Justice and Love

A Philosophical Dialogue

Mary Zournazi, Rowan Williams

• Editore: Bloomsbury Academic
• Anno: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350090385
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Philosophie
• Categoria: Éthique et philosophie morale

How do we see and act justly in the world? In what ways can we ethically respond to social and economic crisis? How do we address the desperation that exists in the new forms of violence and atrocity? These are all questions at the heart of Justice and Love, a philosophical dialogue on how to imagine and act in a more just world by theologian Rowan Williams and philosopher Mary Zournazi. Looking at different religious and philosophical traditions, Williams and Zournazi argue for the re-invigoration and enriching of the language of justice and, by situating justice alongside other virtues, they extend our everyday vocabularies on what is just. Drawing on examples ranging from the Paris Attacks, the Syrian War, and the European Migrant Crisis to Brexit and the US Presidential elections, Williams and Zournazi reflect on justice as a process: a condition of being, a responsiveness to others, rather than a cold distribution of fact. By doing so, they explore the love and patience needed for social healing and the imagination required for new ways of relating and experiencing the world.

PART ONE

JUSTLY LOOKING

 

 

In this part, Rowan and I explore together some philosophical and theological thinking around justice to set the context for the book. We disentangle ideas of justice from senses of individual entitlement and right, and we investigate the idea of justice as a virtue and how this approach to justice has to do with seeing fairly or seeing wholly, which is a qualitative way of perceiving and understanding what is just. This is an invitation to the imagination and how to rethink ‘doing justice’ through different values and virtues. We explore some of the ideas of Saint Paul and other theological thinkers in considering how to approach what is ‘just’ and ‘diabolical’ in our lives.

We call upon on various literary, artistic and cultural practices that enable us to justly look at the world to reflect upon what this might mean for ideas of the ‘good’ in our lives today. Through some of Shakespeare’s plays and different literary texts, we address the limits of mercy, law and justice, and through artists such as Cézanne and Monet, we think about the perceptual quality of seeing and justice.

As novelist and painter John Berger once wrote, to paint the existent may be one of the last revolutionary acts. It promises the potential of hope, and it is in this manner that we consider that to see the world wholly or fairly requires this attention to detail and fact. This may be some of the real evidence that we need to address and respond to the suffering as well as the joy in our lives and the lives of others.

I

On Justice

April 2015

MZ Let’s start these conversations with the etymology of ‘justice’ – it has Latin roots, right?

RW It’s Latin, yes, and related to the idea of jus – meaning law, or ‘right’. This is slightly different from the way in which it works in Greek and Hebrew. The Hebrew, tzedakah, has more the sense of ‘alignment’, a ‘rightness’ of posture, or direction, perhaps. And a bit of that comes over in the Greek dikaios as well. If the Latin justitia and justus bring to mind the sense of resorting to or relating to the law, you don’t quite get that in Greek or Hebrew. It’s a more intrinsic thing, I think. To act with justice, in Hebrew, or to do justice, is to align yourself properly; it is not so much to do with settling a claim.

MZ I think that’s really important, that reminder of an alignment to something as opposed to a settling of a dispute. When do you think that moment happened, where the settling of a dispute came into the language as ‘justice’?

RW I don’t know. But I think any language that depends on Latin, any culture that depends on Roman culture, is going to be inheriting something of that distributive or apportioning sense, the conflict-settling side of it; it is why, historically, when the Greek New Testament gets into Latin, all sorts of ideas about what’s involved in the ‘righteousness’ of God change their emphasis and you get a much stronger emphasis, in Latin theology, on satisfying claims and settling things.

MZ If you were to go and think more about the Greek and the Hebrew, then you’d have this sense of ‘alignment’, or what is ‘right’.

RW Yes. If you think of how Saint Paul speaks about the righteousness of God, and how we are made righteous, it’s not so much how we are made compliant with law, but how we’re made compatible – if that’s the word – with God.

MZ If it’s not about being lawful or law-abiding, then we are looking at something more robust and interesting that aligns us with a different sense of what justice might involve.

RW I suppose you could say that the problem, as Saint Paul himself sees it, is this: he has recognised that simply keeping to the law doesn’t in itself deliver ‘righteousness’, in the sense of becoming aligned or compatible with God. So you can clock up all the particular acts that you’ve done rightly, but you won’t actually achieve real ‘justice’ – because that is your compatibility with the life of God, your capacity to live in God’s company without agony or shame. God’s rightness, or right-directedness, makes demands on your right-directedness, but you can’t put them together just by law-keeping. The whole problem about the Christian understanding of justice has roots somewhere in that complex of thought.

MZ Yes. There seems to have been a historic split, between ‘rightness’ and law, when the law became an entity in itself from the sixteenth century onwards.

RW Increasingly so, yes. Especially once ‘rights’ are understood as certain specific entitlements.

MZ Yes. So that’s what I’m really wanting to get at: what is that difference in approaching rights? That is, between the former sense of the right direction – which seems, to me, to be the one that offers the possibility of ‘communion’ or a relationship – and the individual sense of my rights, or entitlement to things. In the latter way of thinking, the person becomes the centre of everything.

