Nicholas Wolterstorff on Justice

Sure. I was a student at Calvin College (undergrad) and everybody had to take philosophy. I didn't know anything about philosophy. I took the required philosophy course in the first semester of my sophomore year, my second year, and we were 30 minutes into the course and I had this feeling: this is it. I have no idea whether I'll be any good at this stuff, but if I am, this is it. Some people sometimes ask me, why did you choose philosophy? And I say, I didn't choose philosophy, philosophy chose me, and I just gave in. So then I taught for 30 years, taught philosophy for 30 years at my alma mater, Calvin, and then for 15 years at Yale. There were a lot of philosophers who concentrated on one field or maybe two fields. That's never been true of me, partly because, well, largely because, I've been responding to things that were dropped - on issues and so forth - that were dropped on my doorstep. But I've done a lot of work in philosophy of religion, a great deal in political philosophy, including then, especially justice and a good deal in philosophy of art. Those have been my main interests in teaching and in writing. It's been a wonderful life. I've had wonderful students, wonderful colleagues. I hear stories about jealousies erupting in the academic world, conflicts...that's never been my experience. So it's been a privileged life for which I'm very thankful and grateful.

Sure. There's been a lot of discussion about justice in the Anglo-American philosophical community. Much of it spurred (most of it, I guess) spurred by a book by John Rawls, Harvard philosopher, must be 40 years ago by now. And so there were commentaries on Rawls, and commentaries on commentaries on Rawls. It became a very hermetic ingrown. I knew about that. I found it kind of boring. So that didn't get me involved in justice. I was opposed to the Vietnam War and gave talks and those talks mentioned justice, but it was not prominent. Then I was sent by my college, Calvin College, to a conference in 1975, September, 1975 in South Africa. The conference was not about apartheid, justice or anything of the sort. It was about higher education in the tradition of Presbyterian, Reformed Protestantism. But, these were the days of apartheid. There were a good many Dutch men there.

05:35I think they were all men! And the Dutch were very well acquainted with what was going on in South Africa. And furthermore, Afrikaans is a variant of Dutch. I suppose an Afrikaner would want to say no, no, no, it's more than, but it's a variant of Dutch so they could understand each other. And the Dutch were very angry at the Afrikaners for the system of apartheid, and they would manage to include it into the questions afterwards, even though the paper had not been about apartheid. Mr. Vandemere, I found your paper very interesting and it led me to wonder about this practice in South Africa. So the Dutch would just hijack the conference and the Afrikaners were getting very angry. So they finally decided to have a late night session, 10 o'clock, devoted to apartheid, and that's where the so-called ‘coloreds’ in South Africa spoke up.

06:35And I was immensely moved. They talked about the indignities heaped upon them and they used the category of justice. The Afrikaners replied by saying, justice is not the issue. We are a charitable people. We have this vision of distinct nationalities living apart from each other, apartheid and so forth. I was moved by these ‘coloreds’ and it was for me a religious experience. I had the feeling, the sense that God was calling me to speak up in whatever way was appropriate for a professor, for these suffering people. I didn't hear words in the air, but it was just a deep conviction. So, on the plane home, I recognized that I was a changed person, that I had to talk about justice and not talk about it from the standpoint of the philosophical discussion but starting from the victims. Then the second episode was somewhat similar. In May of 1978, I attended a conference on Palestinian rights on the west side of Chicago. I didn't know much about the Palestinians. I knew there were Arabs and quite a few were Christians, most were Muslim and so forth. But once again, I was incredibly moved by their stories and that reinforced what I had experienced in South Africa - justice has to be on my agenda and it has to begin from the wronged, not from what other philosophers are saying, but from the wronged of the world. It was those two experiences that, I think I can use the word ‘searing’ that were for me, searing experiences.

So, I remember vividly the way home from that conference in South Africa. I was asking myself, why was I so moved? I was not uninformed about apartheid. I mean, I didn’t know about it in detail, but I knew about apartheid, but I was not energized to do anything. So what happened? And it became clear to me that what happened was this. I saw the faces and heard the voices of the wronged calling for justice, and that evoked empathy in me. And I came to the conviction. I continued to hold the conviction that for most people reading about justice and even feeling a duty to do something doesn’t energize. Recognizing a duty doesn’t energize them, it’s emotions. The primary emotion for me was empathy, but listening to others talk, it also becomes clear to me that the counterparty motion is anger, empathy with the victims, and anger at the victimizers. So I've come to think that for most people, emotional engagement is crucial, not just intellectual engagement. And furthermore, that for a lot of people, myself included, it was hearing the actual voices and seeing the actual faces that evoked the empathy. I think my experience was not peculiar!

