Mind the Economy/Justice 100

Love and justice: an irreconcilable dyad?

Easter is certainly a time of love, the highest love, that which is measured by Jesus' experience of feeling abandoned by the Father.

20 April 2025

10' min read

Easter is certainly a time of love, the highest love, that which is measured by Jesus' experience of feeling abandoned by the Father. An experience that lacerates flesh and soul. A pain, however, that in the paradoxical logic of evangelical love, redeems. An experience that, in Christian interpretation, represents the apex of God's love for his creatures. Yet, this pain that becomes love is an unjust pain. It is a pain that comes because of unjust accusations, an unjust trial, an unjust condemnation. So can love coexist with injustice, or should love and justice instead lead us in the same direction? This is the question we find at the heart of French philosopher Paul Ricoeur's reflection, a heart where a subtle and radical dialectic lurks, one that concerns not so much two separate worlds, but two modes of ethical action, two tensions that challenge, intertwine, and correct each other. Is it possible, Ricoeur wonders, to build a bridge between the poetics of love and the prose of justice. Between the hymn and the formal rule?" (Love and Justice, Morcelliana, 2019, p. 31). The starting point of the French philosopher's analysis is the so-called "who?" question. Who is the subject and how can one move from the anthropological conception of acting to the ethical, legal and political conception of the responsibility of action? Ricoeur addresses this question starting with the concept of 'imputation'. "A quick semantic analysis," Ricoeur explains, "reveals the anteriority of the concept of imputation to that of responsibility. In this sense, it is not reduced to its relationship with the obligation to repair damages, as in civil law, and the obligation to suffer punishment, as in criminal law. Before these juridical expressions of obligation,' he continues, 'there is the obligation to render an account and, before that, there is the act of imputation, which consists in placing on someone's account an action, which, subsequently, may be praised or blamed' (Person, Community and Institutions, 1994, p. 8-9). That of 'imputation' is the act through which we attribute the action to its author. It is the precondition for being able to hold someone accountable for that action. This act is the semantic foundation for saying that someone has done something, and is therefore responsible. From this imputation descends moral, legal and political responsibility. Ricoeur insists: accountability is not just a legal fact, but an anthropological act, an expression of our deepest ethical structure. From this original concept, then, Ricoeur's ethics develops along three intertwined axes: self-esteem, concern for the other, and justice.

The first point concerns the fact that the individual recognises himself as capable of acting, of promising, of narrating his life. This esteem is not narcissism, but a condition for acting responsibly. "Whatever the relationship with others and with institutions," writes Attilio Danese in this regard, "there would be no responsible subject if he could not esteem himself as capable of acting intentionally, that is, according to reflected reasons. Self-esteem, thus conceived, is not a refined form of egoism or solipsism. The term 'self' is used to warn against the reduction to a self-centred ego. After all, the self towards which esteem is directed is the reflexive term of all grammatical persons (the second and third person are also capable of self-esteem, defined through intentionality and through initiative). (Person and Development in the Time of Post-Liberalism, 1990, p. 77). The second aspect is that which concerns 'concern for the other', the movement of self towards others. In the direct personal relationship, the encounter with the other's face evokes the dimension of love, compassion, friendship. In a relationship in which the other is never an instrument but always an end. "While subscribing to Lévinas' analysis on the face and otherness," Danese continues, "that is, on the primacy of the call that comes from the other, Ricoeur prefers to base ethics on the notion of reciprocity that establishes the other as the similar and the self as the similar of the other. Without reciprocity or, to employ a concept dear to Hegel, - without 'recognition', otherness would stand at an insurmountable distance' (Ibid.).

