Argument

Argument from Justice

Intro

Almost everyone has looked at the world and said, "That's not fair." A child dies of cancer while a tyrant dies rich and old in his bed. A con man gets away with it. A good person is slandered and never cleared. The complaint is not just that we dislike these things. We mean they are wrong, that the world is out of line with how it ought to be.

C.S. Lewis noticed something odd about that complaint when he was still an atheist. You cannot call a line crooked unless you know what a straight line is. If the universe is unjust, there has to be a real standard of justice it is failing to meet, and a universe of matter and chance does not come with one.

Immanuel Kant pushed the point one step further. Justice is not only a ruler for measuring; it is a demand. Good people should not end in ruin, and the wicked should not walk away clean. But nature does not sort anyone by what they deserve, and death closes the books with the accounts unsettled. If justice is real, someone must be able to settle them: a Judge who knows every hidden thing and has the power to make it right. Scripture names him in the question Abraham asked: "shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?"

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In full

The argument from justice runs in two stages. The first stage, associated with C.S. Lewis, is a presuppositional move: the judgment that the world, or some act within it, is unjust is a truth-apt judgment that measures what is against what ought to be, and so presupposes an objective standard of justice that is not identical with any person's preference, any culture's convention, or any evolved feeling. The second stage, associated with Immanuel Kant, moves from standard to sentence. Justice includes desert: the moral order requires that the righteous and the wicked finally receive what they are due, that happiness be proportioned to worthiness of it (the summum bonum). Kant argued that because the moral law obliges us to pursue that highest good, it must be possible, and since nature has no tendency to proportion fortune to virtue, its possibility requires a holy, omniscient and omnipotent author of nature, and a future in which the account can be settled. Kant framed the conclusion as a postulate of practical reason rather than a theoretical proof; this page combines his second stage with Lewis's realist first stage, so that the demand of justice is treated as an objective feature of the moral order and the inference to a Judge becomes a premise-conclusion argument. The argument's natural Christian landing is a final judgment, which Scripture announces (Acts 17:31; Romans 2:5-6). Its sharpest consequence cuts against the one who runs it: a Judge who renders "to every man according to his works" condemns everyone, which is why its companion, The Ought-Owe Argument, takes up the question of mercy.

Argument structure

Form

Deductive, with a presuppositional first stage. P1 and P2 form a transcendental move: the skeptic's own complaint of injustice is shown to presuppose the standard the skeptic denies. P3 through P6 then run a deductive chain from the reality of the standard to the existence of a Judge. P5 is the hinge, an application of the principle that a genuine obligation implies the possibility of its fulfilment, which is Kant's "ought implies can" turned from the individual agent to the moral order as a whole.

Soundness is contested: P1 is denied by moral anti-realists, P3 by those who treat justice as fairness in distribution without desert, and P5 by those who hold that the moral order can make demands that nothing will ever satisfy. Each premise is defended below.

Premise development

P1, Some things are genuinely unjust

Affirmative case:

1. The complaint is universal and sincere. Every culture has words for unfairness, and every child protests it before learning any theory. People do not say "I happen to dislike that the murderer went free"; they say he got away with it, which means something was owed and not paid.
2. Scripture voices the complaint itself. The psalmist confesses, "I was envious at the arrogant, When I saw the prosperity of the wicked" (Psalm 73:3). The martyrs cry, "How long, O Master, the holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?" (Revelation 6:10). The Bible does not hide the data the argument starts from.
3. The skeptic's strongest argument depends on it. The Problem of Evil is, in its most forceful form, a complaint of injustice: the world contains suffering it ought not to contain. Anyone who presses that objection has already granted P1.

Anticipated objections:

1. "Injustice is just a word for what we don't like."
2. "The universe isn't unjust; it is indifferent. Only agents can be unjust."

Rebuttals:

1. Then nothing is unjust, including slavery, genocide or the abuse of a child. The objector can hold that position, but cannot hold it and also bring a moral complaint against anything, including against God. Most people, offered that trade, keep the judgment and drop the theory. See Moral Argument on the Moorean shift.
2. Grant it, and the argument still runs. The unjust acts are done by agents: the murderer, the tyrant, the slanderer. P1 needs only that those acts are unjust and go unrectified. The indifference of the universe to them is exactly what P4 states.

P2, Injustice presupposes a standard

Affirmative case:

1. The straight-line point. C.S. Lewis recalled that as an atheist his argument against God was that the universe seemed cruel and unjust, and then asked how he had got the idea of just and unjust in the first place: a man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line.
2. A comparison needs two terms. To say "this is unjust" is to compare what is with what ought to be. If there is no real "ought," the comparison has nothing to compare against, and the sentence reports only the speaker's feeling.
3. Moral reform assumes it. We call the abolition of slavery a correction, not a change of fashion. That judgment measures past societies against a standard none of them invented.

