Justice. Just Is. Just Us?

The banner brandished by the dozens of students marching down Storrs Walk last Monday read “Divestment is a tactic; justice is the goal.” There’s often a good deal of talk about the j-word in any number of settings — legal, environmental, social, economic, etc. — and I think more often than not, we take its meaning for granted. Specifically, taken for granted in the sense that we may actually have some concrete idea of what the word means. While this article won’t attempt to provide a complete account of the nature of justice, it will try to point the dialogue in the right direction.

The argument put forward by the divestment movement, as I see it, seems relatively straightforward: we shouldn’t contribute financially to the functioning of companies that engage in behaviors we consider ethically reprehensible. Alright, fair enough. But are “ethics” and “justice” the same thing? It’s a question that’s plagued the philosophical community in its entirety, and one that probably won’t be resolved anytime soon. One of the more popular conceptions of justice in the Anglophone world offers a contractual conception of justice: that is, relationships take on some quality of justice when two parties enter into an agreement or contract with one another, and each then obtains certain rights. People have come up with other conceptions of justice (see distributive justice, justice as fairness, justice as property, global justice; the list goes on), but this idea of contractual justice is simple and tidy enough such that I think it might take us where we want to go for now. Now if there’s something unjust about, say, investing in oil companies or arms manufacturers, we have just one of the tools necessary to pinpoint what that is.

Seeing as this is an environmental column, we’ll start with environmental justice, and how divestment could somehow right an unjust situation. Let’s say investing in fossil fuel industries is unjust because their entire business model rests upon the combustion of materials which results in the release of carbon dioxide, which contributes to climate change, which will raise sea levels to the point of jeopardizing coastal livelihoods. We may then say that this is an unjust situation because the person whose shoreline property is now slightly more a part of the shore than they bargained for never entered an agreement which said they were alright with rising sea levels. Or maybe there’s injustice because of habitat loss that occurs — one could argue that because humans and animals both inhabit the same planet, each has an equal right to a safe habitat, or some variation on that theme.  It’s the same basic premise which is supposed to justify our endangered species laws and other environmental regulations. There are countless other examples we could propose, but half of the challenge seems to be actually proposing them in the first place.

One of the problems that arises when dealing with problems with justice — something on which I was fortunate enough to have an extended discussion with recent guest lecturer David Abram  — is that our ethical and moral frameworks are generally limited by our vocabulary and our conceptions of how things relate to one another. Humans have a hard time acting ethically or including non-human nature within our systems of justice because our way of speaking about such things is inherently isolating and anthropocentric. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing — the whole “language” thing has helped our species along its way for thousands of years. However, it also seems like the same manner of speaking has also led to the kind of injustices we find within our own society. I was fortunate enough to be referred, by a friend, to recent JusTalks keynote speaker Tricia Rose’s TEDx talk regarding social justice from Brown University. Revealingly, she observes that one of the fundamental problems in trying to solve issues of justice is that it is generally pretty difficult to talk about structural problems within the contexts of the structures in which the problems arise.

I think all of this helps to show that many of the problems taken on by various groups — those working towards divestment, climate change, food, social and racial equality — can find a lot of common ground once we start working out what justice, conceptually, means. Greater dialogue between all of these groups might help iron out some of the wrinkles preventing us from ending up at the same ends, and increasing communication could enable us to speak more freely with one another about issues which, individually, we’re far less likely to solve. Aristotle conceived justice as a virtue naturally associated with friendship, and that the truest form of justice had a “friendly” quality. While it may seem simplistic, a bit of friendship and some more cooperation could be exactly what our community needs.