The difficulty with justice is that it manifests itself to us prismatically. Economic justice, social justice, legal justice, reparative justice—which of these is primary? Indeed, the word justice can signify virtually the whole of moral goodness, what once was called righteousness. Whenever we sense that something has gone wrong, we tend to appeal to justice and injustice. But these appeals are sometimes inapt.
Consider recent debates about responsibility for climate change. Developed countries are described as having had their fair chance at high consumption lifestyles. We are told that developing countries should be allowed to take their turn, to equalize matters. Of course, when basic aspects of welfare are concerned, there is something to this point; lifting people out of poverty is an urgent task. But the equalization argument makes no sense when framed as an issue of justice. No one—whether in a developed or a developing country—deserves a share of car culture or luxury goods. What has gone wrong in anthropogenic climate change is our relationship to the environment as a whole, and the most relevant virtue to a conversation about consumption is moderation. The high consumption lifestyles we lead in the developed world are out of proportion taken simply on their own, without any consideration of what happens elsewhere.
Unfortunately, the classical framing that prescribes distinct virtues for different domains of life is severely out of fashion. We have, in large part, forgotten how to think about moderation and courage, generosity and piety. I submit that the reason for this forgetfulness is our inability to see that the virtues belong to people first and to societies or institutions only secondarily.
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Integralists are committed to the use of temporal political power to promote the goals or ends proper to human life as these goals are understood within Christian theology. Depending on the broader political orientation of the integralist, however, this axiom ends up being developed in quite different ways.[3] It will help briefly to consider the wide range of policies that might be encompassed under the head of integralism.[4]
For example, integralists typically emphasize the primacy of the family against the secular, liberal construction of society as composed of individuals who freely consent to various types of economic relationships. For some integralists, regarding the family merely as an economic unit will lead us to provide families, especially those with children, insufficient support, as in fact US social policy presently does. But other integralists want to use this basic framework in defense of what they see as the Biblical model of family life and, so, to outlaw divorce and same-sex marriage where these have come to be accepted.
Likewise, integralists typically affirm their commitment to the idea that private property is always ordered to the common good. This commitment can be used to argue against the unlimited accumulation of private property in the hands of some and, therefore, the establishment of limits on individual wealth. Yet other integralists, such as Fr. Thomas Crean and Alan Fimister, use this very claim about the teleology of private property to argue against socialism.[5] (Indeed, John Locke, the father of most modern liberal and libertarian theories of property, himself accepted that private property must be ordered to the common good, understood in explicitly theological terms.)
Here, I want to focus on the subset of integralists—typified by the academic Adrian Vermeule, the journalist Sohrab Ahmari, and the Cistercian monk Pater Edmund Waldstein—who hold that political authority ought to be wielded very widely to direct citizens toward a theologically-saturated conception of the goal of human life (its “final end”). Pater Edmund, for instance, argues that putting heretics to death can be an acceptable means to this fundamental task of political authority, a view (among others) that has tended to alienate fellow critics of liberalism who are otherwise sympathetic.
But instead of focusing on such extreme examples, I want to draw attention to the underlying theory of power in this integralist view and the grave danger in it of falling into a consequentialist mindset. The problem is this: once we set up an ambitious account of what human life is for, its final end, the question of appropriate means can tend to fade into the background. But church and state power both are bound by the demands of justice. No authority is entitled to act unjustly, simply because it recognizes that a genuine human good may be promoted thereby.
Critics of liberalism have rightly charged that—with its focus on rights, especially rights of non-interference—a liberal theory of the state occludes the question of the purpose of human life. Indeed, this occlusion is disingenuous, since the centrality of economic relations to liberalism means that the pursuit of wealth and security is assumed to be the chief goal of human beings, to which family and religious life must inevitably be subordinated.
But in pursuing this critique, we should not also throw out the principles of justice that such rights aim to protect.[6] That is what the integralists threaten to do, when, for instance, they condemn a universal protection for liberty of conscience or religious freedom.
It is only by clearly articulating substantive principles of justice that we can build back our way back to a healthier vision of human society. Take religious freedom. That such freedom is good is not as a bare fact about rights with which we are mysteriously endowed, but because a healthy society makes possible the discernment by which human beings come to recognize truth. Religious freedom, then, is rooted in the fact that human beings have discursive and receptive intellects, that conviction for us comes from seeing things for ourselves. Such use of our intellects is something we are owed by society, which makes it a matter of justice.
Justice and the State – Against a Christian Caliphate
Put Not Your Faith in Princes or a Golden Calf
“William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”
Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”
William Roper: “Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!”
Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”
St. Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons
In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.