More on Justice

I have suggested that liberty and justice are in opposition, one to the other, but this opposition does not so much imply an either or choice of liberty over justice or justice over liberty. Implicit in my previous discussions of liberty are a number of axiomatic statements that I may as well make explicit, first and perhaps foremost, the notion that “one is never not free.” There is some impulse to deny that we, as sentient beings, possess “free will,” as exemplified by Sam Harris’ recent book on The Moral Landscape. On the assumption that our mental states, to include our sense of self and our sense of the self’s agency, have their causal origins within physical states of the brain, he writes, “The problem is that no account of causality leaves room for free will,” and that “our belief in free will arises from our moment-to-moment ignorance of specific prior causes.” We are, each of us, “like a phenomenological glockenspiel played by an unseen hand. From the perspective of your conscious mind, you are no more responsible for the next thing you think (and therefore do) than you are for the fact that you were born into this world.” There is much that could be said about this line of thinking, but I will restrain myself and simply say that free will may ultimately be an illusion, but it is the illusion that makes us human, and it is bottomless. One can get behind the causal factors influencing a certain behavioral pattern (e.g. hunger or depression) and design a variety of causal responses to it (e.g. cooking up a nice kale-goat cheese frittata to stem our appetite or taking Prozac to alter the brain chemistry that gives rise to depression), but the creation and use of those responses in and of itself reveals intentionality, the enactment of a desire to better shape one’s instrumental responses to the world.

Second, and perhaps more important, “our freedom is wholly contingent.” We are always “right here, right now,” and it is this evanescent present and our inescapable presence within it that defines both memory and desire, history and futurity. I am, perhaps, too fond of science fiction, in part because I am an optimist and believe the future will in many respects be better than the past, but also in part because it reveals its contingency so clearly. While we tend to focus on the perspicuity of past science fictions, their contingency is perhaps more to the point. None really have painted an accurate portrait of their future. All seem quaint in comparison to actual developments. I am never not free to act, to include the creation of a wholly imagined future, but I am free to act only “right here, right now,” and for most this contingency feels like a partly visible (partly invisible) constraint on our actions. I may well be hungry, but not have access to the food that would stem it. I may well be depressed, but may not have the access to the medical insurance that would supply me with Prozac. It is perhaps an evolutionary quirk that we feel the constraint more forcefully than our more unfettered acts -- that is to say, generally speaking our “free will” is revealed to us most forcefully when it is thwarted. I do not normally think about my breathing too often, except when it is difficult or impossible, and it suddenly becomes an imperative.

Finally, “the freedom to do what one wills is meaningless without the contingent power -- or to use a more benign term, the contingent capacity -- to actually do what one wills.” That is the crux of the matter. Regardless of the source of our intentionality (e.g. one can imagine a wholly biological and wholly causal origins for “hunger”) our felt sense of freedom emerges in our capacity to shape various instrumental responses to that intentionality (e.g. stopping at Burger King to grab a whopper instead of McDonald’s for a quarter pounder). We would feel less free, more constrained, if there were only one option available to free ourselves from our nagging appetites. We would feel captive if there were no options available. It is here, of course, that free will connects up with the will to power, the capacity to shape one’s world or one’s responses to the world to satisfy our intentionalities and free ourselves from our nagging desires. Unconstrained freedom is the pursuit of power over one’s contingent circumstances, which includes the pesky presence of others likewise in pursuit of power over their contingent circumstances. Within a world where the most powerful prevail, their free will is my serfdom to their will, to one degree or another. At the Machiavellian extreme, the price of freedom, as we all know, is perpetual vigilance, not only to jealously guard such capacity as we have, but also to suppress those who would usurp it.

