Chapter 14

JUSTICE

“Is the life of justice the better and happier life? What we have said already leaves no doubt in my mind; but we ought to consider more carefully, for this is no light matter: it is the question, what is the right way to live?”

Socrates to Thrasymachus, Plato (428/7 B.C.E. - 348/7 B.C.E.), Republic 352 d, (Plato 1941:37)

            We should pause for a space and survey the path behind. In the first part of this book, we looked at making true emotional judgments on activities, people, and things outside ourselves. Now our inquiry turns to making emotional judgments on ourselves, on our lives and our characters.

Review

            Our search for meaning is a search for what truly matters. Initially, we saw that theories of cosmic purpose and the development of human potential could not answer the mattering question. Why should alignment with cosmic purpose or development of human potential be things that matter to us?

            We examined the path of blissful consciousness. We found that, though pain and pleasure certainly matter, other things matter to us besides these states of consciousness.

            We examined the path of satisfied desires. We found that, because desire is inherently motivational, it is directed on future events and not on persons and things, either present and past. Again, other things matter to us besides future events.

            Finally we examined the path of the emotions. For something to matter is just for it to engage our emotions. The range of things that can matter to the emotions is not limited to future events as it is for desires. We noted, however, that though emotional responses are evidence of what is valuable, they are not definitive guides. Emotional judgments, predictions that we would feel certain emotions under ideal conditions, are our guides to value. Our admiration for something, for example, is not enough; we need to know that it is admirable.

            As predictions, however, emotional judgments are beliefs, not emotions. Our value judgment that someone is admirable is our belief, of that person, that she is worthy of our admiration. Beliefs aim at truth.

            It seemed at this point that we had confused facts with values. It seemed that if we understand value judgments as beliefs, we would be left unable to explain why the persons and things we value should matter to us. One bad explanation of why true beliefs matter is that they correspond to a strange sort of reality with “to-be-pursuedness” built into it. We rejected that explanation, along with the idea that truth consists in correspondence to a reality only fully comprehensible to God.

            Why does what we believe valuable matter to us? Why do we admire what we believe admirable? The answer lies in the nature of belief, not the nature of reality. Belief and emotion are intertwined. Beliefs are related both to the evidence on which they are based, and to the emotions that fix them. Emotions are what give beliefs their strength; they allow us to explain the difference, for example, between supposing something to be true and being convinced that it is true. For emotional judgments, it is good, though not conclusive, evidence for an evaluative belief that we feel the correlated emotion. Our admiring someone is good evidence, though not conclusive evidence, that she is admirable. Saying of someone that she is admirable, but that we do not admire her, is odd, though possible. To do so, we would need to have a good reason for discounting our feelings; the reason might be that our emotions respond to our beliefs more slowly than our beliefs respond to evidence. However, our emotional judgments and our actual emotions cannot always be out of sync. Our emotional responses are ultimately all the evidence that we have for our judgments. It would be very odd indeed if we never admired anyone among those whom we judged admirable.

Meaning and Self-esteem

            The big question that each of us asks is this: Is my life meaningful? The answer connects to the emotional judgments that we each make about ourselves. We do not, however, rely on just one emotion or feeling of meaningfulness and its correlated judgment. Instead we rely on a cluster of self-directed emotions, together with a corresponding cluster of life-affirming judgments.

            We cannot make any unified judgment of meaningfulness on our lives. If we look for one, then we will be disappointed. Meaningfulness is not a unitary notion. Because emotions are diverse, meaningfulness is diverse. To ask for more is to doom our search to frustration. We are better off not to ask The Big Question. Instead we should ask only little questions, ones connected to particular emotional judgments. Do not ask: Is my life meaningful? Ask, instead: Am I someone worthy of the esteem of myself and others? Am I the sort of person who deserves love and admiration, who has dignity and self-respect, who has true self-worth?

            Our emotional judgments can be directed both inwards both on ourselves and outwards on other people and things in the world. The emotional judgments directed on ourselves depend on the emotional judgments we direct on the world. We do not judge ourselves without evidence. The evidence for our self-worth is the quality of the outward judgments that we make and how we act on these judgments. To live well, our evaluative judgments about the world must be true, they must matter to us, and they must guide our lives. If we get this right, then we will be worthy of the cluster of life-affirming judgements that comprise a judgment of meaningfulness on our lives.

