustice. The unjust acts a man commits do not necessarily mark him out as an unjust man, in the proper sense of a man infected by the vice of injustice. This can, as a matter of fact, happen in two ways: either because the action is not aimed at an unjust goal, that is, there is no correspondence between the act and its proper (or unjust) object; or because the act as a matter of fact takes its rise from quite a different habit, that is, there is no correspondence between the act and the habit of injustice. To reduce this explanation to its simplest terms, we could say that unjust acts can be committed either from ignorance or from passion (such as anger, love of money, lust, and so on). In both cases, you must absolve the man from the befoulment of the vice of injustice, though you are perfectly right to label him ignorant, hot-headed, greedy, or base.[10]
The point is of major importance, which explains why St. Thomas devoted a whole article to it, and drove it home in great detail in his commentary on the Ethics of Aristotle. We appreciate this importance almost instinctively, and give it expression neatly in the difference of our response to the injustices perpetrated in the world of the West and the Iron Curtain countries: we are angry at the first, we loathe the second.
As far as we can judge it, the white-slaver in this country is not primarily interested in debasing women but in using them for the accumulation of money. The dope peddler is not so furtively active because he likes the moral disembowlment of men; the racketeer, at least the executive racketeers, were not concerned chiefly about murder and destruction. So it is on down the line through the "almost legal" injustices, and the perfumed brutalities of the modern drawing room. The criss-crossing parade of husbands and wives through the same home is not motivated primarily by pleasure in smashing the contract of marriage but by lust, boredom, cowardice or something of the kind. The crimes committed, approvingly, against unborn children, against the bodies of men and women, against the working man or his employer are, with practical universality, motivated by passion or by a fundamental ignorance that grows daily more fearful in its promise of social chaos. In view of this, it seems a solid conclusion that there is a gratifying absence of the vice of injustice in the men and women of the West.
The conclusion is confirmed by lack of any public knowledge of the existence of the vice on a large scale; a fact attested to by the unfeigned horror that rolled in waves over our people at the authentic revelation of the work of this vice of injustice by the Nazi zealots. We called the beatings, tortures, mistreatment and starvation of millions of men senseless, irrational, because, in our loathing of these things, we were reluctant to believe they could come from men still in possession of their human faculties. These things were inhuman, bestial, diabolic; in reality, they were revelations of our capacity for sins, and of the revolting nature of this particular sin that does in fact make up a substantial part of the climate of hell. We had not time to recover from that first shock when the evidence of the continuation and aggravation of this vice on national scales began to roll in; for too long we remained disbelieving, perhaps because we are so reluctant to admit that human beings can be so abusive of men, and like it. Now the evidence can no longer be denied; there is a note of terror creeping into our revulsion from this slimy thing. All of this surely confirms the conclusion that there has not been evidence of the vice of injustice among ourselves.
There have been, it is true, isolated cases of crime which would seem to indicate the vice of injustice as their source: murders apparently for murder's sake, brutal assaults for no assignable reason, sabotage that served no further purpose, and individual torturings. We have met these with the standard modern armor against moral facts, explaining that these people were undoubtedly sick, pathological cases; they were morons, or neurotics, obviously insane. Sin, particularly utterly repulsive sin, sin that hasn't as yet been perfumed into acceptance by the respectable, must always be waved out of existence or into the doctor's office. The things done were no less abominated, but we spared their perpetrators our abomination by a great pity which was not so much in their favor as in our own, that we might not be forced to see that rational men can sin from deliberate malice, that the air of hell can be mixed in the atmosphere we breathe. Though, of course, we still insist on taking full credit for anything of virtue that crops up in our human world. Obviously we are fooling ourselves in this matter, for we did punish as criminals, in the war-criminals proceedings, men who had done just these same despicable things. The point here, however, is that the cases are sparse and scattered enough to allow us to engage in this self-deception. We have not been brought face to face with the vice of injustice here at home; which is a very good argument against its existence here. For injustice is not one to hide its face.
Before we settle back to gloat at the absence of the vice of injustice among us while it is so prevalent in other parts of the world, it would be well to note some of the cautions imposed on our congratulations of ourselves by the very evidence used to prove our freedom from the odious vice. Of the dangers to be particularly noted, two demand serious consideration: the serious risk of getting used to the sight of unjust acts, and the even more serious increase of moral ignorance that makes men blind to the injustice of the things they are doing or seeing done.
