On Becoming the Monster

Nietzsche is watching

I believe that Donald Trump's politics are best described as American fascism. Also—because apparently this has to be said these days—it is very bad thing to be a fascist because fascism is a very bad thing, has been a very bad thing for as long as it has been a thing, and will always be a very bad thing. For that reason it has been encouraging to watch the Democrats oppose Trump on grounds which are often (not always) both strong* and moral**.

That is not to say that the Democrats are, as a whole or as individuals, especially wonderful or especially moral. What it does say is that the President's behavior and speech has been so bad that his political opponents, opportunistic or ideologically pure, have been able to assume the moral and logical high ground for quite some time; with the concomitant result that they have enjoyed the alliance of moral and reasonable people from outside their own political party. They have, of course, also enjoyed the alliance of political opportunists from outside their own party, but that would have happened no matter who the president was.

As a result of all this, we find ourselves in a position where we don't really know the degree to which Democrats as a whole, and individually, really are proponents of reason and morality (and I want to state for the record that both of these categories can operate independently of a person's general politics). They may all be shining beacons of integrity an reason, or they may all be crummy opportunists who are only too eager to exploit the country. In all likelihood of course, the truth lies somewhere between those poles. Hypocrisy is, after all, the tax that vice pays to virtue which is why virtue often characterizes the preferred rhetoric and methodology of those politicians to whom it is available as a sufficiently powerful attack on their opponents.

All of this is well and good and is something I have kept in mind over the course of the Trump presidency. Recently, however, I have started to notice a few Democratic and anti-Trump figures arguing that "winning" in 2020 is going to require Democrats to "play dirty". I want to highlight that sentiment and place a giant warning circle around it. 

Ezra Klein over at Vox wrote what I think is the most insightful and accurate account of the Trumpification of white American Evangelicalsim and it is all about power. In the second paragraph of the piece (the entirety of which is well worth reading) Klein lays out the thesis:

Enter Donald Trump. Whatever Trump’s moral failings, he’s a street fighter suited for an era of political combat. Christian conservatives believe — rightly or wrongly — that they’ve been held back by their sense of righteousness, grace, and gentility, with disastrous results. Trump operates without restraint. He is the enemy they believe the secular deserve, and perhaps unfortunately, the champion they need. Understanding this dynamic is crucial to understanding the psychology that attracts establishment Republicans to Trump, and convinces them that his offense is their best defense.

This... happened

The choice which white Evangelicalism made in 2016, which has scandalized so many other US Christians and has played a significant role in alienating a portion of Gen X and Millennial Americans who grew up within US Evangelicalism is the choice to abandon "their sense of righteousness, grace, gentility"—in other words, to abandon strong moral arguments—in favor of what they euphemistically call "street fighter" tactics. There is a whole lot that could be said about this and Klein has already said much of it, but I want to focus here on the warning that this needs to be for those of us who are committed to actually working to build a better world, to standing against injustice, to being on the side of the oppressed and the marginalized. The great temptation is to descend.

It is vital that we not forget, that we not fail to notice, that white American Evangelicals have justified their embrace of a philandering, racist, misogynist, dirtbag by first concluding that evil (here I am referring specifically to the many actions and words of Trump which cause white American Evangelicals to squirm and say things like "we didn't elect a Sunday School teacher") is finally more powerful than good. Machiavelli's view that "the ends justify the means"—while a very great evil—remains relatively harmless against those who believe that good is more powerful than evil. It is only once we begin to believe that lies are more powerful than the truth, that subterfuge and misrepresentation is more powerful than integrity that Machiavelli's poison can begin to really infect our thinking.

I do not have a whole lot of use for Nietzsche but he was 100% on the ball when he warned "Beware that, when fighting monsters, you do not yourself become a monster." If we become that which we seek to defeat, only with a different hue, then in that same moment we have already lost the capacity to win. I am afraid that there is no help for it. Evil cannot be resisted on its own grounds of lies, deceit, bullying, and violence, evil gives way only to good and good will not prevail without faith. It is in the nature of good that it nearly always appears the weaker power at first. Good will prevail—it must prevail—but in the short term the Truth, Integrity, Nuance, Complexity, and Honesty, will always seem weaker and more fragile than the smarmy and swaggering oversimplified and obfuscating lies of evil.

