David Amrock

To inquire after the true nature of morality or ethics, I think it’s helpful to start by highlighting a crucial folly of our own public morality: the conflation of justice and violence.

In American terms, at least, it’s supposed that violence can actually constitute justice. But the merest inquiry into the meaning of these two words reveals that they must be mutually exclusive. Justice can only be defined in terms of the good, violence only in terms of the bad.

This is not to say, of course, that justice and violence are easily defined. It’s often unclear whether violence is supposed to be reserved for force visited upon a person or an animal, or whether one can be violent against inanimate objects or property. And there is inevitably a gray area between these alternatives: is the destruction of the crop I live off of a form of violence against me?

By contrast, I find the use of the word justice less confused than simply false. In American culture, justice is typically conceived of as a setting things right for someone wronged, and by extension justice is usually something visited upon the wrongdoer (i.e. “retributive justice”).

In the case of, say, theft, we can indeed partially set things right by taking back what’s rightfully ours. But I say partially because we can only halt the ongoing unpleasantness of lacking whatever was stolen. What we can’t do is erase the fact that the theft happened.

In the case of harm there is nothing that can be done to the wrongdoer that then sets things right. Harm already done can’t be revisited. The forms of revenge so often conceived of as justice do not restore anything – instead, they bring further harm into the world. The good of revenge exists only in the mind of the doer, and only in the case at hand. It is thus a relativistic good, and a vanishingly small one.

What then of defense? Shouldn’t we defend ourselves and others from harm? Isn’t violence done in defense always, as the usual thinking goes, justified? I think the concept of justification underscores better than anything the weakness of our conceptions of right and wrong.

The notion of justification is that we can make the bad good so long as it serves the good of ourselves. Again the good becomes merely relative. Is it good that we defend ourselves? Good for us. Is it bad that we resort to violence? Bad for someone else. This does not lead us to a useful ethics. There is no moral content in “I do what is good for me” – that’s the morality of bacteria.

There is objective good, true justice, only where there isn’t bad. And human sentience ensures the bad is as ubiquitous as the good. The nature of human morality thus is in recognizing our own pain in the face of another and resolving not to cause such pain. (And, I think, resolving to alleviate it instead.) Total, pure justice is permanently elusive, but what that leaves us with is our desire for justice, and this must mean, in the end, a desire not to harm.

There is no righteousness in revenge, or even in self-defense. Rather than being “justified,” defensive violence is marked by its unavoidability, and thus its detachment from the moral calculus. It’s only the action we have a choice about that falls within the purview of moral consideration.

From here we have to ask whether violent institutions – the violence that society builds up and programatizes deliberately – are acceptable, which calls into question such banalities as war and what is dubiously called the “justice system,” i.e. the punitive approach to criminal law.

It will doubtless be remarked that both institutions do indeed qualify as defensive, that we have no choice in implementing them, that we must implement them or else harm will befall us.

I don’t deny that our society can’t instantly eliminate every institution that qualifies as violent without likely allowing harm. What I question, and what the American public fails to question time and again, is whether these institutions do the defensive work we assume they do: do the people we treat violently need to be treated violently (I think often not), and do we in fact reproduce the very harm we fear by the highly institutionalized means we construct (I think often so). There is a burden of proof for the defensive nature of the violence we choose to commit through our institutions. We have, all the time, greater and greater means to consider it. We mostly don’t.

It’s a cliché that “violence begets violence,” but what’s left out of the cliché is that there are alternatives to violence, and that moral work is defined exactly in the work we do to find and enact those alternatives. This is an issue that predates our society, and one we ritually avoid.