At the primitive extreme, justice is the response, not to freedom, per se, but to the excesses and abuses of power with which and within which freedom reveals itself. It is all about “getting even,” in the various iterations of the phrase, and to follow up on Martha Nusssbaum’s suggestion that we attend to the classics, it is worth noting at least that, with the Illiad, Western literature begins with a nuanced examination of power and justice. In a contest of raw power, the preeminent king of the various Greek kingdoms, Agamemnon has acquired the daughter of Chryses, a priest of Apollo. The priest recognizes Agamemnon’s “right” to this daughter, not in any legal or moral sense, but simply because Agamemnon is the most powerful of the Greek kings. The priest brings to Agamemnon tribute, and asks that he free his daughter, and accept a ransom for her, in reverence to Apollo, the son of Zeus. Agamemnon refuses, and it is this refusal that sets in motion a cycle of retribution. Just why Agamemnon refuses is a matter for discussion, but his motives, the basic intentionalities that drive him, are recognizable, turning between possession and desire, honor and shame. At one point Agamemnon, tells the assembled Greeks, “I have set my heart on keeping her in my own house, for I love her better even than my own wife.” At another point, he asks Achilles in particular, “Are you to keep your own prize, while I sit tamely under my loss and give up the girl at your bidding?” Regardless, he refuses, and the priest, to exact retribution, prays to Apollo for help, who in turn rains a plague down on the Greeks, who in turn appease Apollo by returning the daughter to the priest. Agamemnon is displeased, and says to Achilles, “since Phoebus Apollo is taking Chrseis from me, I shall send her with my ship and my followers, but I shall come to your tent and take your own prize Briseis, that you may learn how much stronger I am than you are, and that another may fear to set himself up as equal or comparable to me.” Therein lies the crux of the matter. Agamemnon is free to take Briseis because he can. One could also say Agamemnon is bound to take Briseis because he must. He is the more powerful, and power inherently claims superiority over others, a superiority that must be affirmed and reaffirmed, until someone, more powerful yet, goes about “getting even.”

Retributive justice is not my principle concern, though I might point out that the basic motives (the primitive intentionalities) have not disappeared and are unlikely to do so any time soon in our evolutionary history. They continue to shape, albeit contingently, how we go about our lives, and we needn’t look far for examples. At its rawest, the violence of gang warfare reveals retributive justice turning on the same wheels of possession and desire, honor and shame, and its not a far stretch to imagine rival drug lords struggling for possession of territory not unlike Agamemnon and Achilles, the Greeks and the Trojans. I am, at least here, less concerned with Homer’s question, more concerned with Plato’s -- that is to say, what constitutes a just state? Retributive justice is important to that discussion, and our system of civil and criminal courts for the most part exact retributive justice, if not exactly an eye for an eye, the cash settlement and jail time nevertheless are compensatory for wrongs committed. Justice is served for the victim, one gets even, when the other “pays for” his criminal behavior at a rate commensurate to the crime. There are reasons, of course, for bringing retributive justice under the auspices of the state -- a broader concern for public safety, the freedom from fear that a well regulated police and criminal justice system brings to the citizenry -- but the principle reason is reason itself. Several of the Greeks attempted, each in their way, to reason with Agamemnon, presenting him with various alternatives, but he would have none of it. From a position of power, he need not listen to reason. He need not consider, much less accept, alternatives to his threatened appropriation of Achilles’ prize, Briseis, and lest his position of power be questioned or qualified, he is bound to do as he threatened and take Achilles’ prize as his own. The result, if not outright internecine violence, has much the same result, and Achilles’ is memorialized as the first “passive aggressive,” stewing in his anger to the great detriment of the Greeks as a whole. The demand for “reason,” backed by the coercive power of the state, adjudicated by an impartial spectator, would not have made for a good story, but it would have made for a resolution of a qualitatively different sort.