            To see how this works, imagine a much simpler world. Suppose that we have only two possible emotional responses, love and hate. Correspondingly, we can make only two judgments about the world; other people are either loveable or hateful. To get these judgments right, we must love those who are truly loveable and hate those who are truly hateful, and we must allow these emotions to guide our lives. If we do this, then we will be worthy of our own love and we can love ourselves. In this simple world, a true self-love would make our lives meaningful. We could, however, get it wrong. We could misjudge who is loveable or hateful, we could hate those we judge loveable and vice-versa, or we could express our love and hate in inappropriate ways. If we make these mistakes, then we may become worthy of our own hate. A deserved self-hatred would make our lives meaningless.

            The real world is much more complicated. Real people can have a vast array of emotional responses and can make an even vaster array of judgments. Still, the point is to get these judgments right, commit to them, let them guide our lives. By that, we earn a cluster of self-directed emotional judgments that add up to our life truly mattering.

            We need much wisdom to get our judgments right. Emotions are complicated, and can go wrong in at least eight ways: direction, causation, feeling, physiology, attention, motivation, belief, and evaluation. To avoid the first six of these difficulties, we need to know ourselves. To avoid the seventh difficulty, we need to know facts about the world and other people. In earlier chapters, we have examined how knowledge of the self and knowledge of the world affect judgment. To avoid the eighth difficulty, we have to get our evaluations correct. In this chapter, we will examine how knowledge of value affects judgment.

Evaluation

            Because our emotions are cognitively rational, they will respond (even if slowly) to our evaluations. How we respond to a situation will often depend on how we evaluate the situation. Consider this example from a cognitive therapy manual, Mind over Mood:

Anger is liked to a perception of damage or hurt and to a belief that important rules have been violated. We become angry if we think we have been treated unfairly, hurt unnecessarily, or prevented from obtaining something we expected to achieve. It is not simply the hurt or damage that makes us feel angry, but the violation of rules and expectations. Imagine a man who loses his job. Does he feel angry? It depends. If the man loses his job and considers this a fair decision (perhaps because he broke company rules or the company went bankrupt), he is unlikely to feel angry. However, if the man thinks his job loss was unfair (perhaps others broke company rules and were not fired or only men of a certain race lost their jobs), then he probably feels very angry. Similarly if a child steps on your foot while you are riding on a bus, you feel pain. Whether or not you feel angry depends on your interpretation of the intent and reasonableness of the child’s behavior. (Greenberger 1995:193-194)

Whether we feel anger depends both on factual beliefs about hurt or damage and on evaluative beliefs about injustice. Similarly, whether we feel guilt depends on evaluative beliefs about whether the act we have just committed lives up to our standards for action. Whether we feel shame depends on whether we, as a whole person, are living up to our standards for how persons should be. We feel shame when we believe ourselves to be defective or flawed. Similarly, we feel pride only when we believe our accomplishments to be worthwhile. Emotions frequently depend on evaluative judgments.

            A simple evaluative judgment is an emotional judgment. An example is judging that someone is despicable. It is a prediction that if we were free of the distortions to which emotions are prone, we would despise that person. This prediction relies on the cognitive rationality of emotions; it assumes that our emotions would respond to the beliefs we acquire in this inquiry. The best possible inquiry would require that we had all the relevant information about that person, that we had full self-knowledge, and that our other evaluations were correct.

            If we did not say “other evaluations,” this formulation would be circular. For, to judge that the person was despicable, we would need to have already correctly evaluated that he was despicable. Nevertheless, our best assessment would depend on general evaluations such as judging people of his particular type to be despicable. As well our best assessment would depend on evaluations like finding his actions hateful or abhorrent, or his character cruel, selfish, unjust, or whatever. Evaluations are not circular, but we do not make them one at a time and independently of one another. Evaluation, as we have seen, is holistic.

