Is “Justice” Possible In a Community Lacking a Moral Consensus?

Is “Justice” Possible In a Community Lacking a Moral Consensus?

September 5, 2024

I hope you’ve picked up a copy of John Inazu’s book, Learning to Disagree, and are following along with our staff as we endeavor to communicate more effectively in our oft-contentious culture.

Inazu is an attorney, author, and law professor at Washington University in St. Louis. In his book, he invites us into his first-year law class, where he poses several profound questions and offers practical advice on communication skills to navigate our diverse community.

Perhaps the most profound question posed in the book concerns the idea of justice in a diverse community. In his chapter titled “Can We Know What’s Fair?,” Inazu argues that “fairness” or justice is much less black and white, and much grayer than we might realize. His law students struggle with these ambiguities in real cases, which helps them to become more empathetic.

Then, Inazu asks us to consider if a common concept of justice is possible in a community lacking a common concept of morality. He argues that “justice” must be based on morality, which itself must be based on purpose.

I leave you with a few select quotations from Learning to Disagree. I hope you find the conversation stimulating! In the quotations below, Inazu’s references to “our school” or “we” refer to Washington University in St. Louis.

“Because our school lacks a clear concept of ‘justice’, we won’t be able to say whether or how free speech serves justice. But we can set up rules of engagement that everyone has to follow—we can require procedural fairness. We can have rules about who can make public expressions and when they can make them, and we can have rules governing protests about that expression. But all of this is quite different from arbitrating whether actions are fairly punished or rewarded relative to our understanding of what is good or right. Without specifying what our school actually believes about the world, we can’t do much more than require people to follow the procedures.” (p. 34-35)

“The reason we default to procedural rules in every fraught situation is that we have no sense of what we actually care about… We don’t know what we value as an institution because we don’t know our purpose. And without knowing what we value, we can’t really decide what’s fair.” (p. 36)

Note: Inazu uses the word proceduralism to describe the tendency in contemporary American culture to base fairness/justice exclusively on a set of predefined rules, apart from common morality or purpose.

“…proceduralism aspiring toward fairness can still be fundamentally unfair.” (p. 36)

“Knowing what is good or right means knowing purpose and values.” (p. 36-37)

“But I worry that functionality without clarity around our values means we will never get to the questions that really matter.” (p. 37)

In Christ,

Dr. Jeff Marx, Head of School

The mission of Hill Country Christian School of Austin: We partner with Christian families to impart truth, cultivate character, and inspire service while preparing college bound students to think logically, communicate effectively, and impact the world with the love of Christ.