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What’s the Relationship Between Peace and Justice?

“If you want peace, work for justice.” 

This famous quote comes from Pope Paul VI’s address for the Day of Peace in 1972, and touches on the important connection between peace and justice. As we are faced with many challenges that threaten peace and justice in our present day, the words of Pope Paul still ring out with the strength of truth.

We all want to see a more peaceful and just world, but what will it take to get us there?   A great place to begin answering this question is with a more comprehensive understanding of global peace and justice and their relationship to one another. 

Working toward Global Peace and Global Justice

Peace and justice are common words. We use them in our workplaces, in our homes and in everyday interactions. They help us to describe the state of our souls or to illuminate our sense of being wronged. Every human has personally experienced the meaning of these words through their sense of well-being or unease and anger. 

Peace and justice are also global words. They express something we look for in the world at large. We long to see them present in global economies and societies. We want the whole world to be at peace and the whole world to operate in justice.

Why do these concepts seem inextricably linked? Let’s explore the meaning and relationship between these key concepts and look at some of the ways peace and justice are violated in the world today.

What’s the Connection Between Peace and Justice?

The connection between peace and justice is intrinsic. Peace is an indication that the current state of affairs (interiorly in the case of a person’s mind or soul or exteriorly between peoples or nations) is harmonious and properly ordered. It is a state of tranquility, a sense that “all’s right with the world.”

Here’s how Pope Paul VI explains it :

“It is difficult, but essential, to form a genuine idea of Peace. It is difficult for one who closes his eyes to his innate intuition of it, which tells him that Peace is something very human. This is the right way to come to the genuine discovery of Peace: if we look for its true source, we find that it is rooted in a sincere feeling for man. A Peace that is not the result of true respect for man is not true Peace. And what do we call this sincere feeling for man? We call it Justice.”

According to Pope Paul VI, justice is a sincere feeling toward the other.

A nation with a sincere feeling toward a marginalized group living within its borders will not oppress, persecute or drive them out. A person with a sincere feeling toward another person will not steal from them, cheat them or spread rumors about them. People with sincere feelings toward themselves will treat themselves with respect and kindness.

By Pope Paul’s explanation, sincerity is something we owe each other by virtue of our worth as human beings. Any action or state of being that diminishes or does not recognize our human value is unjust.

How to Establish Peace and Justice in the World

When the state of the world feels uneasy, it can be difficult to know what to do or where to turn. Our own actions may not seem like enough, and yet—we are called to speak out against injustices in the world. There are many simple ways each of us can work to establish peace and justice in the world. Here are three simple things you can do right now:

• Speak out when we see injustices. Sometimes all it takes to begin building a more peaceful and inclusive society is one person who is willing to stand up for what is right.
• Take action to overcome our own barriers. When we treat ourselves with love and kindness we are bringing more peace into our own lives, which we can in turn share with others. 
• Offer up prayers. The power of prayer can change the hearts of people all over the world and bring them greater peace. It can also soften our own heart to be more attentive to the needs of our suffering brothers and sisters.

Prayer is the most powerful tool we have. It allows God to enter our heart and fill us with his love. Consider adding the following prayer into your daily reflections:

Prayer for Peace and Justice in the World

"Lord Jesus Christ, who are called the Prince of Peace, who are yourself our peace and reconciliation, who so often said, 'Peace to you,' grant us peace. Make all men and women witnesses of truth, justice, and brotherly love. Banish from their hearts whatever might endanger peace. Enlighten our leaders that they may guarantee and defend the great gift of peace. May all peoples of the earth become as brothers and sisters. May longed-for peace blossom forth and reign always over us all." —Saint John XXIII

Learn More About the Relationship Between Peace and Justice

Divine Word Missionaries work passionately to address issues related to peace and justice and to help those who are most affected by conflict. From our work fighting human trafficking to our work supporting migrants and refugees, we are confronting sources of conflict and attempting to bring true and lasting peace.

If you are interested in learning more about peace and justice in the world today, explore our  informative resource and discover facts about the state of global conflict. 

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Essay on Peace

500 words essay peace.

Peace is the path we take for bringing growth and prosperity to society. If we do not have peace and harmony, achieving political strength, economic stability and cultural growth will be impossible. Moreover, before we transmit the notion of peace to others, it is vital for us to possess peace within. It is not a certain individual’s responsibility to maintain peace but everyone’s duty. Thus, an essay on peace will throw some light on the same topic.

Importance of Peace

History has been proof of the thousands of war which have taken place in all periods at different levels between nations. Thus, we learned that peace played an important role in ending these wars or even preventing some of them.

In fact, if you take a look at all religious scriptures and ceremonies, you will realize that all of them teach peace. They mostly advocate eliminating war and maintaining harmony. In other words, all of them hold out a sacred commitment to peace.

It is after the thousands of destructive wars that humans realized the importance of peace. Earth needs peace in order to survive. This applies to every angle including wars, pollution , natural disasters and more.

When peace and harmony are maintained, things will continue to run smoothly without any delay. Moreover, it can be a saviour for many who do not wish to engage in any disrupting activities or more.

In other words, while war destroys and disrupts, peace builds and strengthens as well as restores. Moreover, peace is personal which helps us achieve security and tranquillity and avoid anxiety and chaos to make our lives better.

How to Maintain Peace

There are many ways in which we can maintain peace at different levels. To begin with humankind, it is essential to maintain equality, security and justice to maintain the political order of any nation.

Further, we must promote the advancement of technology and science which will ultimately benefit all of humankind and maintain the welfare of people. In addition, introducing a global economic system will help eliminate divergence, mistrust and regional imbalance.

It is also essential to encourage ethics that promote ecological prosperity and incorporate solutions to resolve the environmental crisis. This will in turn share success and fulfil the responsibility of individuals to end historical prejudices.

Similarly, we must also adopt a mental and spiritual ideology that embodies a helpful attitude to spread harmony. We must also recognize diversity and integration for expressing emotion to enhance our friendship with everyone from different cultures.

Finally, it must be everyone’s noble mission to promote peace by expressing its contribution to the long-lasting well-being factor of everyone’s lives. Thus, we must all try our level best to maintain peace and harmony.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Conclusion of the Essay on Peace

To sum it up, peace is essential to control the evils which damage our society. It is obvious that we will keep facing crises on many levels but we can manage them better with the help of peace. Moreover, peace is vital for humankind to survive and strive for a better future.

FAQ of Essay on Peace

Question 1: What is the importance of peace?

Answer 1: Peace is the way that helps us prevent inequity and violence. It is no less than a golden ticket to enter a new and bright future for mankind. Moreover, everyone plays an essential role in this so that everybody can get a more equal and peaceful world.

Question 2: What exactly is peace?

Answer 2: Peace is a concept of societal friendship and harmony in which there is no hostility and violence. In social terms, we use it commonly to refer to a lack of conflict, such as war. Thus, it is freedom from fear of violence between individuals or groups.

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On SDG 16: Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions

When the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were adopted, Goal 16 was seen as truly transformative, formally linking, for the first time at the United Nations, development, peace, justice, and good governance. Some of its more ambitious targets include significantly reducing all forms of violence, ending abuse and violence against children, promoting the rule of law, reducing illicit financial flows and corruption, and developing accountable and transparent institutions.

But Goal 16 was not adopted without controversy. Many countries argued against the intrusion of peace and security, and even more so justice, considerations into the development sphere, and would have preferred that the goal be dropped altogether. Other countries maintained that this goal was central for them and that their support for the 2030 Agenda hinged upon it.

Nearly three years later, progress on Goal 16 is uneven, and there is considerable doubt that it can be achieved at its current implementation rate. Challenges arise in all countries, including Canada, and are likely to become more acute given current trends, particularly those related to violence.

Violence worldwide is on the rise and becoming increasingly complex and multidimensional. Almost half the world’s people have been affected by political violence over the last fifteen years, with lower-income countries bearing a disproportionately high share of the burden of armed violence. Yet developed countries are not immune — in many parts of the developed world, different forms of violence are also on the rise. Canada itself faces domestic challenges in addressing issues of violence and homicide, particularly against women and children.

Canada is also facing challenges in other related areas of Goal 16. Issues of justice for Indigenous Peoples have been much debated but insufficiently addressed over the past four decades. Comprehensively combatting transnational organised crime and illicit financial flows are elusive goals for Canada as well.

The challenge will be linking these subnational priorities with national strategies.

A common impediment for countries attempting to implement Goal 16 is the yawning gaps in reliable data, making it difficult to measure progress in meeting the goal’s targets. Fragile and conflict-affected states, in particular, often have incomplete, imperfect, or a total lack of data. The countries of the world vary hugely in their capacity to collect, monitor, and track indicators.

Moreover, obstacles to reaching the goals of SDG 16 are increasingly encountered in urban areas. Populations in cities are expected to increase to almost 70 per cent by 2050, and cities register higher homicide rates than rural areas. The challenges found within ‘fragile cities’ — characterised by rapid, unregulated urbanisation; high levels of inequality, unemployment, and violence; poor access to key services; and exposure to climate threats — mean that Goal 16 must be addressed at the subnational level.

In this context, one possible approach to accelerate the pace of implementation is to link national and local-level policies, providing greater support to subnational governance institutions. Local and regional governments in many countries have already recognised this, arguing that new institutional arrangements and channels of coordination need to underpin more effective, accountable, and transparent institutions, as well as more responsive, inclusive, participatory, and representative decision-making. This is necessary for local governments to become more responsive to their communities, and for states to deliver on Goal 16.

Positive initiatives are currently underway that illustrate how this is happening. New forms of participatory decision-making — such as in budgeting and in enhancements to city housing, service delivery, and slum conditions — have led to improvements in public security and urban safety. Local governments have been working internationally and nationally to share relevant information and innovative, frequently data-driven, solutions.

The challenge will be linking these subnational priorities with national strategies. For example, Canada’s progress in implementing its Federal Sustainable Development Strategy 2016–2019, which focuses on the environmental aspects of the SDGs, does not sufficiently account for Goal 16, even though one of the aims of the strategy is to build safe, secure, and sustainable communities. However, at the provincial level, many strategies overlap with the SDGs — without specifically mentioning them — focusing on employment, education, and environmental concerns, but less commonly on violence and justice.

Achieving implementation of Goal 16 is a daunting task globally, for poorer countries in particular. The plethora of targets and indicators aiming to guide them tends to create white noise. Some countries have been felt disempowered by the ambition and wide spectrum of the 2030 Agenda, as much as they have been able to harness its potential for energising society. This has represented an obvious downside in practice to the United Nations’ otherwise admirable effort to design an all-encompassing agenda.

National governments will get to showcase their achievements at the United Nations High Level Political Forum, which is reviewing Goal 16 in 2019. Until then, greater effort is required nearly everywhere to achieve implementation of national policies towards this goal. Improved links between the national and subnational levels will move us all in the right direction.

This essay is part of Awakening — a collection of essays and artwork exploring sustainable development, organized by the Lieutenant Governor of Ontario, Canada.

David M. Malone

Dr David M. Malone is Rector of the United Nations University and Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations.

The views expressed on this site are the author's. The Markkula Center for Applied Ethics does not advocate particular positions but seeks to encourage dialogue on the ethical dimensions of current issues. The Center welcomes comments and alternative points of view .

December 2, 2021

Peace Is More Than War’s Absence, and New Research Explains How to Build It

A new project measures ways to promote positive social relations among groups

By Peter T. Coleman , Allegra Chen-Carrel & Vincent Hans Michael Stueber

PeopleImages/Getty Images

Today, the misery of war is all too striking in places such as Syria, Yemen, Tigray, Myanmar and Ukraine. It can come as a surprise to learn that there are scores of sustainably peaceful societies around the world, ranging from indigenous people in the Xingu River Basin in Brazil to countries in the European Union. Learning from these societies, and identifying key drivers of harmony, is a vital process that can help promote world peace.

Unfortunately, our current ability to find these peaceful mechanisms is woefully inadequate. The Global Peace Index (GPI) and its complement the Positive Peace Index (PPI) rank 163 nations annually and are currently the leading measures of peacefulness. The GPI, launched in 2007 by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), was designed to measure negative peace , or the absence of violence, destructive conflict, and war. But peace is more than not fighting. The PPI, launched in 2009, was supposed to recognize this and track positive peace , or the promotion of peacefulness through positive interactions like civility, cooperation and care.

Yet the PPI still has many serious drawbacks. To begin with, it continues to emphasize negative peace, despite its name. The components of the PPI were selected and are weighted based on existing national indicators that showed the “strongest correlation with the GPI,” suggesting they are in effect mostly an extension of the GPI. For example, the PPI currently includes measures of factors such as group grievances, dissemination of false information, hostility to foreigners, and bribes.

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The index also lacks an empirical understanding of positive peace. The PPI report claims that it focuses on “positive aspects that create the conditions for a society to flourish.” However, there is little indication of how these aspects were derived (other than their relationships with the GPI). For example, access to the internet is currently a heavily weighted indicator in the PPI. But peace existed long before the internet, so is the number of people who can go online really a valid measure of harmony?

The PPI has a strong probusiness bias, too. Its 2021 report posits that positive peace “is a cross-cutting facilitator of progress, making it easier for businesses to sell.” A prior analysis of the PPI found that almost half the indicators were directly related to the idea of a “Peace Industry,” with less of a focus on factors found to be central to positive peace such as gender inclusiveness, equity and harmony between identity groups.