We can get so accustomed to sights, smells, sounds, as to be completely undisturbed by them; anything unaccustomed in these lines will bring us to sharp attention, while the usual things go unnoticed. A man can sleep through the roar of an elevated train speeding past his window, yet hear the tinkle of an alarm clock. Much the same thing is true in the moral order. What shocks us at first sight can, little by little, become so much a part of our daily experience as to seem almost normal-if the shocking things are injustices, this means that we are getting ourselves thoroughly disposed to accept injustice, prepared, indeed, to cultivate the satanic habit since it seems so widespread. Every age has faced this danger, for every age has had its injustices. Perhaps the least degree of this danger comes from the openly criminal injustices against which society ceaselessly wages war; though people did once get used to having brigands on the roads and pirates on the seas, and we ourselves are almost resigned to graft. A greater danger comes from the "almost legal" injustices, perhaps because the helplessness of the protective forces of society gives them wider scope. But surely the gravest danger of habituation comes from the perfumed brutalities that are accepted as routine in any level of society; perhaps it would be better to see these things not as dangers but as disastrously accomplished facts. We have become accustomed to these things; and to this degree we are prepared to accept injustice as a normal procedure in social life.
Yet, regardless of the ignorance, the passion, or the good intention that lies behind a particular injustice, the damage done to men and to society is not lessened in the least. For material injustice is no less an overthrow of the balance of justice, of the order necessary to society than the injustice that flows from the formal vice of injustice. Just as much damage is done; for the norm of the just and unjust is an external thing which the inner dispositions of men do nothing to change.
With this in mind, it is frightening to look at the injustices to which we have, in fact, become accustomed. Irreligion is so taken for granted that we rarely think of it in terms of injustice, though it is, of its very nature, the basic injustice of the creature against the source of all that he is and has. We do not even hear the marriage contract shattering against the walls of passionate selfishness any longer; it has happened too often to attract attention. Injustice has been so obscured in the practices of contraception that the organ of propaganda for this sort of thing can now call itself "Human Fertility," completely missing the humor of the absurdity. There is serious effort now being expended to have us take impurity in the young as normal and universal, and with considerable success. Fundamental mutilations of men and women, murders done in certain modes, thievery on a grand scale, all these we are habituated to, so much so that we are surprised and hurt when their respectability is challenged.
This moral blindness could not have come about through mere frequency of our contact with these things. The people who perpetrate these things with such undisturbed serenity of soul are not men and women who have simply become hardened to savagery; rather they are blind because they labor under a blanketing ignorance that makes it very nearly a psychological impossibility for them to see the injustice of their acts. But the injustice, you will remember, is no less damaging to men and to society despite their complete ignorance. It is this ignorance, the authors of it, and the means by which it has been accomplished that present the most serious threat to a defense against the vice of injustice both in its inner corrosion of ourselves and the violence of its acts from those who are already victims of it on the other side of the world.[11]
With this established absence of the vice of injustice, it would be heartening to find that we were also just with all the vigor and promptness proper to the habit, or virtue, of justice. For then we would indeed be in a position to spearhead the opposition to the dark evils of injustice. In the beginning of this study, we voiced the strong suspicion that both the vice of injustice and the virtue of justice were absent from our national life. In investigating the latter part of that suspicion, we must tread carefully. It is never so true that virtue is better hidden than vice as in the case of injustice and justice. It is not the smooth functioning of social life which draws our attention, but the upheavals of fights, riots, civil wars; we can take the first for granted as we usually do with beneficient things. Under these circumstances, it would be absurd to attempt to demonstrate the absence of justice from the whole body politic. Yet, the lack of social upheavals at the moment does not argue so much to the presence of justice as it does to the lack of injustice; we may possibly be coasting along on the momentum of the virtue of another age. To keep within the bounds of the evidence, let us state our suspicion in these terms: there seems to be little public evidence of the virtue of justice in our western world; and on a priori grounds with considerable confirmation from the facts, it is difficult to understand the continued existence of the virtue of justice except within the relatively small group of those who hold to vitally strong religious beliefs.
Even stated as cautiously as that, the suspicion of the defect of the virtue of justice in our time runs into a mass of evidence that seems to smother it at once. Look at the apparent contradictions of this suspicion. In the disputes between labor and management, both sides proceed in the name of justice; both sides make accusations of injustice; both appeal to government and to public opinion in vindication of justice, the protection of their rights. Surely, standing thus on their rights, both sides would seem to be consumed with a hunger and thirst after justice. Then there is the matter of arbitration which has come so far to the fore recently; surely the arbiter holds that position of impersonal fairness that we attribute to justice, and he acts in that objective fashion in declaring the just or right thing. Judges sitting in the courts are meting out justice according to the law, day after day. Even the most insignificant quarrel has its spectators who instinctively take sides, obviously for no personal benefit but distributing their cheers or hisses according to their judgment of the justice of the issue at stake in the quarrel. It might be further argued that no people were ever so alertly conscious of their rights as are our own people. The pugnacious assertion of these rights begins at the grammar and high school level with well organized student strikes! We know our rights; we are not to be pushed around by road-hogs, if we are Sunday drivers, or brass hats, if we are apprentice seamen. This is a democracy. Surely, the whole emphasis here is on rights; such a people must have justice ground into their bones. In fact, we go far beyond the demands of justice in our well earned reputation for quick mercy both at home and abroad; no other people have ever given so much, so quickly, and so unconditionally to friends, to enemies, to total strangers on the other side of the world.
