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.

Personality and Style versus Honesty and Justice

Here is a statement sometimes heard, sometimes vociferously: “I can’t stand that person’s personality or style.” The person referenced might by a client, a coworker, a relative—or a former US president.
 
Is the person referred to immoral? That is, dishonest or unjust?
 
Sometimes an elaboration follows about a business or personal relationship: “It’s a personality conflict. We just clash too much and can’t get along!”
 
At my midtown Manhattan job several decades ago, it was clients who were said to have those “bad” personalities and, therefore, were impossible to get along with. Somehow I ended up with three such clients with one each abandoned by my two coworkers and boss. After working with the clients for a short time, I concluded, “There’s nothing wrong with these people. They are quite nice!”
 
On the surface, getting upset over a “personality conflict” or “style difference” seems bizarre. After all, personality or style may mean that one person likes to talk a lot and the other is quiet. These two personalities cannot get along?? Admittedly, the talker may have to ask a few questions to draw the quiet person out. But seriously?
 
Without saying so explicitly, one person in the personality or style conflict—probably both—think the other is immoral, requiring the ending of the relationship.
 
Let us define our terms. As I wrote in Independent Judgment and Introspection (pp. 55-56), personality

is our distinctive method of thinking and acting; it includes all of our beliefs and values—the moral ones, as well as the ones that form our psychologies, that is, beliefs and values about who we are as a person, beliefs and values about other people, and beliefs and values about the environment in which we live. The outward behavioral manifestation of beliefs and values are called traits and the traits that stand out, the distinctive ones, define our personality.

Moral character, then, is a part of personality but must not be confused with our psychologies or our other traits that might be moral or immoral. Gregariousness and shyness are not immoral.
 
The outward behavioral traits define our style, or as the unabridged dictionary says, “an individual’s typical way of life.”
 
Personality and style are obviously related, but not identical. “Style” can be called the acting part of personality. The thinking part is what gives us mental habits that guide our choices and actions.
 
Two more terms to define: honesty means telling the truth, though not always. Exceptions would occur when someone is pointing a gun at you or threatening your privacy, or when the truth might unnecessarily hurt the other person. Justice means correctly judging a person as good or bad or somewhere in between and responding appropriately (1, 2).
 
Judging how honest or just a person is can be challenging in everyday situations, especially if you are not aware of, or allow for, the influence of psychology operating in the other person. Subconscious defensive habits often cancel free will to such an extent that the acting person, the one with the “style,” is not aware of what he or she is doing, such as talking too much or hyperbolizing or feeling afraid to speak up. None of these traits is immoral, or dishonest or unjust in any way.
 
The so-called difficult clients in my experience may have been demanding or even pedantic or confused and unclear about what they wanted. They may have been distrustful and angry over poor service in the past and wanted to be assured that this time everything will go smoothly.
 
My conclusion was that patience and anticipation of possible problems was key to keeping clients happy, and my coworkers and boss did not always indulge such patience, which apparently I did. I believed that my clients just needed to be listened to and that I had to practice that old business-as-usual adage, “promise only what you can deliver and deliver what you promise.”
 
No BS or hyperbole, in other words. Our clients were not dishonest or unjust, though they certainly exhibited many different personalities!
 
So what about the “style,” let’s say, of a former US president? One that called the country’s press the enemy of the people or expressed harsh criticism of anyone who did not do a good job or who criticized him. And was also known to hyperbolize.
 
I heard all of the above types of statements, sometimes with elevated volume, in my years living and working in New York City. Our former president was simply a New York businessman. And that is precisely what his naysayers did not like. He got things done and called his critics names. They declared his personality and style inappropriate, meaning immoral.
 
After all, he did not believe in turning the other cheek, and that was intolerable to anyone who believes self-sacrifice is the highest virtue in personal and professional life. And the “anyone” in this statement is bipartisan, as the doctrine of self-sacrifice is practiced by both leftists and conservatives.
 
Our former US president was not an altruist. He was an egoist who expressed, though not always articulately, the American sense of life. His constituents who also represent the American sense of life responded by electing him president. (See 1, 2, 3.) He was a rare and unusually strong supporter of the US’s national self-interest. Unfortunately, he leaned toward mercantilistic ideas when it came to international trade, but he also used tariffs as bargaining chips in his negotiations.
 
What is essential about our former president is that his “personality” and “style” expressed what is uniquely American by producing significant accomplishments and keeping us out of war for four years.
 
The appropriate response to all of the above types of statements, whether from a coworker or a president, is: “So what?”
 
Get back to work and on with your life.
 
A final note about the mainstream press. We now know how biased, not to mention dishonest and unjust, they were during the previous presidential administration and how eager they are today to silence alternative points of view.
 
Media that advocate censorship are indeed enemies of the people. They are the ones who will welcome a dictatorship to our country (1, 2).
 
See “How Free Speech Dies,” by Wall Street Journal columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady and my post on the same issue.