Well. Yeah, exactly. So I mean, yeah, there were more Afrikaners at the conference than anybody else, and they were not moved in the way that I was, but a few of them were, but most of them not. So I was also forced to reflect on why I responded the way I did, and they did not. And I came to use a biblical category, the hardening of the heart. That’s a profound feature of being human that we have to cope with. And so what is it that hardens the heart? A number of different things. One thing that hardens the heart is “there’s nothing to be done that won’t make things worse”. So you just stick with how it is. Another is, “yeah, but the changes that would be required of me in my life and the life of others if I really responded to these people are just more that I can handle or want to handle”. Another cause of the hardening of the heart is it’s their fault.

11:44They’re to blame. And yet another one is, and this is happening in the Afrikaners is, “yes, what’s happening to you is quite sad, but we’re after a great good, the great good is South Africa has these 11 or so different nationalities, and wouldn’t it be wonderful if each of them could find their own identity, their own way of making baskets and cooking and their own languages and so forth” – apartheid. So it was for a lot of the Afrikaners, it was the vision of that gre–t good that Supposedly they were bringing about. Those are causes of the hardening of the heart.

Let me add one more consideration. Obviously, another cause of the hardening of the heart is racism and similar phenomenon, finding these alien people repulsive or some deep-seated racism. I think it was in these Afrikaners, as a blend of racism and this visionary goal of separate society in which people developed their basket weaving and so forth.

Yeah. So then upon my return from South Africa, I did two things; read up and became more learned about apartheid than I already was, and found myself reading scripture with different eyes, passages that I knew that the Old Testament talked about justice, but those passages didn't jump out at me and now suddenly they leaped out. And a couple of things strike me about justice in the Old Testament, apart from its prominence: one, over and over in the Old Testament when the writer speaks of justice, what the writer quickly mentions is what I've come to call ‘a quartet of the vulnerable’, the widows, the orphans, the aliens, and the impoverished over and over in the Torah, in the prophetic literature. I mean it's a very striking phenomenon.

15:23So justice is connected, deeply connected by them, with the oppressed, with the vulnerable. They don't deny that powerful wealthy people can also be treated unjustly, clunked over their heads and so forth. But for them, why this priority for the vulnerable when they're talking about justice? And I think it is because the Old Testament writers are not theorists about justice. They're looking at actual society and they're implicitly saying, when we seek justice, what should have priority? Who should have priority? And they say that, yeah, of course wealthy people can be treated unjustly, but it's the impoverished, it's the vulnerable that should have priority. So, I think that's what's going on. And obviously another feature of justice in the Old Testament is that over and over they declare that God is just and enjoin us to imitate God in doing works of justice. So, it's always set in a theological context that's very different from secular justice obviously. And about the vulnerable - most of the viewers of this podcast will be aware that Plato's Republic is a book about justice, but nowhere does Plato bring into view the vulnerable in ancient Athenian Greek society. It's a very distinctive feature of the Old Testament Hebrew Bible literature.

Yeah, so in my writing about justice, I over and over make a distinction between what I call first order justice and second order justice. First order justice pertains to how we treat each other in our ordinary relations with each other. And second order justice pertains when there's been a breakdown in that somebody has been wronged. And then the issue arises - what is the just treatment of the wrongdoer and of the victim? So, I think the basis of first order justice is honoring the dignity, the worth of the other person, and if that's correct, and strange as it may sound, there's justice within the Trinity. First order justice, the members of the Trinity obviously honor each other. When I was working on that paper that you mentioned about justice in the Trinity, I undertook to look at the index, indices of a variety of theological works, including Karl Barth. And to my astonishment, almost always when they talk about God's justice it is, retributive justice, that second order justice, whereas when the Old Testament, when the Psalmist says God loves justice, the Psalmist is not saying God just loves punishing people. It's first order justice that God loves. And I find that feature of my, your, theological tradition quite puzzling.

Yeah, I think a lot of people who read their bibles in English translation, I think they feel, they intuitively feel that the New Testament is about love and righteousness and the Old Testament is about justice. And that’s been theologically articulated by most famously by Anders Nygren, Swedish bishop writing in the thirties who said that the Old Testament is about justice and the New Testament is about love, agape. But I think that’s a deep misreading of the New Testament. Here are a few considerations: when in his first appearance in a synagogue in Nazareth, Jesus is invited to read from the scroll of the Old Testament. He reads from the prophet Isaiah and then he sits down and says nothing. And people expect him to make a comment. And he says, ‘This day, this reading has been fulfilled in your hearing’ and the reading speaks about justice and the year of Jubilee.

