Many of us who think about how to bring about a more just world end up with a prior question that needs answering before we can even think about the hows.It’s a definitional issue: namely, what is this concept of justice in society? I’m not even certain this isn’t a trick question. Is there such a thing as justice? What about social justice? Can these words really be defined — do they contain a truth that crosses barriers of time, culture and religion? Is there a way to define justice that is true no matter where, when and who you are?
Maybe it is easier to start with what justice is not. Creating a definition by distinguishing it from a concept that is close to and yet understood as distinct from it may help clarify the definition itself.
Justice is not charity. Charity addresses hunger with food, nakedness with clothes, and thirst with water. It is triage, while justice is more preventative medicine, vaccines, wellness visits. Charity is important and useful, but it addresses the results of a broken society. Justice addresses the causes.
Justice is not peace, though as Martin Luther King taught us, “True peace is not merely the absence of some negative force – tension, confusion, or war; it is the presence of some positive force – justice, goodwill, and brotherhood.” In that larger context, justice is a necessary force toward the achievement of peace even as it is separate from it.
With this understanding of what justice is not, how do we define what it is? As an attorney when I hear the word justice I am confronted with a set of images that include a courtroom, a judge in a black robe, a defendant being given a sentence (as a former prosecutor, the verdict is always guilty). This image involves rehabilitative punishment as a deserved result of a conscious action. This is obviously not the kind of justice we are talking about – or is it? Is social justice merely the application of this kind of courtroom justice across society?
When a criminal is found guilty for stealing he is supposed to be given his sentence based solely on two things – what he did and what he has done (his record). This is our justice system – or it supposed to be. Applying this principal broadly (across society – i.e. social justice) could then be defined as giving everyone the same opportunity to be free from consequences outside of their own actions – poverty, racism, sexism, and other systematic issues that baselessly oppress groups and individuals and make success so much more difficult.
While this definition is neither perfect nor comprehensive I think it effectively captures what we mean when we feel in our hearts the injustice of things that we see around us. When a child of abuse and poverty becomes an adult and ends up in and out of the justice system exactly as they had been in and out of the foster care system. When a family is not welcomed in a certain neighborhood because they do not look like their neighbors. When a woman’s abuser is set free because he is her husband and she cannot yet find a voice to accuse him. We know innately how wrong these things are. Our very souls rebel against them. And I do not believe we would feel that dissonance if we were not meant to act, to move, to change.
And so if justice is not some unrealistic ideal to be discussed but never achieved, then what remains is our response. Because the truth of its potential gives us both agency and responsibility. We can take steps and make changes, however large or small, to live in a way that both limits our participation in harmful systems and promotes the development of more just societal structures.
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