Yes, there is argument for our possession of the virtue of justice, but there is also real question as to the validity of those arguments. Take, for instance, the allegations of mercy as proving the superabundance of justice in our hearts. Mercy is not necessarily a virtue; it can be, in fact, an unregulated outburst of the passion of sorrow.[12] It may flow from an entirely generous love, but then, again, it may be a recognition of the bond of weakness that ties us to all men in misery.[13] In any case, it is a heady thing with an exhilarating lift that is reason enough for exercising mercy. For mercy properly belongs to God; it is the act of superior supplying for the needs of an inferior from his own superior resources. It is godlike action, testifying to the superiority of the merciful man, and men like to look and feel superior.[14] No, merciful acts are not proofs of a superabundant justice. Rather, to be accepted as genuine products of the virtue of mercy and not the outpourings of passion, these presuppose the routine fairness of justice to those closer to hand and the uncounting selflessness of love to those who are so close as to be one with ourselves. A man who will cheat his business colleagues and abuse his children has no claim to the title of merciful no matter how many checks he writes out for the miserable across the oceans. The unquestioned fact of our bounty to the suffering does not dissipate the suspicion of the absence of justice amongst us; rather, it depends on our being cleared of that suspicion for its own virtuous character.
That the instances of insistence on rights noted above could be mistaken for evidence of our virtue of justice is possible only by a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of justice. All these instances are ruled out as irrelevant by the same fundamental characteristic: justice looks to another, not to oneself. The thing is plain from the very definition of justice,[15] and completely obvious from the most hurried analysis of the virtue: "justice by its name implies equality, it denotes essentially relation to another, for a thing is equal, not to itself, but to another. . . . Hence justice properly speaking . . . is only in one man towards another."[16] In other words, by justice we are seeking to give another man his due, not fighting to get something of our own. We need no particular perfection of virtue to grab for our own; our sense appetites are incapable of doing anything else, and our will, by its very nature, is eminently fitted to reach out for what is naturally good, without further perfection. When our mouth waters for steak, it is for steak for ourselves not for someone else; when we insist on the vindication of our rights, we are reaching for what is our own.
In neither case are we practicing justice. We are not trying to give to another, but to get from him. Now, in all the instances cited, the common thing to be noticed is that no one of them involves this man proceeding to give another what is his right. In the disputes of labor and management, obviously the emphasis is on getting rights, not giving them. The arbiter is not moving to give anything, he is telling someone else what must be given; the judge is not acting in favor of another man, as would be the case in particular justice, but is declaring what the law insists shall be given by someone else. The judge is administering justice, he may be in some sense practicing distributive justice or enforcing legal justice, but he is not using the habit of particular justice which is our precise point in this study.
If we possess the virtue of justice, we are giving another man his due. Moreover, we are entirely willing to do this thing; and we do it precisely because it is another man's right in question. We like giving another man his rights; the joy of the virtue lies precisely in that complacency. Our action is not the result of threats, violence, legal pressure, or a nagging conscience.[17] In fact, we get nothing for ourselves out of this just act; what benefits come to us are indirect. Indeed, we do no particular good to the man whose rights we respect: "When a man does what he ought, he brings no gain to the person to whom he does what he ought, but only abstains from doing harm. He does however profit himself, insofar as he does what he ought spontaneously and readily, and this is to act virtuously."[18]
The instances cited above, then, are no more evidence of a hunger and thirst for justice, or even of the very presence of a minimum virtue of justice, than the hungry growling of our stomach is evidence of pity for the hungry. On the score of this one characteristic of justice—that it looks to the rights of another—what is the public evidence of the presence of the virtue of justice? Such evidence would be indisputable acts or clear declarations of a complete willingness to abstain from doing harm to others and to society, of a positive pleasure in seeing to it that we did not harm others. Short of these public manifestations, only God Himself can know surely that this just thing of abstaining from injuring others is in fact done from justice. There will be plenty of evidence of injurious acts, and some of the just acts done with extreme reluctance; of course a good many people are being let alone from. motives other than justice. On the a posteriori side, the case against the virtue of justice will have to rest principally on such negative evidence as contrary acts and public silence in deed and word. Actually, the argument has its chief force when we make it a matter of entirely personal experience. How many men and women do we know who have this perpetual will to give another his due, enjoying that just activity? How often do we ourselves condone an intrusion on the rights of others because of our own immediate advantage or convenience?
