The Meaning of Justice

The challenge of defining justice is that it is both a moral and a legal concept.
 
Reason, courage, integrity, and independence, for example, are moral values with no direct legal counterpart. They each are, to use Ayn Rand’s succinct definition (p. 15), a “that which one acts to gain and/or keep” and derive from the fundamental standard of human life as a rational being. Reason therefore is the highest moral value and standard of ethics. The corresponding virtue is rationality, namely the use of reason as “one’s only source of knowledge, one’s only judge of values and one’s only guide to action” (p. 25). The other three virtues, as I have written before, are, respectively, “acting against great odds or opposition, remaining loyal to one’s fundamental values, [and] relying on one’s own mind to perceive reality.”
 
“Value” is what we act to attain. “Virtue” is the action of acquiring and sustaining the value.
 
In that earlier post, I said the virtue of justice means “judging oneself and others by conformity to moral and legal standards.” But there is an acting component to both the moral and legal concepts that I did not include. Justice is not only a matter of judging, but also a matter of acting in relation to the person being judged.
 
Let’s take the legal concept first, as it is relatively easy to explain. Justice in our legal system means judging a person based on existing law and exonerating or punishing accordingly.
 
Laws in the current system, however, can themselves be judged by more fundamental moral principles, such as by identifying whether the laws violate or support individual rights. Thus, we can also judge what should be law in a proper, more rational capitalistic society, then praise or condemn based on projected law. Big businesses, for example, may be praised for all of the wealth they create, rather than condemned by the non-objective regulations, as happens today.
 
Definitions or at least descriptions of justice in the moral sense abound in the Ayn Rand literature. Let’s examine several.
 
Rand in The Virtue of Selfishness (p. 26) writes “that one must never seek or grant the unearned and undeserved, neither in matter nor in spirit.” But aren’t earned and deserved synonyms of, or closely related terms to, justice?
 
In Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (p. 51), she writes that justice is “the act of judging a man’s character and/or actions exclusively on the basis of all the factual evidence available, and of evaluating it by means of an objective moral criterion” (Rand’s emphasis). This does not include the component of acting in relation to the person being evaluated. Note that justice is itself a moral value and virtue that requires other more fundamental moral values and virtues as criteria by which a person is to be judged, for example, “That person was not honest with me!” Justice is derivative from those other values.
 
Leonard Peikoff (p. 276) does mention the acting component: justice means “judging men’s character and conduct objectively and . . . acting accordingly, granting to each man that which he deserves” (Peikoff’s emphasis). But, again, isn’t “deserve” a synonym of justice? And we might also ask what does acting accordingly mean?*
 
Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged (p. 1019) implies justice means  “that every man must be judged for what he is and treated accordingly, that just as you do not pay a higher price for a rusty chunk of scrap than for a piece of shining metal, so you do not value a rotter above a hero.” Galt here is speaking in elegant, dramatic terms about the principle of trade, which indeed seems to be an acting component of justice.
 
Rand (p. 31), finally, drives the point home: “The principle of trade is the only rational ethical principle for all human relationships, personal and social, private and public, spiritual and material. It is the principle of justice.” Trade is an action, so it seems to be the acting component we are looking for.
 
Let us now try to sort out from these various statements what justice is and concisely state its genus and differentia.
 
As in the legal system, justice is a judgment, which means identifying facts about the person in relation to a standard. And as in the legal system, justice calls for action in relation to the person judged. Thus:

Justice is the value and virtue of accurately identifying facts about oneself and others and comparing those facts to the standard of what is beneficial or harmful to human life as a rational being, then when rationally appropriate engaging the others by exchanging value for value or rejecting any such exchange, which can include punishment.**

In short, justice means accurately judging and—when rationally appropriate—praising or condemning. (“Oneself” must be included in the formal definition because we can be just or unjust to ourselves.)
 
“Value” and “virtue” is the genus, judging and acting in a certain way is the differentia. The qualification of “when rationally appropriate” must be included because we judge people, events, businesses, and governments all the time, but do not have a “duty” to praise or, especially, to condemn them. Much of the time we are not even close to the person being judged, such as a talking head on cable news! And as I often told my students—when judging people we are close to, including ourselves, or when judging events, businesses, governments, and talking heads—be sure to dig, dig, dig for the facts. “Do you have all of them?” I would ask.
 
One final moral concept of justice must be mentioned and dispensed with: social justice. I have defined it as the virtue of “accurately judging oppressed classes as underprivileged and granting them restitution” with a variety of handouts taken from those who are morally competent and successful (Applying Principles, p. 96). In other words, from those who have earned their wealth and property. Social justice is the moral, and by extension, legal concept of collectivist victimology.
 