A big problem is that the index is limited to a top-down, national-level approach. The PPI’s reliance on national-level metrics masks critical differences in community-level peacefulness within nations, and these provide a much more nuanced picture of societal peace . Aggregating peace data at the national level, such as focusing on overall levels of inequality rather than on disparities along specific group divides, can hide negative repercussions of the status quo for minority communities.

To fix these deficiencies, we and our colleagues have been developing an alternative approach under the umbrella of the Sustaining Peace Project . Our effort has various components , and these can provide a way to solve the problems in the current indices. Here are some of the elements:

Evidence-based factors that measure positive and negative peace. The peace project began with a comprehensive review of the empirical studies on peaceful societies, which resulted in identifying 72 variables associated with sustaining peace. Next, we conducted an analysis of ethnographic and case study data comparing “peace systems,” or clusters of societies that maintain peace with one another, with nonpeace systems. This allowed us to identify and measure a set of eight core drivers of peace. These include the prevalence of an overarching social identity among neighboring groups and societies; their interconnections such as through trade or intermarriage; the degree to which they are interdependent upon one another in terms of ecological, economic or security concerns; the extent to which their norms and core values support peace or war; the role that rituals, symbols and ceremonies play in either uniting or dividing societies; the degree to which superordinate institutions exist that span neighboring communities; whether intergroup mechanisms for conflict management and resolution exist; and the presence of political leadership for peace versus war.

A core theory of sustaining peace . We have also worked with a broad group of peace, conflict and sustainability scholars to conceptualize how these many variables operate as a complex system by mapping their relationships in a causal loop diagram and then mathematically modeling their core dynamics This has allowed us to gain a comprehensive understanding of how different constellations of factors can combine to affect the probabilities of sustaining peace.

Bottom-up and top-down assessments . Currently, the Sustaining Peace Project is applying techniques such as natural language processing and machine learning to study markers of peace and conflict speech in the news media. Our preliminary research suggests that linguistic features may be able to distinguish between more and less peaceful societies. These methods offer the potential for new metrics that can be used for more granular analyses than national surveys.

We have also been working with local researchers from peaceful societies to conduct interviews and focus groups to better understand the in situ dynamics they believe contribute to sustaining peace in their communities. For example in Mauritius , a highly multiethnic society that is today one of the most peaceful nations in Africa, we learned of the particular importance of factors like formally addressing legacies of slavery and indentured servitude, taboos against proselytizing outsiders about one’s religion, and conscious efforts by journalists to avoid divisive and inflammatory language in their reporting.

Today, global indices drive funding and program decisions that impact countless lives, making it critical to accurately measure what contributes to socially just, safe and thriving societies. These indices are widely reported in news outlets around the globe, and heads of state often reference them for their own purposes. For example, in 2017 , Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, though he and his country were mired in corruption allegations, referenced his country’s positive increase on the GPI by stating, “Receiving such high praise from an institute that once named this country the most violent in the world is extremely significant.” Although a 2019 report on funding for peace-related projects shows an encouraging shift towards supporting positive peace and building resilient societies, many of these projects are really more about preventing harm, such as grants for bolstering national security and enhancing the rule of law.

The Sustaining Peace Project, in contrast, includes metrics for both positive and negative peace, is enhanced by local community expertise, and is conceptually coherent and based on empirical findings. It encourages policy makers and researchers to refocus attention and resources on initiatives that actually promote harmony, social health and positive reciprocity between groups. It moves away from indices that rank entire countries and instead focuses on identifying factors that, through their interaction, bolster or reduce the likelihood of sustaining peace. It is a holistic perspective.  

Tracking peacefulness across the globe is a highly challenging endeavor. But there is great potential in cooperation between peaceful communities, researchers and policy makers to produce better methods and metrics. Measuring peace is simply too important to get only half-right. 

Insight and Analysis from Foreign Affairs Practitioners and Scholars

Established 1996 • Raymond F. Smith, Editor

Winning the War for Peace, Justice and Prosperity: A Vision

In 1946, military analyst Lee Yuri (李浴日) of China pointed out that this dilemma may arise from the practice of a military doctrine that is not based on saving people, but on killing people. When a war does not end in justice for all, another battle erupts soon afterward. He contended that the world needs to practice a military doctrine that seeks to save people and to provide justice to all. He named this practice a “Military for Mankind” in his book On Victories 1 .

In this essay we first elaborate on the concept of Military for Mankind, which we broaden to include government and business. The concept of fighting a War of Peace, Justice and Prosperity is described in his book. Because justice is the key accomplishment of the War, we abbreviate it as the War of Justice. Ten precepts to practice “Military, Government and Business for Mankind” and to win a War of Justice are constructed from the book On Victories . We then examine what the world has right and wrong during the last two centuries from the perspective of these precepts.

The essay concludes with a list of recommendations for the leaders of the world to consider. The implementation of these recommendations might well lead to winning the War of Justice for the people of the world and thereby to achieving peace, justice and prosperity for all.

II. Military for Mankind . Lee Yuri emphasized the importance of the concept of Military for Mankind:

“The wars fought in 20th Century have been directed more toward a military doctrine of killing people and conquering enemies. Scientific advances have further exaggerated this problem, inasmuch as nuclear weapons are able to kill people by the millions. If military actions are allowed to intensify in this direction, the world will be destroyed and mankind will vanish from this planet.

Today, we must correct this wrongful “military doctrine” and establish one that has been devised to fight wars with the goal of saving people and achieving justice and prosperity for all. This doctrine and its practice will be termed “Military for Mankind” and the war to which it will apply will be termed the War of Peace, Justice and Prosperity.

The Chinese military doctrine developed 25 centuries ago was based on saving people. This doctrine must be reestablished throughout the world.”

Because we are currently engaged in a total war, we need to broaden “Military for Mankind” to “Military, Government and Business for Mankind”. In all countries, the military is a part of the government. For some countries, the country may own most of the businesses. This broadening of the military doctrine facilitates the examination of how each of the three components helps to win the War of Justice.

Government for Mankind was a concept that Confucius examined fully. This concept was adapted by many dynasties to manage the government of China throughout history.

III. War of Peace, Justice and Prosperity . In his classic book, On Wars, Clausewitz deals with the fighting of a battle. He explicitly states that the goal in fighting a battle or a war is to be established by the leader of the government. If the leader establishes the goal as peace, justice and prosperity, his generals must practice Military for Mankind and win the War of Justice for his country. Thus, what we are doing is placing the concept of Military for Mankind into a framework that can be used to analyze wars being fought and their consequences for peace, justice and prosperity.

The War of Justice was examined by Mencius in China. At about the same time, Socrates discussed the moral concept of Good and Justice, and the meaning of justice (i.e., What is Justice?). He spoke about the “medicine of Justice”. In essence, the concept of the War of Justice has long existed in both the Western and Eastern worlds.

The world won World War II in Europe. All nations that were involved there received justice. Germany has long re-emerged as a major power of the world. Peace and prosperity were gained by many nations. Thus, it is appropriate to say that the world won the European War of Justice. On the other hand, no justice was given to many Asian countries that were invaded by the Japan Empire, even if they were allies of the US. As a result, disputes have developed in Asia. Their elevation to a trade war is imminent.

The key point in winning the War of Justice is whether the people (of allies and enemies) gain justice. This is to say that fighting the War of Justice and the actions occurring during and after the battle should respect human life and human rights. In this way, the people will have no intention or desire to fight another war. On the other hand, the War of Justice should be fought without mercy against warlords, drug lords, and terrorist leaders.   IV. Ten Precepts on Military for Mankind and War of Justice. On Victories contains these five books written by Lee Yuri:

• Analysis of Sun Zi’s Art of War
• The Essence of War Principles by Clausewitz
• Sun Yat-sen’s Principles of Revolution
• Essays on Sun Zi’s Art of War
• Essays on Military Doctrines.

He urged soldiers and commanders to study these books. For a country to be strong and to prosper, its politicians and government leaders should practice the principles stipulated in On Victories on all aspects of government and the conduct of war. Because the war is a people’s war, Lee Yuri expected the also the people to read On Victories .

Instead of expecting readers to read that book of 600,000 Chinese words, I have summarized them in the following 10 precepts for your review.

• What is necessary to win the War of Justice :

This requirement was given by Sun Zi in Chapter 1 on Planning for War and interpreted by Lee Yuri as “What is first required of us to win the war is dao 道. What is dao ? It is the good governance by the government leader and military commander. If the leader and commander practice dao , their citizens will be in complete accord with their leader. The people will follow the leader in the War of Justice with no regard to their lives, and undismayed by any danger. They will be imbued with a must win attitude, and fight for their country fearlessly in all situations.“ This precept also implies that if a government does not practice dao , the citizens will not fight for that government.

• Winning the enemy by the War of Justice .

Victory in the War of Justice requires that the people of the enemy have a new government that practices dao . If you have no plan to build this new government of dao , then you are not ready to fight the War of Justice. This strategy can also be described as subduing your enemy with justice so that he becomes your friend. If you should win the war without a battle, the rationale for this precept becomes compatible to the saying of Sun Zi that subduing your enemy without battle is of supreme excellence. The way to “subdue” your enemy is to build a government of dao to serve the enemy’s people or to convert the existing government to one that practices dao for its people. Prevailing should not be achieved by killing only.

• The forms of war :

The war can be a water cannon fight, a crusader war, a revolutionary war, a conventional war, a prolonged war, a guerrilla war, a propaganda war, a psychological war, a media war, a legal war, a nuclear war, a cold war, an ideal or absolute war, a deterrent war, a war of poverty, a trade war, a war against self-destruction or, finally, a War of Justice. Clausewitz identified this  expanded list of wars The world has suffered through or fought all of these wars, except completion of the last war. It is also appropriate to suggest that a war of poverty and a trade war can be identified as part of a War of Justice. Some of these war forms will be elaborated later. In order to win the battle of these wars, Clausewitz believed that it was important that the commander conducts a scientific analysis of the battle and that the government leader sets the objective of the battle and provides the commander with the resources and authority necessary to execute the battle. The form of the war can affect the specific objectives to be established and the time and timing to fight the war.

• The principle to win the war : This principle that was enunciated by Sun Zi is interpreted by Lee Yuri as “If you (the leader and the commander) know your situation and that of your enemy, you will not be endangered in hundred battles. If you do not know the situation of your enemy but only yours, you may win or lose with no certainty in the outcome of the war. Lastly, if you know neither, you will lose every battle.” (Knowing means that you know all aspects of the countries fighting the war: how to fight the battle, what you should and can do during the battle, what is the likely war casualty, can you definitely win the war, and how you can achieve lasting peace after battle victory has been achieved?)
• The need for people to know the Art of War :  Lee Yuri said, “Whether you are strong or weak, it all depends on the thrifty of the Art of War.” He also said, “Wars will be with us for centuries. The world of today has wars. We must promote “Military for Mankind” and educate the people in the right Art of War. The Art of War is the foundation of military might, and the war knowledge of the people, military generals and government leaders is the Great Wall of the country”.
• The essence of fighting any war : “In today’s world, if you can fight, you will persevere. If you cannot fight, you will die,” Sun Yat-sen said. The word “fight” is interpreted as “win in wars against enemy within or without”. Lee Yuri further stated that a government without dao, corrupted officers and greedy people are internal enemies that can cause a country to self-destruct or die.
• The virtues of leaders and commanders : Sun Zi said, “A leader or a commander must have these five virtues: wisdom, honesty, humanity, courage, and discipline.” Lee Yuri expanded on this with “The wisdom is the device of a good plan that ensures success. With honesty, a leader can mete out appropriate awards and penalties and make his administration, especially its financial operation, transparent. With humanity, he cares for his soldiers, his people and his enemy. With courage, he remains calm in the face of adversity and leads the fight. With discipline , he is solemn, respectful and strict in operation of the military and government.” Lee Yuri pointed out in his book, On Victories, that President Roosevelt, President Truman, General and President Eisenhower, General Marshall and General MacArthur had these leadership characteristics and were visionaries.
• The time to fight the war : This was uttered by Sun Zi and interpreted by Lee Yuri as “The visionary leader lays his plans well before sending his troop to fight. The good and kind commander makes his plans for a short battle, a quick war and a complete victory.” Sun Zi also said, “The leader does not moves his troops unless he sees an advantage to his country; does not use his troops unless there is victory; and does not send his troop to fight unless his country is in peril.” The basic principle of establishing the time to fight and win must be firmly adhered to by the leader and commander.
• The basis of winning the battle : Sun Zi said, “A skillful commander first makes his army invincible. When he discovers an enemy’s weakness, he seizes the opportunity, attacks swiftly, and spares nothing to defeat his enemy.” Sun Zi then summed up this point as “A commander who commands his troop, not only cultivates his dao, but also preserves the integrity of his military system. He will take advantage of an enemy’s weakness and ensure victory.” Earlier, Sun Zi described the military system as the organizations, rules and supports in getting the military operational. Similar logic should be applied to the leader of the government and the operation of his governmental system.
• The benefit of victory : In contrast to counting how many people you killed and how many countries you colonized, winning the War of Justice should give you peace for centuries and justice and prosperity for all. This precept emphasizes the importance of winning at all three fronts: peace, justice and prosperity. The war has not ended if we win at only one or two fronts. A corollary of this precept is to fight no war that has the potential to bankrupt yourself.

