Matthew Cavedon
On October 9, Notre Dame political science professor Daniel Philpott delivered the Fourth Annual Lecture on Catholic Political Thought at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. Philpott lectured on the definition of justice, drawing on his work as an activist promoting reconciliation in settings ranging from Kashmir and East Africa to the Catholic Church sex abuse crisis. His remarks are relevant to criminal justice as well.
Philpott notes that modern Western societies emphasize classical Greco-Roman ideals of justice, defining that concept as giving everyone “what is due.” This “rendering to each his own” centers on individuals’ rights. Philpott celebrates rights. For him, they protect the personal dignity of their holders, and when they are understood as complements to duties, they appeal to the virtue of those who recognize them.
Rights, however, are not comprehensive enough to exhaust the meaning of justice. For the Hebrews and early Christians, justice meant a “comprehensive right relationship.” It included things reaching “beyond what is due”—including reconciliation, mercy, forgiveness, grace, and compassion. Going beyond what is due is neither marginal nor optional in seeking justice.
Philpott holds up President Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. as teachers of this kind of justice. Of course, both had invincible senses of what people are due. Lincoln even described the Civil War as what was due America for slavery. As he lamented in his Second Inaugural Address:
If God wills that [the war] continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
But Lincoln immediately looked beyond what was due, committing himself to restoring a comprehensive right relationship:
With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
Likewise, Dr. King gave his life in defense of the justice in what people are due. Yet, he further sought the building of a “world house” living in peace, a “beloved community” characterized by harmony. Philpott says this is why he treated nonviolence as indispensable: Any other way of seeking what is due would undermine the comprehensive right relationship. It would be injustice in spite of itself.
Philpott connects his definition of justice with crime and its social responses. Retribution is due crime because it violates rights—both those of the people who immediately suffer and those of every other citizen who lives under the law. In fact, retribution is inseparable from criminal justice. Punishing innocent people for the sake of some perceived social benefit can only further unravel the comprehensive right relationship.
Retribution, though, is not justice’s only dimension. Victims, including society as a whole, can be owed an offender’s punishment; however, they may have reasons to yield these for justice’s sake. For instance, I recently wrote about restorative justice efforts that seek to heal the relationships that are damaged through crime. (Philpott mentions them as well.) This does not mean the state should lightly excuse crime. A state that fails to retaliate against crimes does not restore the comprehensive right relationship but further harms it. After all, the state’s own duties include vindicating the dignity of every person and setting standard norms for social behavior.
But the state can still advance fuller justice in different ways. Philpott considers the context in which people commit crimes, urging further reckoning with the racial economic disparities left by slavery, Jim Crow, and discrimination embedded in the New Deal. Justice in the form of mercy requires relieving the suffering that has resulted, including disparities that mar the criminal justice system. Surely Philpott would agree that mercy also requires humane reforms such as reducing and improving the conditions of incarceration and protecting human life while policing.
Healing is also part of political justice. Here again, I want to call attention to restorative justice. As I wrote previously,
“When the landing space is secured, justice ends in hope, not death.” … Restorative justice aims to restore the humanity that the offender has pushed away through guilt and that which the victims and survivors have pushed away through anger.
In another essay, I noted that an overly punitive approach imposed by “an uninterested state might actually make it harder for victims to become whole again by showing mercy and working toward reconciliation.” Restorative justice is part of political justice too.
Lastly, Philpott identifies acknowledgment as another requirement of justice. A comprehensive right relationship includes reckoning with injuries and providing meaningful recompense. American law has failed spectacularly to do this in the context of abusive policing, prosecution, and punishment, instead raising barrier after barrier to relief for victims of government wrongdoing. Judicial indifference to violations of rights has left many Americans “with a sense of statelessness.”
What should people do in response to injustices such as these? Philpott says that even citizens who are not individually responsible for injustice are not absolved of the collective responsibility to right it. Thus, see the humanity of accused and convicted people. Insist on reconciliation as the ultimate purpose of criminal justice. Reject a punishment-only mentality and the dehumanizing attitudes that underpin it. Recognize what everyone is due—and what beyond that is also needed for a comprehensive right relationship.
To echo the Bible that Philpott looks to, do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly.