Vol. XXXVIII / 1 - Studia Moralia

THE INJUSTICE OF JUSTICE AND THE JUSTICE OF INJUSTICE 233
need to take off the blindfold or the bandage, in order to see why
and how the innocent as well as the guilty are often struck down
with the sword, while some of the guilty are able to evade the
sword by placing tokens of their worth into the scales of justice’s
other hand. One way to do this is to look upon the faces of those
who have been struck, and those whose money has tipped the
scales.
The methodological option for the primacy of injustices
around and among us as a starting point in reflection about
justice is intriguing to me for a variety of reasons. First, there is
the admonition in recent Magisterial teaching that the moral
theologian is always to be guided in his research and reflection
by theological truth. 7 One of those truths is that none of us is
just yet all of us are called to justice. Magisterial teaching also
reminds us that the formal dimensions of a moral act can never
be separated from its bodily dimensions, 8 that we are called to
preserve a harmony between faith and life, 9 and of course we
have the insight of the Church’s pastoral mission that one of the
privileged places where theological truth and the will of God
reveals itself is in our concrete real lived experience. 10 Second, a
similar approach has already been taken up in philosophical and
legal ethics by people like Kurt Baier and Joel Feinberg. Baier
suggests that the proper domain of justice can be located if “…
instead of asking what justice consists in, we start by exploring
the various things of which we say that they are just and
unjust.” 11 Feinberg, who rightly points out that the classical
definitions of types of justice (commutative, distributive,
justice. If justice begins with the correction of injustices, then the most
important tools for understanding justice will be the stories of injustice as
experienced by the oppressed and the tools of social and historical analysis
that help to illumine the process by which those historical injustices arose
and the meaning of them in the lives of the victims.” K. LEBACQZ, Justice in
an Unjust World (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1987), p. 150.
7
Veritatis Splendor 84.
8
Ibid., 49.
9
Ibid., 26.
10
Gaudium et Spes 34-35.
11
K. BAIER, The Rational and the Moral Order: The Social Roots of Reason
and Morality (Chicago: Open Court, 1995), p. 330.