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The University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, directed by James Hunter, recently hosted a symposium on justice, centering on Nicholas Wolterstorff's book Justice: Rights and Wrongs, forthcoming from Princeton University Press. This is a project Wolterstorff has been working on for some time, and indeed it has grown to such proportions as to require a second volume (touching on the relationship between justice and love), also coming in due course from Princeton.
To respond to Wolterstorff's book, the institute assembled a stellar lineup of participants: Charles Reid, Russell Hittinger, Sarah Coakley, Miroslav Volf, Oliver O'Donovan, Richard Bernstein, Christopher Eberle, and Paul Weithman. (I had to leave before the last three gave their formal responses, but all three had participated in the free-flowing conversation that followed each response.) The standard of discussion was very high, with a range of views represented—including some strong dissent—and universal respect for the scope of Wolterstorff's work and his patient explication of the issues at stake.
In some respects, this preoccupation with justice has been a lifetime project for Wolterstorff, and to provide some context for the symposium, I want to step back for a bit and quote from a column I wrote for the January/February 2000 issue of Books & Culture, called "No Justice, No Peace." (Forgive me for quoting myself, but it seems the most efficient method here. The online content is restricted, and seven years is a long time, even for the doughty readers of B&C. Anyone who saw the column at the time is likely to have forgotten it by now.) So here we begin the flashback to year 2000:
In this space two issues ago ["Thou Shalt Not Take Cheap Shots," September/October 1999] I wrote about what might be called "rules of engagement" for argument, drawing on an essay by the philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff ("Tertullian's Enduring Question," The Cresset, Trinity [June/July] 1999). Here I want to continue on that theme, focusing on a particular kind of argument that is pervasive in American society today. In arguments of this type, there is a claim of injustice and a demand that it be redressed. For example—though readers who have not been in hibernation for the last decade could supply their own examples—in the Chicago Tribune of November 29, 1999, columnist Salim Muwakkil advocated the payment of reparations by the U.S. government to the descendants of slaves. The next day, the front page of the Tribune featured a story about survivors of the siege of Leningrad during World War II, who are now calling for reparations. "People talk so much about survivors of the Nazis," says Bella Zaltsman, a "Leningrad survivor" now living in Chicago. "And in this, we are not included? Is that justice?"
Of course, these examples represent only one subset of the many varieties of such claims. Recently I was told that Wheaton College (where, I am delighted to say, my daughter began her studies last fall) is under pressure to change its admissions policies. Unlike many colleges (see "Colleges Look for Ways to Reverse a Decline in Enrollment by Men," The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 26, 1999), Wheaton has maintained a more or less even balance between men and women. But because far more women than men apply to Wheaton, the admissions bar for women is set much higher. (Many young men enrolled at Wheaton, it could be said, are the beneficiaries of "affirmative action.") To some of the parents of young women denied admission—and no doubt to some of the applicants themselves—this seems a clear injustice.
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