Hey there, readers. This is Letters from Home & Away, an ongoing correspondence between me (Kate) and my pal Ali. On Tuesdays, we recommend books. On Thursdays, we write about ideas.
This week, my letter to Ali is written from my parents’ deck in Happy Valley, Oregon.
Dear Ali,
The word “justice” is in vogue right now. It’s in job postings and campaign ads. In tweets and mission statements. Coffee can be just. Ice cream can be just. Dubious corporate motives aside, I think this focus on justice is good.
But what exactly do we mean by the j-word? Given our country’s political estrangements, we must have competing definitions of what a just society looks like, and what it owes to its members.
To try to understand what those definitions are, I picked up the political philosopher Michael Sandel’s Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? My freshman year of college, I sat in on a Sandel lecture. Every seat was full. Some students raised their hands and spoke into microphones to answer questions. I could never be so brave! So I didn’t take the class. (Lame.)
Luckily, anyone can watch Sandel’s lectures online. Or you can read his excellent, accessible book. A professor of government, Sandel writes like a teacher: presenting arguments and counterarguments, referencing and contextualizing the ideas of different philosophers, economists, and political theorists.
Maybe justice is utilitarianism, the calculated pursuit of the most pleasure for the greatest number of people.
Or maybe libertarianism, which insists on the freedom to do whatever you want so long as it doesn’t harm anyone else.
Maybe justice has to do with Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative: respect every person (including yourself) as a means, not an end.
Or John Rawls’s veil of ignorance: justice is the condition we’d all choose if we knew nothing about our individual identities (our class, our gender, our race). We’d want an egalitarian society that would do well by us, no matter what life we were born into.
Or maybe justice is connected to Aristotle’s notion of the good life, which has to do not only with what’s equal, but what’s virtuous.
Justice takes these abstract ideas and applies them to concrete issues: affirmative action, sexual ethics, reparations; the ethics of lying, or surrogate pregnancy, or the draft. Sandel pulls out contradictions. He questions assumptions. He’s curious, and earnest.
As we try to figure out what justice means in 2020—for gig-economy workers, for Black people, for teachers, for migrants, for those who are impoverished, or sick, or incarcerated—it’s helpful and humbling to return to these arguments about dignity and respect, duty and consent. Understanding what’s been said about justice before might help us imagine what it looks like now. It might help us to be not just woke, but wise.
And talking to others about the deep moral beliefs behind their political positions (What do you think “the good life” is? What would your ideal society look like?) has real potential. Sandel concludes:
A more robust public engagement with our moral disagreements could provide a stronger, not a weaker basis for mutual respect…. We cannot know until we try.
Other things I read this week:
Back in New York, we loved tapping away in the Hungarian Pastry Shop over sludgy coffee and an almond horn. This essay at Lit Hub about the end of writing in cafés filled me with dread (and made me laugh).
Ah, the romance! The intrigue! The promise that you won’t actually have to write all day because your friends will stop by!… writing the Next Great Whatever novel while you sip espresso in your local is so much a part of the fantasy of Being a Writer.
Ibram X. Kendi’s powerful Atlantic cover story, “Is This the Beginning of the End of American Racism?,” addresses our nation’s longstanding denial and potential revolution.
Though it was hardly his intention, no president has caused more Americans to stop denying the existence of racism than Donald Trump.
You and I have chatted before about Joyce Carol Oates: I’m so charmed by this recent poem of hers.