Anticipated objections:

1. "The standard comes from society. Justice is whatever a fair social contract would produce."
2. "Evolution gave us a sense of fairness; even monkeys protest unequal rewards."

Rebuttals:

1. A contract can describe fairness; it cannot make it binding on those who reject it. If justice is what a society agrees to, then a society that agrees to slavery is just by definition, and the reformer who opposes it is unjust. The objector does not believe that, which shows the standard sits above every contract and judges it.
2. Evolution explains the feeling, not the truth of the judgment. A sense of fairness selected because it helped primates cooperate would feel the same whether or not anything is actually owed to anyone. The objector who debunks the feeling has debunked his own complaint about injustice with it. See Atheist Moral Realism Defeater.

P3, Justice is a demand, not only a measure

Affirmative case:

1. Justice includes desert. The core of justice in every legal tradition is that each receives what is due. "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" (Genesis 18:25) is Abraham's appeal to exactly that: it would be wrong "to slay the righteous with the wicked, that so the righteous should be as the wicked."
2. Kant's highest good. Immanuel Kant taught that the supreme good is not happiness alone but happiness joined to worthiness of it. In his Lectures on Ethics he describes the most perfect world as one "in which all rational beings are happy and are worthy of happiness," and warns that "if all men were to obtain this happiness without distinction of just and unjust, the highest good would not be realized, because though happiness would indeed exist, worthiness of it would not" (Kant, Lectures on Ethics, "The Ethical Systems of the Ancients," PDF p. 1).
3. The unvindicated victim. When a murderer dies in comfort, something is still owed to his victim. The intuition is not that the world would be nicer if he had been punished, but that a debt remains outstanding.

Anticipated objections:

1. "Justice is about fair distribution and fixing harms, not about punishment or desert."

Rebuttals:

1. Restoration presupposes desert. To restore a victim is to give back what was due to him; to call a punishment excessive is to say it exceeds what was deserved. Even restorative accounts of justice run on the concept of what is owed. Removing desert removes the very idea of a wrong to be put right.

P4, Nature cannot meet the demand

Affirmative case:

1. Fortune is not sorted by virtue. Rain falls on the just and the unjust. The wicked often prosper and the righteous often suffer, and no natural law tracks the difference.
2. Death closes the account. Once the victim and the wrongdoer are both dead, no human court can reach either one. The ledger of history ends unbalanced.
3. The early church saw the same gap. Athenagoras argued that "the award according to merit finds no place in the present existence, since many atheists and persons who practise every iniquity and wickedness live on to the last, unvisited by calamity, whilst, on the contrary, those who have manifestly lived an exemplary life in respect of every virtue, live in pain, in insult, in calumny and outrage, and suffering of all kinds" (On the Resurrection of the Dead XVIII, Schaff ANF 2, PDF p. 126). From that gap he concluded that a judgment after death must come.

Anticipated objections:

1. "Human justice systems do a decent job; we don't need a cosmic one."

Rebuttals:

1. Decent is the concession. Human courts miss the hidden crimes, the powerful, the dead, and the wrongs no statute names. Every honest judge admits that many debts are never collected. The argument concerns those, and they are not few.

P5, A real demand must be capable of being met

Affirmative case:

1. Ought implies can. No one is bound to do the impossible. Kant applied the same logic to the moral order as a whole: because the moral law commands us to pursue the highest good, its realization must be possible.
2. A standard that can never be satisfied is not a standard. If justice will never be done for the countless dead, then the demand that it be done is an illusion, and P1's complaint collapses back into preference. The skeptic who wants to keep the complaint must allow that justice can actually be done.

Anticipated objections:

1. "Some demands are simply tragic. Justice can be real and still never be satisfied."

Rebuttals:

1. Then justice is real only for the lucky. On that view the victims who die unvindicated were owed something by a moral order that has no means of paying and never will. The demand would be real in name and empty in fact, which is precisely the condition in which words like "owed" lose their meaning. The tragic view keeps the vocabulary of justice while giving up its substance.

P6, Only a Judge can meet it

Affirmative case:

1. The requirements are specific. To settle every account, a judge must know every deed, including the hidden ones; have power over every outcome, including what lies beyond death; and be himself perfectly just, or his verdicts would add new injustice. Those are the attributes of God, and no impersonal process has them.
2. Kant drew the same conclusion. In the Critique of Practical Reason he wrote that "it is only from a morally perfect (holy and good) and at the same time all-powerful will, and consequently only through harmony with this will, that we can hope to attain the summum bonum which the moral law makes it our duty to take as the object of our endeavours" (Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, quoted in The Idea of God in Kantian Philosophy, PDF p. 3).
3. Scripture names the Judge and the day. "The Rock, his work is perfect; For all his ways are justice: A God of faithfulness and without iniquity, Just and right is he" (Deuteronomy 32:4). God "hath appointed a day in which he will judge the world in righteousness by the man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead" (Acts 17:31).

