After discovering that his wife cheated on him, Henry, in a moment of con- fusion, seeks out the company of his physical therapist, Bradley, who tells Henry a story of how he, Bradley, had his dreams of being a football player crushed by a bad knee injury. He goes on to tell Henry how he used this bad situation for ethical transformation, saying, “It was a test . . . I had to find my
life.” This, we know, Bradley did, for he became a brilliant physical therapist and, by doing his job justly (that is, well), he also found a lot of happiness. Bradley’s story, of course, foreshadows Henry’s own story of ethical trans- formation—of being shot in the head, only to become a better man, which is also to say a happier man, for it.
Now at last we come to the question asked at the beginning of this chap- ter: Do we all need to get shot in the head (in order to become better, hap- pier people)? In a perfect world—in a world where love of justice is strong enough—then the answer is certainly no. But we don’t live in such a world; in our broken world, where legitimate self-interest usually becomes selfish- ness, most of us would probably do well to be shot, as Henry was, in the head.
Notes
1. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Justice: Rights and Wrongs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni- versity Press, 2008), 4.
2. Wolterstorff traces a version of this definition all the way back to the Old Testa- ment, though such a definition also has its roots in Aristotle’s proportionate equality and, most clearly, in Augustine, who writes, “The righteous man is the man who values things as their true worth; he has ordered love, which prevents him from loving what is not to be loved, or not loving what is to be loved, from preferring what ought to be loved less from loving equally what ought to be loved either less or more, or from loving either less or more what ought to be loved equally.” Augustine, On Christian Teaching, trans. R. P. H. Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 27.28. For both Augustine and Wolterstorff, God is the ground of ontology and axiology; it is God who created all things and his creational laws—the universal moral law being just one instance that reveals to the righteous man or the man of prudence how each thing ought to be treated.
3. Wolterstorff, Justice, 9. This is partly what C. S. Lewis means when he says of the universal moral law, “Only a Person can forgive.” C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Lon- don: HarperCollins, 1999), 339.
4. Although he doesn’t discuss it, Wolterstorff, as a Christian, must somehow deal with the dynamics of rights being violated by one person yet being made right by another. For instance, even if Christianity is correct in maintaining that God, in Jesus, can forgive people for violating his right to be obeyed, what can be said of the person who has been wronged but never made right by the person who has wronged him? Is injustice thus ever enduring? I expect that Wolterstorff would like to say that God rights the wrongs that have been inflicted. This may work if we think of it in this way: if per- son A stole ten dollars from person B and person C gave person B the money to make up for the loss, person B’s wrongs seem to have been made right. However, there is still a sense—perhaps an unreasonable sense—in which person B is still in a state of being
wronged. Perhaps this sense is that the emotional damage hasn’t been made right; there is a sense that person B is owed something, namely, an apology from person A. Again, Wolterstorff could say that person C’s surplus of kindness is both financial and emo- tional and hence in both ways it makes up for the deficiency felt at the hands of person A. This seems to be a tolerable solution to the problem, but obviously even if there is a God who is willing to forgive all things and right all wrongs in the next life, this hardly changes the fact that people in this life ought to have their rights respected by all people.
5. Wolterstorff, Justice, 34. 6. Ibid., 136.
7. See C. S. Lewis, “We Have No ‘Right to Happiness,’” in C. S. Lewis Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces, ed. Lesley Walmsley (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 388–92.
8. Wolterstorff, Justice, 176.
9. Moreover, if Wolterstorff is right, then it’s not clear to me how he would be able to maintain that God is the perfection of happiness, since surely God has been wronged many times. I suppose he could argue that because God is simple and impassable, God can’t be affected by others. But this, then, would mean that God couldn’t have a real relationship with his creatures: He could relate to them only via his ideas of them. While it’s not the purpose of this chapter, I’d suggest that the problem Wolterstorff’s position raises is one that is best left unresolved. It’s best to take a page from the sceptics who would suggest temporary agnosticism in this matter since it seems equally intolerable to deny both that rights and material objects are goods and that God doesn’t actually relate to his creatures in a genuine way.
Scene 3
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