In February 2017, President Donald Trump, after a campaign lambasting the evils of Obamacare, declared, “Nobody knew healthcare could be so complicated!” It is with no small amount of shame that I pull a similar stunt and express my shock at the endless complexity of justice.
Coming into Humes, I thought I had at least a rough understanding of what justice should be. After months of poring over texts, films, and lectures all tackling justice, the theme of our course, I have come to a powerful yet dreadfully obvious realization: the problem of justice is a remarkably hard one. Popular culture likes to reduce matters of justice down to clear narratives of right and wrong, with the former typically prevailing just before the final credits roll. However, justice is often a far more complex, less satisfying concept. In particular, its difficulties are apparent in three contexts: in the implementation, depiction, and determination of justice.
Implementing justice is hard. After reading John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, I felt inspired: employing two simple principles, I could build a just society from scratch! The only problem? Today, neither I nor anyone else can build a society from scratch. This is exactly the qualm Charles Mills raises with Rawlsian justice in his 2020 Tanner Lecture. More specifically, Mills emphasizes Rawls’s ignorance of America’s racist foundations and the consequent need for corrective justice. This critique is evident in post-apartheid South Africa’s struggle to establish unity. As Dr. Lipsker outlined in plenary, despite the overwhelming success of CODESA in building a positive South African future, citizens still held deep-seated grievances. South Africa did not have the privilege of starting a society from scratch: instead, they had the far taller task of implementing justice in a nation with existing rifts.
Depicting justice is hard. It requires intricately balancing the spotlight between the victims, perpetrators, and systems behind a given issue. This task can often feel impossible. In the Nuremberg trials, prosecutors honed in on convicting high-ranking Nazis by whatever means necessary, even if that meant focusing on mundane documents instead of the suffering of the Jewish people. On the other hand, in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, political theorist Hannah Arendt critiqued Israel’s focus on structural anti-semitism and the horrors of the Holocaust at the expense of the specific responsibility of the man on trial: Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. In light of these opposing criticisms, it is difficult to visualize an approach to justice that can fully hold criminals accountable while also properly memorializing the victims’ plight.
Determining justice is hard. Sometimes, we cannot even speculate on someone’s innocence or guilt due to a dearth of information. This was the case in The Trial, where details as basic as the crime Josef K. was convicted under were never revealed. In other cases, differing perspectives and experiences completely shape perception. Here, the chasm between the views of Job and his friends in the Book of Job comes to mind. Job knew he did nothing to deserve his fate, while Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar insisted otherwise without knowing their friend’s entire life story. Finally, even when equipped with all of the necessary facts and a degree of impartiality, many decisions are far from obvious. Long Night’s Journey into Day illustrates this well, depicting four amnesty cases lacking obviously correct answers even after finding the full truth. Even a neutral judge and a complete set of facts is often insufficient for decisively determining justice. The fact is, justice is hard.
Works Cited
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Viking Press, 1963.
Conway, Madeline. “Trump: ‘Nobody Knew That Health Care Could Be so Complicated’ – Politico.” Politico, 27 Feb. 2017, www.politico.com/story/2017/02/trump-nobody-knew-that-health-care-could-be-so-complicated-235436.
Hoffman, Deborah and Frances Reid, directors. Long Night’s Journey Into Day. Seventh Art Releasing, 2000.
Kafka, Franz. The Trial. Verlag Die Schmiede, 1925.
Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Belknap Press, 1971.
Scheindlin, Raymond P. The Book of Job. W. W. Norton & Company, 1999.