From this angle, then, the case against the presence of the virtue of justice among us rests upon the unjust acts that pepper society, the silence of deed and fact in favor of the virtue, and personal experience. It can be granted that this is not a very strong case; still, it is strong enough to be unsettling. In connection with the a priori argument, it will prove confirmation enough to be terrifying.
The a priori arguments almost state themselves once a few of the essential marks of justice are clearly understood; and these arguments leave us wondering how the virtue of justice can possibly continue to exist among us. There is no need for an exhaustive treatment of justice; for our purposes it will be sufficient to select two such essentials of justice: the radical presuppositions for the existence of the virtue in man; and the triple source of right. If our time fails to measure up on these essentials, we are coddling the dead bodies of words when we speak of justice.
There is no reason for justice, no sense to it, not even a possibility of its existence, unless man has a spiritual soul with the spiritual faculties of intellect and will by which faculties he can know universal and unchanging truth and make free choice of means to his end or, abusing that freedom, freely turn away from his end altogether. This is not an arbitrary statement. It is an immediate corollary from the notion of justice which has been at the root of all the civilizations of the West. Accepting that notion, we must see justice as engaged with equality which essentially denotes a relation to another; for justice, there must be a capacity to see the relation of one man to another, to be aware of otherness. This knowledge is far and away above the limitations of sense knowledge to the concrete singular; it is intellectual knowledge which lights up the path for free choice necessarily implied in every concept of justice. To surpass the limitations of the sensible, to reach out to the universal, to detect so immaterial a thing as a relation, and to be free of the senses' determination to a necessary object, all these are spiritual actions arguing apodictically to a spiritual principle of action in man.[19] By this consideration alone, justice is restricted to natures capable of intellectual knowledge and free choice, that is to spiritual natures: to God, angels, and men.
It will not do here to adopt evasive tactics, dropping the word "spiritual" in favor of the more vague "psychic." Such a trick would allow us to point to the psychic life of the dog or the monkey and feel that we have obliterated the distinction of animals from men, and the notion of the spiritual. Of course, there is psychic life in the dog and the monkey; they are both alive and therefore have those principles of life which we call souls. For that matter, there is psychic life in a plant, and for exactly the same reason. The relevant point here is the kind of souls, a point resolved by a simple observation of the kind of life of which these souls are the principles, the effects of which they are the causes. There is no justice between plants, between dogs, or between monkeys, because there is no spiritual life in them to make them capable of a knowledge of relations to others and of free choice. The demand justice makes is for a spiritual nature in the full sense of that term, an immortal principle of life that exceeds the limitations of the material universe.
No argument is necessary to make clear what the philosophies of our time have done to the notions of spiritual, immortal soul, intellectual knowledge, unchanging truth, free will, and choice that is within a man's power. No argument is required, for a denial of these things is an explicit, even a proud, fundamental of American philosophies. The local twists given to relativistic positivism by the pragmatism of James and the refinements of John Dewey have not weakened but have made more bold these fundamental denials. The rejections of man's spirituality, of unchanging truth, of unswerving moral goodness, have been made with utterly wearying frequency and refuted just as often; certainly there is no need to authenticate them again, for there is no one to challenge their universality in American philosophical thinking.
The particular relevancy of these denials for our present study lies in the fact that they have become basic in our American philosophy of education, with the result that they must be embraced, or at least repeated in examinations, in the larger colleges where the teachers of normal schools are trained. The graduates of these colleges then staff the normal schools, where, naturally, the same philosophy of education is the daily diet of the students who are to be the teachers of elementary and secondary schools supported by public funds. Since this hasn't happened yesterday or today, we already have generations of young people who have been exposed to this philosophy of denial through all of their scholastic days. All this is common knowledge; an achievement against justice made possible by the tremendous resources of government. The matter for wonder is not that perfumed brutalities creep into the lives of the products of this philosophy; rather, it is astounding that we are aghast at the vice of injustice behind the Iron Curtain. It is, in fact, an encouraging testimony of the soundness of men that the wholesomeness of their human nature has resisted the complete penetration of the intellectual poison down to the last details of their relations with others. These people have been made ignorant through the elaborate processes of education, stupified to the point of being blind not only to the reasons for justice, but to the very possibility of its existence.