Good ends will never be achieved through evil means, or put more directly, evil means will never succeed in achieving good ends—the means always entail then ends—and if we forget that, we are doomed to create our own Trump.

Footnotes:

*Strong grounds would be grounds which are, and should be, convincing to a rational, reasonable person.

**Moral grounds would be grounds which do, and should, carry moral weight and do not involve advocating immoral motives or actions.

Dancing Back Into Elfland

Imagine a forest. Make it a good forest. Actually imagine a forest you can’t really imagine because the real world is always surprising you; the real world is a source of wonder and of encountering that which is beyond our own selves. It contains danger, and pain, and beauty, and grandeur. So imagine a forest you can’t quite imagine — a forest haunted by wonder.

Now imagine that you are traveling through that forest. How do you want to do it? What is, in your mind, the best possible way to be traveling in a forest? Do you want a man-made highway running through it? Do you want a car to drive on that road? Maybe a hiking path? Or do you even really want to get out of the forest? Maybe you are happy with a trail? Or how about just a guide — someone who really knows this forest and who can make your time here worth while.

Now imagine a life. Make it a good life. Actually imagine a life you can’t really imagine because real life is always a surprise; real life is a source of wonder and of encountering that which is beyond our own selves. It contains danger, and pain, and beauty, and grandeur. So imagine a life you can’t quite imagine — a life haunted by wonder.

Now imagine that you are living that life. How do you want to do it? What is, in your mind, the best possible way of living through a life? Do you want man-made structures cutting though it to make it easier to navigate? Do you want a way to insulate yourself from the extremes of the life? Maybe some rules for how get through it? Or do you even really want to get out of the life? Maybe you are happy with some general guidelines for living it? Or how about just a guide — someone intimately acquainted with suffering and joy, with living itself and can make your time in the life worthwhile.

This comparison begins to get at what I think my favorite poem in the DaoDeJing is getting at. Poem 38 reads in part as follows:

A truly good man is not aware of his goodness,And is therefore good.A foolish man tries to be good,And is therefore not good.… Therefore when Tao is lost, there is goodness.When goodness is lost, there is kindness.When kindness is lost, there is justice.When justice is lost, there is ritual.Now ritual is the husk of faith and loyalty, the beginning of confusion.Knowledge of the future is only a flowery trapping of the Tao.It is the beginning of folly.

This echoes one of the best quotes from C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity:

…though Christianity seems at the first to be all about morality, all about duties and rules and guilt and virtue, yet it leads you on, out of all that, into something beyond. One has a glimpse of a country where they do not talk of those things, except perhaps as a joke. Every one there is filled full with what we should call goodness as a mirror is filled with light. But they do not call it goodness. They do not call it anything. They are not thinking of it. They are too busy looking at the source from which it comes.

And the same sentiment appears in the Mystic Muslim Poet Rumi:

Beyond good and bad, there is a field, I’ll meet you there.

Aristotle made similar points when he talked about morality, calling it not at act, but a habit. Of course each of these thinkers had different ideas about how to achieve this state of goodness, but the thing they all seem to agree on — to have discovered — is that the good life, the right life, is an un-reflective sort of thing. That is, they saw that living well is not about a technique. It is wandering in a forest, not getting through the forest. Specifically, for each of these folks, any ethical system is a degradation from the whole point of things. Ethical systems are, at best, a concession to our brokenness.

I find that DaoDeJing breaks it down most clearly, starting with the the first step down from right-being (the Tao/Dao). The poem presents, in roughly narrative form, a brief taxonomy of ethical systems, all of which have had their own moments in history.

Non-Ethics and Flourishing

The Tao

As a Christian, I would characterize being with the Tao/Dao as being with Christ. It is following the suffering King, the Prince of Peace, and Lord of Joy in the dance of life. To follow Jesus is to give up on the notion of where we are going and to focus instead in who we are with. It is a matter of being rather than a matter of getting somewhere. This is existence characterized by relationship and love, it is being in the forest; nobody knows what it leads to, we only know that it is right it is flourishing.