Because the fighting power of the world’s major powers is so superior, winning a battle over a lesser country is a foregone conclusion. As a result, we differentiate the doctrine for Military for Mankind and War of Justice from the conventional doctrine on military and government operation by emphasizing the following factors:

1. Justice for all people, but without mercy for warlords, drug lords, and terrorism lords. 2. Winning the hearts of the people following the battle 3. The essential for a government to practice dao , i.e., to have good governance.

V. On the World. In the last three decades, international exports increased at a rate of about 9% a year or about 12-fold. The improvement in productivity, removal of trade and investment barriers, growth of international and national markets, and innovation and development of high-tech and information systems have contributed to this dramatic increase. However, despite these successes, financial crises still develop. Many countries are fighting for resources and battling for trading advantage. People are suffering as a result of high unemployment and/or lack of food and medicine.

Will we have peace, justice and prosperity for the world in 20 years? Based on the outcome of the wars fought during the last 20 years, the answer may be negative. However, the progress in world affairs by the major powers gives us hope that we will have a yes answer.

Before elaborating more on the yes or no issue, we will examine from the perspective of Military for Mankind and War of Justice the world’s current conditions, discuss the world order, and address the root cause of wars and financial crises. After further examination of China’s situation and that of the USA and the relationship between the two countries, we have five recommendations for the world to act on.

Table 1 contains six groups of data that characterize the strengths and weaknesses of four countries. The first group is the resources that the four countries have. Their productivities are appeared as the second group. The third group is the debt owed by governments. The investment by these countries in their military operation is shown as the fourth group. The last two groups are data of the health of their people and some indices characterizing the corruption of government operations.

Table 1. Resources, productivity, debt, military expenditures, health and corruption of four countries.

* The conversion is calculated at assumed values of $100 per barrel and $4 per 1,000 cubic feet. ** The first number is years of remaining reserves based on oil reserves. The number in parenthesis is the number of years increased by the shale reserves if consumption remains at the same rate. *** The public debt of USA does not include the debt $5T owed to governmental agencies such as Social Security Trust Funds. Foreign entities own $5.72T of the $12.1T public debt; The Federal Reserve owns $1.79T, State and Local governments own $0.7T; and private entities and individuals own $3.89T. The public debt of China includes $2T that is incurred by provincial and local governments. **** www.transparency.org.

VI. New World Order. The recent signing of a chemical weapon agreement with Syria and a nuclear weapon agreement with Iran by six major powers — USA, China, Russia, Great Britain, France and Germany — certainly indicate the emergence of a new order of the world’s powerful countries. Among these six countries, USA is clearly a superpower . This is due to the Americans’good citizenship; its highly regarded functional legislatures; its exceptional legal system; the strength of America’s democratic government; the superiority of its armed forces; its No. 1 status in GDP; innovation, business practice and business size; and the abundance of its natural resources. With its present, new leadership, China’s GDP will grow rapidly, the corruption will be controlled and the country will progressively move from a developing country to a developed country. Then, China may advance to second rank among world powers.

Five of these major powers have nuclear armaments. They understand well the disastrous effect on the world of a nuclear war. The possibility of nuclear wars among the six major powers is nil.

The relationhip of Russia and China to the four other major powers is no longer like that to the Soviet Union led by Joseph Stalin or the China led by Mao Zedong. Instead, the six major powers are working together to reach an agreement with Iran for a reduction of its nuclear stockpile. Although this agreement is only the first step towards ensuring that Iran will not possess nuclear weapon, the signing of theagreement reflects a major breakthrough by the six major powers in that they are working together first to impose economic and financial sanctions on Iran and then to negotiate a compromise for all parties. Hopefully there will be no nuclear threat to Israel and the world by Iran and Iran will revise its government operation so that it will no longer be regarded as a state that sponsors terrorism.

The second good news item is that USA, Russia and Syria have worked out an agreement to free Syria of its chemical weapons. At present, all chemical weapons have been identified and ships that are capable of destroying the weapons are on their way to Syria. The destruction of all Syrian chemical weapons that were sold to that country by Western powers will relieve Israel and the world of one key security concern about Syria. On the other hand and based on the outcome of the Iraq and Afghanistan war, the approach taken by the USA to resolve the conflict between the Syrian government and its opposition forces will not succeed in building a Syrian government that can govern the Syrians well. It is not likely that USA will be fighting a Syria war, but the human suffering of Syrians caused by a Syria war is simply not acceptable. A new way to deal with the Syrian conflict must be developed jointly by the USA and Russia.

All other countries of the world will be separated into those countries that are civilized and those that are uncivilized. A civilized country works within international laws. It has demonstrations that can be regarded as peaceful. Some have high unemployment and operate with huge government deficits. These countries do not sponsor terrorism. Their legislators and government officials are elected by a majority of their citizens or by a selected group.

We will use the China throughout her Century of Humiliation as an illustration of an uncivilized country. During that period (up to 1949), internal turmoil was produced by government corruption and/or the greed of warlords. China suffered and many people died. Mentioned in his 1932 book The Japanese Prison in Shanghai War, Lee Yuri told his fellow inmates that the turmoil and corruption that were happening in China would destine China to extinction. Several countries (excluding the USA) took advantage of China’s situation to compound further the atrocities of killing or looting in China.

The uncivilized countries are usually governed by a dictator or tyrant. As a way to protect his interests within his country, the dictator may use his power and resource to export terrorism to the world. Iraq was such a state.

VII. Corruption and Greed . The root cause of most world problems is the corruption of some officials and greed of some people. Three incidents or crises will be examined to support this reasoning. The first is the financial crisis of 2008, the financial loss and human suffering of which are given in Table 2.  In contrast to the second incident — the Iraq and Afghanistan War — the financial loss of 2008 crisis was about eight times the financial cost of the War. The human suffering of the first incident is in the form of unemployment and company bankruptcies, whereas that of the second incident is given in numbers of military deaths and wounded personnel.

Table 2. Cost and Suffering of Three American Crises or Wars.

* The first number is the sum of row 4 and 5 of Table 3 on military deaths and wounded personnel. The second number does not include the deaths of terrorists and people wounded by, or getting cancer through, the Attack.

The financial crisis of 2008 resulted first from the greed of some financial executives who sought more commissions by granting mortgages to unqualified home buyers. At the same time, the home buyers hoped to be enriched by inflation and committed themselves to purchase homes that they could not afford. Meanwhile, some industries were overburdened by labor costs and became uncompetitive. Unable to survive the financial crisis, many companies declared bankruptcy and were reorganized subsequently. Fortunately, wise decisions made by the governments and people and the correction of the financial system imposed by governments enabled many banks and companies to recover. One noticeable example was the return of General Motor to its position as the leading automobile manufacturer in the United States. The description of the cause of the 2008 financial crisis certainly supports the suggestion that our government and laws could not restrain people’s greed. As a result of this failure, there were enormous financial losses and unspeakable human suffering.

The Iraq and Afghanistan war is the response of USA to the third incident which resulted from terrorists’ greed for revenge. These two wars were made under an unwise decision (i.e. USA can win easily). The estimated cost of the war is given in a report by Linda Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz. This report states, “The fresh calculation — which includes the cost of spiraling veterans’ care bills and the future interest on war loans — paints a grim picture of how America’s future at home and abroad has been mortgaged to the two conflicts entered into by George W Bush in 2001 and 2003.” The report’s stark conclusion is, “There will be no peace dividend and the legacy of Iraq and Afghanistan Wars will be costs that persist for decades.” The projection can be much grimmer if another Saddam Hussein emerges in Iraq and the Taliban retakes Afghanistan.

Corruption usually means the acceptance of bribes by government officials. From the perspective of Military for Mankind, Government and Business and War of Peace, Justice , and prosperity; corruption means these seven crimes or unjust practices:

• Taking bribes,
• Obtaining votes by unethical means to get elected (for the purpose of getting more money or power),
• Using governing power beyond the ordinary (as exemplified by the power grabbing of Mao during The Cultural Revolution),
• Wasting government funds (as in the building of a bridge to a deserted island),
• Gouging customers for profit (as in the use of patent law or monopoly position to set up unjust pricing),
• Polluting air, land and sea for more profit,
• Avoiding or evading fair taxation (as exemplified by the move of a company to a country that has no corporation tax).

With this broadened definition of corruption, two issues should be addressed. In many countries, executives are granted lavish bonuses whether or not they improve their company’s performance. In other countries, government officials who get important projects done well and at an optimum cost are not rewarded with a bonus. As a result, accepting bribes becomes a necessity for them to have a living standard that is comparable to those who receive a bonus. The second issue is for the companies to not use the loopholes in international laws and the legal protection of domestic laws to earn extraordinary profits and not pay a fair share of taxes. If the companies are conducting themselves properly in their business practices, people will have more money to invest in their country and the country will have more money to deal with the problem of overspending.

VIII. On the United States of America. “In the twentieth century, no country has influenced international relations as decisively and, at the same time, as ambivalently as the United States. No society has more firmly insisted on the inadmissibility of intervention in domestic affairs of other states, or more passionately asserted that its own values were universally applicable.“ This is a statement that was made by Kissinger in his book, Diplomacy .

How successful is the U.S. ambivalence and passion? Table 3 gives the casualties that the USA has suffered in wars since World War II. In World War II, U.S. casualties were high. If it were not for this U.S. sacrifice and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world would not be as good and peaceful as it is today.

Table. 3. American casualties in wars during the last sixty years (source: Wikipedia).

* The U.S. casualties in the Pacific Theater were about 67% of those listed.

During World War II in the Pacific Theater, the atrocities committed by the evil Japanese Empire to Asian countries were horrendous. As an example, 40 million Chinese persons were killed in that war. The reparation established by the San Francisco Peace Treaty merely required Japan to return the property that it had looted from China. Injustice was perpetrated on China by the signers of the Treaty.

The Korean War may be described as stagnant. The good news is that we have a strong South Korea that practices dao and that China is helping the world to change the behavior of North Korea. Although the U.S. retreated hastily from South Vietnam, Vietnam is changing by itself. Overall, we may say that the sacrifice of the U.S. in these two wars has been somewhat justified.

After we won the battles for Iraq and Afghanistan, we built up the world’s two most corrupt governments through the democratic model of U.S. The U.S. sacrifice did not end with a halt to the killings between the Sunnis and Shiites of Iraq. As our troops withdraw from Afghanistan, the Taliban is poised to overrun the current government.

Hopefully, the leaders of the U.S. can appreciate three lessons of these two wars. The first is that the people of Iraq and Afghanistan differ from Americans. What is important to us may not be important to them. When we apply our system and/or passion to them, the government that is built up may not function in the way that we expect. Second, we need to do a better job of Precept 4, i.e., knowing yourself and the enemy. We knew that we could win the battle for Iraq, but did not know that we could not establish a good Iraqi government. Knowing how to win a battle that is not a War of Justice as defined by Precept 2, is not a sufficient reason for the U.S. to send its generals, men and women into harm’s way to do an impossible job. Thirdly, USA did not select the right timing to fight the war (Precept 8). If the economic sanction were extended for a few years, Saddam Hussein might surrender and USA would win the battle without a fight.

The two world’s foremost reserve currencies are the U.S. dollar (62%) and the Euro (24%). Economist Paul Samuelson and others have maintained that the overseas demand for the dollars enables the United States to maintain persistent trade deficits without causing the value of dollar to depreciate or the flow of trade to readjust. This monetary advantage of the USA is further enhanced by the country’s superpower so that the U.S. treasury bonds become the vehicle into which foreign countries invest their export/import surplus.

The Federal Reserve has set the interest rate at an unprecedented low level to promote economy recovery from the 2008 financial crisis. Such an interest rate significantly lowers the U.S. government’s burden of paying interest on the public debt.

Samuelson stated in 2005 that, in some uncertain future period, these pressures (the continuous accumulation of trade deficits, the printing of paper money, the increase in public debt, and an increase in interest rate) would precipitate a run against the U.S. dollar with serious global financial consequences.

If the U.S. does default on its public debt, will that make the U.S. government one of poor governance (i.e., the violation of Precept 1)? However, a better question to ask is whether we should do something now to reduce the pressures or wait until bankruptcy before we reorganize the U.S. back into its status as the world’s superpower. The revamping of General Motor suggests that the U.S. and Americans will succeed in the reorganization.

The world has many conflicts. Another world financial crisis is on the horizon. One important thing for the U.S. to consider is what changes in our foreign and domestic policy we should make so that we can still be the superpower and the country that works for peace, justice and prosperity throughout the world.

IX. On China “The Chinese economy displays both unmatched dynamism and unrivaled complexity. Since the early 1980s, China has consistently had the most rapidly growing economy on earth, sustaining an average annual growth rate of 10% from 1978 through 2005.“ This is a 2006 assessment of China by Barry Naughton in his book The Chinese Economy . The China’s GDP in 2013 is expected to grow to $9.16 trillion, which is much higher than the $5.8 trillion GDP of Japan. In January of 2014 it was reported that China may already have edged out USA as the country that has the highest level of trade of all countries. Most importantly, the Chinese now know that they must depend on growth in their domestic market to ensure that the dynamic growth of their economy continues.

President Xi Jinping is the new leader of China. His China Dream is to make China rich with goodness. He also has a Military Dream, which is to make the armed forces of China strong and committed to winning the War of Justice for all people.

In China, a new leadership team is elected by party members about every 10 years. The election of leaders involves an elaborate process. The leaders so chosen are well prepared to do their jobs and each has a specific assignment.