The argument from the triple source of right seems easier, perhaps because it becomes tangible in our legal thinking and so approaches more immediately to the world of the concrete. The rights of others, and our own, are either fantasy or fact, fiction or reality. If we settle for fantasy and fiction, then the whole question of justice is unworthy of consideration; it is a myth foisted on a world of men who are by nature implacable enemies with nothing but their own strength to support their days in a jungle world gone mad. Here there is no justice, only a pretense of it in the mode it pleases the present spinner of fiction to cast it. This conception, we think, would be indignantly rejected by the men of the West. But let us not be too sure of this until we have looked at the facts or realities of rights.
The proportion between a man and a thing, or his right to this thing, to be fact, reality, must have a solid basis, a source satisfying to our rational demand for explanations. Why does this man have a right to this thing; why does such a proportion come into being at all? There are only two possible sources of such a proportion; it comes either from the very nature of things or from the determinations of men. We have known this, of course, for the centuries that stretch back to the beginnings of western thought. Man has a right to some things by nature, a proportion is set up by the very fact that he is a human being; there are, in other words, rights that are established by the natural law. Other rights are the product of a general agreement of the men of a society, an agreement that, obviously, can not conflict with man's natural rights without destroying those who made the agreement; these are the positive rights set up by positive law in its determinations of the proportions left undetermined by natural law. Still other rights, also by agreement, are the product of what is sometimes called private law or contract; this, too, will have the social sanction and moral force of positive law which marks out the proper field of contract and the conditions which must accompany the private agreement for validity before the court of society.[20]
Other sources have in recent times been assigned to account for men's rights by way of replacement of the anciently recognized sources: money, blood, the will of the ruling man or ruling class, society, and so on. But all of these are obviously false for they suffer from a double defect; first, they give a man no stability of rights in time, extent, or depth, for all of these things are accidental to men as men; secondly, they make fictions of rights, giving them no connection whatever with the natural world, the world of things as they are. As the West has seen it for so many centuries, a man has rights because there is a necessary connection between these things and the goals for which human nature is designed; the basis, in other words, of his rights is the solid order flowing from the nature of things as they are, from the world of reality. Man is not shoved to his goal; he is moved by commands, and moves himself by obedience to those commands. Over and above instincts, he has obligations; and because of those obligations, he has rights to the opportunities to fulfill his obligations and get to his goal.
If we remove the sources of rights, eliminate them from our thinking, we have abstracted the material which is proper to justice; there can be no justice because there is nothing for justice to work on. If we keep the words right and justice, but deny their connections with nature, we are in no better case for we have made whims or fictions of rights. If we name any of the accidental sources mentioned above and then proceed to social living as though right and justice meant something, we are still in the world of fiction though we are pretending this world is a real world. Men, in fact, have no rights as men.
What are the facts in the West relative to the sources of right? What, if anything, have we done to law and to contract? While it may be tempting to look at what has happened to the marriage contract, to labor-management contracts, to treaties and international agreements, we can pass over the matter of contracts in favor of their sources; namely, positive and natural law. If these two have not been maintained in their objective reality, there is no reason to expect any but the most ephemeral of fictional rights from contracts.
The most immediate observable attack on the reality of positive law, and therefore of positive rights, has been the now long enduring attempt to separate positive law from morals, to make it a thing apart from natural law and fundamental truths. Not that this has been an unsuccessful attempt; it has been widespread, dominating most of our legal thinking on the theoretical level. Its proponents have been eminent men who were at the same time extremely vocal. They have made use of both qualities to pour out their opinions at such a rate as to flood the field; what opposition was not drowned by this eminent flood, was sneered into insignificance as anachronistic, conservative to the point of absurdity, and wholly out of touch with progress. Of course the thing spread from the theoretical level to that of actual practice and gave us a picture of law ranging from a convenient weapon of the socially strongest, through the snap-judgments of judges, to a verbal record of judicial moods. All this merely echoed the relativistic positivism which had taken over on the philosophical level, proceeding on the same hopeless assumptions of relativistic truth and relativistic morals as inevitable consequences of the denial of intellectual knowledge.[21]
Our concern here is not to argue the point of the relativists among the legal thinkers, but to see clearly its repercussions for the virtue of justice. If men are convinced, and proceed to legal practice on these grounds, the virtue of justice makes no sense. In this case, justice would revolve around rights that might easily disappear by tomorrow or next year, since there is nothing absolute about them; at best, they are the result of some accident such as wealth or the favor of a particular group or government, at worst they are pure fictions evolved to keep the mass of men in line. Why should such rights not be changed, curtailed, eliminated, or transgressed if the thing can be done conveniently and safely? The undermining of natural law is an evident thing from what has been said above of the denial of the fundamental presuppositions of the virtue of justice. Those denials were aimed at the nature of man, denying him a spiritual soul, intellectual knowledge, and free will; without these things, it is futile to talk of a natural moral law for men, a rule of action flowing from human nature itself. The denial seeped down into our legal thinking to feed the emptiness of the new theories of the independence of positive law from directives of nature. One can judge the extent of the damage done by the violence of the present reaction making itself felt in favor of natural law. Again, there seems no need for a detailed authentication of this matter here; for, again, there is no one to challenge the fact. This has not been something that men did furtively, in shame, but openly in a spirit of adventurous pioneering. The reader who desires details and copious references need only turn to the series of excellent studies by Attorney Ben W. Palmer in the American Bar Association Journal.[22] The important thing here is to understand the significance of this rejection of natural law as it concerns the presence of the virtue of justice among us; to see, in other words, the impossibility of justice on grounds that eliminate both the subject of justice and its proper material. The question thus becomes "how can justice exist among us?" Rather than "does justice exist among us?"
