First Justice, Then Reconciliation?

One way of positively relating justice to reconciliation is to suggest that the process of reconciliation can begin only

injustice has been removed. This...seems to be the position of the Kairos Document [a document, written by theologians critical of the South African regime before the dismantling of apartheid, which used the concept "cheap grace" to describe the readiness to accept love from God without any sense of obligation toward others.], which so rightly denounces "cheap reconciliation." But is this "first justice, then reconciliation" stance plausible? There are major problems with it.

First and most fundamentally, "first justice, then reconciliation" is impossible to carry out. All accounts of what is "just" are to some extent relative to a particular person or group and are invariably contested by that person's or group's rivals. In any conflict with a prolonged history, each party sees itself as the victim and perceives its rival as the pepetrator and has good reasons for reading the situation that way.

Even more significantly, as Nietzsche rightly noted in "Human, All Too Human," given the nature of human interaction, every pursuit of justice not only rests on partial injustice but also creates new injustices. In an ongoing relationship, as the temporal and spatial contexts of an offense are broadened to give an adequate account of it, it becomes clear that any action we undertake now is inescapably ambiguous, at best partially just and therefore partially unjust. No peace is possible within the overarching framework of strict justice for the simple reason that no strict justice is possible. Hence the demand at the communal or political levels is often not for "justice" but for "as much justice as possible." But the trouble is that, within the overarching framework of strict justice, enough justice never gets done because more justice is always possible than in fact gets done.

Second, even if strict justice were possible, it is questionable whether it would be desirable. Most of us today feel that the legal provisions of the Hebrew Bible, which insist that the punishment be commensurate with the crime, are excessive. "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" strikes us as too severe. Originally, of course, the provision was meant to restrict the excess of vengeance. And yet it is precisely the demand for more than equal retribution that is strictly just. If a person's tooth is broken in retribution for that person's breaking mine, we are

even for the simple reason that the situation of offense is manifestly not one of exchange. In a situation of exchange, both of us would have disposal over our teeth, and I would give mine under condition that I was given his in return.

But in a situation of offense, the consent to the exchange is lacking. By breaking my tooth he has violated me and therefore deserves greater punishment than just the breaking of his tooth. Most of us, however, don't thnk that a world in which corrective justice was pursued even with such strictness as the principle "tooth for a tooth" demands would be a desirable one; and so, even when we demand "justice," we are in fact after something much less than strict justice, which is to say that we are ready tacitly to "forgive" part of the offense. We are at least implicitly aware that the normal functioning of human life is impossible without grace.

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