Let us use the rise of Xi to the presidency of China to explain how the Chinese election works. First, his father was prosecuted during The Cultural Revolution. As a result, Xi was sent out to a poor county for reeducation. However, his father was released from prosecution and assumed an important role in the success of the market economy policy of Deng Xiaoping. Xi’s effective dealings with the people in that county and his hard work gained him admittance to Tsinghua University, a top ranking university in China. Before his rise to the upper echelon of the central government, he listened to the concerns of people and worked to resolve them. He worked diligently to attract foreign investment. Resources are allocated to support the growth of new foreign and domestic companies. Before he became president, he had cultivated an important leadership position in the military.

His China Dream really motivates all Chinese not only to become richer, but also to become good citizens. Even if the defense expenditures as a % of GDP remains at the current level (which is about one half of that of the USA), his Military Dream will narrow the gap in the number of weapons between USA and China. China’s success in the landing of Chang’e 3 on the moon certainly suggests that their technology or quality gap in military technology may be narrowing. If Xi can effectively resolve the problem of corruption, China will be a formidable opponent of the USA.

Let me offer six personal observations (derived from my contact with Chinese persons of various levels and my readings of Chinese news) for consideration by the readers:

• Government Control. Practically speaking, the government owns all lands and most companies in China. Because of the abolishment of agriculture tax for all farmers, they will not be considered in this observation as persons working for the government. Accordingly, we can be assured that the workforce that is employed by the government will constitute a much larger percentage of the population than that of the other major world powers. As the government gains more experience in running the market of China, foreign companies that exporting goods to China may be asked to do more than selling their products to China and taking their profits out of the country.
• Infrastructure. Everyone knows that infrastructure is being constructed in China at an unprecedented level. Its accomplishment in this regard is even more amazing as a country with the least corruption (according to the corruption index listed in Table 1) may not be able to do it at the quality and for the cost that China achieves.
• Corruption . My merchant friends regard corruption in China as rampant. On the other hand, many foreign companies thrive without bribing officials and some companies, wanting to increase sales, got convicted by China for bribery.
• Farmers around prospering cities. The farmers are taking extra job as small businessmen and earning a great deal of extra income.
• No housing bubbles in robust cities. Many people there are betting for housings. In addition, the farmers are buying houses in cities so that their children can have a better education. The two top most priorities for Chinese families in China are owning a house and getting the best education for their children.
• Education . Good and free education is available for every child. Children in remote areas are learning English and computer skills. Recognizing the moral bankruptcy subsequent to The Cultural Revolution and the rise of materialism following Modernization, schools are taking the lead to promote the teaching of Confucius, Mencius, and dao in order to give the future generations a moral anchor.
• Research and Development. This is aggressively pursued as exemplified by the success in building a high speed railway system, sending a rover Chang’e-3 to the moon and making enormous progresses in biological science and engineering.

Three critical issues require our consideration:

• The first is whether we want China to be a formidable friend of the USA.
• Second, should we do everything in our (super)power to weaken China so that she will never be our opponent?
• Third is whether USA, China, Britain, France, Germany and Russia should collaborate and become the maker of peace, justice and prosperity of the world.

Before we consider these issues, one thing that Precept 4 calls for is that we know Chinese and China. Martin Jacques said in his book, “Soon, China will rule the world”. If his “soon” means in the next 10 to 50 years, this statement is definitely not supported by the data given in Table. 1. However, he did point out that the West was ignorant of China and its culture. If the U.S. is ignorant in these aspects, can U.S. make objective assessments of and intelligent decisions on the three issues mentioned earlier?

Here is an example of how the new China conducts foreign policy and practices the for-mankind doctrine. By avoiding domestic political affairs and funding the construction of a pipeline system across Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan, China wins the friendship of these countries, stabilizes their economic and political conditions, and resolves China’s energy needs. Similarly China and India have improved their relations by signing a border agreement while China and Vietnam are working to resolve their dispute concerning the South China Sea.

As China’s economy was improving, Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao and the leaders before them made a significant investment to build up the educational system. The graduates are assuming important government positions. Many of them are committed to correcting past errors, such as the corruption of government officials, and leading their nation to new heights. These two Chinese leaders worked vigorously to establish a system that can eliminate corruption in government and greed in people.

With the rise of Xi to the presidency and Li Keqiang to the premiership of China, their determination to clean up the government, the threat that corruption may destabilize the Chinese government will disappear. China will have a strong and wise government to serve her citizens.

Many world events indicate that China is a major power for world peace. It is not the China of the 20th Century. China is destined to grow and be a country for mankind.

X. On Sino-American Relation . A good relationship began in 1784 as the “Empress of China” sailed to Canton, China. Washington signed a Sea Letter and sent a delegate with the hope that the Empress of China could open up a new pathway and a new market to bring new life to the newly formed USA. The Americans took gentian roots from the Appalachian Mountains and red and white wines to China. They brought back a great deal of Wuyi tea (Bohea) from Fujian and china, which generated a huge profit for the sponsors of the ship. One of the sponsors was Robert Morris, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

Up to 1949, the USA was the friendliest of the “Imperialist” countries to China. During World War II, the USA provided a huge amount of supplies and materials with which China could fight the evil Japanese Empire. Many brave Americans came and risked their lives to help China fight the Sino-Japan War. Flying Tigers downed 2,600 Japanese airplanes. The Americans who lost their lives in the Pacific Theater as listed in Table 3 may have reduced Chinese casualties by tens of millions. Similarly the strong resistance of China to Japan’s invasion weakened Japanese capability to fight against MacArthur’s brazen island hopping assault. China should also be grateful to the USA and Great Britain for China being appointed as one of the five permanent members of the Security Council of the United Nations.

Unfortunately the ascendance of Stalin and Mao to power and the fighting of the Korean and Vietnam War degraded Sino-American relation to an adversarial relationship. The USA’s China policy became one of containment.

Fortunately, the establishment of a normal Sino-American relationship through Ping-Pong Diplomacy and trade between China and the outside world has increased rapidly. The granting of most favorable nation trade status to China by President Bill Clinton further increased trade between the USA and China.

On the other hand, the USA’s containment policy is still in effect as demonstrated by the military confrontations that have occurred in the Diaoyu Islands and the South China Sea. However, the improvement in submarines, the increased range of missiles, and the number of nuclear warheads of China make the containment policy obsolete.

The USA must have a new China policy so that confrontation will seldom be escalated into a battle with human casualties. Equally important is that the major powers should never think of a nuclear war as a means to destroy the other major powers.

The meeting of President Obama and Xi at Sunnylands, California is a good beginning. Their desire that the USA and China form a new major nation relationship is so important that the world would applaud it.

Americans do a great deal of good in the world. They also do things that are not good. Similar comments apply to the Chinese. If they do collaborate to resolve world conflicts peacefully (i.e., with minimal human casualties), then U.S.A, China and the world will have and enjoy a win-win-win situation.

XI. Recommendations. Some suggestions were made earlier for the two countries being assessed here. Five general recommendations are given below for consideration by all civilized countries:

• On Corruption and Greed : The world should work together to reduce seven forms of corruption or greedy crimes described earlier. The United Nations needs to develop a body of international laws for use in prosecuting the crimes. Countries that are unwilling to enforce the laws should be excluded from world trade. Domestic laws should be amended or rewritten to reduce crimes of corruption within and without.
• On International Collaboration : All countries — the major powers and lesser nations — should collaborate in world affairs and use trade, instead of deadly weapons, as a means to change a government to one of good governance. Human values and the suffering in each country differ. The killing of people should be the first issue to be addressed by collaborative effort. Changes to an existing government are less formidable than the formation of a new government that is free of corruption.
• On the Prevention of Financial Crisis : The culprit in this crisis is corruption, government overspending, insufficient taxation, export import deficits, and low interest rates that are unsustainable. The government and the people must make some sacrifices to ensure that there will be no financial crisis and the associated economic human suffering for decades.
• On Research : The world may run out of oil and gas in 20~30 years. We should invest in the research and technology necessary to deal with this issue. Investment needs to be made by the world on technologies that will lead to more energy, higher food production, and more practical medical technology so that energy, food and healthy people will be there to run the world when there is no longer any oil output from the ground.
• On Education : The people need to be educated on what is Military, Government and Business for Mankind, why we fight the War of Justice , how to be a good citizen in a way to assure that our government does practice dao , what sacrifices are needed to assure effective government operation, and answers to other issues raised in this article. People must learn that greed, injustice and doing things only for their own self-interests are culprits that will destabilize their government and create wars among countries.

The tasks called for by the recommendations are being done by the world. We just reword them under the perspective of Military for Mankind, the War of Justice and a broadened definition of corruption to highlight the urgency for the world to carry out the tasks.

Corruption and financial crisis can cause a country to self-destruct. The USA and China should join forces in a war against self-destruction.

1. This book, others and essays written by Lee Yuri are on the website: www.leeyuri.org . Hard copies can be obtained with a donation.

American Diplomacy is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to American Diplomacy.

This book, others and essays written by Lee Yuri are on the website: www.leeyuri.org. Hard copies can be obtained with a donation.

Social Justice and Peace

• First Online: 05 July 2019

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• Linda M. Woolf 4  

Part of the book series: Peace Psychology Book Series ((PPBS))

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Social injustice and systematic violations of human rights create cultures of violence and harm. This chapter explores the relationship between elements of social justice (e.g., distributive justice, procedural justice, and equity), human rights, and various elements of peace processes (e.g., negative-positive peace; peacekeeping to peacebuilding), which can be used to advocate and foster cultures of peace. The influence of globalization on the burgeoning child sex tourism trade provides a case study to examining the interplay between human rights, social injustice, and direct, structural, and cultural forms of violence.

Linda M. Woolf is Professor of Peace Psychology and International Human Rights at Webster University.

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Woolf, L.M. (2019). Social Justice and Peace. In: Njoku, M.G.C., Jason, L.A., Johnson, R.B. (eds) The Psychology of Peace Promotion. Peace Psychology Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14943-7_14

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Justice and peace go hand in hand – you can't have one without the other

Tensions between peacemakers and champions of justice are inevitable in societies riven by conflict, but resolving these differences benefits all

I f ending a conflict means offering aggressors positions in the resulting political settlement and impunity for their crimes, is the compromise acceptable? Or should full accountability and criminal procedures for aggressors be non-negotiable – even if it means that the violence and killing are prolonged? Such questions have served to create tensions between peacemakers and justice practitioners .

One thing is clear: separating peacebuilding from the promotion of justice undermines both. As Louise Arbour, former president and CEO of International Crisis Group, has pointed out , peace and justice are interdependent. The real challenge is how to reconcile the inevitable tensions between them.

The 16th sustainable development goal refers to “peaceful and inclusive societies”, “access to justice for all” and “effective, accountable and inclusive institutions”. This is welcome, but innovation will be needed to advance peace and justice as complementary objectives.

The scale and complexity of the challenges facing societies affected by conflict means narrow approaches that prioritise one over the other will miss the mark . We need to find creative ways of integrating efforts to prevent conflict withthe promotion of human rights, justice and the rule of law.

Too often, justice is taken to mean improving and implementing laws. As a result, actions tend to focus on increasing the capacity of law institutions, such as the police and courts, to improve access to justice.

Access to a system that helps to manage disputes between people is important – but it is only part of what’s needed for peace. “Access” is no guarantee of the quality or fairness of a justice system, while equal access to the law is very different from equality before it.

But while the fairness of justice systems, formal or informal, should remain a common preoccupation, we also need to tackle the much larger question of how to build more just societies. Justice is not something that is merely dispensed through courts and the police. Instead, it is experienced either positively or negatively through the quality of opportunities, relationships, transactions and behaviours right across society.

To improve people’s experiences of justice, a much wider selection of actors – not just those within the criminal justice chain – must be involved. We know that poverty, insecurity and injustice are man-made consequences of unfair policies and practices. We know that states can fail because, among other things, their policies exclude people from decision-making and access to resources – and this often fuels insecurity and violence.

We also know that poorly conceived economic investment can contribute to patterns of horizontal inequality , environmental degradation and bad governance – all of which make conflict more likely. So this reality needs to be changed. The fundamental question centres on power, and ensuring it is “not used cynically or to dominate, but responsibly, knowing that generosity and beneficence builds trust,” as the economist Jeffrey Sachs has written.

In some contexts, justice institutions actively uphold laws, power structures and norms that entrench inequality and threaten peace. We need to think of justice as the outcome of a contest over resources and power. These contests occur everywhere – within and beyond the justice sector – and their outcomes can be fair and conducive to peace, or they can just as easily be the opposite.

Contests around unequal access to services, jobs, land and resources, or around tax evasion or environmental degradation, can be critical justice issues, the outcomes of which have a significant bearing on peace and development . It is the task of both peacebuilders and justice experts to facilitate contests that are peaceful, without diminishing the fairness of the outcomes.

To highlight these issues, Saferworld , in partnership with the Knowledge Platform on Security & Rule of Law , is launching a series of articles to discuss the role of diverse actors in crafting complementary approaches to advancing peace and justice. How can we maximise the potential that the rule of law has to offer? How can fairer environmental, social, economic, or housing policies address injustices and contribute to peace and development? How can architecture and the use of space promote or reduce violent behaviours? How do gender roles reinforce injustices that contribute to violence? And why is injustice such a powerful motivator of violent behaviour?

Inadequately addressing people’s everyday experiences of injustice is morally wrong as well as a driver of underdevelopment and violence. People do not live single-issue lives where justice is confined to the legal field. By pooling creative ideas on how to work more broadly on justice, we aim to catalyse action and learning on how to advance the collective interest and make progress towards a more just peace.

