Henry Turner is a man who at the beginning of the movie seems to have it all: he’s a successful Manhattan attorney with a beautiful family and all the worldly goods one could hope for. If pleasure were the same as happiness, Henry would be a happy man indeed. However, they aren’t the same, and Henry isn’t happy.
According to Abrams’s screenplay, the chief source of Henry’s unhappi- ness is his unethical behavior. Henry’s injustice extends to his wife, Sarah, whom he cheats on and to whom he “never apologizes”; his daughter, Rachel,
whom he neglects; and those on the opposite side of the legal bench, whose cases he distorts. While few will disagree that these are in fact instances of injustice, most can’t clearly articulate why. Thus, justice needs to be defined to get at the precise nature of Henry’s immorality and subsequent misery.
In Justice: Rights and Wrongs (2008) Nicholas Wolterstorff argues that justice is ultimately grounded in rights, wherein rights are normative social relationships or proper bonds between persons and things.1 People have
rights to certain goods, and justice means rendering to each his, her, or its rights—treating each person or thing as he, she, or it ought to be treated.2 For
instance, Sarah Turner has a right to the good of being apologized to when she has been wronged, and Henry acts unjustly when he denies her this.
We’ll notice from this that Wolterstorff thinks it’s better to approach justice from the point of the recipient (rights) than from the point of view of the agent (duties and obligations) since “if one thinks exclusively in terms of obligations, and if, furthermore, one thinks of guilt as guilt for violat- ing the moral law rather than guilt for wronging the other, then the person who has been wronged falls entirely out of view.”3 This is a helpful observa-
tion (especially if we remember that he is not denying that there are obli- gations and a moral law as well). Let’s say that after cheating on his wife, Henry felt bad about it, but let’s say that he felt bad because he violated the universal moral law that states that a person should, all things being equal, keep his promises (in this case, keep his marriage vows). While this sense of violating basic moral injunctions is extremely important, it’s incomplete; something more needs to be said. For the sake of argument, let’s agree with Wolterstorff that breaking the moral law by performing such acts as lying is to wrong God, who is the lawgiver behind the moral law and who has the
right to be obeyed by his creatures. Yet even here if Henry were to ask only
God for forgiveness, he would—if this were all there is to it—still be act- ing imperfectly since he has wronged his wife and justice demands that her rights be respected and upheld as well.4 In other words, in order to be just
Henry must somehow make things right with not only God (whose rights as the creator he has trampled on) but also his wife (whose right to have a faithful husband Henry has disregarded) and even, if we wished to push the case, his daughter (insofar as children have the right to be raised in a stable household).
While some may say this is all fine and well, others may want more clarification on the matter, namely, to know what kind of rights Henry has violated. Has he violated (leaving God aside for the moment) his wife’s and
his daughter’s socially conferred rights or natural rights? Socially conferred rights are rights that people have been given by society. For instance, my being free to give my students the grade they deserve has been conferred on me by my university. In contrast, natural rights are rights with which people are born. While all agree that there are socially conferred rights, not all agree that there are natural rights. Since I want to argue that Henry has violated the natural rights of his wife and his daughter, we need to see why there must be natural rights.
Wolterstorff argues for natural rights by distinguishing objective obli- gations, which are obligations that hold in general, such “do not lie,” from subjective obligations, which are obligations attached to a subject or person, such “Henry should not lie to his wife.” Wolterstorff then argues that all who accept that there are objective obligations (he has nothing to say to those who don’t) will also accept that there are subjective obligations, since obligations aren’t given in a void. Following this, Wolterstorff introduces his “principle of correlatives,” which states that “if Y belongs to the sort of entity that can have rights, then X has an obligation towards Y to do or refrain from doing A if and only if Y has a right against X to X’s doing or refraining from doing A.”5 For instance, if Sarah is the sort of entity who can have rights (and pre-
sumably, as a human being, she is), then Henry has an obligation to refrain from lying to her if and only if Sarah has a right to Henry’s refraining from lying to her. What this means, of course, is that if Henry’s subjective obli- gation not to lie to Sarah is natural, then the correlative subjective right— Sarah’s right not to be lied to by Henry—is also natural.
So Henry Turner begins the movie as a man of the deepest kind of injustice—a man who doesn’t respect the natural rights of others, a man who doesn’t treat each person as he or she ought to be treated in the depths of his or her very nature. Nevertheless, it still remains to be seen why this makes Henry miserable, which is to say it still remains to be seen how hap- piness is connected to justice.