It is worth noting that, at issue, is a distribution and redistribution of property. The interest in the women may well be sexual, but it is not romantic. Though spoken in anger, Achilles looking to the distribution of the spoils, to include the women, says to Agamemnon, “you forget this, and threaten to rob me of the prize for which I have toiled … Never when the Achaeans sack any rich city of the Trojans do I receive so good a prize as you do, though it is my hands that do the better part of the fighting. When the sharing comes, your share is far the largest, and I, forsooth, must go back to my ships, take what I can get and be thankful, when my labor of fighting is done … It will be much better for me to return home with my ships, for I will not stay here dishonored to gather gold and substance for you.” While the people of the sacked cities of Troy might feel the need for retributive justice consequent to the appropriation of their gold and women, Achilles’ “right” to the property is two-fold. On the one hand, it is the right consequent to power. He has, in the full exercise of his superiority, labored to seize it and he has a right to his share. On the other hand, it is the right consequent to equity. Insofar as Achilles is a member of a collective, the Greek’s, his share must be equitable. It is a question of equal pay for equal work, and while Achilles’ was willing to accept some inequality, inequity, in the distribution of the spoils -- pay tribute to Agamemnon’s position among the Greeks -- the threatened seizure of Briseis was the proverbial last straw. His sense of justice was offended.

For the moment, I am more concerned with what has come to be called redistributive justice, getting and keeping things more or less even in an economic sense. Robert Reich is perhaps the most audible contemporary proponent of redistributive justice. He writes, with some alarm, that “income in America is now more concentrated in fewer hands than it’s been in 80 years. Almost a quarter of total income generated in the United States is going to the top 1 percent of Americans.” To his credit, in calling for a redistribution of wealth through various state sponsored actions, Reich is purely pragmatic in the American grain. The current distribution of wealth and the policy decisions leading to the wide disparities, in his view, simply do not work well for the state as a whole. As Reich himself put it, “I could have grounded my argument in morality: It is simply unfair for a handful of Americans to take home such a large share of total income when so many others are struggling to make ends meet,” but as he goes on to point out, “I have chosen instead to base my argument on the tangible [economic and political] threats that such inequality poses to everyone -- including even the wealthiest and most influential among us.” While Reich would not perhaps put it so bluntly, on the economic side, while sacking the cities of Troy, there is only so much that the Greeks can take away. Within the modern economy, while perpetuating the on-going assault on the middle class, there is only so much that the richest 1 percent can take away without leaving the cities of America in ruins. On the political side, we come full circle. Achilles’ response to the injustice perpetrated by Agamemnon was anger, and the Illiad itself is the chronicle of “the anger of Achilles,” an anger that “brought countless ills upon the Achaeans.” Anger is the antonym of reason, and Reich, among many others, has noted that we are descending into a politics of anger, a moral outrage at the growing inequities that is, no less than Achilles, misplaced, misdirected, and likely to bring countless ills upon Americans. The sense of outraged justice is more in evidence Harold Meyerson’s recent editorial. He writes, “the banks that are repossessing millions of home with a speed that suggests they’re double parked are the same banks that made billions by swapping paper on millions of homes purchased with mortgages that made no sense.” Meanwhile, “as events would have it, pay at Wall Street’s biggest banks is headed for another record high this year, the Wall Street Journal reports. Pay and benefits at the 35 largest firms will rise an estimated 4 percent over last year, to $444 billion.” In the end, “inquisitive minds might want to know how the big banks -- and bankers -- are getting richer while the underlying economy they serve isn’t.”

There is, or so I am suggesting, a fundamental sense of justice predicated on things being more or less equal, and the growing income disparity, the growing concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, begs the question, what’s wrong with this picture? Of course, one response could well be, not a damn thing! Achilles wasn’t serving the sacked cities of troy, and no one really believes the big banks serve the underlying economy. As a local editorial put it, responding to the same Wall Street Journal article, “the wizards of Wall Street insist that they have a pay fortunes to keep top talent. There’s truth in that. Wall Street is about making money, after all. That’s the only reason to be there. Pay cuts can cause the roaches to scatter to fatter feeding grounds in, say, hedge funds.” Despite the attitude, there is a deep cynicism and despair in such a response, resigned to live, if one is not among the fortune few, with anger and helplessness as one waits for the world to change. Meanwhile, it doesn’t appear that it will. As the same editorial continues, “it does not appear that the Great Recession has made much of an impression on the culture of the Street. All it has done is make a whole lot of other people a whole lot poorer.” There’s truth in that as well, but few really believe that the growing income disparity has much if anything to do with “talent.” Few really believe that their purchase on reality is wrong or simply stupid, that they deserve the abuses of power because they are inadequate and inferior -- and if one or another admits to being mistaken and deserving of misfortune, it is not because they feel themselves to be inferior, rather it is because they share equally in “being human,” mistakes and misfortune a fate we all share alike even though, perhaps, the consequences are disproportionate. As it becomes increasingly apparent, however, that the rich are getting richer, not because they are more talented, but because they are better positioned, in one way or another, to exploit others, the outraged sense that we should, if only we could, “get even” erupts in the misplaced vituperation that has spread across the political spectrum the last few years. Our all too human need for retributive justice for the distributive injustice erupts haplessly onto the op-ed pages and the blogs. If it has any effect at all, given that this is an election season, it will perhaps result in candidates, not one of whom is likely to make the substantive change their rhetoric implies, most of whom will allow the already entrenched further retrenchment.