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While conflict, used interchangeably with a clash or violence, refers to a state of opposition between people, views, or objectives, violence “…is any condition that prevents a human being from achieving her or his full potential” (Cortright 7). The issue of conflicts has become a daily subject as cases of killings, bombings, and assassinations continue to occur at an alarming level. Racial, color, religious, tribal and economic differences are the major fuels behind conflicts.

Peace, on the other hand, refers to the prevailing conditions in the absence of conflicts and violence. As clashes continue to persist around the globe, playwrights, among other people, have resolved into addressing the issue, the causes, effects, and the possible solutions. According to Terry George, the director of the famous Hotel Rwanda film, the world is yearning for people who can courageously campaign for peace and justice.

Hotel Rwanda , the fascinating composition of Terry George, brings to light the most horrifying upshots, as contemporary history unfolds. It features both tribal and religious conflicts as they occurred during the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

It is a sensitive account of the Hutus of Rwanda, whose genocide campaigns saw the death of thousands of the marginalized Tutsis, upon whom the departed Belgian colonizers had bestowed power. Revolving around a prominent hotel in Kigali, George features Don Cheadle as the manager of the hotel and a representative of the majority Hutus, the wealthy tribe that enjoys majority of the country’s resources.

His wife stands in for the minority Tutsis. She is the least happy as she watches her people suffer harassments and severe beatings. She pleads to her husband to help them despite being a Hutu. As the violence intensifies, killings of the Tutsi begin based on race, religion, and social status. As the European clients and staff force their way out of the country, Paul becomes in charge of the visitor’s hotel.

He cannot tolerate the mass killings anymore and therefore opts to transform the hotel into a refugee camp for the Tutsis, a step that his Hutu people perceive as betrayal. However, from this courageous step, he ends up preserving the lives of at least 1238 Tutsi people. However, the director qualifies in his good way of demonstrating peace and justice, as this is his objective.

The aforementioned subject of conflicts and violence dominates the movie. Nevertheless, efforts of nurturing peace and justice still stand out. The director features both tribal and religious conflicts as observed, not only in Rwanda, but also in the world allover. The majority Hutus clash with the minority Tutsis claiming, “We are the majority. Tutsis are the minority. Hutus must kill all the Tutsis…” (George). From these words, the director brings to light death as one of the many the consequences of conflicts.

The singling out of a Paul from his people, Hutus, to bring salvation to the minority Tutsis is subject to discussion. As Paul struggles to foster peace among the Tutsis, he is welcomes conflicts from the other side, who view him as a traitor, validating Cortright’s words that “Peace does not mean the absence of conflicts” (7). Patriotism is more than love for ones country.

It entails the willingness and sacrifice of ones own people. According to this theory, Paul is a traitor, rather than a patriot and is subject to a stern punishment. However, the director strategically presents Paul’s bold step of going against the majority, who are never right, to picture him as an epitome of the few who are able to stand for peace and justice, not based on gender, tribe, and religion, to quote a few.

Hotel Rwanda qualifies in driving home the point that, if one person could single him/herself out of the action of the majority, the peace, justice, love, and harmony could carry the day. This film will prove relevant in the coming weeks because the students will find it easy to understand the subject about conflicts and violence. This must-watch film presents a good way of demonstrating peace and justice.

Works Cited

Cortright, David. Peace: A History of Movements and Ideas . Cambridge University Press, 2008.

George, Terry, dir. Hotel Rwanda. Lions Gate Films, 2004. Film.

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Justice as a Virtue

The notion of justice as a virtue began in reference to a trait of individuals, and to some extent remains so, even if today we often conceive the justice of individuals as having some (grounding) reference to social justice. But from the start, the focus on justice as a virtue faced pressures to diffuse, in two different ways.

First, “justice as a virtue” is ambiguous as between individual and social applications. Rawls and others regard justice as “the first virtue of social institutions” (1971, p. 3), but Rawls is not the first to think of justice as a virtue of social institutions or societies — Plato was there long before him. However, justice as a virtue of societies, polities, and their institutions is addressed elsewhere , so the focus in this essay will be on justice as a virtue in individuals. That said, individuals typically live as members of political communities, so the societal dimension of justice as a virtue will never be long out of view (Woodruff 2018).

Second, from the start the effort to analyze the virtue of justice has led to attempts to formalize the requirements (or norms) of justice, and at times the latter project has threatened to swallow the first in ways that make thinking of a virtue of justice gratuitous or otiose. We might be tempted to think that the virtue of justice consists simply in compliance with the norms of justice our theory specifies: a just person will be one who complies with the norms of justice, whether those are narrowly interpersonal or more broadly social or political in scope. In this way the virtue becomes subsidiary to norms of justice independently specified (Anderson 2010, p. 2; LeBar 2014). Doing so threatens to lose the force that the notion of virtue had in the earliest thinking about justice.

A further complication is that even the idea of justice as a virtue of individuals seems ambiguous in regard to scope. Plato in the Republic treats justice as an overarching virtue of both individuals and societies, so that almost every issue he (or we) would regard as ethical comes in under the notion of justice. But in later usages justice covers only part of individual morality, and we don’t readily think of someone as unjust if they lie or neglect their children — other epithets more readily spring to mind. Individual justice first and most readily regards moral issues having to do with distributions of goods or property. It is, we say, unjust for someone to steal from people or not to give them what he owes them, and it is also unjust if someone called upon to distribute something good (or bad or both) among members of a group uses an arbitrary or unjustified basis for making the distribution. Discussion of justice as an individual virtue often centers on questions, therefore, about property and other distributable goods, though the broader sense broached by Plato never entirely disappears. Still there is disagreement over whether the broader distributive questions associated with political morality have subordinated or obscured the earlier Greek concerns with justice as a virtue of individual character (Hursthouse 1999, pp. 5–6; Coope 2007; Lu 2017).

1.1 Ancient

1.2 medieval and modern, 2. social psychology and justice, 3. justice as a virtue of societies.

• 4. Justice and other Virtues

5. Recent Developments

6. conclusion, other internet resources, related entries.

Philosophical discussion of justice begins with Plato, who treats the topic in a variety of dialogues, most substantially in Republic . There Plato offers the first sustained discussion of the nature of justice ( dikaiosune ) and its relation to happiness, as a departure from three alternatives receiving varying degrees of attention. First, there is a traditionalist conception of justice (speaking the truth and paying your debts). Second, Plato has Socrates rebut the Sophist conception of justice which built on a distinction between nature ( phusis ) and convention ( nomos ) As Plato has this conception articulated by Thrasymachus in Book I, justice is simply the “advantage of the stronger,” not tracking anything like the sort of value attributed to it by traditionalists. Finally, Plato has Socrates confront a conventionalist conception of justice that anticipates modern contractarian views, in which justice — forbearing preying on others in exchange for not being preyed on by them — is a “second-best alternative,” not as good as being able to prey at will upon others, but better than being the prey of others. These last two challenges give rise to the central question of the book: to whose advantage is justice? Would we really be better off being unjust if we could get away with it? Plato’s negative answer to that question is the project of the balance of the work.

Plato’s method involves the provocative idea that justice in the city ( polis ) is the same thing as justice in the individual, just “writ large.” There are good reasons to worry about that assumption (Williams 1973; Keyt 2006). But in Plato’s sociology of the city, there are three classes engaged in a kind of division of labor. There is a guardian class which rules, a class of “auxiliaries” that provide the force behind the ruling, and the class of merchants that produce to satisfy the needs and desires of the city. Similarly, the psyche of the individual has three parts: a reasoning part to rule, a “spirited” part to support the rule of reason, and an appetitive part. Plato finds justice in the city to consist in each part “having and doing its own,” and since the smaller is just like the larger, justice in the individual consists in each part of the psyche doing its own work. (This grounds the idea, later enshrined by Justinian, that justice is “giving every man his due;” Justinian I.i). Further, Plato argues, justice is a master virtue in a sense, because in both the city and the psyche, if each part is doing its own job, both city and psyche will also have wisdom, courage, and moderation or self-discipline. This conception of justice sustains the contrast with the conventionalist view advocated by the Sophists. On the other hand, at least initially it leaves it an open question whether the just individual refrains from such socially proscribed actions as lying, killing, and stealing. Plato eventually seeks to show that someone with a healthy, harmonious soul wouldn’t lie, kill, or steal, but it is not clear that argument succeeds, nor, if it does, that that is the right understanding of why we ought not to lie, kill, or steal (Sachs 1963; LeBar 2013, ch. XII).

Plato gives a somewhat different treatment of justice in Crito , in which Socrates’ eponymous friend attempts to persuade Socrates to accept his (Crito’s) offer to bribe a way out of the death sentence Socrates is waiting to have executed. Here Plato’s arguments first associate the just life with the good life, thus the life Socrates has most reason to live. And justice, he then argues, requires not only not inflicting wrong or injury on others, even in response to wrongs from them, but fulfilling one’s agreements, and — in particular — abiding by one’s (tacit or explicit) agreement to abide by the laws of the city unless one can persuade it to change them. Of course, justice cannot require one to abide by laws that require one to act unjustly, as Socrates’ own case (as characterized in Apology ) shows (Kraut 1984).

It is worth noting (as Johnston 2011 observes) that even if Plato’s is the first philosophical discussion of justice, a concern with what an individual is due as a matter of justice is a driving issue in Homer’s Iliad , though there is no counterpart concern there with justice as a property of a society or tribe. So even Plato’s philosophical concerns are building on well-established questions about what justice requires of us in our treatment of one another.

Aristotle does not see the virtue of justice in quite the comprehensive sense Plato does; he treats it as a virtue of character (in the entirety of one of the ten books of the Nicomachean Ethics , also common to the Eudemian Ethics ), and as a virtue of constitutions and political arrangements (in Politics ). The question naturally arises as to the relation between these forms of justice. Aristotle seems to think they are closely related, without being synonymous applications of the same concept. As the latter is a conception of political justice, we will focus here on the former. Justice as a personal virtue follows Aristotle’s model for virtues of character, in which the virtue lies as an intermediate or mean between vices of excess and defect ( Nicomachean Ethics V). While he grants that there is a “general” sense of justice in which justice is coincident with complete virtue, there is a “particular” sense in which it is concerned with not overreaching ( pleonexia ). It is not clear, however, exactly how Aristotle understands this arrangement, or the nature of the vices of excess and defect which this “particular” justice is to counteract. One very plausible reading has it that justice is opposed to a desire for maldistribution of “goods of fortune” such as money, fame, or honor (Williams 1980; Curzer 1995). On another it is opposed to an insufficient attention to others’ rights (Foot 1988, p. 9). On still another it focuses on the goods of others, or common goods (O’Connor 1988; Miller 1995).

These issues remain open in part because Aristotle seems most interested in establishing a conception of the formal structure of “particular” justice, which seems to reflect a conception of desert. He distinguishes between justice in distribution and justice in rectification. The former, he claims, adheres to a kind of proportionality, in which what each deserves is proportional to the relationship between the contributions. If A contributes twice as much as B (of whatever the metric of merit is relevant in some particular case), then A’s return ought also to be twice B’s. This conception of distributive justice obviously lends itself to “goods of fortune” — and to some goods, like wealth, more obviously than others — but it need not in principle be confined to such goods, although the examples Aristotle provides suggest such applications. Similarly, justice in rectification involves a sort of “arithmetical proportion.” If C defrauds D by amount X, then justice requires depriving C of X and restoring X to D, as a matter of reestablishing a kind of equality between them. These structural devices are elegant and attractive, but they leave open a number of questions (LeBar, forthcoming). First, as indicated, to what are we to suppose they apply? Second, in what way do they figure into the nature of the person who is just in the particular sense? (That is, how are they related to justice as a virtue?) Does a model of particular justice as a virtue fit the general model of virtue as a mean, and if so, what sort of mean is it? Aristotle seems torn between a conception of justice as a virtue in his distinctive understanding of what a virtue is — with a requirement that one have all the virtues to have any ( Nicomachean Ethics VI.13), and rooted in the doctrine of the mean — and justice as having the form of a formal normative structure, to which the virtue threatens to become subsidiary. All this is to leave aside questions of the relation between this “particular” sense of justice and political justice, and the role of the virtue of justice in the individual as it contributes to justice in the polis.

Epicurus’ conception of the role of justice was more central to his eudaimonism perhaps than its counterpart in Plato and Aristotle, but that reflects in part his distinctive understanding of eudaimonia , or happiness. For Epicurus this consisted in ataraxia — tranquility, or freedom from disturbance. Given that the good life is the life without disturbance, justice plays a key instrumental role. One might, Epicurus thinks, withdraw entirely from human society to avoid disturbance, but the alternative is to live socially under terms which secure the avoidance of disturbance. This is the structure of the ideal Epicurean community, in which each forbears aggression (Armstrong 1997, Thrasher 2013). Justice is a matter of keeping agreements generally, and in particular the agreement not to harm or transgress social norms.

In this way Epicurus offers a conception of the virtue of justice that harmonizes both its personal and its political dimensions. The personal virtue consists in the motivation to abide by a contract not to aggress or harm others. The political virtue inheres in a polity in which such norms regulate the conduct of its citizens, and these two dimensions of justice as a virtue reinforce each other.

The other great ethical tradition of antiquity (Stoicism) had remarkably little to say about justice (Annas 1993, p. 311), so we pass on to the medieval and modern periods.