Virtue Ethics

Therefore when Tao is lost, there is goodness.

The loss of un-reflective, flourishing existence, is goodness. A preoccupation with becoming like the sort of person who just is un-reflectively good. This is the ethics enunciated by Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, it is a system built, not out of an intimate knowledge of the Tao, but of a careful observation of those who do. To characterize this shift in Biblical terms, it is the fall, an attempt to systematize and know what is beyond knowledge. It is a diminution because it is an attempt to squeeze the infinitude of possibilities of being into our finite minds. It is the centipede’s dilemma: we stop dancing in order to work out how we were doing it and find that we cannot start again. So we begin to study other dancers and awkwardly ape their movements.

Kantian Ethics

When goodness is lost, there is kindness.

When that proves unsustainable, when we discover that we do not have the mental or moral fortitude to make ourselves into good persons, we resort and therefore diminish to kindness. Kindness — treating people correctly, as people — is also characteristic of un-reflectively good people but it is not a rule it is something they simply are. This is the ethics of people who know what flourishing looks like and are trying to discipline themselves towards it. Imagine someone who is trying to behave in a kind way, not because kindness is a natural reaction for them but because they know that they ought to be, it feels a little uncomfortable doesn’t it?

Divine Command Theory — the Rules

When kindness is lost, there is justice.

When people trying to be kind to one another fails to hold society together we resort of laws (what Laozi characterizes as justice though I don’t particularly like that definition of the word). We make rules prohibiting harmful behavior and then we institutionalize ways in which to harm the people who break those rules. At this level we get the many ethical systems which insist on rigid set of rules (or the principles from which those rules ought to be derived). This is also the level on which our whole system of human rights operates — it is the level below which we have tried to guarantee we will not go. This is where most religions live and operate in discomfort together with other less religious secular systems and the classically liberal understanding of human rights.

Utilitarianism, Objectivism

When justice is lost, there is ritual.

If we take the concept of ritual out of a classical Chinese context and put it in a contemporary Western one we get something like social norms or manners. When basic allegiance to human rights and laws fails to guarantee social coherence or human flourishing, we resort to being polite to one another. The whole idea here is that we need to just not hurt anybody. Think about the number of calls there have been recently for a return to civility or decorum. The yearning for norms which are enforced by social acceptance rather than institutional violence seems to be the last gasp of a society trying to hold together as a benefit to its own members. When it fails, there isn’t much left; all of our barriers to evil have been broken. We are no longer un-reflectively good, we are not trying to emulate goodness, virtue holds insufficient attraction for us, our laws have become brutal and unjust, and social acceptance has become tyrannical and stifling.

The Narrative

It is worth pointing out that this downward progression can also be characterized as forward movement. Each system is built, in some ways, on a recognition of the failures of the types of system above it. Virtue ethics begins with the recognition that there is flourishing and that we aren’t doing it. Justice ethics recognizes that those who try and fail to be virtuous without structural and institutional constraints tend to end up making things worse for everyone (think about the misogyny of the Roman empire’s ultimate conflation of virtue with masculinity) so, giving up on making people better, we bring in rules backed by the threat of violence in order to establish a sort of lowest common denominator in our relationships with one another (and sometimes, but far to rarely, the rest of the world). But those power structures and systems always seem to end up disenfranchising and ultimately marginalizing and oppressing people so we dismantle them, we deconstruct them, and we narrow the scope of our concern to harm and fairness. At this point we are probably having some trouble enunciating any justification for those to concerns (instead the easy thing to do is to become appalled with anyone who would dare to question them) but we are clinging to them with intense focus. This is also a movement forward, the concerns at each stage were real and serious concerns; with the failure of each previous stage the scope of our moral universe narrowed but also intensified, it is a process of “Maybe we can’t do all of it but we will at least manage this area of greatest concern”. But the thing is doomed, it must eventually fall to pieces as the debates about negative and positive rights emerge, as harm is accepted for the sake of preventing more or different harm to those more worthy of protection.