The third constituent element of this triad is 'justice'. Justice concerns the 'third party'. When a subject - the stranger, the citizen, the anonymous other - comes into play, then solicitude is no longer enough. What is needed is an impersonal structure that ensures fairness and transcends the informality of personal relationships to give itself institutional form. If solicitude is the response that comes from meeting the other's face, what to do when the other does not have a face? When we are talking about millions of strangers or people who have not yet been born? There, says Ricoeur, justice as an institution comes into play. Ethics, to be effective in a complex society, must be embodied in objective forms, rules, laws, procedures. While love is personal and therefore partial, justice tends towards universality. There is a fragile and powerful beauty in Ricoeur's idea of justice. It is not the impartial coldness of the scales that weigh abstract rights with a blindfold on, nor the rigidity of laws armoured in faceless codes. His justice is a humanised justice, a constant tension between the rigour of fairness and the gentleness of love, between the objectivity of institutions and the warmth of solicitude. Justice is not the first name for ethics, but it is what comes when love alone is no longer enough. Not because it is inferior or secondary, but because love is partial, whereas justice wants to be universal. Love addresses a specific 'you': the friend, the beloved, the neighbour. Justice, on the other hand, addresses unknown 'thirds' who also claim something from us, even though they have never met us.

Thus the point arrives where 'the separate examination of the reasons for love and justice must now be followed by their dialectic' (Love and Justice, p. 31). This critical transition from love to justice thus does not imply a turnover, but rather represents a dialectical movement. "Love is not a substitute for justice. It demands more than justice. It asks to go all the way to the bottom of its universal claim, breaking down the cultural and historical barriers of its effective field of application, all the way to the bottom of its care for the irreplaceable singularity of persons, to the bottom of its tendency to subsume particular cases under rules, all the way to the bottom of its project of making the solicitude of cooperation prevail over the balance of well-understood interests." (Person, Community and Institutions, p. 12).

Solicitude is the intermediate category, the bridge between personal love and institutional justice. It is not just a feeling, but a mode of relating that implies attention, responsibility, reciprocity. It is born in the face of the other, as in Lévinas, but finds a more articulated expression in Ricoeur: solicitude recognises the other as capable, as a subject worthy of esteem, and accompanies him to the public dimension of citizenship and law. For Ricoeur, ethics cannot stop at 'face to face'. If we were to remain only in the orbit of love, of personal dialogue, of empathy, ethics would close in too narrow a circle. And here comes the 'third party', the place of impersonal otherness: the one I cannot love but to whom I owe justice.

On the one hand, writes Attilio Danese in the Introduction to Person, Community and Institutions, 'Friendship is a paradigmatic figure of an interpersonal relationship animated by solicitude. In it, in fact, equality is assumed, reciprocity is demanded, the

reversibility. The other interpellates the 'I', which responds with a solicitude that sanctions self-esteem itself; the 'you' summons, the 'I' responds responsibly'. On the other 'It is the third element of interaction, however, that prevents the 'I' from owing all of itself to the 'other' and thus drowning in the 'you'. Lévinas rightly notes in this regard: 'If I were alone with the other, I would owe him everything. But there is the third [...] The third is other than the neighbour, but also a neighbour of the Other and not only my fellow man'. At the same time, it is the presence of the face that prevents the third from taking everything and overpowering the personal dimension with its neutrality' (p. 19). The two processes, therefore, are in a dialectical relationship of mutual verification. Justice is therefore that normative device that translates solicitude into rights, into rules, into equality. But it is more than this because it does not forget the faces of individuals. It acts with the blindfold raised and the sword sheathed. Ricoeur's challenge is to maintain, at the very heart of the institution, the memory of love. Justice must not erase solicitude, but institutionalise it, make it equitable, stable, widespread. "Where to find the paradigm of such a living tension? - The philosopher asks himself in the final part of his Love and Justice - It seems to me it can be sought in the fragment Speech of the Mountain in Matthew and in the Speech of the Plain in Luke - he replies - where, in one and the same context, the 'new' commandment - to love one's enemies - and the 'golden rule' are found juxtaposed' (p. 32). On the one hand the 'economy of gift', of superabundant love and surplus, and on the other the logic of just reciprocity, of equivalence. The imperative to love the enemy has a supra-ethical nature, says Ricoeur, because it stems from God's gratuitous love that is salvation from the slavery of Egypt. "Because it has been given to you, give in turn (...) by virtue of this because, the gift turns out to be the source of obligation" (p. 35). Whereas the movement of love to the enemy is a directional movement - love because you have been loved. A movement typical of indirect reciprocity, the logic of equivalence embodied in the 'golden rule' moves bi-directionally or circularly - love the one who has loved you. This is the equivalent logic of direct reciprocity where the parties in play - the agent and the patient, what is done and what is done, the acting and the undergoing - though irreplaceable are declared interchangeable, reversible.