The legacy of the ancients — Aristotle in particular — continued into the medieval period, notably in the work of Thomas Aquinas, who appropriated much of Aristotle’s philosophy while setting it into a Christian theological framework. As in Aristotle, virtue and virtues are prominent parts of his ethical theory. And, like Aristotle justice is an important virtue, though for Aquinas it less important than the virtue of charity, a Christian virtue that did not appear among the virtues recognized by Aristotle. There are other elements of his account that situate it in an interesting way in the transition from ancient eudaimonist accounts of virtue, to virtue as it appears in the modern era, before it recedes from prominence in ethical theory.

But to the extent Christian writers allied themselves with Plato and Aristotle, they were downplaying another central element in Christian thought and morality, the emphasis on agapic love. Such love seems to be a matter of motivationally active feeling rather than of being rational, and some writers on morality (eventually) allowed this side of Christianity to have a major influence on what they had to say about virtue.

Significant elements of the Aristotelian account of justice reappear in Aquinas’. First, justice is first and foremost a virtue of character rather than institutions, although Aquinas draws a distinction among such virtues not found in Aristotle. For Aquinas, justice as a virtue is a matter of perfection of the will, rather than the passions (ST II-II 58.4). Aquinas offers no account of justice as a virtue of societies or institutions, though he interprets the “general” sense of justice he borrows from Aristotle as being a matter of individual willing and action for the common good. “Particular” justice, which as in Aristotle’s account is most of his focus, has to do with relationships -- in particular but not limited to exchange -- between individuals as individuals (ST II-II 58.8).

Second, Aquinas grounds the norms for these exchanges in the ancient formula of Justinian, which hearkens back to Plato: justice is giving each his own. But his interpretation of this formula situates him astride a deep but subtle divide between ancient and modern thought. To some extent this effect is an upshot of his inheriting not only the Greek eudaimonist tradition, but also a Roman jurisprudential tradition in which notions like standing and right as claim (rather than, say, fairness) had begun to emerge (Porter 2016, p. 143). As a result, Aquinas’ synergistic account has some novel complications.

One major complication, relative to the ancient accounts, is that what is ours by right is a recognition of a kind of status, as an effect of the order among people ordained by God ( ST I-II 100.8). As Jean Porter points out, this establishes a normative standard for justice that does not grow out of the agent’s own perfection or eudaimonia (Porter 2016, p. 157). There are two significant follow-on implications.

First, the fabric of the eudaimonist approach to practical reasoning and life — inherited from the Greeks — begins to fray. For better or worse, on the Greek eudaimonist views (including here Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and Epicurus) our reasons for action arise from our interest in a happy life. If the reason-giving nature of others arises from a different source, as this reading of Aquinas suggests, then practical reason seems to have a duality of ultimate sources, with the complications that kind of duality brings.

Second, this is the first step in the diminution of the theoretical significance of the virtues — a process that will not begin to be reversed until the middle of the 20th century. On Aristotle’s view, for example, the virtuous person sees reasons for acting that the non-virtuous do not (and that arguably are not there to be seen absent the effects of virtue — LeBar 2013; Berryman 2019). Virtue is no longer the normative epicenter of the theory, as it was for the Greeks. To the extent that this aspect of Aquinas’s view has virtue responsive to value or reasons that is accounted for in some way other than the work of virtue, it is the leading edge of process that will result in a much-reduced role for virtue in later ethical accounts

Hume is an excellent exemplar of this point, in both the Treatise and the Enquiries . Virtue, Hume maintains, is a matter of “some quality or character,” produced in one by “durable principles of the mind” ( T III.iii.I, p. 575). We deem such qualities virtues not, as on the ancient Greek view, because they conduce to the happiness of the person who has them, but because they have a “tendency to the good of mankind” or society. ( T III.iii.I). This service renders them pleasing to our “moral tastes:” our approbation, Hume tells us, has its source in “view of a character, which is naturally fitted to be useful to others, or to the person himself, or which is agreeable to others, or to the person himself” ( T III.iii.I, 591). We can think of that as the criterion some quality of character must have to be deemed a virtue. In consequence, what counts as virtuous is an upshot of, and not the source of, the normative foundations of this view.

By Hume’s time the content of justice as a virtue has shifted as well. In Hume’s treatment, the focus of justice is property — relations of “mine and thine.” It is a “cautious, jealous” virtue in the sense that it is focused on the sorts of exclusionary powers that are characteristic of property rules and relations. We may always be aspiring for more but justice aims at the preservation and security of what one has already ( E III.1, p. 184). So the virtue of justice, as Hume thinks of it, will in the main consist of a quality in one which disposes one to observe and uphold these rules.

What Hume wants to show is, first, that we can have such a disposition or quality (that is, that it is possible for us to have a quality or character to observe the rules of justice), and, second, that such a quality would count as a virtue, given his criteria. His approach to these questions in the Treatise is framed by a problem he has set up himself. To appreciate that problem, we have to step back to Hume’s broader view about moral motivation. Hume had argued that moral principles “are not conclusions of our reason” ( T III.i.I); instead, they are “more properly felt than judg’d of” ( T III.i.II). Morality, and virtue, is a matter of sentiments or passions. Why? Hume marshals a number of arguments to this effect which are not relevant to our purposes. The basic reason is that the functional roles of reason and the passions are markedly different, in Hume’s view. The task of reason is to discover truth or falsehood, in “relations of ideas” or “matters of facts” ( T III.i.I); as such, it utterly lacks the capacity to move us to action. Only the passions can do that ( T II.iii.III). The passions, on the other hand, have no representational content whatsoever; they are “original existences” ( T II.iii.III; III.i.I). Virtue is paradigmatically a practical matter: it is a property of what we do, and to act we must be motivated. That means any successful account of virtue must find it in our passions, not in any aspect of our reason ( T III.i.I). So far so good.

However, when we come to justice, we look in vain for a passion that can supply motive power for us to act justly. If anything, our natural motives move us away from justice ( T III.ii.II). Self-love requires “correcting and restraining” ( T III.ii.I). And only a passion can do that. But which? Hume himself dismisses the possibilities of public or private beneficence or universal love. In the end he concludes that there is no natural passion to explain it. Instead, it is in a certain crucial sense artificial ( T III.ii.VI). Under certain conditions, given that we are sensible of the advantages of living in human society, our self-love or self-interest may be given an “alteration of its direction,” and induce us to respect the rules of justice. These Hume thinks of primarily as involving honesty and “particular” property rules ( T III.ii.II). That “alteration” needs explanation.

Two facts about the conditions in which we act — one about us, one about our environment — set this alteration in motion. First, Hume maintains, we are limited in our generosity or benevolence. And second, we live in conditions of scarcity ( T III.ii.II). We have to work to make a go of it, and we cannot count on others to do so for us. We need control of our world to meet our needs, but we are vulnerable to the selfishness and predation of others.

The solution, Hume argues, is that we naturally fall into a “convention” by which we observe that rules of property — the observance of which is key to the virtue of justice — is good for all of us. This convention is no formal agreement; Hume argues that it cannot be something like the product of promise or compact ( T III.ii.II). Instead, “it arises gradually, and acquires force by a slow progression, and by our repeated experience of the inconveniences of transgressing it” ( T III.ii.II, p. 490). Much as two men pulling the oars in a boat together need no explicit agreement to find they prosper by such an arrangement, so do we generally. (Wilson 2018 explores support for Hume’s hypothesis through work in experimental economics.) So in the end it is self-interest that drives us to comply with the requirements of justice, though Hume adds that sympathy with the public interest induces our endorsement of it once justice has become established. This endorsement, however, is reserved for a scheme of property rules taken generally; as Hume observes, individual instances of compliance may frequently be “contrary to public interest,” though such compliance is still required of us. Hume believes the benefit of the system overall, both to society and to individual, requires that rules not admit of exceptions ( T III.ii.II, E Appendix III, §256). Self-interest accounts for the possibility of our being motivated to act as the virtue of justice requires, and both the utility and the agreeableness, both to ourselves and others, of a resulting social order with respected property rules, leads to our approbation of that motivation as a virtue.

In fact, this point — that “public utility is the sole origin of justice” — is the point of Hume’s discussion of justice in the Enquiries (III.I, ¶145). Scarcity imposes a need for us to distinguish mine from thine, and we have not sufficient generosity in our natures to do without property rules (as we might, say, in our families). And once again Hume argues that our recognition of the utility and necessity of justice provides “entire command over our sentiments” ( E III.II, ¶163).As David Johnston observes (Johnston 2011, p. 138), Hume’s understanding of the value of justice as instrumental in the promotion of utility marks a sharp shift from earlier understandings which invoked various forms of reciprocity in understanding that value.

Such a sentimentalist account of justice is also found in Adam Smith; in fact, a focus on the sentiments almost completely swamps concern for virtue. Our judgments of virtue and vice, he says, are compounded by consideration of two different “relations” in a sentiment: “the cause or object which excites or causes it, and … the end which it proposes” (TMS II.i.introduction). His focus on those two “relations” obviates any independent discussion of virtue per se. He does however explicitly countenance a virtue of justice, developed in contrast with the virtue of beneficence. In Smith, even more clearly than in Hume, one can see that this virtue consists in conformity to “rules” or “laws” of justice that appear to exist antecedently to the realization of the virtue itself, unlike ancient accounts. Smith indicates that justice merits resentment when absent, that it may be “extorted by force,” and that in the main it requires forbearing from harming others.. Smith calls justice a “negative virtue” in this respect: often all it requires is that we sit still and do nothing (Smith 1759, II.ii.I.5, 9). It is essential to the subsistence of society, Smith tells us (Smith 1759, II.ii.3.3-4), but — in contrast to Hume — is not reducible in its motivational basis to regard for society. Instead, our just concern for “multitudes” is compounded of our concern for individuals, which arises from “fellow-feeling,” which is yet short of “love, esteem, and affection” (Smith 1759, II.ii.3.7).

In Kant, finally, along with a movement away from sentimentalism we see the completion of the distinction between justice as a virtue and justice as a norm to which a virtue may or may not correspond. While Kant has a theory (or “doctrine”) of virtue, he distinguishes that theory precisely against a counterpoised theory of justice. The two are complementary elements in the “metaphysics of morals.” Moreover, the doctrine of justice itself has two parts, roughly corresponding to the distinction present since Plato’s work, between the role of justice in the individual and the role of justice in the state. Kant calls these “private right” and “public right,” respectively. But right in either case is not how Kant at least conceives of virtue; instead, right is a “condition” that can obtain between the moral agents comprising a moral or legal community, in virtue of their principles of choice in acting (Kant 1797). Little remains here of the notion of justice as a virtue of individuals as it began with the ancient Greeks.

20th-century developmental psychology drew deeply on the Kantian legacy. Piaget (1932/1948) treated moral development as principally involving increasing cognitive sophistication. More particularly, Piaget saw that sophistication as a matter of taking more and more general or universal views of moral issues, and endorsed the Kantian and rationalist idea that morality rests on and can be justified in terms of considerations of justice. Piaget saw a “law of evolution” in moral development, from an understanding of rules (including moral rules) as being “heteronomous” impositions of authority, to which one is objectively responsible, to a grounding in mutual respect, accompanied by subjective responsibility to others (Piaget 1932/1948, p. 225). This transition is fostered through social interaction, and attention to norms of equality and reciprocity replace those of mere obedience.

Educational psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg was inspired by Piaget to propose a conception of moral development that postulated six stages of human moral development. In his earliest work, Kohlberg identified the highest stage of such development with a concern for justice and human rights based on universal principles. Concern for relationships and for individual human well-being was embedded in a framework of conformity to social norms, at lower stages of the process. Moreover, he saw the ordering of the different stages in Piagetian fashion as basically reflecting differences in rational understanding: those whose moral thinking involved the invoking of universal principles of justice and rights were thought to show a more advanced cognitive development than those whose moral thought appeals primarily to the importance of relationships and of human well-being or suffering. The paradigm of moral development involves judgments that are “reversible,” in the sense that each party to the issue can accept the correct judgment by reversing his or her perspective and taking up the viewpoint of the other (Kohlberg 1981). The sophisticated moral reasoner will engage in a process of “moral musical chairs,” taking up the positions of the parties to the conflict successively. It is, on this version of Kohlberg’s thought, that formal feature of the deliberative process that is characteristic of greatest moral development. As his research and thought progressed, however, Kohlberg increasingly acknowledged that these formal features were less characteristic of overall moral development and thought than of the deployment of specifically justice-based concepts. In fact, Kohlberg was impressed by the work of Rawls, and thought that the nature of Rawls’ “original position of equality” exemplified the kind of reversibility that is paradigmatic of the highest form of moral thought (Kohlberg 1981, p. 204). However, his approach treats utilitarianism as less cognitively advanced (more primitive) than rationalist views like Kant’s, and utilitarians (like R.M. Hare) naturally called into question the objectivity and intellectual fairness of Kohlberg’s account.

More significantly, perhaps, the evidence for Kohlberg’s stage sequence was drawn from studies of boys, and when one applies the sequence to the study of young girls, it turns out that girls on average end up at a less advanced stage of moral development than boys do. In her 1982 book In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development , Carol Gilligan responded to Kohlberg’s views by questioning whether a theory of moral development based solely on a sample of males could reasonably be used to draw conclusions about the inferior moral development of women. Gilligan argued that her own studies of women’s development indicated that the moral development of girls and women proceeds and ends in a different fashion from that of boys and men, but that that proves nothing about inferiority or superiority: it is merely a fact of difference. In particular, Gilligan claimed that women tend to think morally in terms of connection to others (relationships) and in terms of caring about (responsibility for) those with whom they are connected; men, by contrast and in line with Kohlberg’s studies, tend to think more in terms of general principles of justice and of individual rights against (or individual autonomy from) other people. But Jean Hampton, among others, responded that Gilligan’s critique was itself a distortion, and that concerns for justice and individual rights are as significant for and in the moral lives of women as for men (Hampton 1993).