And then we are back where we started, or at a Looking Glass Land image of where we started. The systems have failed, the destination has evaporated or proved impossibly distant. There is only a lost wandering in the woods. We did not know good and evil, then we learned it, and now we have lost it again. It was always beyond us, the question is what comes next. We were, then we thought we knew but did not know, now we begin to know that we do not know.

Now if only we could stop trying to get somewhere and just be, we might begin to dance again

Crises—Moral Opportunism or Moments of Moral Clarity?

Supernova

So this poem appears in the collection Wells of Knight (click HERE for my review of the full collection) by my friend Gabriel Blanchard who blogs over at Mudblood Catholic. While the collection was released in February of this year, I first encountered it years earlier when Gabriel read it to our writers group/philosophy club (we call the group Pints & Prose) and it sort of messed me up. Yes, the subject of the poem is tragic, and yes, the poem showcases Gabriel's particular talent for poignancy but that isn't what got me. It is message of the poem itself that has shaped me(1).

Beyond the tragedy of the suicide in Supernova is the instrumentalization of the suicide. Now that it is too late for him to change his mind, the suicide spends his last minutes being informed of how competing interests are going to use his death to further their own agendas. The tragedy behind the tragedy is its reduction to argument-fodder. It is a reduction which effectively erases the personhood of the suicide himself; not only has he lost his life, he has lost possession of his life's (and death's) meaning.

What I took away from Supernova is a visceral reminder of the second (and to my mind far superior) formulation of Kant's Categorical Imperative(2): That we should treat persons (ourselves and others) always as ends in themselves and never as means only. The application here is that we should never reduce a person to a tool only, that is, we must not instrumentalize a person. Any action we take has to be one which recognizes the full personhood of the persons whom that action will impact. It is important to notice at this point that this does not mean that we should never act in a way that treats people as a means—the only is crucial here—it means that we cannot treat persons as mere means. After all it is basic to cooperation that we are using ourselves and others to achieve a goal. What it important is that we do not, at the same time, lose sight of that person's own good. We can (often we should) use people to accomplish our goals, but we can only do that if acting in that way benefits them as well.

After the horrible mass shooting in Las Vegas the reactions were rapid and predictable: We started with grief, already tinged with a little suspicion. We watched one another on social media to see how others were reacting, many of us watched particular accounts and outlets for cues. Calls to reexamine gun regulations came out at nearly the exact same time as calls to not talk about gun regulation and attempts to portray the people who talk about gun regulation in the immediate aftermath of a gun related tragedy as macabre and insensitive. The White House has promised "we'll be talking about gun laws" and has also said that we should not talk about guns yet. The talk show hosts have talked about the shooting and have tried to use their platforms to move the country on the issue (I'll post two of the more moving monologues at the bottom) and various media outlets and analysts have attempted to give us some insight into the issue(3). And while the analysts skew left, the right has been staking out a "moral high ground" position by calling on everyone not to "politicize" the tragedy. And of course the crazies are already screaming "conspiracy."

So... yeah this isn't going very well

Here is the thing. We can't not politicize this tragedy.

It is basic to human nature that when something bad happens we want to help. That is a good thing. People near Las Vegas were lining up to donate blood because that is a way they knew they could help. The stories already coming out of this tragedy about the heroism of first responders and crowd members reactions to the shooter are heartbreakingly beautiful(4). In times of tragedy many of us want to help. It is what we do. But most of us can't actually do much. We can donate money to the red cross and we can post supportive statements on social media, but after this sort of tragedy there isn't a whole lot we can do.

Except that we can try to make sure it doesn't happen again. See, there are actually two problems with calls not to politicize this (or any of the other) shooting tragedies. The first problem is that it smuggles in (or sometimes outright states) an accusation of opportunism. The underlying message in the calls against politicization is that calls to change our laws in an attempt to prevent future tragedies are violations of the second formulation of Kant's categorical imperative: that people who call for gun regulation in the wake of these crises are reducing the victims to political tools.