What it really means is to take from the alleged thieving rich and give to the alleged underprivileged poor. It is a dishonest concept and is therefore unjust!
 
 
* “Fairness” is another word that is often thrown in when discussing justice, but it, too, is a synonym.
 
** “Exchanging value for value” is the general meaning of trade, but it is important to note that in economics and business “trade” has a narrower meaning: the buyer values the product more than the money paid and the seller values the money received more than the product sold. In the more general moral sense of the term, the exchange is still a value-for-value trade.

On the Separation of Church, Science, Education, and Business from the State: Avoiding Repressive Fascism

A suggested revision of the First Amendment of the US Constitution:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, scientific research, education, or business activity, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

When the state meddles, bad things happen—besides violating our rights.
 
The origin of the notion of a dividing line between church and state, or more correctly, “a theory of two powers,” as Britannica.com writes, goes back to Mark 12:13-17 when Jesus replied to questioning by the Pharisees who were attempting to trap him in a dilemma: either offend his followers by saying taxes should be paid to Rome or be arrested for treason for telling them not to pay.
 
Jesus replied: “Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and give to God what belongs to God” (Mark 12:17, New Living Translation).
 
Prior to this statement, church and state were inseparable. Throughout the early Middle Ages, the Church continued to dominate life, though by the tenth century numerous secular rulers had arisen to compete with and manipulate the Church. Over the centuries, conflict between church and state, as well as conflicts between the newly founded religious sects, led to many bloody wars. In the eighteenth century the notion of individual rights and separation of religion and state became expressed in the US’s First Amendment.
 
Classical liberals of today understand the separation as complete, as in “leave us (the citizens) alone” to pursue religion or not and in the manner we choose. The state should stay totally out of religious life.
 
As writer Collin Killick put it: “Laws that establish religion in government, even if created with the most benign intent, could put our nation on a path toward repressive theocracy” (emphasis added).
 
And “repressive” is how the state has been relating to science and business.
 
Former Harvard epidemiologist Martin Kulldorf, though not fully calling for laissez-faire of science by the state, is calling for the decentralization of scientific research. Kulldorf challenges the domination of government string-pulling in science because the government, especially in public health as controlled by the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control, dispenses most of the research money, deciding who gets it and which problem will be studied. Two-thirds of research money comes from federal, state, and local government sources, with well over half from the US government.
 
The gatekeeping, not to mention censorship, by the government on scientific research became apparent throughout our recent past two years of covid totalitarianism, as I have described the ordeal.
 
Kulldorf’s coauthor of the Great Barrington Declaration, Sunetra Gupta, calls the science-controllers cartels: government agencies, journal editors, and peer reviewers, all of whom determine promotion, tenure, and research in academia.*
 
“Repressive scientism,” using F. A. Hayek’s term for a “pretense at science,” is what we seem to have been given. The disastrous effect of logical positivism on science today cannot be overstated. Quoting from the description of Hayek’s book, The Counter Revolution of Science, at Mises.org:

There was once such a thing as the human sciences of which economics was part. The goal was to discover and elucidate the exact laws that govern the interaction of people with the material world. It had its own methods and own recommendations.

Throughout the twentieth century, however,

the economy and people began to be regarded as a collective entity to be examined as if whole societies should be studied as we study planets or other non-volitional beings.

As molecules, in other words, or billiard balls and other inanimate objects. “Science had turned from being a friend of freedom into being employed as its enemy.” From a methodological individualism, where the individual entity or person was the unit of analysis, to a methodological collectivism—the group, or collective, as the unit.
 
The new, repressive method now applies to all sciences. And that is the collectivization and herd conformity (or groupthink) of science that we have today with the government in charge.
 
What we are left with is a narrow range of conventional research, sometimes flawed (or even fraudulent), and neglect or repression of creative thinking and disagreement with the establishment.
 
Decentralize all research to the university level, says Kulldorf. Let universities distribute the money and publish their own scientists’ findings through open (not blind) peer review. The process would speed up research and publication and perhaps lead to innovative findings.
 
The best solution, of course, would be to separate education completely from the state, but that would mean making universities businesses, which they are, as are churches. They just are not profit-making businesses, which they should be. (See Applying Principles, pp. 187-90.)
 
The fundamental issue is to completely separate business and state. Paraphrasing Killick, “Laws that regulate and control businesses could put our nation on a path toward repressive . . . fascism.”
 
Which is what fascism in its essence is. Socialism owns everything and everyone; fascism, a variant of socialism (perhaps we should call it the “Omicron” of socialism??) leaves some property private, but only in a nominal sense. It still controls everything and everyone at the governmental level.
 
It is the total, airtight control we have endured over the past two years.
 
 
* See my discussion of academic research, the peer review process, and its effects on science in Applying Principles, pp. 123-32, 140-42.