Anticipated objections:

1. "Karma could balance the books without a personal God."
2. "Kant himself said this was not a proof, only a practical postulate."

Rebuttals:

1. Karma has no judge, and so no justice in the full sense. An impersonal law cannot weigh motive, know what was hidden, or distinguish a wrong done from a misfortune suffered. It also collects every debt without exception, which leaves no room for mercy. See Karma.
2. Correct, and that is why this page adds Lewis. Kant treated the moral law as a fact of reason but declined to call the postulate knowledge. Once P1 and P2 establish that justice is an objective standard rather than a subjective requirement of practical reason, the demand of P3 is an objective demand, and the inference to its condition is no longer merely practical.

Master objections to the whole argument

Tactical notes (live debate)

1. Start with a story, not a syllogism. Name a case of unpunished evil and ask, "Was that unjust, or just unpleasant?" Get the word "unjust" on the table.
2. Run the Socratic funnel. "Is anything truly unjust, not merely disliked?" Then, "Where does that standard come from?" Then, "If the person who did it dies untouched, is the debt cancelled or still owed?"
3. Turn the problem of evil. The objector's complaint about evil is a complaint of injustice. The argument does not dodge it; it shows the complaint needs a Judge to be true, and needs one who will act to be answered.
4. Do not stop at the Judge. Close by pointing out that a perfectly just Judge is a problem for everyone in the room. That opens the door to the gospel rather than to bare theism.

Live-cite kit

Scripture:

• Genesis 18:25 (ASV): "shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" The appeal to divine justice from inside the Bible.
• Deuteronomy 32:4 (ASV): "For all his ways are justice: A God of faithfulness and without iniquity, Just and right is he." Justice grounded in God's character.
• Acts 17:31 (ASV): "he hath appointed a day in which he will judge the world in righteousness." The appointed settlement, guaranteed by the resurrection.
• Romans 2:5-6 (ASV): "the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God; who will render to every man according to his works." Desert, finally rendered.

Scholarly and patristic:

• Kant, Lectures on Ethics (PDF p. 1): "if all men were to obtain this happiness without distinction of just and unjust, the highest good would not be realized."
• Athenagoras, On the Resurrection of the Dead XVIII (Schaff ANF 2, PDF p. 126): "the award according to merit finds no place in the present existence."
• C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, quoted in Frank Turek, Stealing from God (PDF p. 127): "A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line."

Aphorism / closer:

• "If nothing is really unjust, you have no complaint. If something is, you have a Judge."
• "Justice is good news for every victim and bad news for every sinner. That is why the cross matters."

Connection to Scripture

• Genesis 18:25, the Judge of all the earth does right
• Deuteronomy 32:4, all his ways are justice
• Psalm 73, the prosperity of the wicked, resolved in the sanctuary where the psalmist "considered their latter end"
• Ecclesiastes 12:14, every work and every hidden thing brought into judgment
• Revelation 6:9-11, the martyrs ask how long
• Acts 17:31, a day appointed and assured by the resurrection
• Romans 2:5-11, the righteous judgment of God according to works
• Romans 3:26, God just and the justifier

Patristic and scholarly anchors

• Athenagoras, On the Resurrection of the Dead XVIII (Schaff ANF 2): because merit is not rewarded in this life, a judgment after death must come.
• Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, "The Existence of God as a Postulate of Pure Practical Reason," and Lectures on Ethics: the highest good joins happiness to worthiness, and its possibility requires God.
• C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book I: the complaint of injustice presupposes a standard of justice.

See also

• The Ought-Owe Argument, the companion argument: if justice is real, every sinner is in debt, and only a Judge who pays his own ledger can be both just and merciful
• Moral Argument, the parent argument from objective moral values and duties
• Moral Arguments, the family of moral arguments
• Argument from Conscience, the inward witness to the same moral order
• Problem of Evil, the objection this argument turns on its head
• Problem of Evil, Free Will Defense, the companion defense on why evil is permitted now
• Theodicy, the wider question of God's justice in a fallen world
• Euthyphro Dilemma, on whether justice is above God
• Karma, the impersonal alternative and why it falls short
• Hell and Eternal Punishment, on what final justice involves
• H4941 - mishpat, the Hebrew word for justice in Genesis 18:25 and Deuteronomy 32:4
• H6664 - tzedeq, the Hebrew vocabulary of righteousness
• Arguments, master index