Dissertation Fellow 2004-05
John Carlson
The University of Chicago
The Case for Limited Justice: Human Nature, Irony,
and Transcendence in Political Ethics
Justice is a guiding political pursuit traceable to the earliest
days of Western thought and a vital principle that continues to
frame explicitly—or to operate in the background of—the
most pressing ethical problems in contemporary political life. But
scholarly forays in justice dominating moral and political thought
for the last half century have largely ignored the language of moral
anthropology and transcendence—omissions that have given way
to skewed appreciation of this crucial concept. This project marks
a strong departure from such recent approaches by showing how views
of human nature and of God, divinity, or “the ultimate”
deepen our reflection upon much neglected aspects of justice: the
preservation of political order, punishment, reconciliation, and
their collective impact upon relations within a community and a
community’s aspirations and values.
Through surveys of Plato, Calvin, Hobbes and others, I begin by
reclaiming justice’s “anthropological” and “transcendent”
underpinnings. I also consider why these root ideas have been jettisoned
from contemporary thought, which I attribute to their associations
with overly ambitious forms of justice. (This is especially the
case when the search for justice is fueled by transcendent appeals
that extend beyond politics.) Often, justice—when unlimited
or made ultimate or absolute—ironically begets injustice,
eliding critical scrutiny and jeopardizing other important human
endeavors. As a correction, I draw from the wellsprings of St. Augustine,
Reinhold Niebuhr, and Albert Camus to craft more modest measures
of “limited justice”—a position that accounts
for human error, allows sufficient latitude to make amends, and
actually provides for more substantive achievements of justice.
Due attention in politics to distinctive features of human nature
serves to account for and moderate transcendent appeals in just
and feasible ways. Limited justice also recognizes the irony of
a situation in which the human longing for justice is undercut by
the moral finitude of our nature to achieve it. These insights of
limited justice emerge only upon reclaiming the centrality of human
nature and God to the tasks of political inquiry.
This study goes on to bridge the conceptual roots of justice in
Western political thought with practical issues in political life
today. From the conceptual treatment emerges a “casuistry
of limited justice” that sharpens our clarity onto debates
surrounding capital punishment, justifiable use of force, and war
crimes tribunals. For without a clear understanding of the human
possibilities and limitations of achieving justice, we are not likely
to arrive at satisfactory resolutions of these or other exigent
problems in political ethics.
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