Moral, metaphysical and natural justice

Abstract

There is a natural human desire to see justice accomplished on a historical, as on a personal plane. The Torah proposes that such justice is operative in human affairs, albeit sometimes slowly or obliquely. Philosophers from Anaximander to Al-Fãrãbi and beyond discover a cosmological justice in the elements of nature - either a basis or a surrogate for natural justice in history. Plato and Aristotle find in human character a middle term to warrant the promises that connect justice with desert: virtue fosters success and vice breeds weakness - debility in the individual and instability in the state. Integration, social or personal, is a strength; injustice is a failure of integration. Biblically too, Balaam cannot curse the migrating Israelites because the justice plainly visible in their camp, even at a distance, leaves no room among them for destructive dissension and dissolution. Just as the dove survives the dinosaur, the values and institutions of civilization, and the communities that live by those values, survive the demise of empires that equate power with violence and wisdom with pragmatic cunning. Metaphysical justice tailors our achievements to our strengths, although allowing us to cultivate those strengths. Natural justice engrains our intentions in our character, making us the victims or the beneficiaries of our individual choices and political policies. Moral justice is that component of natural justice in which we humans take a hand and try our luck and judgment against the exigencies of chance and violence, always hoping to improve upon the verdicts of nature but never certain when they might be visited upon our own unwitting deficiencies.