Justice & Truth

Injustice is inescapable. There is always someone doing injustice to another. Or someone might perceive that injustice is being done to them. More and more, people think that another group of people has wronged them, that they would not have problems if it were not for ‘them.’ Yes, groups have perpetrated any number of small and not so small injustices on others. But how many of my problems are of my own making or simply bad luck? It kind of feels good to blame ‘big food’ or ‘big agriculture’ or ‘big pharma’ for my woes instead of taking responsibility for my own poor decisions. As a friend of mine was fond of saying, ‘I did not get this fat by watching other people eat.’

We are in control of much of our lives but not everything. Others inflict injustices upon us, but life is often more cruel than those who have chosen to hate us. We used to understand this better than we do today. ‘It was not in the cards.’ ‘That happened out of the blue.’ ‘We did not bargain for this.’ We have agency, but our ability to control how things turn out is limited. There are some who deny human agency, claiming that all is predetermined. We only seem to have agency and life only seems to be random. That I got stung by a wasp on Christmas Eve would have been predetermined billions of years ago they would say. Everything leading up to that sting – the creation of wasps, that wasp’s instincts, his being on the faucet, my not seeing the wasp, my grabbing the handle – was just a predestined series of events that were unavoidable. Some would blame impersonal forces of nature infallibly and inevitably leading to that sting while others might say that a divine being or beings orchestrates all that happens. I’m prone to recognize that unfortunate things just happen that are hardly part of the grand orchestration of nature or of God Himself.

Our justice system recognizes that we have agency but are not in total control of our lives. We understand that a tire may suffer a blowout that was unforeseeable and unpreventable. We also understand that if a particular tire from a particular manufacturer undergoes an inordinate number of blowouts, it becomes a matter of product liability. It might have been a bad design, it might have been defective production processes, or it might have been a known problem that was not disclosed, corrected, or addressed for the sake of profits or corporate reputation. Bad luck turns into injustice when responsible parties choose not to act in a just manner.

Increasingly, however, our culture judges justice less on objective fact than on emotion. When a tire blows out causing a fatal crash, justice is demanded. It might have been that a perfectly good tire that was well designed and properly manufactured blows out because it hit too many potholes over its lifetime or should have been replaced 20,000 miles ago, emotion still wants to blame the maker of the tire while not taking into account the city or state’s responsibility for maintaining the roads or the car owner’s responsibility for replacing worn tires. Seeking justice absent truth won’t result in justice.

When emotion trumps truth, justice is in jeopardy. In a recent murder case, a mistrial was declared because one juror refused to side with the other eleven jurors. Was this juror wrong? We were not in that courtroom, so we really can’t say for certain. Some people, however, are absolutely certain that the accused is not guilty while many would insist that the defendant must certainly be guilty. The more emotion is involved, however, the more that justice will not be served.

Human juries err based on any number of factors, such as withheld evidence, poor legal representation, poor prosecution, prejudice, and so forth. Our system is well designed and prone to produce justice as long as all parties are acting justly: the prosecution is honest, the defense actively seeks to protect the rights of the accused, and the jury weighs the facts in evidence impartially and dispassionately. If any of the parties do not do their part, the probability of the innocent being declared guilty and the guilty declared innocent abounds.

We can lament this, but we must always remember that God is the ultimate judge and the He cannot be misled or bamboozled. We fallible humans make mistakes and are prone to any number of biases. But God is just beyond measure. Thankfully He is also merciful beyond measure.

—Fr Booth