Justice & Compassion

Coexisting with Courageous Leadership

“Quick Reminder: Kindness and justice are not synonymous. Be kind. Advocate for justice. Lives depend on it.” - Bernice King.

We are subjected to justice and injustice right from the beginning - even before birth. As fetuses, we are influenced by the food, chemicals, sounds, and emotions experienced by our birth mothers and the environments they live in. Upon our arrival in the world, we are surrounded by the love and kindness of our parents and families, at least for most of us. However, this compassion can dwindle as we grow, resulting in a world where justice seems to disappear and nothing makes sense.

Few people care enough about injustice to do something about it unless they are personally impacted. This may seem harsh, but you know it’s true if you think about it.

If you want compassion and justice in society, you must practice them daily. This might mean being comfortable with discomfort. It might mean speaking up when witnessing injustice or prejudice, even if it is not directly impacting you. But even here, there needs to be balance.

“You lose your grip on justice if you care about it too much. Justice is a matter of poise and balance. In the end, it is a kind of human wisdom.” -Paul Woodruff, “The Ajax Dilemma”

I like this quote. It reminds me that we are often focused on the injustice others are doing while ignoring our own and skipping any opportunity we may have to practice compassionate justice. Woodruff’s reference to “human wisdom” caught my eye as well. If humans practice justice and wisdom, we must first consider what it means to be human.

When I contemplate the essence of humanity, concepts like justice, compassion, love, and wisdom naturally surface. If justice is indeed a fundamental aspect of our society, does its failure imply a loss of our humanity? Does justice necessitate the presence of compassion to be truly effective? I would argue in the affirmative.

Woodruff suggests that some believe Justice and Compassion are incompatible. He proposes a more profound exploration of compassion, clemency, and pity before reaching such a conclusion. While we may pity the condemned, it doesn't automatically justify clemency. How absolute is justice? Under what circumstances can we apply compassionate justice? Is a justice system devoid of compassion even humane? These are the questions that have fueled debates for centuries.

What does it take to practice compassion? If you know yourself and do the daily work of happiness, you may have enough room for compassion if you remain present. When you are devoid of these things, you do not have space for compassion.

Does one need a spiritual connection to practice compassion? In The Ajax Dilemma, Paul Woodruff delves into justice and leadership through the lens of the story of Ajax and Odysseus and the contentious issue of who deserves Achilles' coveted armor. It's a profound exploration of the human condition and our ability to coexist.

In this story, some characters deeply understand compassion, clemency, and pity, while others do not. The leader is interested in doling out justice, devoid of compassion, as he worries about maintaining order. Our subjective process of wrestling with these dilemmas is what it means to be human.

Plato believed human beings have a soul, that our souls existed before birth and continue to exist after death. That we are spiritual and physical. If we take this hypothesis, which I immensely like, we can say that justice and compassion may co-exist. To be human is to have a soul. We would be incapable of compassion if we did not have a soul. When humans try to administer justice without compassion, they lose support from the masses. When groups of people are treated inhumanely, they will eventually revolt against their oppressors.

We practice justice daily and numerous times throughout the day, in our interactions with friends, family, co-workers, or even strangers, and our inner voices and how we talk to ourselves.

When we hear justice, most think about the criminal justice system. Today, every group in America has a smaller portion of people within it who feel oppressed in our society. Are segments of our population oppressed by an ineffective and abused criminal justice system? I think so. But we may disagree on who, what, and why. And there is the rub.

Our criminal justice system is broken. I have been saying this for what seems like my entire life. It operates differently based on socioeconomic status, connections, and legal representation. It is an accessible institution to criticize. We have all witnessed powerbrokers avoiding being held accountable by our criminal justice system for as long as I can remember. In effect, all United States Citizens are oppressed by our broken criminal justice system, which is too often devoid of equity and accountability.

We can agree that justice is giving each person what is due to them, good, bad, or ugly. Justice is not so easy, though. In some states, a woman who aborts her deceased fetus can go to jail in the United States of America today. So can her doctor. Is that justice? How about a 5-year-old rape victim whose father kills the rapist? Should he go to jail? What role should compassion have in administering justice? How do we administrate compassion through a judicial process when so much is left to interpretation? When so much of the power within the judiciary is subject to the whims and will of the electorate whose political candidates appoint people to lifetime judgeships who may not be equitable or fair? How do we create and ensure quality and equity within our judicial system?

One element of justice at the core of the story of Ajax and Odysseus is that in the execution of justice, there is always a winner and a loser. “You win some, you lose some” is something we have all heard. But it’s the “how” that counts most. How do you handle winning, how do you win, how do you handle losing, how do you lose? Egos have tremendous influence over what kind of person we are, especially what kind of winner or loser we are.

After losing the desired armor, Ajax’s ego and battle fatigue after fighting the citizens of Troy for nine years takes over, and he loses it and tries to kill his boss, Agamemnon, and his competitor, Odysseus. When that fails, he kills himself. Ajax was a lousy loser. The punishment for trying to kill your boss was to be stoned to death, or if you are already dead, to not have a proper and dignified burial. The king was set to let Ajax’s body rot on the roadside, but Odysseus correctly argued for a compassionate execution of the law in his case. Agamemnon wrestled with how the soldiers would view him and the concept of justice if he demonstrated compassion. He worried it would be considered a weakness and give rise to mutinies or insubordination. Odysseus argued compassion was of greater importance since, in the case of Ajax, showing compassion demonstrated proper respect for his position as a leader among all soldiers.

I see humanity in every angle of this story. Administering justice requires the practice of another cardinal virtue: courage. One must be courageous and humane to execute compassionate justice.

I am not sure equity will be possible, but we should all demand a solution that guarantees equity. It may not matter now, but if you ever need an equitable justice system personally, you will wish we had one.