20:47So Jesus identifies himself there as the one anointed by God to bring about justice. But it has to be said that in most of our English bibles, the Jerusalem Bible excepted, but in most English translations, the word ‘justice’ does not occur very often in the New Testament. And probably when it does, it’s usually retributive justice. So, what’s going on? Okay, so there’s a Greek word dikaiosune which in classical Greek – when I first studied Greek, I studied classical Greek – and when you come across dikaiosune in Plato and Aristotle, you automatically translated it as justice. Then I remember vividly taking a course, in New Testament in Greek and dikaiosune is there, now it’s translated as righteousness. So, from that junior college class, I asked myself, what’s going on? What’s possible is that the word changes meaning, of course, between Plato 300 years before the New Testament, but that doesn’t seem very likely. I think it’s just a mistranslation.

21:58I think the root idea of dikaiosune is ‘doing the right thing’. That’s what it is. And when we hear the word righteousness, righteousness in present day English is a character trait. It’s got a negative connotation. If somebody said that ‘Wolterstorff, you’re a very righteous man’, I’d say, what do they mean to say or suggest? So, in the beatitudes Jesus says, ‘Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of dikaiosune’. Most translations say, ‘blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness’. Now put your head to that one. You know some upright people, they’re not usually persecuted. They’re either admired or ignored. It’s people who work for justice who get under the skin of other people. A rule of thumb is that if some organization is evoking hostility, it’s not an aid organization, it’s a justice organization. ‘Blessed are those’ – this is Jesus in the beatitudes, again – ‘who hunger and thirst for dikaiosune’ – standard translation is righteousness.

23:14Well, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, I guess I would say, well then be righteous, then be righteous! Whereas justice is, in good measure, not in your hands, it’s how the people around you are being treated and treating others. So that’s why we hunger and thirst for justice because it’s in good measure out of our hands. Paul, in Romans 1:17 gives the theme of the book, and the theme of the book he says, is God's dikaiosune standardly translated – here we go again, this is getting tedious, right? - God’s righteousness. But the theme of the book then becomes God's fairness as between Jews and Gentiles, and fairness is not justice. So I think the theme of Romans is justice and N.T. Wright In his recent translation of Romans translates it as ‘justice’, he calls it justice.

Yeah, the Roman, Latin, late Roman Latin jurist, Ulpian, his definition of justice got into the Byzantine Emperor Justinian’s Code Digest, which became... Justinian summarizes the laws of the Roman Empire, and that shapes the Western tradition, and the Ulpian-Justinian definition of justice is, justice is rendering to each person what is his or her – now I’m going to use the Latin here, jus, j.u.s – Justice is rendering to each what is his or her ‘right’ or ‘due’; that’s about as close as we can get to it in English. I mean in Latin you’ve got this play on jus that we can’t replicate in English. So, the western tradition has always, from the beginning, the western legal tradition has pretty much followed Justinian: justice is rendering to each what does his or her due. It’s true of the great mediaeval philosopher Thomas Aquinas, he follows the Justinian definition. So, I think that just my impression that very few people in the West explicitly disagree with Justinian’s explanation of justice in terms of what’s right, what is due a person, what they have a right to, their objections are different. So I don’t see myself as an innovator when I connect justice to rights, but I see myself as utterly traditional.

Yeah, so the next thing to say is that though few writers explicitly disagree with the Ulpian-Justinian definition a lot in the 20th century have argued that rights language has become debased, I think that's a good word to use for it, and that consequently we should use other language. Now I think that the language of love and obligation, for example, now it's my view, and I don't think many people disagree that rights and obligations are actually correlatives of each other. If I have an obligation to treat you a certain way, then you have a right to my treating you that way, and conversely. So what people are arguing in effect is that given these correlatives that the right/rights side of the correlative has been debased and we should use the obligation side of the correlative. Now, of course obligation language can also be debased, the abusive husband saying to the wife, “you've got an obligation” when it's nonsense.  

28:09So, rights language, so these people tend to make the point that rights language in the modern world has been co-opted by what they call possessive individualists, people who focus on their own rights to the ignoring of the rights of others. What you suggested is correct. I think that's a profound misuse of rights language. When you and I are in a situation together, we each have rights and obligations. It's not that I've got all the rights and you've got all the obligations. You come into my presence bearing rights. So, to fail to see the symmetrical character of rights and obligations of rights is to abuse it. And no doubt there are plenty of people who talk only about their rights and don't want to talk about the rights of the other people. That's an abuse.

