The Problem with Justice: Adventist Philosophers Review “Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization” – 3
In partnership with the Society of Adventist Philosophers, Spectrum will present reflections by SAP scholars on each chapter of Lewis R. Gordon’s Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization this summer. This is part one. (Gordon will be the Londis Lectureship Speaker on the SAP conference this fall.)
Every year I teach medical students a course called God and Human Suffering. One objective of the course is to nurture a nuanced perspective on the social and existential conditions that contribute to human suffering and the special responsibility of healthcare professionals in alleviating it.
In one session, I draw on public health research and examine the egregious racial disparities in health outcomes in the US between Black and white Americans. I trace this racial inequity in health back to slavery, Jim Crow laws, and several other post-Civil War discriminatory policies that led to many African Americans living in segregated neighborhoods and lacking access to adequate healthcare, quality housing, and education.
The most emotionally challenging part of the class is describing the terror African Americans endured between the 1880s and 1968, when close to 3,500 African Americans were lynched in the most cruel and gruesome ways. I show pictures of groups of white Christians posing proudly and happily next to the bodies of their brutalized victims. Christians and church leaders carried out many of these hangings, sometimes right after worship.
The terror of Jim Crow tells us that many Christians saw no tension between their faith and these brutal rituals of public violence. It was, for them, perfectly just to torture and murder African Americans for violating Jim Crow etiquette.
Most of my students find it hard to comprehend how something so obviously wrong and repugnant appeared to be justified to members of these white Christian communities. Lewis R.Gordon’s reflections on ethics and justice in chapter three of Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization illuminates the perplexing reality that justice is often wielded to defend the indefensible. Justice, Gordon boldly argues, “is not enough” (34).
It is often taken for granted that justice is a good thing and is worth fighting for. However, what justice entails is not always obvious. What is commonly considered just and right may turn out to be deplorable violations of human dignity. By pointing this out, Gordon does not advocate abandoning justice. Instead, he calls attention to the uneasy reality that our conception of justice often presumes that our current social norms and values are legitimate.
To clarify his argument, Gordon explains that an ethical obligation presupposes the humanity of the people to whom we are accountable. However, in a racist society, it is precisely the humanity of some people that is denied. In many contexts, some people are made “into things” and so are without rights (36). If the social system considers some people less than human and can thus be treated as property or undesirables, then the prevailing notion of justice means the legitimate oppression and domination of some by others.
The flip side of this is also the case: those who reject their status as things and behave in ways that assert their agency are doing “violence” to justice. Torture and murder are thus justified means to restore public order. Colonialists reasoned that if the Indigenous peoples in the Americas did not have rights to their lands because they were not “industrious” like Europeans, then they could be legitimately dispossessed. Similarly, African Americans who drank from the wrong water fountain or sat in the wrong seat on the bus are, according to the presumed theory of justice in the 1950s, legitimate targets of brutal law enforcement.
One of Gordon’s most provocative arguments in the chapter is that focusing on justice could trap us in an ideological framework that causes us to be insensitive to the reality outside of such frameworks. Accordingly, justice functions like a closed system through which our ethical perceptions are filtered. Like a person experiencing paranoia or a conspiracy theorist, justice shrinks our world into a loop of self-referentiality. Gordon calls practices that shrink our world “disciplinary decadence” (39).
For Gordon, the problem with justice is that it tempts us to believe that ethical issues can be settled in advance with the correct philosophical framework. This confidence assumes an unrealistic degree of universality and objectivity. But how can we be sure that our understanding of justice is valid? Is the liberal notion of individual freedom better than the Confucian model of harmony? Is libertarian freedom or the Nguni concept of Ubuntu (often translated as “I am because we are”) a healthier social ideal? Gordon points out that normative theories of European political philosophy are frequently considered universally valid, although many alternatives exist.
It would be a mistake to read Gordon as recommending ethical relativism. Instead, he contends that just as reality is always greater than the scientific and philosophical frameworks that seek to comprehend it, our moral responsibilities may transcend what is commonly considered right and just. To make his point, Gordon discusses at length one of the most influential political philosophers, John Rawls.
Rawls is considered by many to be the best philosopher of the liberal democracy. For Gordon, Rawls’s theory of justice is an excellent example of an approach to justice that falls prey to disciplinary decadence. Gordon contends that Rawls uncritically embraces a truncated view of human nature and political reality. These assumptions are present in modern European philosophy but are not shared by other indigenous traditions. For example, Rawls implicitly accepts Thomas Hobbes’s (anti-social) account of human beings as atomistic and isolated individuals. Additionally, he also assumes political power is fundamentally coercive rather than empowering.
Although Rawls believed his theory had progressive implications, he unconsciously embraced ideas closely aligned with colonial conquest and economic exploitation. Gordon shows that these assumptions led to Rawl prioritizing civil and political liberties rather than economic equity, the material basis for realizing one’s freedom in the community. In contrast, Charles Houston, an African American jurist and former Dean of Howard University Law School, formulated a theory of justice before Rawls that prioritizes correcting economic disparities (44). According to Gordon, Houston’s approach is far more attentive to human beings’ social and material nature than Rawls’s.
For Gordon, serving true justice requires ” suspending ” and transcending our current understanding of it. Thus, his argument is also a challenge to action. Gordon argues that transcending current norms requires political action, not individual moral formation. Politics, for Gordon, cannot be subordinated to ethics because political action creates new norms. Political action aims to generate new social realities in which better ethics can take root.
One might ask Gordon, however, where these new values would come from. Indeed, better social norms and values are not invented out of thin air. As in previous chapters, Gordon advocates “intercommunicating or creolized practices of normative production” (Gordon 2020, 47). In other words, an essential task of philosophy is to de-center European philosophical paradigms and to engage with many decolonial, Indigenous traditions and struggles. By thinking between cultures and traditions, something new might emerge that can guide the world out of colonial legacies.
This chapter offers many valuable insights about the limits of justice, moral philosophy, and the need to decolonize political thought. Gordon points a way forward for those who are concerned about the rise of fascism and the dehumanization of migrants and refugees today. However, I wonder if Gordon neglected the political potential of leveraging moral philosophy to generate new norms and values. Indeed, many ethicists do not see themselves as defending hegemonic norms.
Political philosophies that clarify and advance concepts of justice are critical to guiding global human rights movements. For instance, philosopher Madison Powers and founder of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics Ruth Faden developed an inductive theory of justice for public health advocacy by paying attention to what worldwide social movements demand from their institutions. It is a creative framework that draws on ideas from different philosophical traditions and lived realities.
It is unclear why normative political philosophy must fall prey to disciplinary decadence if philosophers recognize the limits of such frameworks. Even the most radical political action is informed, at least in part, by moral ideals, such as freedom, equality, and human dignity. It seems unavoidable that some normative theory always lies in the background of political judgments, if only implicitly. In practice, the critical use of these concepts may also be necessary for social movements to gain traction. As Gordon acknowledges, even new norms do not emerge from a vacuum. Moral philosophers may yet have a role to play in critiquing inadequate norms and concepts in favor of better ones.