There is, or so I am also suggesting, an “organizational” component to justice (or, for that matter injustice). An “organization,” however it might be conceived, has the freedom to act, presumably on behalf of justice, getting and keeping things more or less even, and individuals as individuals are subject to its coercive power. Here it might be worthwhile to pause for a triad of sidebar notes. First, of course, intentionalities, ends, are important. An organization is organized, so to speak, to satisfy certain ends, not others, and there is no reason an “organization,” as such, need necessarily be organized to administer justice. Indeed, most are not. Second, for those that are, there need not necessarily be anything remotely pragmatic in the administration of justice itself. There are, for example, few reasons for the maintenance of the death penalty. It does not serve a purpose beyond itself, or at any rate does not serve those purposes well. It does not deter crime, except perhaps among those very unlikely to commit the crime in the first place. It is not “cost effective,” insofar as the cost of execution most often far exceeds the cost of life-time incarceration. The death penalty, rather, as the most extreme form of state administered retributive justice, rather, serves other human needs that need not justify themselves beyond itself. Third, finally, in order to achieve their ends, to borrow a phrase from Hayek, an organization “must create power -- power over men wielded by other men.“ To exact the death penalty, an organization must have sufficient coercive power to take the life of another. To exact any form of redistributive justice, an organization must have sufficient coercive power to appropriate the resources of one for redistribution to another.

There are, perhaps, several strands of thought that need to be teased out in the preceding paragraph, not least is the notion of an organization. I have hesitated in calling I a “state” or a “government” in part to emphasize the pragmatic purpose, the instrumentality of a “organization” to a set of ends, none of which need necessarily be concerned with “justice.” The organization may well have as a purpose the exploitation of certain commodities in order to “make a profit.” When thinking of the large, modern corporate structures, it seems even a bit odd to suggest that they be organized for any purpose other than “making a profit,” though often enough the corporate public relations would suggest their concern for those damaged in that pursuit -- e.g. BP’s recent advertisements expressing their concern for and willingness to make retribution for the damaged lives along the gulf coast. That, however, is not their primary purpose, their governing intentionality, and it is not surprising perhaps to learn that they have not followed through on the retributions with much felicity. It is also important to remember as well that the ends, the governing intentionalities, most certainly do justify the means instrumental to their satisfaction -- that is, they provide a wholly rational justification for the means selected, a point of adjudication between competing ends relative to ancillary criteria like “efficiency,” and thereby an alignment of means to ends. There is some slippage here, and to justify, to align the means with the ends, has little or nothing to do with justice, per se, nor does it necessarily mean that ethical or moral stricture will be a criteria against which those means are adjudicated. It does not, in other words, particularly surprise us that BP, along with Halliburton, was at least in part complicitous in the oil spill. Although “legality” and “regulatory compliance” may be criteria against which the means to profit might be adjudicated, one suspects that they are so only to the extent that potential retribution makes obedience to regulatory restrictions more “efficient” or more “cost effective.” This is “risk management” and has little to do with justice, per se.