The status quo is an invisible position

but it is still a position

That charge may or may not be accurate—we cannot know the hearts or basic motivations of anyone else—but it is certainly not charitable. To conclude that someone who calls for gun control in the wake of a mass shooting is violating the second formulation of the categorical imperative is to forget that it is entirely possible to relate to people as both means and ends. It is to assume that the gun control advocate does not believe that gun regulation is in the interest of the victims (or their families and goals). And those are some pretty ridiculous assumptions.

The second big problem with calls not to politicize these tragedies is the fact that "we should not change our laws in light of these events" is, itself, a political position. I don't know how to emphasize this enough. Because we live in an existing country, with existing laws and existing social structures, to call for silence is to tacitly advocate for the politics of the status quo. "Things should not change" is just as political a statement as "things should change".

Of course it doesn't feel that way to the folks making the charge. The status quo doesn't feel like a position, it feels like "normal". So calls to change the status quo hurt. People may well be crying "opportunism" because it feels like they are being attacked when they are hurting and vulnerable. At the same time gun regulation people are calling for moral clarity in light of greater evidence of damage, others are feel that their emotions are being manipulated in their moment of pain—and they want to push back.

So how should we respond to tragedies like this? My only real recommendation is that we try to do it with a lot more charity and a little more honestly. We mourn, and we help. Just don't try to pretend that people who want to help in a different way aren't doing the same thing that you are. What looks to you like moral opportunism may be their moment of moral clarity.

  

Footnotes

(1) I like to imagine that I got out of Supernova at least roughly the message that Gabriel meant to put into it but if not, then I will have to be content with thanking happy chance.
(2) I am not, as a rule, an enormous fan of Kantian ethics. However, with quite a few other non-Kantian ethicists, I am a fan of the second formulation. So please don't read this as an endorsement of Kantian Deontological ethics as such.
(3) Fivethirtyeight.com has a compelling piece about the statistical victims of gun violence (it is suicides) for example.
(4) Also there is the story of that one guy who reacted in a quintessentially American way and stood up under fire to flip the shooter the bird.

Wisdom of the Vikings Part 4: Worldliness

I know you got skills girl.

Worldliness

The traveller must

train his wits.

All is easy at home.

He who knows little

is a laughing-stock

amongst men of the world

This is part 4 in an ongoing series (the series starts HERE) bringing together the Hávamál (a collection of Norse wisdom poetry) and the still-evolving rules and mores of the Internet, particularly as they are developing in the realm of social media.

While this particular bit of wisdom might seem to be a fairly prosaic platitude on prudence, I think it actually represents a particularly salient perspective on the subject. The more contemporary platitude is familiar enough: Better to  remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt has be variously attributed to Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln and few others (quote investigator has a nice treatment here). It provides the worthwhile advice that talking too quickly can get you into trouble and that it is when we speak - or type - in haste that we are most likely to embarrass ourselves. It's certainly a helpful couple of cents for anyone getting ready to venture into the wild anarchy of online forums and contentious Facebook threads.

But in this piece from the Hávamál we tap into a piece of wisdom more precisely directed at the wild unregulated frontier environment of Vikings and, per my hypothesis, the internet. Online the great tendency and temptation is to engage with the full force of one's personality and opinion. The anonymity of the web is infamously heady and it can be tempting to show off one's erudition or unload the full weight of your opinions on some poor, unsuspecting commenter, much like a young Viking warrior eager to prove her mettle by pitting her skills against some older stranger. Worldliness reminds us that having been considered a wit among your circle of friends or a bright student in your own school is no guarantee then when you go to cross words (or axes) with strangers in a strange place, you won't end up humiliated. Thus the wise viking, like the wise internet user (anyone one want to start recommending Viking-esque titles for internet users? I sense a developing need for such a term. Put your ideas in the com-box) must train his wits and remember that what was easy at home (on his own Facebook page or Twitter feed) surrounded by friends and family (in that internet echo-chamber where we can control whom we interact with and how we are perceived) may prove woefully inadequate amongst men of the world (in the larger world of forums and com-boxes). 

