Posted by
CRB on Thursday, September 03, 2009 8:00:31 PM
This is one of those question that defines our movement. And theirs. Justice, it seems, is an elusive term, one that is not quite so neat and clean as we would like.
Dictionary.com says:
–noun
1. the quality of being just; righteousness, equitableness, or moral rightness: to uphold the justice of a cause.
2. rightfulness or lawfulness, as of a claim or title; justness of ground or reason: to complain with justice.
3. the moral principle determining just conduct.
4. conformity to this principle, as manifested in conduct; just conduct, dealing, or treatment.
5. the administering of deserved punishment or reward.
6. the maintenance or administration of what is just by law, as by judicial or other proceedings: a court of justice.
7. judgment of persons or causes by judicial process: to administer justice in a community.
8. a judicial officer; a judge or magistrate.
9. (initial capital letter) Also called Justice Department. the Department of Justice.
No real disagreement here. Both sides will agree on this definitions. Where the difference lies is in how we implement justice. For the leftist, justice come about through the elimination of class. Again, from Dictionary.com:
the distribution of advantages and disadvantages within a society
Implementing this "distribution" requires a clarification of who has any advantage or disadvantage and putting in place a mechanism for redistribution of these advantages in order to resolve the perceived disadvantages. This is what we know as the social dialectic. Karl Marx observed that human rights and freedom are not natural but determined by external conditions and as such are resolved by changing these external conditions.
It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.
-- Karl Marx, Critique of Political Economy
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
--Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto
The move for universal health care, with universal being a term that has been lost because it carries the baggage of its Marxist ideology, does much more than right an apparent injustice of available rights. It also redistributes. And it defines the rights of a person as external to that person. Rights have become a managed commodity rather than natural. (My criticism of the Left is the same that I level at Rome's misuse of grace as a commodity that can be distributed ad hoc.)
When today's modern liberal (leftist, that is) takes the position that rights belong to the government and can be taken at will, then we have lost our republic. We have lost it when we surrender our ownership of the authority to educate ourselves, to feed ourselves, and to heal ourselves. And each other. Instead the Left has taken ownership of these rights. And that is, always, a principled lost of freedom. And that is unjust.
Cross-posted in Evangelical Perspective.