Justice as a larger loyalty

Justice as a Larger Loyalty

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Richard Rorty

Let me begin by asking you to consider some thought experiments. Suppose that you are being pursued by the police and you go to your family home and ask them to hide you. You would expect that they would do so. It would be abnormal if they did not. Consider again the reverse situation. You know that one of your parents or one of your children is guilty of a sordid crime and nonetheless he or she asks for your protection, asks to be hidden from police inquiries. Many of us would be willing to perjure ourselves in order to supply such a child or parent with a false alibi. But if an innocent person would then be wrongly convicted as a result of our perjury, most of us would be torn by a conflict between loyalty and justice.

Such a conflict will be felt, however, only to the extent that we can identify with the innocent person whom we have harmed. If the person is a neighbour the conflict will probably be intense. If it was a stranger some might consider it a weaker claim. There has to be some sense that the victim is one of us before we start being tormented by the question of whether we did the right thing when we committed perjury. So it might be equally appropriate to describe us as torn between conflicting loyalties — loyalty to our family and loyalty to some group large enough to include the victim of our perjury, rather than torn between loyalty and justice.

Our loyalty to such larger groups will however weaken or perhaps vanish when things get really tough. Then people whom we once thought of as like ourselves will be excluded. Sharing food with impoverished people down the street is natural and right in normal times but perhaps not in a famine when doing so would amount to disloyalty to one’s own family. The tougher things get, the more ties of loyalty to those near at hand tighten and those to everyone else slacken.

I think any time one wrestles with loyalty and justice one is in the thick of the human experience. My mother brought me up with a huge sense of justice, in particular an attention to the treatment of the innocent, the ill-treated, the forgotten. But she also always reminded me that “family came first” and above all we had to look out for each other. This tension was never really in doubt, with these values in conflict mom would always choose loyalty and she would NOT be alone. I confess that growing up and being outside of my family experience it was sobering to see how easy it was for “loyalty to trump justice”. I was bothered how emotional bonds cast away fairness and instead focus on whom we owed our loyalty. I witnessed terrible acts of cruelty done to people, not because they were on the wrong side of justice but because they stood with the “enemy”, they were on the wrong side. Values were more about creating a narrative, an excuse, than they were about sorting out where one’s opinion should rest.

I confess I have resolved to be a bit of an umpire, to listen carefully to all points of view, and to hold all parties accountable to their own rhetoric, to ask tough questions, no matter the personal affection I feel for them. Too often we have allowed our affections to cloud our moral judgements and the result has been unfairness, injustice. I know lots of people whom I cannot abide personally whom I have stood up for as a cause of righteousness and I know lots of people whom I adore personally whom I have told that I could not support because they were on the wrong side of justice. It is, after all, “justice, not just us”.