The state is not unlike any other organization, and can be organized for any number of purposes, none of which are concerned with justice. Here’s the difficulty -- most states, including our own, are organized relative to ends which have little or nothing to do with either retributive or redistributive justice. Increasingly, and I am not the first to make this suggestion, the major Western powers are becoming more and more shareholder states, and government, increasingly, has taken on the role as the protectorate and guarantor of the modern global corporation. Although it has the edge of paranoia, Chomsky writes, for example, that “there are many factors driving global society towards a low-wage, low-growth, high-profit future, with increasing polarization and social disintegration.” Not least is the “fading of meaningful democratic processes as decision making is vested in private institutions and the quasi-governmental structures that are coalescing around them, what the Financial Times calls a ’defacto world government’ that operates in secret and without accountability.”

The recent banking crises illustrates the point rather well. First, the progressive de-regulation of the banking industry over the last three decades (a bi-partisan effort if one counts the contribution of Bill Clinton) amounted to the abdication of the government’s coercive power, which in turn had rather predictable results. They were progressively freed from the regulatory constraints that limited the available means to the end of profit within the industry, but in doing so also mitigated risk for those outside and served by the industry. The financial institutions were free to engage, albeit creatively, in riskier and riskier behavior. The purpose, the governing intentionality, of the financial institutions was to make money, and so long as they were successful in aligning the means to that end, so long as they paid dividends to the shareholders, their behavior was justifiable relative to those ends. Few complain as the bubble expands. Second, however, when the bubble burst, as was perhaps inevitable, the financial industry, too big and too important to the national economy to fail, did not turn to the shareholders for the necessary capital to survive, but to their guarantors, the government. There are, of course, hundreds of reasons why the corporate giants did not turn to those form whom the entity was ostensibly organized to serve and had benefited some, if not the most, from the excesses of risk. The corporations do not have the sort of coercive power to “take back” money from the shareholders (and it seems a little odd to suggest even that they might do so). Moreover, there is some validity to the argument that the financial industries were too big to fail, insofar as it’s difficult in one way to differentiate between taxpayers and shareholders. Those who leveraged outsized home values, if they were fortunate enough to sell before the bubble burst, benefited no less than the shareholders, and perhaps were share-holders. My own retirement fund, through TIAA-CREF, was invested in many of those same organizations at one or two removes. So, third, using its coercive power to exact dollars from the taxpayer/shareholder, the government intervened. While I have little doubt tha things would be much worse right now for Joe and Mary Paycheck had the state not intervened -- in part because most are dependent upon the mortgage industry for housing -- the result had little to do with justice. Those who put us into this situation continue to draw outsized salaries and, so far at least, are largely protected from, free from, the sorts of civil litigation that would exact retributive justice. They are also largely protected, free from, any efforts at redistributive justice. Foreclosures, for example, continue apace. I am sure the banks will not benefit to the same degree that they would have benefited had all paid off the inflated mortgages, they nevertheless seize full possession of a property, have full benefit not only of the full resale value of the home, but the years of accumulated interest and principle payments. In the meantime, the so-called home owners, duped and exploited, are just out of luck.

