Vol. XXXVIII / 1 - Studia Moralia

THE INJUSTICE OF JUSTICE AND THE JUSTICE OF INJUSTICE 259
can complement each other if they are able to speak as equals
and in mutual respect. Justice is often blind. If blind, it needs to
rely on hearing. If it is also deaf to the voice of half the people in
the world, the face of justice is distorted into “the madness a
dying soul,” and justice becomes “no respecter of persons.” The
voice of the ethic of care of women may remove the blindfold
from men’s eyes, just as the voice of the ethic of justice may
remove the blindfold from women’s. True equity requires caring
and conformity, true equality requires principled reflection and
rational deliberation. It has taken us a while to realize this, but
it is the justice that Jesus both taught and practiced.
Beyond gender differences, the psychological data also
reveals a fundamental difference in the way people understand
and use justice concepts depending upon the type of social
situations in which decisions are made and actions carried out.
In the course of a week, most people will find themselves
making moral decisions within and across many different moral
domains. 62 These moral situations are in part outlined or
delineated by two factors, the nature of the objective
relationship that the actor has with others in the action
opportunity (the parameters of which are offered by the moral
domain), and the inner reasoning processes at work in the actor
which relates his knowledge of the relevant principles and rules
to their applicability in the concrete action situation. This twofold
division roughly corresponds to the classical distinction
between objective and subjective morality, between the concerns
of phronesis and deontology. What unifies these two activities or
directions are principles of morality. As Agnes Heller reminds
us, there are in fact distinguishable social and moral clusters in
which justice concepts may mean different things, and make
different demands upon people. There are also transclusteral
aspects of justice which help the individual to integrate and
make sense of all of the others. Separating these, and properly
ordering them is part of the work of individual conscience in its
relationship to legitimate authority. 63
62
A. MACINTYRE, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, pp. 1-2.
63
A. HELLER, General Ethics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 39-44; 106-
113.