The conclusion of the post series devoted to Martin Luther King, Jr’s work and its reflections in the Periclean program focuses on justice. Justice is moral righteousness, most often associated with the laying down of the law. Justice is mandated in societies from a variety of sources, including religion and morals that come from divine inspiration. It concerns how people should be given what they earn or deserve, how punishment should be delivered for those who commit injustices, and how victims can best be healed.
There are many theories of distributive and retributive justice, meaning that how we achieve it is open to debate. Since we are focusing on the dream of Dr. King, how did he envision that we achieve justice? We can get a glimpse at this through his Letter from a Birmingham Jail dated April 16, 1963, which goes into further detail about how he sees the formation of injustice and how to determine whether or not a law is unjust.
First: “...I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial ‘outside agitator’ idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.”
This quote leads me to believe that King wished distributive justice to be distributed across communities nationwide. The distributive justice King advocates is not a good, but rather love and respect. It is of a sort that is timeless. He saw groups of people being systematically denied this respect. His call is aimed at individuals, to treat one another with a spirit of brotherhood - as if different races were our own flesh and blood.
The Periclean Scholars extend distributive justice across international borders. Some may say that we are taking goods and resources that could be used in America, such as dollars for shopping malls, clothing for children, or building tools for domestic groups, and acting in the fashion of Robin Hood. To those who say that, I would say that the allocation of these resources for our partners acknowledges the ties that connect us all. They should be used to attain the best collective results. In this sense, supporting Periclean partners gives a synergistic effect, in that 1 plus 1 is greater than 2. The giving of ourselves for the justice of our partners allows us to receive just as much, if not more, than what is given. Dumping our dollars on goods and services for those closest to us (geographically or in kin) cannot give this same effect.
Second: “How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority.”
King’s words tell us that justice is more than just the laying of the state’s laws. It is sticking to moral integrity as the mainstay of our mandate for justice. From the retributive side, it is our responsibility to change the law if we find it is in discord with moral righteousness. However, we should be careful here not to tie the law of the land to the law of any one nation’s primary religion. Consider for a moment sharia law and its impact on Islamic nations. Citizens do not treat each other as they would have unto themselves, because their view of integrity does not always mesh with natural law.
Pericleans operate independently of one nation’s laws. They must consider a variety of perspectives, cultural requirements, and expectations before putting plans into action. While they must obey custom, the law that governs Pericleans and their actions is the compass of eternal and natural law. This sense of justice allows us to treat “others” as equals and partners as players on the same level. Being fair and just in this sense is the antithesis to ruling without law, as in, without a set of national laws there would be no law. Eternal and moral law, combined with the integrity of doing the right thing when certain people are not watching, provide a foundation for Periclean actions.
Third, at the conclusion of the letter: “I hope this letter finds you strong in the faith. I also hope that circumstances will soon make it possible for me to meet each of you, not as an integrationist or as a civil-rights leader but as a fellow clergyman and a Christian brother. Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.”
King could end this letter any way he chose, but the lasting impression he wished to leave was one of his vision for our society as transformed into a just one. King did not dream of jailing those who had betrayed him. He did not dream of forty acres and a mule. He dreamed of a type of restorative justice. He acknowledged that it would be nearly impossible (and both impractical and backwards) to impose retributive justice on those whose ancestors committed acts of racism and hatred. For one, people might see my white skin and think that my family owned slaves, but in fact I am a descendant of immigrants who arrived after the Civil War and relatives who supported civil rights. We only need look to Zimbabwe for an atrocious example of retributive justice, of the sort that King’s words show that he sought to avoid. To restore King’s soul, he wanted brotherly love. He wanted all people to be treated equally and fairly.
Pericleans use our talents and gifts to affect the destinies of our partners in positive ways. We do our best to overcome years of inequality between nations and communities as agents that distribute justice. No, we do not create laws, but rather we heal and work with those to move beyond the wrongs that have been committed against them by various forces. We select communities that are willing partners, that have specific needs based on a past history. We only choose partners that are willing to show us love and equality, to see us as brothers and sisters on this same earth. We work with those who are open to restorative justice. We retain partnerships in the spirit of King’s dream.
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