I am suggesting, of course, that we -- our government -- has aligned itself with corporate ends, what Jefferson called the “aristocracy of the monied corporation.” Corporate ends have little to do with justice, per se, much to do with the concentration of wealth, and the power that comes away with wealth, into as few hands as possible. In pursuit of those ends, the corporation itself is inherently monopolistic -- that is to say, totalitarian in their internal organization and imperialistic in their external orientation. While I think it true that the monopolistic practices of the monied corporation can work well within a formal electoral democracy, electoral politics have become something of an amusement not unlike the World Wrestling Association. If not exactly a choreographed sham -- there do seem to be real winners and real losers in the electoral process -- then certainly an event brought to you by one or another corporate sponsors. The recent Supreme Court decision of Citizens United has reinforced the trend, allowing considerable sums of corporate and union dollars to sponsor one candidate or another, often channeled through various non-profits that are allowed to hide donors, a good rhetorical strategy given the negative character of the sponsorship revealed in their ads. In answering the question why the worst get on top, Hayek has made a number of observations that are useful to an understanding of the recent mid-term elections, identifying negative selection criteria. One, of course, is an anti-elitism, an appeal to the “lowest common denominator that unites the largest number of people,” the symbols and slogans with the broadest emotional appeal, which is supported by what seems to be “almost a law of human nature.” Though we perpetually bemoan it, we also perpetually engage in negative campaigning based, no doubt, on the premise that “it is easier for people to agree on a negative program -- on the hatred of an enemy, [those presumably against the visceral values evoked by the symbols and slogans] -- than on any positive task.” With that in mind, of course, it is clear enough that political rhetoric is based on the presumption that one will be able to “obtain the support of all the docile and gullible, who have no strong convictions of their own but are prepared to accept a ready-made system of values if it is only drummed into their ears sufficiently loudly and frequently.” Insofar as both wrestlers in the political arena are dependent upon their sponsorship, insofar as both wrestlers come away from the match as grotesquely distorted human beings, in the end, who wins and who loses may not matter quite as much as the rhetoric would imply, so long as the concentration of corporate power is allowed to continue apace.

In this regard, one part of me wants to be amused by the Tea Party, the populist anger it represents, and its appropriation by the Republican party, which is, in the end, anything but populist in its ends. There is an unabashedly “lowest common denominator” feel to Republican rhetoric, but they have been much more masterful in the appropriation of core American values than have the Democrats. As Michael Tomasky puts it in a recent review article, “in American politics, Republicans routinely speak in broad themes and tend to blur the details.” The Republicans “speak constantly of liberty and freedom and couch practically all their initiatives -- tax cuts, deregulation, and so forth -- within these large categories.” The Democrats on the other hand “typically ignore broad themes and focus on details.” They talk “more about specific programs and policies and steer clear of big themes.” Tomasky points out, “there is a reason for this: Republican themes like liberty, are popular, while Republican policies often are not. On the other hand, Democratic themes, [like justice], are less popular, while many specific Democratic programs -- social security, medicare -- have majority support.”

As a result, there has been an odd bifurcation in the American politics for some time, a sort of duplicity at the core. Democratic programs are popular, if they are understood, because they tend to benefit the wider populace, but to understand those policies requires an attentiveness to arcane detail that is easily misconstrued by those hostile to the policies and dismissed by the broader populace unwilling or unable to dig into the discussion. The democrats have become the party of policy wonks, and they have not tied their policies to “larger beliefs,” and have, as Tomasky goes on to say, “tried to hide those beliefs, or change the conversation when the subject arose” in part because there may well be no simple -- that is, simplistic -- belief systems within which to couch their arguments. The views and tastes of the wonks are more finely differentiated, and consequently they are, to use Hayek’s phrase, less likely “to agree on a particular hierarchy of values,” and the values are irrelevant in any case, because they can agree on the particular benefit of particular policies to a broad range of people. Banking regulation is not intended to benefit the banking industry, nor those few who stand to profit most from the banking industry. It is intended to benefit those who bank with the banks, but those who benefit from regulation have neither the detailed education nor the willingness to exercise the focused intelligence necessary to understand banking policy, much less how they might benefit.

