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Life isn't going well for a person who is not respected as she should be; her flourishing has been diminished. She has a right to be treated better. Since rights generate correlative obligations, the agent dimension of the moral order and the "living well" part of human flourishing come into the picture as well. A person isn't living well if she fails to respect others, and she is thereby diminishing her own flourishing, not just the flourishing of those persons she is wronging. Committing injustice, you aren't living well precisely because you are making the life of others not go well. When you are practicing justice, you are living well and are thereby helping the life of others go well. That, in rough outline, is what needs to be said about the relation between justice and human flourishing.
In the Christian tradition, however, human flourishing is related principally to love, not to justice—or so I think. The ultimate maxim of action isn't the principle of justice but the command of love—love of God and love of neighbor. So how is love related to justice and how are both linked to human flourishing?
A powerful tradition in Protestant theology—most stringently expressed in Anders Nygren's Agape and Eros—sees love as paramount, and love and justice as irreconcilable. Wolterstorff spills a good deal of ink in both Justice and Justice and Love countering this tradition by establishing the importance of rights in Scripture, as well as showing that love and justice are not mutually exclusive. As he puts it in another of his texts on the topic, there is justice in love, whether that love is the love of the three persons of the Trinity, the perfect love of the redeemed in the world to come, or the imperfect love of those who are on the march through history.
Think of love as care and it's easy to see how love and justice are coordinated rather than opposed. Here is how Wolterstorff sums up his position in Justice and Love: "To care for one's neighbor is to recognize the worth of the neighbor and seek to respect that worth and have it respected … . But also, caring about the neighbor may take the form of seeking to enhance his wellbeing beyond what justice requires, and often without worrying whether or not justice requires it."
Love as care has two dimensions. The one is justice, committing a person to recognize a neighbor's worth and act in accordance with it. The other is benevolence, committing a person to enhance a neighbor's wellbeing. Since for Wolterstorff respect for rights trumps enhancement of life-goods, the pragmatic order of importance of the two dimensions of love as care is clear: first justice, then benevolence.
One way to interpret how justice and benevolence relate within the command of love is to say that justice is obligatory and benevolence supererogatory. Wolterstorff's formulation—that caring "about the neighbor may take the form of seeking to enhance his wellbeing" —could suggest that he considers benevolence as the supererogatory component of the love command. Yet that is not the case. He clearly recognizes the duty of charity—"a duty to treat someone a certain way when that person does not have a right against one to one's treating her that way." But the two duties—the duty of justice and the duty of benevolence—are different. First, the duty of benevolence is a third-party duty, a duty to God to be benevolent toward the neighbor, not directly a duty to the neighbor. Second, the duty of justice trumps the duty of benevolence. It is not permissible to wrong anyone to enhance his or anyone else's life-goods; in the "practice of agape we must never fail to do what justice requires." So when we are commanded to love the neighbor, we are commanded to do justice as well as to practice benevolence. Both are duties, just different kinds of duties and, given our finitude, prioritized duties.
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