The Idea of Justice

From ‘First and Last Things’ by H.G.Wells

“You will note, for example, that I base my Socialism on the idea of a
collective development and not on the “right” of every man to his own
labour, or his “right” to work, or his “right” to subsistence. All these ideas of
“rights” and of a social “contract” however implicit are merely conventional
ways of looking at things, conventions that have arisen in the mercantile
phase of human development.
Laws and rights, like common terms in speech, are provisional things,
conveniences for taking hold of a number of cases that would otherwise be
unmanageable. The appeal to Justice is a necessarily inadequate attempt to
de-individualize a case, to eliminate the self’s biassed attitude. I have
declared that it is my wilful belief that everything that exists is significant
and necessary. The idea of Justice seems to me a defective, quantitative
application of the spirit of that belief to men and women. In every case you
try and discover and act upon a plausible equity that must necessarily be
based on arbitrary assumptions.
There is no equity in the universe, in the various spectacle outside our
minds, and the most terrible nightmare the human imagination has ever
engendered is a Just God, measuring, with himself as the Standard, against
finite men. Ultimately there is no adequacy, we are all weighed in the
balance and found wanting.

So, as the recognition of this has grown, Justice has been tempered with
Mercy, which indeed is no more than an attempt to equalize things by
making the factors of the very defect that is condemned, its condonation.
The modern mind fluctuates uncertainly somewhere between these
extremes, now harsh and now ineffectual.
To me there seems no validity in these quasi-absolute standards.
A man seeks and obeys standards of equity simply to economize his moral
effort, not because there is anything true or sublime about justice, but
because he knows he is too egoistic and weak-minded and obsessed to do
any perfect thing at all, because he cannot trust himself with his own
transitory emotions unless he trains himself beforehand to observe a
predetermined rule. There is scarcely an eventuality in life that without the
help of these generalizations would not exceed the average man’s
intellectual power and moral energy, just as there is scarcely an idea or an
emotion that can be conveyed without the use of faulty and defective
common names. Justice and Mercy are indeed not ultimately different in
their nature from such other conventions as the rules of a game, the rules of
etiquette, forms of address, cab tariffs and standards of all sorts. They are
mere organizations of relationship either to economize thought or else to
facilitate mutual understanding and codify common action. Modesty and
self-submission, love and service are, in the right system of my beliefs, far
more fundamental rightnesses and duties.
We are not mercantile and litigious units such as making Justice our social
basis would imply, we are not select responsible persons mixed with and
tending weak irresponsible wrong persons such as the notion of Mercy
suggests, we are parts of one being and body, each unique yet sharing a
common nature and a variety of imperfections and working together (albeit
more or less darkly and ignorantly) for a common end.
We are strong and weak together and in one brotherhood. The weak have
no essential rights against the strong, nor the strong against the weak. The
world does not exist for our weaknesses but our strength. And the real
justification of democracy lies in the fact that none of us are altogether
strong nor altogether weak; for everyone there is an aspect wherein he is

seen to be weak; for everyone there is a strength though it may be only a
little peculiar strength or an undeveloped potentiality. The unconverted
man uses his strength egotistically, emphasizes himself harshly against the
man who is weak where he is strong, and hates and conceals his own
weakness. The Believer, in the measure of his belief, respects and seeks to
understand the different strength of others and to use his own distinctive
power with and not against his fellow men, in the common service of that
synthesis to which each one of them is ultimately as necessary as he.”