The reconciliation, the dialectical synthesis between the logic of abundance and that of equivalence seems truly impossible. Even the words of Jesus, who while exhorting superabundant love condemns equivalent love, seem to attest to this. "If you love those who love you, what merit will you have? Sinners also do the same," we read in Luke 6:32-35. "This apparent condemnation of the Golden Rule cannot but disturb us," Ricoeur writes, "since the rule of justice can be seen as a redeclination in formal terms of the Golden Rule. A redeclination that finds its fulfilment in John Rawls' second principle of justice: the difference principle according to which every possible form of inequality can only be considered legitimate if it primarily benefits those who are most disadvantaged. "This formula," Ricoeur concludes, "is equivalent to equalising the parties as far as the inequalities imposed by economic and social efficiency allow" (p. 38). But if the logic of superabundance undermines that of reciprocity, and the rule of justice is the daughter, so to speak, of the latter, we would then have a discredited social justice that is, after all, contrary to the logic of true love, contrary to the "new commandment". But why, then, do both the 'new commandment' and the Golden Rule appear contiguous in both the Speech of the Mountain and the Speech of the Plain? Another interpretation is possible,' writes Ricoeur, 'according to which the commandment of love does not abolish the Golden Rule, but reinterprets it in the sense of generosity, as a not only possible but necessary channel of a commandment that, by virtue of its supra-ethical status, enters the ethical sphere only at the price of paradoxical and extreme behaviour (...) to those who strike you on one cheek, turn the other cheek too' (p. 39). It is the same 'extremism' of Francis, of Gandhi, of Martin Luther King. Can social justice embody the same logic? "If the supra-moral," Ricoeur replies, "is not to slip into non-moral, or even immorality - into cowardice, for example - it must pass through the principle of morality, summarised in the Golden Rule and formalised by the rule of justice. But the reciprocal statement is no less true' (p. 40).

Ricoeur thus tells us that from the logic of superabundance does not come a critique of the rule of reciprocity but of one of its possible interpretations, the one that sees reciprocity only as an exchange of equivalents, a do ut des, 'I give so that you may give'. But the logic of superabundance - 'give because it has been given to you' - corrects the affinché of the utilitarian maxim 'and saves,' the philosopher concludes, 'the Golden Rule from an always possible interpretation' (ibid.). But the analysis does not end here. It is necessary to develop the second pole of dialectical tension. For if it is true that the logic of superabundance undermines and 'straightens out', so to speak, the logic of reciprocity, is it not possible that the latter may also undermine and thus 'straighten out' the rule of justice? Ricoeur is convinced of this. "Just as the Golden Rule, left to itself, lowers itself to the rank of a utilitarian maxim, in the same way the rule of justice, left to itself, tends to subordinate cooperation to competition, or rather to expect the simulacrum of cooperation from the balance of rival interests alone" (p. 42). If this sense of justice is not 'touched and secretly guarded' by the poetics of love, the logic of superabundance, the prophecy of the 'new commandment', then the risk of it becoming nothing more than a 'subtly sublimated variant of utilitarianism' will be more than concrete. "Only the secret affinity with the commandment of love saves Rawls' second principle of justice from this relapse into an unreflective utilitarianism" (p. 42).

We thus come to a conclusion that overcomes the initial antinomy between the two logics of social action through the creation of a dialectical tension that does not eliminate the contrast but makes justice 'the necessary medium of love'. "Precisely because love is supra-moral," Ricoeur writes, "it enters the practical and ethical sphere only under the guidance of justice (...) through the synergistic action of love and justice.

What is the conclusion of this operation? What is the practical relevance of this operation of dialectical mediation between the logic of love and that of justice? The observation that the expression of a balance between the two logics - on the individual level, but also on the social and political legal level - is perfectly feasible. But Ricoeur goes even further, describing as 'perfectly reasonable, albeit difficult and interminable' the task of tenaciously incorporating 'gradually an additional degree of compassion and generosity into all our codes - from the penal code to the norms of social justice'. A wish I can only make my own these days.