Justice

What Justice means in leadership

You help plan a neighborhood evening event. The organizing group wants to put the returns station beside the nearest homes because it is easiest for the team. You bring the residents’ stated concern about late clattering into the plan and arrange a quieter return point farther from their windows. The trolley takes a longer trip. Convenience no longer has the only chair at the planning table.

The residents do not owe the group silent acceptance of every burden that makes the event easier to run. Justice asks what the undertaking owes those affected, including people with little leverage over its decisions. A fair outcome may require consultation, a changed arrangement or a cost borne by the organizers themselves.

Justice gives…

A wider account of what is due can prevent a successful event from depending on an avoidable burden shifted to others. It also makes the purpose of consultation concrete: affected people’s claims can change the choice.

Finding the balance

A defensible arrangement gives affected people’s claims weight alongside the organizers’ needs, including when that adds effort.

In ordinary life

An absent user

Check who relies on a shared space before assigning it to your project.

The cost of repair

Include people who bear a proposal’s cleanup or maintenance, not only those who receive its immediate benefit.

Nearby virtues, different work

Fairness

Fairness attends impartially to interests and evidence. Justice asks what those interests establish that people are ethically due.

Compassion

Compassion responds to suffering. Justice can recognize a claim before someone has to suffer to make it visible.

Recognizing a counterfeit

Benevolent favor is a counterfeit of Justice when meeting an existing claim is presented as a gift that earns loyalty. Justice recognizes what is due without charging gratitude for it.

How to cultivate Justice

• Name people affected who are absent from the decision.
• Ask what claim their use, effort or exposure gives them.
• Include the cost of honoring that claim in the plan.

Try it today

Consider a small shared arrangement you can influence. Identify an affected person whose needs have not been considered and check the relevant agreement or ask an appropriate question before proposing a change.

Questions worth returning to

• Who bears a cost without having a voice in this choice?
• What do they have a claim to, beyond what they can negotiate?

Choose your practice

These pages offer ideas for reflection and character practice, not professional advice. Choose practices suited to your circumstances and abilities. You may adapt, pause, or skip an exercise; putting yourself or someone else at risk is not proof of virtue.

Quotations and further reading

Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.

1. This virtue is justice: the violation of justice is injury: it does real and positive hurt to some particular persons, from motives which are naturally disapproved of.

   Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
   SECTION II. Of justice and beneficence.; CHAP. I. Comparison of those two virtues.

   Smith defines the breach of justice through the injury to a particular person. An organizer’s convenience must be weighed against the actual burden imposed.

2. Therefore, justice combined with practical wisdom will command all the confidence we can desire; justice without wisdom will be able to do much; wisdom without justice will be of no avail at all.

   Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Officiis
   BOOK II EXPEDIENCY; section 34

   Cicero refuses to treat practical cleverness as sufficient without justice. An efficient arrangement still needs an account of what people are due.

3. For they secure one sort of justice, to be sure, in that they do no positive wrong to anyone, but they fall into the opposite injustice; for hampered by their pursuit of learning they leave to their fate those whom they ought to defend.

   Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Officiis
   BOOK I MORAL GOODNESS; section 28

   Cicero distinguishes doing no direct wrong from neglecting someone one ought to defend. Absence from the meeting does not cancel an affected person’s claim.

4. Others again who say that regard should be had for the rights of fellow-citizens, but not of foreigners, would destroy the universal brotherhood of mankind; and when this is annihilated, kindness, generosity, goodness, and justice must utterly perish; and those who work all this destruction must be considered as wickedly rebelling against the immortal gods.

   Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Officiis
   BOOK III THE CONFLICT BETWEEN THE RIGHT AND THE EXPEDIENT; section 27

   Cicero extends consideration beyond fellow citizens. The undertaking’s members are not the only people whose interests belong in its decision.

5. To be held to rigid rules of justice for the sake of others, develops the feelings and capacities which have the good of others for their object.

   John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
   CHAPTER III. OF INDIVIDUALITY, AS ONE OF THE ELEMENTS OF WELL-BEING.

   Mill connects just limits with developing regard for others. Honoring a claim can be part of learning to lead, not merely an obstacle to the plan.

6. In the unceasing ebb and flow of justice and oppression we must all dig channels as best we may, that at the propitious moment somewhat of the swelling tide may be conducted to the barren places of life.

   Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House
   CHAPTER II; INFLUENCE OF LINCOLN

   Addams describes work that gives justice a practical channel. The change to a return point is a small arrangement through which consideration becomes effective.

7. Why cowards are cruel may be easily discovered; but for what reason, not more infamous than cowardice, can that man delight in oppression who has nothing to fear?

   Samuel Johnson, The Works of Samuel Johnson, Volume III: The Rambler
   The Rambler, No. 148

   Johnson challenges oppression by those who have nothing to fear. Power over a decision gives no reason to make others bear needless costs.

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