            Our judgements, our predictions about how we would feel after inquiring into the matter, have to be based on evidence. This evidence can only be how we, and others, actually feel in particular cases. Yet, how we actually feel can never be conclusive evidence for our judgment. One reason concerns the holism of our evaluative judgments. We have seen how this works in our earlier look at the structure of scientific reasoning. Our emotional judgments are going to depend both on our initial emotional response and on other evaluative judgments to which we are committed. Our judgment has to fit with both our response and with our other evaluations. Achieving this fit may require that we adjust either our initial response or our other evaluations.

            Someone’s judgment that he should be angry at being fired will depend not only on his initial angry response but also on his judgment about whether his firing was unfair or unjust. If his opinion is that his boss’s action was fair, then his initial anger can be processed and will fade. On the other hand, he may change his opinion of his boss; perhaps she is not a just person like he thought she was. His reevaluation of his boss, however, should look to other clues: her past actions toward him and others, the pressures she is under and responsible for facing, and what his beliefs about justice are.

Morality

            Meaning intimately connects to justice and morality. Sadistic acts can be neither admirable nor valuable. Desires for more than a fair share, or that others should have a lesser liberty, are not indicators of value. The reason is this: Value judgements are emotional responses under hypothetical conditions of full factual and evaluative knowledge. Emotional responses depend on, and change with, evaluative knowledge. Full evaluative knowledge includes knowledge of what is just or unjust, and what is morally permissible or not. So, value judgements depend on moral knowledge. Emotional judgments will be false if they depend on false moral beliefs. The meaningful life has to be a just life.

            Some threats to meaning are extreme. We can all readily agree that sadism and cruelty are wrong. Someone who judges that cruel acts are enjoyable has made a false judgment about what is valuable. His judgment is a prediction. He believes that he would enjoy this act under mistake-free circumstances of evaluation – in full and vivid knowledge of his own psychology, of facts about the world and other people, and of this judgment’s fit with other evaluative judgments. He can go wrong by failing to discount properly for his own warped psychology. He can go wrong in falsely believing that his victims do not mind (or even enjoy) his cruelty. He can go wrong in assuming that cruelty is somehow admirable, or at least not hateful and abhorrent. The fact that he enjoys cruelty is not evidence enough that cruelty is worthy of enjoyment. Other reasons prevail. His judgment is false; his life is going seriously wrong. He may gain pleasure, but he loses meaningfulness.

            Most threats to meaning are less extreme, though more dangerous because less obvious. They arise more from carelessness than ill-will. They come from a lack of thought, a neglect to inquire, and a failure to reflect critically. Consider something as commonplace as the food we eat. Would we enjoy it as much if we were fully and vividly aware of where it comes from and how it is produced? Are we properly aware of the working conditions of the South American farmers who harvest our coffee? Or the mountainside deforestation required to make room for the coffee plants? How do we feel about the labourers harvesting our vegetables amid toxic sprays banned in North America and Europe? How do we feel about the billion or more malnourished people in the world, people whose hunger a very small sacrifice by the billion overfed could easily end? How do we feel about the possible benefits and dangers of the genetic engineering employed in producing our cereals and cooking oils? Or about the environmental degradation produced by continuous use of chemical fertilizers? How do we feel about the conditions under which many animals we eat are raised? Veal calves in crates? Laying hens crowded into battery cages? The slaughter of male chicks surplus to egg production? The conditions in slaughter houses? What judgments would we make about our food if we knew these things? Would we buy fairly-traded, shade-grown coffee, or the supermarket’s cheaper house brand? Would we buy organic food, or the easy, cheaper, agribusiness alternative? Would we eat free-range eggs, or the cheaper battery-cage ones?

            If we get these judgements wrong, or any of the many others involved in our living and livelihood, then we risk mistakes in our self-judgments. We want our lives to be truly meaningful. We want to make a cluster of positive evaluations on ourselves, and we want these evaluations to be true. The truth of our self-evaluations depends on the sorts of persons that we are and the sorts of lives that we lead. The sorts of persons that we are depends on the truth of the judgments that we make. We risk it all through thoughtlessness.

            Our highest interest is not self-interest in the narrow sense of caring only for ourselves. To judge ourselves worthy of esteem and respect, we must make and live true judgments about our relationships to other people and to the world generally. Morality constrains meaning. The search for meaning leads to a search for justice.