Part 5 is HERE

Click to get the Hávamál on Amazon

Wisdom of the Vikings Part 2: How to Seat a Guest

How to Seat a Guest

Giver of the feast!

Your guest is here.

Where shall he sit?

Fast temper grows 

in a far seat

Prompt him not to prove

his mettle.

One thing I think is really exciting about internet interaction culture is that it has caused us to rethink our understanding of hospitality. In historically individualistic "western" America, we have adopted a hospitality culture formed out of paradoxically government-ensured safety. Our hospitality ideals are not, therefore, driven by concerns over safety and the preservation of social peace, but by the promulgation of comfort and warmth. As a result we largely restrict our hospitality to those we are comfortable with and often feel justified being inhospitable to those with whom we prefer not to interact. If we don't feel comfortable with someone we have little difficulty ensuring that they do not enter our homes, we can be fairly effective in cutting off contact with them.

While this situation has its own strengths and weaknesses, it is noticeably different from the contexts of both Medieval Iceland and the internet, where it would require significant and peculiar security measures to keep someone out. Furthermore if we commit shaming, unfriendly, and inhospitable acts against someone in America, we are not in any particular danger from them, whereas in Viking Iceland such an insult or even simple failure to honor a guest could reasonably be expected to result in violence and even death.

Online the consequences are not that dire of course, but they are similarly volatile. A "guest" or commenter on a blog or in a Facebook feed needs to be greeted with respect and welcome. Think back to how many host-replies begin with a polite "Thanks for your comment!" or "Thanks for reading!" even when the host follows it with a disagreement. Wise moderators work to make sure that commenters do not feel that their voices are being mocked on silenced unjustly (we will get to dealing with purposeful trolls and flamewars another day). These gestures, making sure that all commenters are treated with respect even when they offer deeply divergent or even ignorant takes and opinions, are vital in a world where there is no guaranteed protection from aggressive repercussions (and the internet is becoming impressively sophisticated when it comes to the legal destruction of people's personae, reputations, and profiles).

So again, Norse wisdom proves timely in the internet age. Aphorisms developed in a more anarchic culture of honor and shame give us a touchstone for a digital frontier of the barely-regulated internet. When someone comments on your blog or Facebook feed, or responds to your tweet. Treat them with respect, see to it that they feel appropriately honored in your environment or else be prepared for her to prove her mettle.

Part 3: The Positive Value of Courtesy and Hospitality

Click HERE for the beginning of the series.

Click to get the Hávamál on Amazon

Confessions Part 1

Hey folks. As a heads up, I have started a series Confessions of an Amoral Ethics Teacher over at Pints and Prose, the creative laboratory which grew out of a longstanding writers/thinkers/questioners group. If you are interested in following the series which will autobiographically explore my reaction and rejection of ethical systems. I will keep this post updated as it comes out, and yes, C.S. Lewis will be much referenced and quoted.
For now the Introduction is here.

The Justice of Horton

Do you think that there is a way that things are supposed to be?  I don't mean a belief in the "best of all possible worlds" that Voltaire liked to make fun of, I mean a sort of basic sense that some things are just right and that sometimes a situation is just wrong?

This is an elephant on a tree

One of my favorite children's books is Horton Hatches the Egg by Dr. Seuss (one of my favorite children's authors). In Horton our hero, Horton the Elephant, agrees to "egg sit" for a lazy bird (Mayzie) who promptly takes off and vacations on the beach for several months leaving Horton on her nest. We see him suffer through increasingly unpleasant trials beginning with bad weather and going on to abandonment by his friends, abduction (along with the egg, nest, and tree) by hunters and finally abject humiliation. Throughout it all Horton says to himself "I meant what I said and I said what I meant; an elephant's faithful one hundred percent" and sticks to his commitment. Then, (spoiler alert) at the climax, Mayzie stumbles upon him and the egg hatches. Seeing that it is hatching, Mayzie tries to re-claim her egg but when it breaks open, out flies... you guessed it... an elephant-bird! And Horton get to go home with a child while Mayzie pouts in a corner and everyone exclaims that "It should be, it should be, it SHOULD be like that!" - A sentiment with which I heartily concur. It should be like that.

