The Crucial Importance of Justice
"This is why Objectivism takes the virtue of justice so seriously, a virtue to be practiced consistenly, unfailingly, mercilessly, in this world, i.e., in the here and now.
No supernatural dimension exists, in which every wrong will be righted. A victim of injustice can in fact never be rendered fully whole.
"Life is measured in time:"
there is no way to go back in time and remove the pain and suffering the victim has experienced. Perpetrators of injustice can (and should) seek to make amends and compensate their victims, but the perpetrators can never put their victims back to where they were prior to the injustice. Whether it's someone who falsely accused a co-worker, who cheated on a spouse or who defrauded a customer, . .
"the fact is
that this is a portion of the victims' lives
that they will never get back."
As one of the main characters in Atlas Shrugged comes to realize, in an important formulation: "There is no escape from justice, nothing can be unearned and unpaid for in the universe, neither in matter nor in spirit - and if the guilty do not pay, then the innocent have to pay it."
If you want the good to triumph, therefore, you can't leave it to the gods or to karma. It's your responsibility. You must explicitly champion and fight for that which you regard as good. Justice, properly understood, is a demanding virtue. We live in a non-judgmental age, which often derides the act and even the very idea of morally judging another person. Objectivism's advice is radically different:
"One must never fail to pronounce moral judgment."
In all human endeavors, each one of us should work carefully and conscientiously to separate the good from the evil, and then actively support the good and actively expose, punish and shun the evil. The forms this takes in life are many and varied. But the principle remains the same. Anything less than this will undermine the good and prop up evil.
Thus when Objectivism maintains that the universe is benevolent, it is not tying to erase or minimize the existence of human evil. Recorded history is rife with evil and injustice. "Man," Rand writes, "is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyer - and that is the way he has acted through most of his history."