We might take a pollyanna attitude and dismiss all this as mere theorizing which men will never try to put into practice; after all the facts do show that the vast majority of our people are being let alone by their fellows, so justice does in fact exist. There are several difficulties connected with this comforting refusal to face the facts. It is most probable that the just acts which leave us fairly peaceful may have other sources than justice; but it is the virtue of justice which is an essential for the life of society. Again, it is a fact that men have put this kind of thinking into practice; that is precisely what has aroused us to the point of revulsion at the murder of society in the Iron Curtain countries. Finally, we have introduced a great deal of this thinking into the details of our own living. How else can we explain the brutalities routinely perpetrated by the highly respectable, and with a serenely clear conscience? When men can be made so ignorant as to be blind to the nature of man and opposed to the basic sources of human rights, it is not possible to prevent that ignorance from flowing into their actions.
It is possible that the patterns of action inherited from a wiser age have carried us along in spite of our loss of the wisdom which designed and sustained those patterns. If there were no breakup visible in these patterns, we would still have good reason for alarm at their lack of foundation; but beyond all question, those patterns are breaking up. Yes, we are horrified at the savagery that has swept over Eastern Europe, but our grandparents would be just as horrified at our divorces, contraceptive industries, respectable killings, and debonair irreligion. If, as seems the case, we have traded wisdom for materialistic opportunism which rules out the possibility of wisdom by its denial of the spiritual, then we are committed to an unfounded hope of somehow muddling through social life under the guidance of an extended sense knowledge, necessarily blind to relations to others, or under the guidance of utterly tyrannous wills that have no reason to care about such relations to other men.
It just can not be done. The minimum for social living is that the men of society abstain from injuring each other; which is to say the minimum of the virtue of justice is essential for social life. That respect for the rights of others must be a pleasant, solidly perpetual thing to which we need not be driven. Briefly, then, for the maintenance of human society, it is required that each man shoulder his responsibilities in the face of the rights of his fellows. You ask too much when you demand this in the name of fictional rights with no basis in reality, or when you ask it of a man incapable of knowing rights, incapable of commanding himself, incapable of obeying the commands of others, incapable of law.
It would seem, then, that our original suspicion has considerable foundation, that we are living in a society that subsists without either the vice of injustice or the virtue of justice, or at least without reason for the virtue of justice. Up to now, our nature has risen in instinctive protest against the horrors of the vice of injustice nakedly revealed in all its malice. But we are being conditioned for the reception of that vice into our own souls by the parade of unjust acts that offend our eyes less and less, and by a deliberately cultivated ignorance that blinds us to the injustice of many savageries. Meanwhile, the virtue of justice becomes more impossible as we whittle away its foundations in the nature of man and the sources of right.
If all the world were at peace, if there were no open evidence of the brutality of injustice, if there were no gathering clouds of malice, we would still be teetering on the edge of a momentous decision. For a social vacuum cannot endure for long; inherited patterns of action will eventually wear thin; eventually, and in a very short eventuality at that, either injustice will move in to make a savage desert of our lives or justice will reassert its basic support of social living. In implementing our abomination of injustice, we have much more to do than issue a call to arms.
Walter Farrell, O.P.
Endnotes
1 "It is not easy for any man to do an unjust thing from choice, as though it were pleasing for its own sake and not for the sake of something else: this is proper to one who has the habit, as the Philosopher declares." Summa Theol., II-II, q. 59, a. 2, ad 3 um.