29:01And one should say it's an abuse. But, I don't think that we should give up on rights language. And here's basically why. When I have the language of rights and being wronged available to me, I can talk about my moral condition. If the only language is obligation, then consider the abused wife. If she's only got the language of obligation, she can talk about ,say to the husband, that you're failing your obligations and so forth, she cannot talk about her moral condition. She's being wronged. And so the language of rights is for bringing to speech the recipients. And that's why the great social justice movements of the 20th century have all used the language of rights: child rights, rights of women to vote, the rights of people of color to vote and so forth, because they're not just talking about the obligations of the oppressor, they're saying, calling attention to their moral condition. So, the rights language is important, rights and being wronged for calling attention to the moral condition of the wronged, of the victims.

So let me also bring love into the picture, Bethan. I think two distinctives of justice and scripture are first, that contrary to what Nygren argued; that love and justice are pitted against each other, I think that when we look closely at scripture, what we see is that acting justly is understood as an example of acting lovingly, to treat the other person justly as one component, not the whole component but one component of what it is to treat them lovingly. Jesus when asked, what is Torah? And he says, ‘love your neighbors, love God above all, and your neighbor as yourself’, he's quoting there Leviticus, ‘love your neighbor as yourself’ and there love your neighbor as yourself culminates in a long list of what you should do, including acting justly. And yet another distinctive, as you point out of justice and scripture is its connection to shalom, to flourishing. Over and over in the Old Testament, justice and shalom. Shalom is flourishing of the individual and the society and all relations: relations to God, to other human beings, to nature, to oneself. And justice is far and away from being the whole of shalom, but it is the sort of ground floor of shalom when people are being treated unjustly, even if they tolerate it, that's not biblical shalom. So, justice is a condition of shalom, but shalom goes beyond. And I think it's important for us to keep that in mind because otherwise emphasizing justice can be sort of hard-nosed and rule-oriented and so forth. We’ve got to keep in mind that it's a component of seeking shalom.

33:20Here we go again, translations - shalom in the Old Testament is often translated ‘peace’. I think that's much too weak a translation than ‘flourishing’. Jeremiah says to the exiles in Babylon, ‘Seek the shalom of the city for in the shalom of the city, you shall find your shalom’. It's usually translated seek the peace of the city, but it goes beyond peace. It's ‘seek the wellbeing of the city’, ‘the flourishing of the city’. That should be for us the context of acting justly.

So let me first say that in the various responses in the Global Faculty Initiative to what I wrote, scholars in a wide diversity of, wide range of fields, pointed out how justice is relevant in their field. Now, often I found myself surprised, it just hadn't occurred to me a linguist in, as I recall, South America points out how, over and over, how people speak, the language they use, is a matter of justice or injustice. And of course we've had gross examples of that in Canada and the US where children were brought into these... natives were brought into these schools and told that they should not speak their native language, but only speak English and so forth. So yeah, there are many ways in which those of us who are academics should be alert to justice in how we interact with our students and fellow scholars, and what we choose for research.

35:41A college and a university, let's face it, is full of power structures. The professors have power over the students, the administrators try to have power over the faculty, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. And what I've seen repeatedly is that older scholars try to have power over younger scholars that are jealous of being displaced and so forth. So, what I was first alerted to in South Africa I have come to see is very relevant to how I treat my colleagues, my administrators, and my students. Treat them all with dignity. There's a lot of put downs in the academy, by professors of students and so forth, and of course students can treat professors unjustly also. So, the basic idea is honor. I'm haunted by that passage in 1 Peter 2 v 13 as I recall, in which Peter says, ‘honor everyone’. In the Roman world that was incredible. Roman culture was an honor culture, but you honor the people on top of you in the structure; to say honor everyone was mind blowing. But that's, you are my Christian inheritance. We are to honor everyone: honor those students, honor the young scholars, honor your administrators!

Yeah, I think all of us should be asking the question about justice, justice and shalom, and how we treat each other. But those of us in the humanities, if you're studying stars, I don't see that the stars treat each other unjustly. But if you're in the humanities, justice also pertains to the subject matter. I remember teaching at Yale once, a seminar, we were reading Augustine and one of the students was just abusive towards what Augustine had said, and it finally occurred to me to say, it was a woman, and it finally occurred to me to say to her, would you say what you just said if Augustine were sitting across the table from you? ‘Oh no’, she said. Well, imagine Augustine is sitting across the table from you. Treat Augustine, way in the past, with due honor. Don't just rubbish it.

And thank you. It's been a pleasure.