Bias and Justice

(From The Moral Core: The Biblical Perspective on Justice by Dean Brackley, SJ. I found this through Ray McGovern.)

Most modern, Western conceptions of justice stress its essential impartiality. For us, judges who are supposed to symbolize justice … could not be considered proper judges and at the same time be biased, prejudiced, and partial. Bias is incompatible with our abstract concept of justice.

Biblical justice will have none of this. It is forthrightly biased, prejudiced, and partial. More accurately, it recognized that all systems of justice are biased, covertly or overtly, and it opts for overt discovery of the bias. Biblical justice theory is biased and it admits it.

Its bias is two-edged: it is unequivocally partial to the poor and suspicious of the “rich.” This meaning is etymologically grounded in the very word for justice, since the biblical root for sedaqah, the prime Hebrew word for justice, has from the first a bias towards the poor and needy. The related Aramaic tsidqah meant “showing mercy to the poor.” Our modern tendency is to think of justice in terms of criminality or litigation. Our justice is concerned with trouble. The biblical preoccupation is wholly other. Justice is “good news,” especially “to the poor” (Luke 4:18).

So positive (versus punitive) is the terminology used for justice. God says (literally), “I will not do justice … to the wicked.” Justice applies to the innocent.

Justice is not reacting to evil, but responding to need. Woe to those who “deprive the poor of justice” (Isaiah 10:2). The prime focus of this justice is not on the guilty, but on victims and the dispossessed.

Deuteronomy says: “You shall not deprive aliens and orphans of justice.” What justice requires is spelled out in detail: never “take a widow’s cloak in pledge” or a poor man’s cloak if he needs to be warm — even if it is owed to you by a mathematically strict standard of justice. “When you reap the harvest in your field and forget a swathe, do not go back and pick it up; it shall be left for the alien, the orphan, and the widow.” When you are harvesting your olives or your grapes, leave some behind: “What is left shall be for the alien, the orphan, the widow” (Deut. 24: 10-22).

This early and often repeated formulation of justice primarily involves not contracts or torts, but compassion, benevolence, and redistribution. Augustine summed up the tradition simply when he said: “Justice consists in helping the needy and the poor.” The poor, quite simply, are God’s children and they are marked out for special handling. That special handling is the prime work of justice.

Because of its overarching concern for the poor, biblical justice is not quibbling legalism. It is large-hearted and magnanimous. It must, in the course of life, descend to the picky details of legality, but its heart is not there.