Description: If you think you know what justice is, you're probably going to start killing people next

Transcript: I’m a very long way from understanding what justice is. I’ve always been of the Isaiah Berlin view. Isaiah Berlin is one of my favorite philosophers, and his view in a nutshell – it’s a little oversimplified, I guess – was that if you know for sure what justice is, you’re probably gonna start killing people next. That is, his view is that most of the mystery . . . I’m sorry. His view is that most of the misery in our history and the world’s history has come because someone has thought they know the single truth, or the truth in the face of which all other truths must fall. It could be a single religious truth, a single _________ or cultural truth. It could be a single ideological truth. When you know the one thing that’s the most important thing, the one crystal truth, his fear was that’s when you start letting all the ordinary barriers that keep us from doing terrible things fall because you want to do that terrible thing. So I am a long way from claiming that I know what justice is. A part of me simply wants us to follow the golden rule: Love the neighbor. And I guess most people would endorse that. But it’s awfully hard sometimes to figure out what love is. And it’s awfully hard sometimes to figure out what the neighbor is. And because of those difficulties, I’m a great believer in being modest in our claims of what we should force other people to do. In fact, one of the things that confuses me and scares me about politics today in the United States and much of the world is that so much of the political debate is about what we should force people to do, what we should prohibit them from doing. __________ left and the right __________. _________different things I want to force and prohibit. And I don’t have a sufficiently powerful sense of my own righteousness to be able to think first and foremost about what I should force people to do. I have to think first and foremost about how I’m supposed to live myself, my own life, and what I’m supposed to do to encourage others or to inspire them rather than to forbid them or to force them.

Recorded on: 7/25/07

Description: Beyond what is in the U.S. Constitution, economic and social rights.

Transcript: When I think of justice, I think of something that’s not all that much different from respect for individual rights. Now in this respect though, I speak not simply about the civil and political rights that for, I think, many Americans are conjured up by the concept of rights. It’s not simply the rights that are in the U.S. Constitution that is to say, but also some basic economic justice. Some basic respect for what are known as . . . as economic and social rights in the international realm. But that is to say at the minimum, the provision of the necessities of life – the housing, the food, the medical care and like – that allow people to exist and live with some basic dignity. So I do think that with that holistic concept of rights, that there’s not all that much difference between justice and respect for rights. But I do think to . . . to equate the two, you have to move beyond the more procedurally oriented rights of, say, the U.S. Constitution – the civil and political rights – and look at some of the more substantive rights of . . . of what are known as economics and social rights.

Recorded on: 8/14/07

Description: Putting social justice in a proper context.

Transcript: Well social justice is a term that’s __________ around a lot and I’m not really sure what it means. I don’t even know what the words are doing together, although I do use it for lack of a better term. Really we’re talking about justice. I’m not sure what the word “social” is doing there. Is it an adjective to describe the word justice? Isn’t all justice social, but at the same time individual? I mean really what we’re talking about is justice; but I think for too many people justice is understood in very narrow terms to mean what happens in the legal system. And of course what you understand if you study law as I did is that law is well beyond what is written down in the books, and of course well beyond what the judges themselves say about what’s written down in the books. There’s lots of ways in which law emerges – administratively through judges and through legislators; but more broadly speaking, justice is the way in which we understand our world and the decisions and choices we make morally and ethically about how to organize ourselves and about how to coexist together. And what seems patently obvious in one cultural context as just, and necessary, and good may, of course, seem absolutely blasphemous in another context. So justice itself is quite a concept. And that again is why human rights become so important, because what we’re talking about is a universal system of understanding what we’re all entitled to as human beings irrespective of where or how we live.

Recorded on: 8/13/07