This year we want to have a strong focus on missional justice. In the last blog, Jeremy laid out some biblical foundations for thinking about justice. Over the next 5 weeks, we are reposting a helpful article from Tim Keller (Gospel in Life Q4 2020) looking at secular visions of justice that shape our current world. He will examine how Scripture affirms and critiques these positions. In this blog, he will look at the problem with not having a firm foundation for justice.
The Problem We Face
Which justice? There have never been stronger calls for justice than those we are hearing today. But seldom do those issuing the calls acknowledge that currently there are competing visions of justice, often at sharp variance, and that none of them have achieved anything like a cultural consensus, not even in a single country like the US. It is overconfident to assume that everyone will adopt your view of justice, rather than some other, merely because you say so.
Biblical justice. In the Bible Christians have an ancient, rich, strong, comprehensive, complex, and attractive understanding of justice. Biblical justice differs in significant ways from all the secular alternatives, without ignoring the concerns of any of them. Yet Christians know little about biblical justice, despite its prominence in the Scriptures. This ignorance is having two effects. First, large swaths of the church still do not see ‘doing justice’ as part of their calling as individual believers. Second, many younger Christians, recognizing this failure of the church and wanting to rectify things, are taking up one or another of the secular approaches to justice, which introduces distortions into their practice and lives.
The History of Justice
The traditions. No one has done a better job of explaining our current predicament over justice than Alasdair MacIntyre, especially in his book Whose Justice? Which Rationality? [1] He shows that behind every understanding of justice is a set of philosophical beliefs about (a) human nature and purpose (b) morality, and (c) practical rationality—how we know things and justify true beliefs. In his book he traces out four basic historical traditions of justice. There is the Classical (Homer through Aristotle), the Biblical (Augustine through Aquinas, whose accomplishment was to incorporate some of Aristotle), the Enlightenment (especially Locke, Kant, and Hume)—which then set the stage for the modern Liberal approach, which has fragmented into a number of competing views that struggle with one another in our own day.
Earlier Enlightenment thinkers sought a basis for morality and justice not in God or religion but one that could be discovered by human reason alone.[2] David Hume did not believe that was possible. He argued that there are no moral norms or absolutes outside of us that we must obey regardless of what we think or feel, and therefore we cannot discover them through reason. Rather he taught that the only basis for our moral decisions was not reason but sentiment–moral intuitions grounded largely in our emotions rather than in our thinking. Hume “won the field” and today his successors have taken his ideas out to their logical conclusion, that all moral claims are culturally constructed and so, ultimately, based on our feelings and preferences, not on anything objective.
The failure of the Enlightenment Project. But MacIntyre shows how problematic this is. The social consensus on morality and justice that Enlightenment thinkers thought they could achieve by leaving religion behind has not been realized, and MacIntyre explains why. In his famous wristwatch illustration, he shows it is impossible to determine if a watch is a “good” or a “bad” watch unless you know what it is for. Is it for hammering nails or telling you the time of day? Without knowing the telos or purpose of the watch, any evaluation of it is impossible.
Likewise, unless you know what human beings are for, you will never come to any agreement as to what good or bad behavior is and therefore what justice is. The secular view is that human beings are just here through chance. We are not here for any purpose at all. But if that is the case then there is no good way to argue coherently on secular premises and beliefs about the world that any particular behavior is wrong and unjust. Human rights are based on nothing more than that some people feel they are important. Not everyone does, however, and what do you say to people who don’t believe in them and don’t honor them? Why should your feelings take precedence over someone else’s? After David Hume, no modern theory of justice has any answer other than–”because we say so.”
The Problem of Foundations
Many secular people respond to MacIntyre by saying we don’t need any basis for human rights, because “everyone knows” that care for the rights of others is just ‘common sense.’ Below is an excerpt from a dialogue interview (slightly edited by me) between Christian Smith, author of Atheist Overreach, and an atheist on a podcast called “Life After God.”
Smith: There is a difference between having an instinct that it is wrong to let people starve without helping them—it is another thing to insist that we ought to make the sacrifices—often huge sacrifices—necessary to prevent the suffering. If a people say: “[Why should we help others?] What happens beyond our borders is not our problem”–what does the [secular person] say to them?
The standard is not “do we have a regime to force people to sacrifice for others?” but do we have a basis for persuading a reasonable skeptic who asks “why should I care about them?” Do you have not only an explanatory rationale for why letting people starve is wrong–but also a justifying motivation so that they are motivated to make the sacrifices necessary to help them? Without both, you can’t have a set of moral values prevail in a society. And if you are [strictly secular] I don’t think you have them. I’m not saying atheists can’t choose to be good, but when they do so it is an arbitrary subjective preference, not a rationally grounded view that has persuasive power over others.
Atheist: That does not make sense to me. I just figure that because people are human beings that they should be treated fairly. I know what it feels like to be treated with kindness and with meanness. I know that others feel the same way, so I want to treat them with dignity and respect because that is what I would want. I don’t have an objective source for the dignity of people—it is based on the fact that I would want to be treated in this way. Why isn’t that compelling to a reasonable skeptic? Why do I need more reason/justification than that? It seems common sense.
Smith: I don’t think it is reasoning that is at work there. That’s not an argument–it’s a sensibility. And those kinds of sensibilities (about love and human rights) are riding on the continued currents of some millennia of a cultural inheritance that is powerfully influenced by Christianity and Judaism. That is what makes these ideals make sense to you. If I worry about anything—I worry about this. These moral ideals–of loving your neighbor and honoring her human rights regardless of who they are or where they are–make sense to us now. But if they are (as I think can be demonstrated) based on the cultural inheritance of religion [based on the worldview that our culture used to have], then will these moral ideals make sense to our grandchildren as religion continues to decline? Won’t they just ask: “Sure I care about my not-suffering, but why should I care about someone else’s not-suffering?” [Secularism] has no good answer to that question.
The atheist is saying to Smith that it is just common sense or rational to say, “I want to be treated this way, therefore I ought to treat others that way.” Smith says that is not reasoning. You may feel that the golden rule is right, but why should someone else feel the way you do about it?
In the next blog, we will look at how biblical justice compares to secular versions.