The basic experience of justice is that every day, as we wake up, some things are loudly there, immediately demanding and immediately satisfying. And every day, we have to put that loud stuff in its place, with relation to what has been there longer -- what we remember. We rescue our lives from the river of ongoing experience by insisting: "this is important, that isn't. This cannot be seen properly unless that is also recalled. We have been through this frustration before, and it always yields."
One is sometimes tempted to think of ethics as like calculus -- advanced work for human beings, after the basics of selfishness have been mastered. But I think that the ethical move is just an extension of what happens when we wake up, every day. We put our memories and experiences in order.
That suggests something a bit surprising: the work of memory, especially recalling what's important, turns out to be basic ethical work and a plausible training ground for justice. Ethics is at its root about taking account of things, and the ethical muscle is named "Take Account of More."
Posted by shea0017 at September 3, 2004 10:48 AM