In recent years, a variety of social sciences have intensified investigation into aspects of our natures that are plausibly important for a virtue of justice. For example, Widlok 2018 surveys cross-cultural anthropological work examining the development of “ethical skill” in rightful and just sharing practices.

For a variety of reasons, many ethical thinkers have thought that justice cannot be based in sentiment but requires a more intellectually constructive rational(ist) basis, and in recent times this view of the matter seems to have been held, most influentially, by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice . Rawls makes clear his belief in the inadequacy of benevolence or sympathetic human sentiment in formulating an adequate conception of social justice. He says in particular that sentiment leaves unanswered or indeterminate various important issues of justice that a good theory of justice ought to be able to resolve.

Rawls’s positive view of justice is concerned primarily with the justice of institutions or (what he calls) the “basic structure” of society: justice as an individual virtue is derivative from justice as a social virtue defined via certain principles of justice. The principles, famously, are derived from an “original position” in which (very roughly) rational contractors under a “veil of ignorance” decide how they wish to commit themselves to being governed in their actual lives. Rawls deliberately invokes Kantian rationalism (or anti-sentimentalism) in explaining the intellectual or theoretical motivation behind his construction, and the two principles of justice that he argues would be agreed upon under the contractual conditions he specifies represent a kind of egalitarian political liberalism. Roughly, those principles stress (equality of) basic liberties and opportunities for self-advancement over considerations of social welfare, and the distribution of opportunities and goods in society is then supposed to work to the advantage of all (especially the worst-off members of society). He also says that the idea of what people distributively deserve or merit is derivative from social justice rather than (as with Aristotle and/or much common-sense thinking) providing the basis for thinking about social justice.

According to Rawls, individual justice is theoretically derivative from social justice because the just individual is to be understood as someone with an effective or “regulative” desire to comply with the principles of justice. However, it is not merely social justice that Rawls understands in (predominantly) rationalist fashion. When he explains how individuals (within a just society) develop a sense and/or the virtue of justice, he invokes the work of Piaget. Rawls lays more stress than Piaget does on the role our affective nature (sympathy and the desire for self-mastery) plays in the acquisition of moral virtue. But, like Piaget, he stresses the need for a sufficiently general appreciation and rational understanding of social relations as the grounding basis of a sense of duty or of justice and he explicitly classifies his account of moral development as falling within the “rationalist tradition.”

4. Justice and Other Virtues

Few would doubt that justice is a virtue of character. But there are other moral virtues. How is justice related to them? Is it more important? Even in Republic , in which Plato makes justice a “master virtue” of sorts, there are other virtues (wisdom, courage, and self-discipline), and elsewhere (notably Gorgias ) Plato makes self-discipline ( sophrosune ) the “master virtue,” so it is not clear that justice has any sort of priority over these other virtues. Likewise, though the texts we have show Aristotle devoting more space to justice, it is not clear that the particular form of the virtue of justice has any sort of pre-eminence. On the other hand, Cicero claims that justice is the “crowning glory” of the virtues ( De Officiis I.7). If we take virtue of character to have the moral centrality the ancients (perhaps in contrast to the moderns), how much importance should we accord to justice among the virtues?

Aquinas cites Cicero as a target in developing a sophisticated view of the relationships among the virtues ( ST II-II 58.12). On Aquinas’ view, Cicero is half right, for Aquinas distinguishes between virtues as responsive to appetites of our animal nature (moral virtues) and as responsive to appetites of our intellect (virtues of the will). He takes it that justice is preeminent over the moral virtues because it inheres in the rational part of the soul, and because its object is more noble (the good of others, or the common good, rather than the individual good). On that point he can agree with Cicero. However, these virtues themselves are not as excellent as the theological virtues, of which the greatest is love (or charity -- caritas; ST II-II 23.6). There are several arguments for this claim but it is grounded in Paul’s admonition to the Corinthians, that love is the greatest among the virtues of faith and hope (1 Corinthians 13:13).

In recent decades there have been secular challenges to the primacy of justice among virtues. Recall that Carol Gilligan had argued for a “different voice” for women in coming to grips with moral problems. Instead of a rights-based understanding of morality that gave special consideration to the individual, women saw relationships between people as primary (Gilligan 1983, pp. 19, 29). Kohlberg had offered a thought experiment about a man (“Heinz”) tempted to steal a life-saving drug to save his sick wife (Kohlberg 1981, p. 12). Whereas boys are more likely to think of Heinz’ dilemma in terms of what is the right thing to do, girls, Gilligan argues, see the world as “a world of relationships and psychological truths where an awareness of the connection between people gives rise to a recognition of responsibility for one another” (Gillian 1983, p. 30). Gilligan carefully frames this contrast as one between voices, not a matter of ranking of dispositions or virtues, but her work can and did provide a basis for making that sort of assessment between virtues, one on which (as in Aquinas’ case) love and care for others turns out to be more important than considerations of justice.

In some ways, Nel Nodding’s pioneering work in laying out an “ethic of care” takes such a step. Following Gilligan, she sees much ethical theory as missing a feminine voice, one which grounds moral concern for the concrete other in caring for them and their needs, and thus as relational rather than individualistic (Noddings 1983, 1999). Yet some caution is required before seeing her as taking up something like a Thomistic stance on the priority of love over justice. For one thing, to a significant degree she wants to emphasize the importance of the concrete and particular as opposed to the abstract and general (or the reliance on universal principles) in thinking and acting morally. But that is an emphasis which animates some particularistic forms of virtue ethics, and does not distinguish justice from love or other virtues. Moreover, where she explicitly argues that care “‘picks up’ where justice leaves off” (Noddings 1999, p. 12), she is thinking of justice as a property of institutions (e.g. Rawls’ theory of justice as fairness), and institutional implementations of those theories, not a virtue of character. She is clearly concerned about the limits of “rights-talk,” but that at least historically has not been a prominent part in thinking about justice as a virtue of character. Thus she does not clearly take a side in this matter.

Like Noddings, Virginia Held frames much of the point of the ethics of care against a historical theoretical backdrop of attention to justice (Held 1995, 2004, 2006). To some extent, like Noddings, for Held the relevant notion of justice is not a virtue of character but a concern with fairness, equality, and individual rights, or perhaps more generally impartial universal principles (Held 2004, p. 144; 2006, p. 14). In fact, Held more clearly poses an ethics of care as an alternative to virtue ethics (Held 2004, 143; 2006, 14). This is for two reasons. First, virtue ethical theories focus on dispositions and traits of individuals, whereas an ethics of care focuses on relations between individuals. Second, an ethics of care sees people as partially constituted by their relations with others, as opposed to the individualism characteristic of virtue ethics. Held does not think an ethics of care can do without a concern for justice as a value, however (Held 1995, 129). More generally, she believes, caring provides a “wider network” within which concerns for justice and virtue (as well as utility) should be fitted (2004, 147; 2006, 72). Margaret McLaren (2001), on the other hand, responds on the basis of commonalities between care ethics and virtue ethics that care ethics actually is most attractive when situated as an ethics of virtue. Marilyn Friedman (1987) similarly seems accepting of the general framework of virtue ethics, and of crucial places for virtues of both caring and justice within such a framework, responsive to different degrees and in different ways to gender differences she believes actually do hold, though not falling along a caring/justice fault line.

Michael Slote also accepts care ethics as well-situated as a virtue ethical theory, but argues for the necessity of conceiving such a theory as “agent-based” -- holding that motivation or motives are “the ultimate bases for evaluation of action, institutions, laws, and societies” (Slote 1998, p. 173). As he has developed his view, empathic motivation has come to take an increasing role (Slote 2010, p. 124). As with Noddings and Held, for Slote the relevant questions about justice are about forms of social organization, the allocation of rights, and so on. If there is a vestige of the Platonic/Justinian model of justice as a virtue, it would appear to figure in only as a rationale for the shape of some social policies reflecting e.g. social (or perhaps global) distributive justice. But empathy is the focal normative concern throughout. The justice of a society constitutively depends on the motives of the individuals who make it up (Slote 1998, p. 187; 2010, p. 128). If the relevant motives are caring or empathic ones, then Slote’s analysis would seem to collapse the distinction between caring and justice as virtues of individual character (or motivation). That is, individuals would count as just exactly to the degree that their motivations are empathic, and they thus contribute to the laws, policies, institutions, and so on in ways that are reflective of similar motivations across society. But that is just to say that they are caring motivations as well.

A somewhat different feminist critique of a focus on a virtue of justice comes from Robin Dillon. Like Slote, her concern is more with social institutions, structures, and hierarchies than with traits of character, and in fact these priorities lead her to be critical of virtue ethical theories which, she believes, cannot ask the right questions about virtues and vices (Dillon 2012, p. 86). However, she does accept the point that character traits matter, though she believes attending to the vices that allow and support social structures that allow for oppression and domination is more pertinent to feminist moral philosophy.

Lisa Tessman, on the other hand, accepts the basic framework of Aristotelian thinking about virtues of character, and with it the virtue of justice (Tessman 2005). However, she argues that oppressive social conditions can interfere in ways Aristotle did not anticipate with the formation of virtues of character and consequently (given Aristotle’s framework) with prospects for happiness (eudaimonia). One point of amendment, then, to Aristotelian thought is to recognize that oppressive social conditions may make other traits — traits that are important for liberatory struggle — into virtues. Another, congruent with other lines of feminist critique, is that Aristotle is insufficiently appreciative of the need for sensitivity to and response to suffering, so that something like the kind of supplementation recommended by care ethics is appropriate. A different model of response to the development of the virtue of justice specifically under non-ideal or unjust social conditions, one modeled on Kohlberg’s original architectonic understanding of the virtue, is defended by Jon Garthoff (Garthoff 2018).

Finally, in recent work Talbot Brewer has argued that a “revisionist” version of Aristotelian virtue ethics does a better job than competitors (including Kantian and contractualist theories) at recognizing the “irreplaceable value” of each human being (Brewer 2018). Brewer believes that a robust conception of the virtue of justice does important work for such a theory, not just focusing on distribution and allocation, but more generally establishing the space for virtuous recognition of ways that others can demand that we treat them (Brewer 2018, p. 25). Still, Brewer invokes Aquinas to argue that such justice is not enough, that that what is required is a recognition of a virtue of love to unify and perfect the other virtues of character.

While Rawls’ work has sparked an explosion of work in distributive justice and social justice more generally, in recent years a variety of strategies to return to a focus on justice as a personal virtue has emerged. These strategies vary across both dimensions we have considered, taking with various degrees of seriousness the connection between institutional and personal forms of justice, and focusing on the latter as a virtue, among (and like) other virtues.

One such strategy is that of Jon Drydyk, who builds on the “capability approach” to human welfare to make a case for a capabilities-based account of the justice of individual agents, in particular as against an “Aristotelian” approach that stresses justice as a matter of response to merit. Acting justly involves “striving to reduce and remove inequalities in people’s capabilities to function in ways that are elemental” to a truly human life (Drydyk 2012, pp. 31, 33). This is a “subsidiary” virtue account, in that we begin with a prior conception of the content of the requirements of justice, and conform the virtue to this conception. However, Drydyk emphasizes justice as a virtue of individuals, rather than institutions or societies. Drydyk’s strategy offers a counterpoint both to the Rawlsian way of thinking about just societies and to the ancient Greek way of thinking about justice as a virtue of individuals.

John Hacker-Wright argues that what is needed to replace a “legalistic” concern with moral status (as on modern liberal conceptions of justice) is instead an ethic of virtue with a different conception of the virtue of justice. Instead of a concern for the resolution of claims in something like reciprocal, contractual relations, Hacker-Wright’s conception of the virtue of justice is a matter of sensitivity to “vulnerability of value” in things, animate and otherwise. Thus, the threat of unjust — vicious -- wronging hangs not only over people who are sufficiently cognitively impaired so as not to perceive insults, but also corpses, animals, and even rare and valuable rock formations (p. 463). This counts as a sense of justice in that, on Hacker-Wright’s view it is not merely that we can act wrongly or viciously toward such entities, but (following Midgley 1983) that they can be wronged by us by our doing so. However, while Hacker-Wright claims that on a virtue ethic “The character of the agent is recognized as ineliminable in picking out facts as they figure in our moral deliberation,” this does not strictly speaking seem to be true, as prior to virtue there is value which it is up to the just or virtuous person to respond with sensitivity (Hacker-Wright 2007, pp. 461, 463, 464).

David Schmidtz and John Thrasher suggest rethinking the relationship between social justice and individual justice (Schmidtz and Thrasher 2014). Turning Plato’s account of justice in Republic on its head, they depict justice as a bridge between a virtue of the soul and of the polis : because we are essentially social, we need community, and justice is a matter of harmony with the community. On their view this is (largely) a matter of compliance with rules and institutions that enable people to live in harmony and flourish together.

