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A: Good Professor, of my
right to ask I lack, but my desire to apply to my faculties the philosophical
dimensions of law I leave to your judgment. Tell me, Good Professor, what
justice is, having explained it, rest my probing mind.
B: Probing minds shouldn't rest. Inquisitive minds are like the arguments of two philosophers,
they shouldn’t relent. Now, you ask a baffling question and of my 30 years of
looking for the answer, isn’t embarrassing that I possess no answer?
A: To that extent, Good
Professor, I can surmise. The subject, as it were, produces more heat than
light...
B: Careful. Not heat.
Because if you speak of heat we are presupposing that it is an emotive topic,
an area that can evoke public outrage. To my mind, this has been a question for
professors to grapple with in the academic world. As the subject continues to
occupy their minds, to a large extent, justice has been individualised and has been defined in terms
of their application in their lives.
A: Most certainly.
Consequently, what would be just would be out of “positive outcome” of a
decision of a fact-finder and judge and unjust if not along these lines. But is
this what justice presupposes?
B: Justice is not a
limited concept, fortunately or unfortunately. Justice is a fountain
wherewithal the refreshing waters of eternal replenishment abound. But not
without misgivings. Thomas Jefferson ‘trembled
for his country’ upon the staggering truth that ‘God is just’ and that ‘His justice
cannot sleep forever’. Wasn’t it Mohandas Gandhi who said that ‘there is a
higher court than courts of justice and that is the court of conscience which
supersedes all other courts’? We are also reminded of Martin Luther King, Jr. who
observed that ‘the moral arc of the universe bends at the elbow of justice’.
So,
good friend in search of knowledge, it is good you ask that we may, in a manner
of speaking, discuss some of these realities. To discuss justice is to discuss
the mysteries of the universe: one never exhausted it.
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