Hard work should be rewarded, bad people should get their comeuppance, children should outlive their parents, the good should thrive. And all of that and so much more; all of the should be like is what I mean by the word "justice".

I think that the idea of justice has been misunderstood for a while now, especially in American culture. It is not so much that we have gotten it completely wrong as that we have narrowed it too much. Most people I talk to want to use "justice" as a synonym for "fairness" or, if they see a distinction, they will treat justice as a more powerful or deeper version of fairness. Thus someone might say "It wasn't only fair, it was just". But while fairness is often a part of justice, it is by no means the whole of it. To be fair is merely to treat everyone equally, to be just is to treat each person and every thing the way that person or thing should be treated. And that treatment will only be fair (though technically "fair" has experienced its own unfortunate devolution over the last several hundred years) if it treats them all equally.

Totally didn't see this coming

Here is where the practical problem comes into play: it is only possible to be just if you have some idea of how thing ought to be. To be just is to say "this should be like that" and to then go about trying to make it so. Neither a determinist (who thinks that all things already are as they have to be), a modernist/non-supernaturalist (who has no grounds for claiming that there is any such thing as should be only what, in fact, is) nor a post-modernist (who doesn't think anyone has a right to talk about what should be for anyone else and besides how sure are they that there really is a this or a that  anyway) can be just.

Now please don't misunderstand me, I am not saying that those folks can't be virtuous, kind, fair or egalitarian. They are often all of those things. In fact, they are often very just - I would point especially to the social gospel of the liberal Christian, modernist movement of the last century and the "social justice" movement so popular among contemporary post-moderns as wonderful and encouraging examples of people loving justice. What I am saying is that those worldviews give them no grounds for believing in or even really understanding justice. To the extent that they have it, they have it by tradition, by uncritical conscience or by divine Grace.
  But it takes a pre-modern (eastern or western) to get justice.

Socrates

A little history: the basic concept of justice in the west seems to have originated with Socrates. Plato's most famous book The Republic is entirely concerned with the question "what is justice" (the Greek word was dikaiosune). After quickly demolishing arguments that justice is "the will of the strong over the weak" (a view that stayed pretty well dead until Nietzsche came along) and the slightly stronger claim that it is "doing right by friends and harm to enemies", Socrates spends most of the book defending the idea that to be just is to act and become in accordance with the way things are, or put another way, to love the good and conform to it. (He then has a lot of ideas about how that can be accomplished and a really unfortunate extended-analogy about the soul and the city-state which has given rise to some misconceptions about his political views; but I won't get into all that right now). But from then, right up until the enlightenment, the idea that justice was conforming to the way things should be was the dominant understanding of the west.

Over in the east, Lao Tzu seems to have independently come up with the same basic idea. He was able to speak much more simply about "life in conformity with the Tao". Confucius then watered it down a bit by trying to get really practical by providing elaborate descriptions of what different 'tao-conforming' lives would look like. In both cases, eastern and western pre-modernism seems to have independently agreed that justice requires first an understanding of how things should be and then an attempt to conform oneself to that understanding.

Lao Tzu

Finally, in the contemporary world, justice is most clearly talked about by natural law and virtue ethicist (who are mostly going back to the pre-modern thinkers). Most notable would be CS Lewis who showed, rather convincingly, in The Abolition of Man that belief in the natural law, the Tao, is necessary for humanity to remain human. The love of that Tao and the attempt to conform to it is justice.

But why is justice so important? Well, a sense of justice implies a vision of how things should be, and without that, I can't help but think that there will be a great deal of drifting about without any real direction. Quite practically, it is justice that tells me that I cannot do just anything to accomplish a good goal, for a world in which one problem is fixed and I have been corrupted by a terrible act (even in the service of a good goal) is not the way things should be. It is justice that tells me things can be better and it is justice that urges me to make them better. It is by justice that I recognize injustice. Justice is the eye of the conscience; what I do blindly by conscience is illuminated by justice.

Justice is  Badass