2 "The will, like the reason, extends to all moral matters; i. e„ passions and those external operations that relate to another person. On the other hand justice perfects the will solely in the point of its extending to operations that relate to another: and the same applies to injustice." Ibid., q. 59, a. 1, ad 3 um.
3 This is seen clearly if we remember that injustice is the direct contrary of justice. Thus, when St. Thomas describes the primary and secondary acts of justice, he is at the same time giving a direct insight into the opposing acts of injustice. "Doing good is the completive act of justice, and the principal part, so to speak, thereof. Declining from evil is a more imperfect act, and a secondary part of that virtue. Hence it is a material part, so to speak, thereof, and a necessary condition of the formal and completive part." Ibid., q. 79, a 1, ad 3 um.
4 The first and third types of injustice are stated explicitly: "Injustice is twofold. First there is illegal injustice which is opposed to legal justice: and this is essentially a special vice, insofar as it regards a special object, namely the common good which it contemns; . . .. Secondly we speak of injustice in reference to an inequality between one person and another. . . ." Ibid., q. 59, a. 1. For the second type of injustice, see Ibid., q. 61, a. 1; q. 63, a. 1.
5 "We speak of injustice in reference to an inequality between one person and another, when one man wishes to have more goods, riches for example, or honors, and less evils, such as toil and losses, . . . ." (II-II, 59, 1) Ibid., q. 59, aa. 1, 2.
6 Objectum temperantiae non est aliquid exterius constitutum, sicut objectum justitiae; sed objectum temperantiae, id est, temperatum, accipitur solum in com-paratione ad ipsum hominem. Et ideo quod est per accidens et praeter inten-tionem, non potest dici temperatum nec materialiter, nec formaliter; et similiter neque intemperatum; et quantum ad hoc est dissimile in justitia et in aliis virtutibus moralibus; sed quantum ad comparationem operationis ad habitum, in omnibus similiter se habet." Ibid., q. 59, a. 2, ad 3 um.
7 Ibid., ad 1 um.
8 Ibid., a. 4.
9 " . . . sometimes from choice, for instance when the injustice itself is the direct object of one's complacency. In the latter case properly speaking it arises from a habit because whenever a man has a habit, whatever befits that habit is, of itself, pleasant to him. Accordingly, to do what is unjust intentionally and by choice is proper to the unjust man, in which sense the unjust man is one who has the habit of injustice: . . ." Ibid., a. 3.
In Ethic., lib. V, lect. 13 (1045): "quando aliquis ex electione inducit alteri nocumentum, est injustus et malus. Et talis dicitur ex certa malitia peccare."
Ibid., lect. 14 (1057): "scilicet quod simpliciter et per se injustum facere non est aliud quam quod aliquis volens noceat: et in hoc quod sit volens intelligitur, quod sciat et quod laedat, et quod nocumentum inferat, et ut, idest qualiter, et alias hujusmodi circumstantias."
10 "Accordingly it may happen in two ways that a man who does an unjust thing, is not unjust: first, on account of a lack of correspondence between the operation and its proper object. For the operation takes its species and name from its direct and not from its indirect object: and in things directed to an end the direct is that which is intended, and the indirect is what is beside the intention. Hence if a man do that which is unjust, without intending to do an unjust thing, for instance if he do it through ignorance, being unaware that it is unjust, properly speaking he does an unjust thing, not directly, but only indirectly, and, as it were, doing materially that which is unjust: hence such an act is not called an injustice. Secondly, this may happen on account of lack of proportion between the operation and the habit. For an injustice may sometimes arise from a passion, for instance, anger or desire, and sometimes from choice, for instance when the injustice itself is the direct object of one's complacency . . . a man may do what is unjust, unintentionally, or through passion, without having the habit of injustice." Summa Theol., q. 59. a. 2.
In Ethic., lib. V, lect. 13 (1041): "Tripliciter contingit aliquod nocumentum inferri circa communicationes hominum adinvicem. Uno modo per ignorantiam et involuntarie. Alio modo voluntarie quidem, sed sine electione. Tertio modo voluntarie et cum electione."
Ibid. (1044): "Quando aliquis sciens quidem nocumentum inferre sed non praeconsilians, idest absque deliberatione, tunc est quaedam injustitia, sicut quae-cumque aliquis committit per iram et alias passiones, si tamen non sunt naturales et necessariae hominibus. . . . Illi igitur qui propter praedictas passiones aliis nocent, peccant et faciunt quidem injustum, et actus eorum sunt injustificationes: non tamen propter hoc ipsi sunt injusti et mali, quia non inferunt nocumentum propter malitiam sed propter passionem. Et tales sunt qui dicuntur propter in-firmitatem peccare,"
11 We shall touch on this ignorance and its causes in some detail later on in this study when we attempt to analyze some of the reasons for the decay of the virtue of justice.
