ON LOCATING JUSTICE
August15th 1997
The next issue, Number 16, will appear on September 15th 1997.
The problem of evil is widely recognised and is the subject of much
agonising. Briefly the problem is 'how can there be undeserved suffering
under an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good God?' (called OMNI, for short).
The answer given briefly by my unsophisticated mother was that "it's all for
the best". Professional theologians are less brief; they hold down
pensionable employment writing long and opaque treatises which say the same
thing only less clearly. "God", they say at inordinate length, "has a Plan
for the Good and IF parts of it are, by any normal human standards, bad THEN
that is because we don't, can't, understand it fully but we must nonetheless
have faith in the Goodness of The Plan".
Jews, gipsies, homosexuals and others. gasping their last in the Nazis'
gas-chambers ..... starving refugees in the Zairean jungle, too weak to bury
their dead children ..... people being tortured to death in hundreds of the
world's police stations .... may need to have this explained to them!
"It's all for the best" comes down to saying that, for God, the end
justifies the means, the badness of the means is as nothing to the goodness
of the end. It escapes the notice of some people (who value believing more highly
than they value thinking) that since morality, briefly put, demands the use
of good means to achieve good ends, the "it's all for the best" view implies
moral laxity on OMNI's part.
But it is the less widely discussed 'problem of good' that is the main
subject of this brief article. There is such a problem - for believers in
OMNI. The problem of evil is not their only problem.
The problem of good is 'how can evidently undeserved good be reconciled with
the existence of OMNI - who is supposedly, among other things, wholly just?'
The experience of many like me is that we have had a remarkably easy ride in
life compared to what is endured by many millions of others. Indeed many of
us have had remarkably easy rides compared with our immediate family,
friends, neighbours, colleagues and general acquaintances.
IF this is justice THEN it follows that the likes of me are good deserving
people - justly getting a better deal than most because we are better people
than most. This prompts us to entertain a very good opinion of ourselves
.... tempts us to fall into the sin of pride.
We can try to extricate ourselves from this sinful thinking - our pride at
being so good as justly to deserve our good fortune - by asking "Why is it
that we are so good, so deserving?" The answer might be that OMNI made us
that way and we must thank him for our being "not as other men are." (an act
of thanks that, Biblically speaking, we ought to rule out).
So the OMNI idea drives us favoured ones to take attitudes that (we are
assured by his spokespersons) we ought not to take. The OMNI idea, with
inexorable logic, leads us hyper-fortunates astray - so why follow it? Why
indeed?
There is a larger dimension to all this; it is not simply a matter of
fortunate individuals being encouraged by the OMNI idea to have unduly high
self-esteem. It is a collective thing; it is a global thing.
The white peoples are, on the whole, better off in very many ways than the
non-whites. If OMNI is presiding justly over the total scheme of things then
the conclusion is unavoidable - white people are of superior worth compared
to non-whites; they get the goodies because they ARE the goodies!
So the OMNI idea leads not only to the morally obnoxious conceit that I am a
superior person; it also leads to the morally obnoxious conceit that our
white kind is superior to their non-white kind.
Moreover it is easy to see that, logically, the OMNI idea leads straight to
one of the most widespread of human cruelties - 'when in doubt, blame the
victim' - victims would not be victims if they did not deserve, in OMNI's
unerring judgment, actually to be victims .
So things look pretty bad for the OMNI idea. Why not ditch it? Better by far
to accept that there is no built-in justice in the fabric of the universe
but that, crudely put, there are only ideals of justice wandering about in
the restless inquiring human mind?
Is it not then the case that justice is located in our minds? That's where
it is? Justice is perhaps solely our brain child for us to cherish; we are
wrong to neglect it and even more wrong to pervert it.
Maybe if we saw our ups and downs as matters of luck and judgment, rather
than as gifts or challenges or rewards or penalties from 'out there
somewhere' .... then maybe we would be more inclined to proper humility and
proper compassion.
To attribute to their god the qualities summed up in the nickname OMNI, does
not help the cause of humility and compassion. It is no wonder that somany
theists are arrogant hostile uncaring fanatics. The wonder is that so many
more theists are, nowadays, as humble and compassionate as they are.
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