An alternative proposal for thinking of the justice as a personal virtue ties it intimately to the experiences we have as emotional creatures. On this approach, instead of justice standing as distinct from “natural virtues” motivated by passions (as on Hume’s account), or needing to be replaced by sentimentally-driven attitudes such as care or compassion, justice is to be seen as a virtue largely constituted by emotion (Solomon 1994, Roberts 2010). The virtue amounts to a stable disposition of character to respond in the relevant ways to instances of injustice, perhaps consisting in those occasions in which one does not receive his or her due, and on the other hand to be disposed to a “will to give each his due” (Roberts 2010, p. 38). For Roberts, this is a will to realize “objective justice,” and as on other recent accounts, the virtue (and the passion) are theoretically subsidiary to this primary notion of “objective justice.”

There are also recent ventures in the spirit of the ancient Greek thinking about the individual virtue of justice. Rasmussen and Den Uyl (2005) argue for two interpersonal senses of justice (pp. 160-63). One is the familiar Aristotelian virtue. The second is a “metanormative” principle governing the institutions and legal frameworks in which individual agents (just and otherwise) live their lives and exercise their practical agency. The second of these senses of interpersonal justice does not draw its content from the exercise of virtue, but rather makes a place for it. The former does depend on virtue overall (including the exercise of practical wisdom) for its demands, but these are construed broadly in the traditional way of rendering to each his due. Bloomfield (2011) similarly suggests extending the Aristotelian virtue of justice, but in an inward direction, arguing that self-respect is necessary for happiness, and treating oneself fairly requires treating oneself fairly, as one treats others fairly, as a property of justice as individuals.

On the other hand, Wolterstorff (2008) argues that the eudaimonism of Greek thought prevents a proper appreciation for the nature and significance of justice and rights. Whether there is theoretical space remaining for a virtue of justice is not a question Wolterstorff considers, but he does believe there is no hope for an adequate grip on justice in an Aristotelian or Stoic framework.

Recent thinkers have grappled with the question of priority between formal principle and virtue that vexed Aristotle, and offered solutions that for the most part subordinate the virtue of justice to the prior notion of the justice of distributions, as Aristotle himself seems to have suggested. Bernard Williams claims explicitly that this is so (Williams 1980, p. 197), as does David Wiggins, in an attempt to bring a “pre-liberal,” Aristotelian conception of justice to bear on modern liberal conceptions, a la Kant and Rawls (Wiggins 2004). To do so, Wiggins distinguishes three senses of justice: (A) a matter of outcomes or states of affairs in which each gets what is due; (B) a disposition to promote justice (A); (C) a condition of the polis in virtue of which (A) is realized. Wiggins claims that the proper outcome of this collision of conceptions is one that recognizes a form of logical priority of justice (A) over justice (B) (p. 489). At the same time, against Williams he insists that the normative demands of justice (A) are “comprehensible” only within the perspective of a person with justice (B). And in fact he claims that a necessary condition on acts and outcomes satisfying the norms of justice (A) is that they be recognized to be so by those with the virtue of justice (B). Wiggins’ thinking here is not transparent, but perhaps the thought is that the logical point is purely formal: someone with justice (B) must, in act or judging justly, be responding to some norm which counts as justice (A). But, as merely formal, that tells us nothing about the substantive content of that norm. To get that, we have ineliminable need to refer to the judgment of the person with justice (B). That marks a way perhaps of restoring Aristotle’s focus on virtue in coming to understand the virtue of justice.

LeBar (2013, 2014) takes a similar tack in attempting to incorporate Kantian and post-Kantian insights into just demands on the treatment of others into an Aristotelian virtue framework. On his view, there is no way to specify the contents of the demands of justice, or to spell out its norms, independently of the wider possession and exercise of the virtues, including the virtue of practical wisdom. At the same time, what the virtuous and just person sees, in inhabiting a social world with equals in moral standing, are the norms which have become associated with the liberal conception: the standing to obligate others and hold them accountable, for example.

Finally, all of these are Western treatments of an individual virtue of justice. May Sim (Sim 2007, 2018) makes the case that there are informative parallels between the Confucian treatment of the virtues (in particular, yi) and the virtue of justice as adumbrated in Plato and Aristotle.

There are many different conceptions of the virtue of justice, and only some of them are distinctively virtue ethical. Many non-virtual ethical approaches put forward theories of virtue, and what distinguishes them from virtue ethics is that the given theory of virtue comes later in the order of explanation, rather than itself serving as the basis for understanding (all of) morality. This is especially the case with justice, where (as we have seen) it is naturally tempting to account for the norms of justice first and derive an account of the virtue in light of those norms. The question of the priority of norms of justice or the virtue of justice is likely to continue to generate exploration and debate, as is the question of how our lives as social and political animals contributes to understanding the virtue of justice. These vexed questions have inspired a profusion of views and no doubt will continue to do so.

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Williamson County justices of the peace say medical examiner needed for volume of deaths

The first call came in about a drowning. The phone rang a second time 45 minutes later about a different death. Later that afternoon, a third call came in about someone killed in a traffic wreck. Williamson County Justice of the Peace for Precinct KT Musselman said he answered all three calls while presiding over eviction, towing and truancy cases in his court.

As one of the county's four justices of the peace, he not only hears civil court cases but also must determine the cause and manner of death and order autopsies in homicides, suicides, accidents, drug overdoses or deaths with undetermined causes because the county doesn't have a medical examiner. That needs to change, said Musselman, who presides over Precinct 1.

More: Travis County has the highest rate of fentanyl deaths in Texas. Why is Austin a hot spot?

The number of deaths that the four Williamson County justices of the peace responded to grew from 461 in 2014 to 1,023 last year, or 122%, Musselman said. Because of COVID and having to respond to death investigations, he said he has 25 jury trials on backlog.

"In our society we are taught not to talk about death out of respect and I don't have an issue or cause with that," he said. "But I am required as an elected official to speak up on behalf of the people I represent who deserve more than what the four of us can give."

More: It's time we asked why Williamson County doesn't have a medical examiner | Opinion

County Commissioner Valerie Covey said she is working with the JPs on an interim solution that involves contracting with people who would only investigate deaths for each justice of the peace office. Commissioners haven't discussed it yet, she said, but the issue will be addressed during the county's budgeting process this summer. The cost to hire death investigators has not yet been estimated.

Commissioner Terry Cook said she knows the justices of the peace need help with their jobs.

"In a county like ours, it doesn’t make sense anymore to do business as it has been done in the past," she said. "We have to really study and come up with a solution now."

County Judge Bill Gravell, a former justice of the peace, said officials are studying short-term and long-term options.

"We have a strategic plan that addresses long-term goals, which can include things like the addition of a medical examiner’s office," Gravell said. "We have a group actively working on gathering information for this. We also have groups looking at short-term options for the next fiscal year budget."

Williamson County, with an estimated population of 772,000, is not required by state law to have a medical examiner. Only counties with populations of 2.5 million or greater must have them. But commissioners courts can establish a medical examiner's office at any time.

Eighteen counties in Texas have medical examiners, including seven — Nueces, Cameron, Galveston, Montgomery, Webb, Johnson and Ector — with lower populations than Williamson County, according to figures from Williamson County Justice of the Peace Rhonda Redden.

Williamson County spokesperson Connie Odom said officials are looking at the cost of offices for medical examiners under construction, including one in Lubbock. The office there is being built for an estimated $45 million that comes from voter-approved bonds and American Rescue Act Funds, according to the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal.

"It's a very expensive operation to have an ME's office," said Covey. "We are putting it in our strategic plan and looking at where it might be located," she said.

Covey said the county already has reliable agencies and private forensic businesses that provide autopsies, including the Travis County medical examiner's office and Hill Country Forensics.

Williamson County spent $1.56 million for autopsies during 2023, according to county figures. Other Central Texas counties with smaller populations and fewer death investigations spent less.

Hays County spent $736,571 on autopsies in 2023, officials there said. Its six justices conducted 389 death investigations that same year. In 2023, Bastrop County spent $283,725 on autopsies and its four justices did an estimated 211 death investigations, according to county officials.

In Williamson County, the justices of the peace take turns serving one week per month investigating deaths all over the county, as well as conducting their court duties.

Justices of the peace are not required to go to all death scenes and can conduct some investigations by phone. They do not determine if someone is dead but talk to law enforcement, relatives and doctors after a person has died to figure out the manner and cause of death.

The JP's can order autopsies if needed and require doctors to take a sample of body fluids or tissue. They are required to sign death certificates if a doctor cannot or refuses to do it. No medical or law enforcement experience is required to be a justice of the peace.

Redden said she has ended up working on death investigations much more than her assigned one week per month.

"I work a lot of hours," she said. "I put in 3,100 hours in 2023 and about 2,500 to 2,600 of them were dedicated to death investigations. It means I go into work early and work through lunches and stay late and work on weekends. ... For me, my family has been my sacrifice."

Redden, who presides over Precinct 4, said she spends a lot of time talking to families that have lost loved ones, even if it means she has to delay court for 20 minutes.

"They are going through such a hard time that they forget to eat and drink," she said. "I have to remind people to drink some water every hour. I take my time with families because they need it."

Musselman said the justices often get called to death scenes in the late night or early morning hours, leaving them exhausted for court the next day.

"If a call comes in from Taylor it takes you 30 minutes to get there and if you get called for another death in Liberty Hill it takes you 45 minutes to get there, often on back roads," he said.

One of the last times he was on call he was notified about seven deaths in one day, he said. Four of the calls were less than two hours apart, Musselman said.

"It's so many that you literally lose track," he said. "I've had to call back police officers and say, 'Can you tell me that the name of the deceased again?'"

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I Supervised New York City Judges. Juan Merchan Put On a Master Class in the Trump Trial.

By George Grasso

Mr. Grasso is a retired New York City administrative judge.

I spent almost 13 years as a judge in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. I supervised judges presiding over a wide spectrum of cases, dealing with complex legal issues, angry victims, difficult defendants and intense media scrutiny. The job can at times be thankless and frustrating.

But for all the cases I saw, I never encountered anything remotely as challenging as what Justice Juan Merchan faced in his Manhattan courtroom while presiding over the first criminal trial of a former president. And since Donald Trump was found guilty on 34 counts, Justice Merchan has come under further vicious attack.

As a retiree, I was able to attend each day of the Trump trial. What I saw was a master class in what a judge should be — how one can serve fairly and impartially for the prosecution and the defense, and above all remain a pillar for the rule of law in America.

Since the indictment over the cover-up of hush-money payments was issued last year, Justice Merchan has been subjected to an unrelenting pressure campaign. The defendant, Mr. Trump, and his supporters viciously attacked the judge and his family in deeply personal terms. Most judges strive to maintain their composure under the greatest of stress, but few succeed — yet Justice Merchan remained cool, calm and collected at every step of the trial.

As a supervising judge, I always emphasized the importance of maintaining control to those under my charge. That is how a judge ensures that all defendants — especially the most difficult ones — get a fair trial. That is how everyone is treated with courtesy and how rulings are evenhanded and fair. In this area, Justice Merchan excelled.

He issued a gag order carefully designed to protect witnesses, jurors, prosecutors and court staff, but left himself out of the order. He did this to ensure that the defendant’s right to harshly criticize the proceedings was protected even though he must have known that he would become an even greater target of Mr. Trump’s ire. When Mr. Trump repeatedly violated the order, Justice Merchan bent over backward to avoid sending the defendant to jail, despite a clear legal justification to do so.

It is hard for me to think of another defendant acting out in the same manner who would have received such lenient treatment. But special times — and special trials — sometimes call for special measures. A judge needs to know when to apply such measures.

In the course of the trial, he maintained his composure. Defense attorneys received many favorable rulings, and in some instances (like during the testimony of Stormy Daniels) he even made and sustained objections on behalf of the defense during direct examination. On other occasions, when Mr. Trump engaged in particularly objectionable behavior (like muttering curses about a testifying witness), he calmly called one of the defense attorneys to the bench to put a stop to the inappropriate behavior. Other judges might have called out the behavior directly, embarrassing Mr. Trump in front of the jury, which could be seen as prejudicial to the defendant.

I can’t think of one time when the judge interjected himself unnecessarily against either prosecution or defense, but not everyone agrees with that. In a recent New York Post opinion piece , for example, the lawyer Alan Dershowitz referred to “one of the most remarkable wrongheaded biases I have ever seen” regarding Justice Merchan’s handling of the defense witness Robert Costello’s behavior.

Maintaining order and fairness in a courtroom is not bias; it is how justice is served, and it is no easy thing to obtain.

Since the verdict, Republicans have unleashed further attacks against Justice Merchan. One Arizona Republican running for a House seat called Justice Merchan “a corrupt and biased political operative” and said that he “must be disbarred and prosecuted.”

Let’s be clear, these attacks are not really about Justice Merchan. They are direct attacks on our entire system of justice. As President Biden said in remarks concerning this case on Friday afternoon, they are reckless, dangerous and irresponsible.

However, I do agree with Mr. Dershowitz’s position in that same opinion essay that we should televise trials in New York State, so all could see for themselves what I saw every day and what he saw on the day he was there. For most Americans who followed the case, all they were able to see has come from media gaggles outside the courtroom.

Justice Merchan had to set a boundary between Mr. Trump’s raucous but protected speech (barring transgressions of the gag order) and the fact-based evidentiary and back-and-forth questioning that is central to a trial. By guarding that boundary, he protected the integrity of the rule of law.

I am aware of the deep divisions in our country as to the wisdom and strength of this case. But I am certain that Americans were well served by Justice Merchan.

George Grasso is a retired New York City administrative judge and a former Police Department first deputy commissioner.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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