Goodness/Justice

As with the “sense” of perfect and unconditional truth and love, philosophers have long recognized the human desire for perfect goodness or justice. Not only do human beings have a sense of good and evil, a capacity for moral reflection, a profoundly negative felt awareness of cooperation with evil (guilt), and a profoundly positive felt awareness of cooperation with goodness (nobility); they also have a “sense” of what perfect, unconditioned goodness/justice would be like. Human beings are not content to simply act in accordance with their conscience now, they are constantly striving for ways to achieve the more noble, the greater good, the higher ideal. They even go so far as to pursue the perfectly good or just order.

A clue to this desire for perfect goodness/justice may be gleaned from children. An imperfect manifestation of justice from parents will get the immediate retort, “That’s not fair!” Adults do the same thing. We have a sense of what perfect justice ought to be, and we believe others ought to know this. When this sense of perfect justice has been violated, we are likely to respond with outrage. A violation of this sort always seems particularly acute. We seem to be in a state of shock. We really expect that perfect justice ought to happen, and when it doesn’t, it so profoundly disappoints us that it can consume us. We can feel the same outrage towards groups, social structures, and even God.

One need only look at last year’s newspapers to find a host of well-meaning, dedicated, and generous men and women who have tried to extract the perfect and unconditioned from the legal system, the ideals of social justice, and institutions dedicated to the common good. The despairing rhetoric of dashed idealism and cynicism does not belong solely to early Marxism; it can be found in public defenders who decry the legal system for prosecuting the innocent, and victims who vilify the very same system for letting the guilty go free. It can also be found in educators who criticize the educational system for not setting high enough standards, and in community advocates who tear down the very same system for making the standards too high and too exclusive. But our imperfect world will not allow either side to be perfectly correct.

As with our “sense” of perfect and unconditional love, our sense of perfect and unconditional goodness/justice has both a positive and negative side. The positive side is its ability to fuel all our strivings for an ever more perfect social order, a more just legal system, greater equity and equality, and even our promethean idealism to bring the justice of God to earth. The negative side of this “sense” of perfect or unconditional justice is that it incites our expectations for perfect justice in a finite and conditioned world, meaning that our promethean ideals are likely to be frustrated. This causes disappointments with the culture, the legal system, our organizations, and even our families. We seem to always expect more justice and goodness than the finite world can deliver, and it causes outrage, impatience, judgment of others, and even cynicism when it does not come to pass.

What is the source of this “sense” (notion) of perfect goodness/justice, even the promethean desire to save the world, and to be the “ultimate hero?” As with the desire for complete intelligibility and unconditional love, the desire for perfect goodness/justice seems to go beyond any experience or knowledge of justice we could possibly have. Our frustrated idealism reveals that we continually see the limits of any current manifestation of goodness and justice which, in turn, reveals that we are already beyond those limits. Given that our desire will only be satisfied when we reach perfect, unconditional goodness/justice, it would seem that our desire is guided by a notional awareness of preveals the transmaterial (spiritual), self-transcendent dimension of human beings.erfect, unconditional goodness/justice; and, given that this notion cannot be obtained from a conditioned and imperfect world, it would seem that its origin is from perfect, unconditional goodness/justice itself. For this reason, philosophers have associated it with the presence of God to human consciousness. This presence of perfect and unconditional goodness/justice to human consciousness further