12 "Mercy signifies grief for another's distress. Now this grief may denote, in one way, a movement of the sensitive appetite, in which case mercy is not a virtue but a passion; whereas, in another way, it may denote a movement of the intellective appetite . . ." Summa Theol., II-II, q. 30, a. 2.
13 ". . . one grieves or sorrows for another's distress, insofar as one looks upon another's distress as one's own.
"Now this happens in two ways: first, through union of the affections, which is the effect of love. . ., Secondly, it happens through real union, for instance when another's evil comes near to us, so as to pass to us from him. Hence the Philosopher says that men pity such as are akin to them, and the like, because it makes them realize that the same may happen to themselves. This also explains why the old and the wise who consider that they may fall upon evil times, as also the feeble and timorous persons, are more inclined to pity: whereas those who deem themselves happy, and so far powerful as to think themselves in no danger of suffering any hurt, are not so inclined to pity." Ibid., a. 1.
14 Ibid., a. 4.
15 "(Justice is) the perpetual and constant will to render to each one his right," Ibid., q. 58, a. 1. ad 1 um.
"And if anyone would reduce it to the proper form of a definition, he might say that justice is a habit whereby a man renders to each one his due by a constant and perpetual will." Ibid., a. 1.
16 Ibid., art. 2.
17 Cf. Summa Theol., II-II, q. 58, aa. 1, 2. The texts cited above in footnotes 7, 9, and 10 as to the formality of habit in general and of injustice in particular have relevancy here. In the same context of the Commentary on the Book of Ethics, there are multiple texts making explicit the doctrine stated here; a man is just by knowingly and willingly doing the just thing; he acts from choice; the just thing is the thing intended, etc.
18 Ibid., a. 3 ad 1 um.
19 "Since justice by its name implies equality, it denotes essentially relation to another, for a thing is equal, not to itself but to another." Ibid., a. 2.
"Again the act of rendering his due to each man cannot proceed from the sensitive appetite, because sensitive apprehension does not go so far as to be able to consider the relation of one thing to another; but this is proper to reason." Ibid., art. 4.
"The will is borne towards its object consequently on the apprehension of reason: wherefore, since the reason directs one thing in relation to another, the will can will one thing in relation to another, and this belongs to justice." Ibid., ad 3 um,
20 "The right or the just is a work that is adequated to another person according to some kind of equality. Now a thing can be adequated to a man in two ways: first by its very nature, as when a man gives so much that he may receive equal value in return, and this is called natural right. In another way a thing is adequated or commensurated to another person, by agreement, or by common consent, when, to wit, a man deems himself satisfied, if he receive so much. This can be done in two ways: first by private agreement, as that which is confirmed by an agreement between private individuals; secondly, by public agreement, as when the whole community agrees that something should be deemed as though it were adequated and commensurated to another person, or people, and acts in its stead, and this is called positive right." Ibid., q. 57, a. 2.
"As Augustine says, that which is not just seems to be no law at all: wherefore the force of a law depends on the extent of its justice. Now in human affairs a thing is said to be just, from being right, according to the rule of reason. But the first rule of reason is the law of nature, as is clear from what has been stated above (q. 91, 2, 2 um). Consequently every human law has just so much of the nature of law, as it is derived from the law of nature. But if in any point it deflects from the law of nature, it is no longer a law but a perversion of law.
"But it must be noted that something may be derived from the natural law in two ways; first, as a conclusion from premises, secondly, by way of determination of certain generalities. . . ."
"Accordingly both modes of derivation are found in the human law. But those things which are derived in the first way, are contained in human law not as emanating therefrom exclusively, but have some force from the natural law also. But those things which are derived in the second way, have no other force than that of human law." Ibid., q. 95, a. 2.
21 For thorough substantiation of this fundamental attack on the reality of positive law, the reader is referred to the detailed studies made by Miriam T. Rooney: "Law and The New Logic," Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, XVI (1947), 140; "Pluralism and The Law," Now Scholasticism, XIII (1939), 305; "Mr. Justice Cardozo's Relativism," Ibid., XIX (1945), 1; "Law As An Instrument of Social Policy: The Brandeis Theory," Ibid., XXII (1948), 1.
22 "Defense Against Leviathan," June; "Background for Dissensions: Pragmatism and Its Effects on the Law," December 1948; "Groping For a Legal Philosophy: Natural Law in a Creative and Dynamic Age," January, 1949.
© The Thomist, The Thomist Press 1949
This item 926 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