It is deeply ironic, of course, that the conservative appropriation of core American values, particularly “liberty” -- the value of most concern to conservative thinkers like Hayek -- are being used to create a populist base for a party that is anything but populist in program. If the Democrats must hide their ends, the sorts of redistributive justice that form the core justification for their action, the Republicans on the other hand “have been able to present their philosophy as truly American,” and in most respects their public rhetoric is truly American. Americans are for the most part egalitarian and distrustful of elites, particularly intellectual elites, and distrust arguments that are not obvious on the face of it, and it is obvious on the face of it that “regulation” is a curtailment of “liberty,” but it is not always obvious on the face of it that “deregulation” will not lead to greater liberty, at least not greater liberty for all. It will, however, eviscerate the government’s ability to control the behavior of those whole acts have very broad impact on the American populace and likewise eviscerate the basis for exacting retributive justice against those who behave badly, those who leave behind a wide swath of damage across the American landscape, but who have, technically, done nothing “wrong” -- that is to say, done nothing that is overtly or explicitly prohibited. It is obvious on the face of it that “taxes” are an affront to one’s “right to property,” but it is not always obvious on the face of it that “tax cuts” will not necessarily provide greater income to the vast majority of Americans, at least not in amounts that would make a difference. Eliminating social security and the progressive income tax will make a difference in American’s take home pay, and will provide more disposable income predisposed to find its ways into the coffers of various international corporate entities, but it is unlikely to compensate for the loss of medical and retirement benefits. The least among us will suffer the most, and those at the lowest levels of income, those who have the least ability to save, when they are no longer able to eke out a living, will be consigned in the last years of their life to extreme debility and poverty. The elimination of social security and the progressive income tax are eviscerating the government’s ability to effectuate any form of redistributive justice and setting the stage for the continued corporate colonization across the country.

I am suggesting that government is our last best hope for “justice,” and theoretically at least, there is little reason why the state should not, “if it is to achieve important ends, be run by decent people for the good of the community as a whole,” presumably a “good” equitably distributed among the “community as a whole.” The first difficulty, of course, is this: “liberty,” on the one hand, is not an end unto itself, but the fundamental condition within which one acts toward certain ends, certain governing intentionalities. Both Hayek and Rawls are correct in assigning it primacy. Although certain ends, certain intentionalities, are given importance in our biological nature, as human beings, we choose others, and it is no less necessary to maintain “liberty” in our ability to align our instrumental acts with the desired ends, whether given or chosen. If the Republicans have the advantage, it is this felt primacy of “liberty,” relegating “individual justice” to a secondary and “social justice” to a tertiary, organizational concern. Organizations, as such, need not necessarily have “justice” or the equitable good of the whole community as their governing end, and as I have suggested, most, including the corporate structures that largely “governs” the day to day life of people across the globe, do not. Government, as a specific organization, should have “justice” as its end, its governing intentionality.

Having said this, however, we are brought up against the second difficulty: just as absolute “liberty,” unchecked by mitigating social justice, leads to a winner take all tyranny of the individual over the collective -- just as absolute “liberty” of competing organizations, unchecked by mitigating social justice, leads to a winner take all tyranny of the one over the others -- absolute “justice,” no less than absolute freedom, undoes itself. The loose thread that starts the unraveling is this: just what is “good for the community as a whole?” Any answer to this question, as Rawls and others have noted, is at once comprehensive, but limiting. To use an observation of Hayek’s again to illustrate, if we have a clear and compelling answer to the question, if we know or believe we know unequivocally that which is “good for” the mass of mankind, ends “independent of and superior to those of the individuals,” and if the community or state is organized and justified rationally against those ends, then of course “only those individuals who work for the same ends can be regarded as members of the community.” It is comprehensive insofar as “a person is respected only as a member of the group, that is, only if and insofar as he works for the recognized common ends,” but it is likewise limited insofar as there are many answers to the question, most of which have been, or take on, the characteristics of a “religion.” Without equivocating over just which God one might mean, whether Jove or Jehovah, once one admits, for example, that “the proper end of mankind is to serve God and advance his kingdom across the earth,” it is not merely a matter of “having faith,” but of enacting one’s faith, an enactment often predicated on the assumption of divine justice, that my God is a just God. The Book of Job, for example, is a case study in divine justice. Job was selected for his affliction, not because he in any way deserved them -- indeed he was without sin -- but because he was the most faithful of the faithful, and it is to test his unwavering faith, against which Satan strikes his wager with God, and for which Job is rewarded in the end, despite some considerable collateral damage along the way in the loss of his original children.

