Understanding Justice

Wednesday, March 4, 2026

The war continues.  Iran seems to have a successor leader, but they can’t seem to get him “elected.”  Our efforts appear to be achieving what we have set out to achieve.  It is going to take a while to reach our end goals, but so far the journey is going well.  and so I feel a need to turn to another topic, at least for today.  Let’s talk about justice.

“Economic Justice,” “Social Justice,” “Environmental Justice” are terms you hear frequently in liberal circles – really frequently in Christian liberal circles.  So I did some digging.  I have to be honest, I cannot make heads or tales of it.  It’s a lot of words, with almost none of them being pragmatic in any fashion.  (Here’s an example.)  In the end it seems to be a nice sounding principle to which people can appeal to justify whatever political end they seem to be pursuing at the moment – typically it involves some redistributionist policy of some sort.

For example, I was engaged in a discussion about college admissions some time ago, arguing that racial quotas in such were wrong.  I argued that taking a position from a qualified student and giving it to a lesser qualified student simply on the basis of race was of itself racist.  One of the people in the discussion countered, “What about justice?  That person of color did not have access to all the education the qualified student did.”  Let’s examine the transaction the justice based interlocutor proposed.

He proposed taking from someone to give to somebody else.  Unlike economics, college admissions is a zero sum game – only so many students get into college X each year.   So is justice served by taking admission away from someone that worked very hard to qualify for admission or is it simply some sort of institutional theft justified by a lot of philosophical jargon? There is no justice in the transaction proposed, there is simply a shift in preferences away from academic qualifications and towards race.

“Justice” advocates talk a lot about the virtues while often ignoring the virtues’ counterpart – the Seven Deadly Sins of Catholic theology.  It is fascinating that among the Seven Deadlys are both “greed” and “sloth.”  Greed is the utterly selfish accumulation of wealth.  Sloth is not trying.  It seems to me that the kind of transactions proposed by the “justice” crowd amount to taking from the greedy and giving to the slothful.  Such a transaction still promotes sin.  Why would a Christian buy into something like that?  I thought the idea of Christianity was to overcome sin?

I will not deny that the African-American kid from the southside of Chicago is going to have a harder time getting into an Ivy League school than the white kid from Beverly Hills.  I am simply arguing that taking an admission from the Beverly Hills kid to give it to the lesser qualified Chicago kid is not just.  So how do we get to justice?

I think the answer lies in noting that both greed and sloth are among the Seven Deadly Sins.  Justice is impossible while sin rules.  Christians need to maintain their focus on the mission Christ has sent us on – making disciples of all nations – conquering sin.  I will admit to not knowing exactly how justice will look, but I do know I’ll never find out until sin is fully conquered.