Philosophy

Two Approaches to Justice

At the all night party that is Plato’s Republic, the guys start out discussing “What is justice?” in a familiar way: somebody gives a definition, Socrates finds a counter-example, somebody gives another definition, and the game goes on: trying to capture in a formula – decent human relationships, large and small, long term and short term. That project has marked thinking about justice up through Rawls’ Theory of Justice in the 20th Century.

The ancient Hebrews thought about justice too, but some developed a more cynical line. Any formula will limp, any system will limp, any arrangement will limp. (Remember, these folks spent a lot of their political lives as oppressed minorities.) So the key to justice is to keep any formula, system, arrangement from taking up all the available space. Think about two big contributions of Jewish thought to talk about justice: jubilee and gleaning. The idea of jubilee is partly this: every 25 years, debts are cancelled, slaves are freed. Any definition, any system, has exactly 25 years to work its magic or its mischief. The idea of gleaning agriculturally is: don’t harvest clean. Leave some grain for the poor to get, for animals maybe. Extended, the idea is: don’t push any system to maximum efficiency, don’t apply any rule with maximum rigor. (I remember the old sitcom “Hank,” about a guy who got an education by sneaking into the back row of Harvard lectures. The Hebrews would have approved, I think. They would also have liked garage sales, plea bargains, cable television, and alternative medicine.)

Someplace in the 19th Century, the American legal system gave birth to the corporation as we know it today: immortal and limitless. Surely, when the corporation was born, people had reason to believe that big, long-lasting corporate entities would produce prosperity enough to make questions of justice pointless: the rising tide would lift all boats far above the minimum requirements of justice. The stories of Carnegie’s contribution to American and world prosperity, of Edison’s contribution, would make that thought inevitable.

And while this was going on, there was this Jewish guy in the back of the room, muttering warnings from long experience with systems and formulas and plans.