I should point out that state and social organizations predicated on some concept of absolute justice -- if not national socialism, then communism in its idealized, if not its realized, versions -- are no less comprehensive, and just as limiting. As Hayek has noted, for example, “the intensity of the moral emotions behind a movement like that of National Socialism or communism can probably be compared only to those of the great religious movements of history,” and within all religious movements, many things follow, not least the subordination of the individual, as an individual, to the greater good -- the relegation of the individual, as individual, to an instrumental role whose life and livelihood must be justified to and is justified by the predetermined ends -- as Hayek notes, “most of those features of totalitarian regimes which horrify us follow of necessity.” Those features have been well discussed, and most do follow, as Hayek suggests, from the suppression of the individual, as an individual, and the relegation of free agency and its sustaining power upward to larger and larger organizations in the hands of fewer and fewer men. It justifies a form of terror internal to the group in the suppression of the individual, and for the faithful, it justifies terror external to the group in the protection and advancement of its aims. This seems to be true, whether we are dealing with the state religions that dominated the conflicts of the 20th century, or the religions proper that have come to re-dominate the conflicts of the 21st, and the collateral damage left in the wake of those conflicts really needs little more discussion.

I will not reiterate the whole of Hayek’s or other’s arguments against theo-centric or state-centric notions of absolute justice, except to say that any collectivist ethic, consecrated within a comprehensive doctrine, eventually makes a bargain with the devil. While a collectivist ethic within a comprehensive doctrine seems the antithesis of individual freedom -- that is, it “does not leave the individual conscience free to apply its own rules” -- but the collectivist entity itself, the organization, as an organization, must be free from restrictions that inhibit its pursuit of “the good of the whole,” and it must be free to do what is necessary in order to achieve “the good of the whole,” indeed “there is literally nothing which the consistent collectivist must not be prepared to do if it serves ‘the good of the whole,’ because ‘the good of the whole’ is to him the only criterion of what ought to be done.” I mention the Book of Job, however, to suggest, perhaps over subtly, that a prescriptive faith the so-called free market is no less comprehensive, and no less limiting than other faiths. There is a congruence between the invisible hand of God and the invisible hand of the Market, both of which dispense an arbitrary form of “justice,” and both of which are for the most part unfathomable. That Weber and others have noted the congruence, and that it continues to play itself out in the Republican party, with its restrictive social legislation coupled with its laissez faire economic legislation. Conversely, of course, it is opposed by the Democratic party, with its regulatory economic legislation coupled with its laissez faire social legislation.

If the Republican party is in ascendancy within the United States, and it certainly appears to be, it is perhaps indicative of a shift in sovereignty. The free market is free for whom? We as consumers are free to consume, and we do so with some abandon within the limits of diminishing capacity, as the corporate engines that provide for consumption grow larger, more powerful, and ultimately more coercive of the various governments where they do business. It is perhaps worth pointing out that, while we still feel the romantic urge to worship great men and women, the concentrated power of an organization is nothing personal. Individuals within an organization wield power, but it is positional power. They do so within the system constraints of the organization itself. It is perhaps not surprising that those at or near the top of an organization are most attuned to the traditional Republican need for freedom, internally the freedom to “manage” the organization making contingent adjustments of means in pursuit of its given ends, and externally the freedom to extend the encompassing reach of the organization for the greater good of a greater whole. It is perhaps not surprising either that those at or near the bottom of the organization are most attuned to the traditional Democratic concern for justice, particularly redistributive justice. The leveling intent and effect of labor unions, for example, not only draw down corporate profits in the redistribution of wealth in the form of personnel costs, but in doing so they also inhibit, put real constraints on institutional -- that is to say, corporate -- freedom. I probably don’t need to point out that labor unions are not examples of moral probity. They have adopted means no less limiting of the individual conscience in the contingent adjustment of their means in pursuit of a greater good for a greater whole. In either case, I am not sure it much matters whether one chooses the Republican yin to the Democratic yang, except that the one serves to be a counter-balance to the other, so that neither has the opportunity to fully govern, to fully align means and ends within a comprehensive doctrine. If I tend to favor the latter, it is, at the instant, less an ideological concern, more a corrective concern to restore a balance between liberty and justice if we have not already tipped too far.