RW That’s right. I was thinking about the different ways in which we use ‘doing justice’ to something or someone. We might say, ‘That photograph doesn’t do justice to him’. What does that mean? Not that some claim has been left unfulfilled, but that the photograph doesn’t allow the person to be seen as they should be. And that’s much more on the relational end of the spectrum, rather than the problem-solving or conflict-settling end. It’s not that a photographer or a portrait painter has somehow failed to pay his or her dues. They’ve just not seen something, they’ve not been on the proper wavelength.

MZ Yes. And similarly, I think, if you’re looking at a portrait or a painting or an image, you’re wanting to see something and attribute something, whereas there might be something you see that isn’t in the framework that you’re bringing with you, something you’re not expecting from the image. So it’s not necessarily the unspoken, it’s something to do with the spirit in which you enter or relate to the image.

RW Essentially, it’s to do with how you want to see what’s before you. There are ways of trying to see that seek to contain or swallow things, and there are ways of seeing that allow the vision to be sent off in different directions and filling out what’s there.

MZ Yes. And the imagination comes into play.

RW And the imagination, yes. It’s one reason why portrait-painting fascinates me. My sister-in-law’s a painter and most of her work is portraiture – almost entirely of people she knows very well. I often look at her work and think of it in terms of this ‘doing justice’. In some respects, she’s not what you’d call a realistic portrait painter, but what she produces are quite obviously portraits; they are very definitely ways of seeing what’s there, and they often have an indeterminacy in them that allows you to see more as you look again. That’s why – for her, as for other painters and portraitists – often a sketch will do better ‘justice’ than a full-scale oil painting. It can be very illuminating to think about what it means to say, in that context, that an image ‘does justice’.

MZ Yes, doing justice. This is something interesting that Roland Barthes talked about in his book Camera Lucida, and his search for the ‘just’ image of his mother.¹ He was looking at photographs after she died, looking for images of her, and he found one photo from when she was a child (what he called the Wintergarden photograph), and it was a surprise to him. What he found in it was a sort of kindness in her hands, things like this; he found a tenderness in her through the photograph and he didn’t expect to see her like that. He wanted a ‘just’ image of his mother and he found it in unexpectedly in that photograph. And this surprise or unexpectedness has something to do with the ability to see. So maybe there is something in that. But to do justice is wanting a result, isn’t it, in some ways? You’re wanting some kind of definitive result, some finality – something which, actually, is never the case.

RW Yes. The trouble with starting from the legal claim end of the spectrum is that in those terms it is possible to ‘finish the business’ – or, at least, it seems to be, though it isn’t so in practice, of course. In fact, this is the kind of illusion that’s quite cruel to people who feel that the law is going to deliver closure for them. ‘The killer of my daughter has gone to prison and now that’s all settled’; but it isn’t. To claim that it is, is certainly one approach to the doing of justice but not a particularly interesting one, in some ways, and certainly not a very decisive one. It does a bit of necessary business, but it can’t be the whole picture.

MZ I think the clue is in what you were just saying. The law has its function, but the truth is that it’s never going to satisfy, in some respects, because it’s not going to deal with the emotional trauma of what’s happened, or other things that may arise … and there’s the question of what happens when justice fails? I think ideas of justice and law are necessary, but that there is something else that needs to be addressed in the understanding of what is just or what is justice?

RW And because that’s potentially a really enormous issue, it is alarming for people. It seems a lot easier just to tick off the things that have been ‘settled’.

MZ Yet it’s that approach that creates the problems.

RW This is a particularly interesting question for me at the moment in the context of the development charity I chair. In Christian Aid, we’ve been having quite a lot of discussion over the last few years about the need to move from the language of charity to the language of justice, because we don’t want to see international aid as ‘charity’, in the sense of a nice thing to do with our surplus, kindly throwing coins to the poor, as it were. It’s about what is properly due to the deprived and disadvantaged; and I think all of us have wanted to say, as many Christians would want to say, ‘Yes, of course.’ But what we’re in the business of is rather more than simply rectifying a balance, or clearing the slate, or paying our debts. The justice we want to affirm and sustain can’t simply turn its back on the proper root of charity – the element that has to do with mending relations and so on.

MZ What is coming to mind is if we go back to the proper root of charity, it opens up something interesting, and, in a way, that has to be thought through in relationship to justice.

RW Exactly.

MZ And how would we begin that understanding without dismissing either? I can see the discussions that could go on in an organisational context: there would be a limit to how you could intervene and what you can do; but if you’re thinking about the core of the idea of charity and the core of the idea of justice, which are very different things to the way we popularly consider them …

RW Yes. Both words have come down in the world and got into bad company.

MZ Charity in particular.

RW I read something on this years ago in some of John Bossy’s work on s...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Conversations between Souls by Ben Okri
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue: Some Reflections on Justice and Love
• PART ONE Justly Looking
• I On Justice
• II Justly Looking
• PART TWO Reckoning
• III Reckoning
• IV Time and Attention
• V Witnessing
• PART THREE Love
• VI For Love and Justice
• VII Discourses of Faith
• Afterword
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright