Justice and the Death of Children

Today we mourn the death of murdered children. It is a crime so vile that many of us experience a visceral reaction – we feel nauseated, dizzy, tears come. The instinct to preserve children is one of the most basic. It seems especially honed by evolution in humans because we are unique in the length of time we must care for our young. Jane Goodall described the heartbreaking story of a mother chimpanzee carrying the corpse of her dead baby and refusing to part with it. How much more heartbreaking is the story of human parents who must bury their children, given our longer lasting instinct to protect and care for our young.

In our culture, children symbolize innocence, and any attack on the innocent epitomizes injustice. The Holocaust will forever stand stand as the ultimate icon of injustice. For all generations we will grapple with how such monumental injustice could have occurred in what we hope to be a just universe. Arguably, Anne Frank will be our icon of the Holocaust in the popular imagination. We are outraged at the Universe, some of us at God, when innocent lives are unjustly cut short. Something is wrong with us. Something is wrong with the Universe.

If both our nature and our sense of order in the world are outraged at such a crime, how much more the outrage at the murder of one’s own offspring. That ultimate betrayal is at the heart of many of our religions. Because Abraham was willing to do God’s will despite his devotion to his only son that he loved, and his revulsion at such a heinous act, the near sacrifice of Isaac has become the seminal event in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Canaanite worship of Moloch – a god who required child sacrifices – was the cause of their destruction by Israel, according to the Bible. There is an implied promise that God will, in the end, protect children or at the very least, avenge their deaths. It is a promise central to any theodicy – any theory of why evil, and redemption from evil, occurs.

So why does evil happen, and how are we redeemed from evil? There are two kinds of evil: the evil we do to one another, and the evil that is done to us. Depending on your idea of free will, you may have some control over the evil you do to others. It fulfills our innate sense of justice when evil is avenged, as in the satisfying conclusion of a Dickens novel. But that leaves open the question of why evil befalls the seemingly innocent. The answer varies widely by religious belief. Jews believe that the reason why evil happens is God’s business, not ours; Catholics believe that evil began with the Fall and God redeems us ultimately; Hindus and Buddhists believe that evil is karmic retribution and that over-attachment is the source of human suffering; Zoroastrians believe in an equal and opposite principle to Good (an idea adopted by Christians in their idea of Satan); Gnostics believe an evil Creator, the demiurge, has imbued evil into Creation; similarly, Kabbalists believe that cracks appeared in the integral goodness of the Universe when God had to withdraw Himself to make room for Creation. Sociologists and psychologists only address the first part of the question of evil – why we and our groups attack others, but they have little to say about the seemingly random horrific events that befall us through no fault of our own.

Theology/ Psychology/ Sociology	People do evil because…	Evil happens to good people because…
Judaism	Free will disobeyment of commandments	Only God knows. Maybe a symptom of exile, maybe a test, maybe rewards come later.
Kabbalistic Judaism	Free will choice of the evil inclination	A necessary bi-product of the divine act of Creation
Catholicism (St. Augustine)	We lost our gift of the ability to resist evil impulses by Original Sin.	Satan and his fallen angels wreak evil. Evil highlights the Good.
Protestantism (Luther, Calvin)	Human nature is totally depraved and corrupted by Original Sin.	Satan’s causes evil, but why God allows it is a mystery.
Eastern Orthodox	The world and human nature is in a fallen state full of demonic temptation and death, ever since mankind chose to participate in evil.	Evil is the absence of Good. God permits trials and suffering as sources of salvation.
Zoroastrianism	People may choose to dishonor the order of creation.	Angra Mainyu is the evil opposite of the good creator-god Ahura Mazda, and assaults creation.
Hinduism/ Buddism	Excessive attachment	Karmic justice
Islam	Free will actions that displease God or manifest unbelief.	It’s a test of one’s belief that can open one to God.
Gnosticism	We lost connection to our spiritual essence.	The material world, created by the Demiurge, is inherently evil.
Sociology	Failure to submit individual desires to the group order
Psychology	Pathological impairment of moral constraints (superego) to animal nature (id).

We struggle with the Problem of Evil. Justice, when good is rewarded and evil incurs divine retribution, is satisfying to our nature. That is how we are supposed to operate morally, on an individual basis, and that is how the Universe is supposed to operate on a metaphysical basis. But the Newtown murders force us to face the problem of Injustice – why are innocents harmed? Why doesn’t the moral behavior we expect and demand of ourselves also apply to the Universe and to God?

We are emphatically admonished “Justice! Justice! You will pursue.” (Deuteronomy 16:20) But why is God not also bound by that divine injunction? Is Justice a quality of God, as Maimonides teaches, or is Justice a quality that God loves? A version of this question was raised by Plato about 2,500 years ago. It is called the Euthyphro Dilemma. Most major religious thinkers have grappled with it in one form or another ever since, because depending on how one answers it, God may not be omnipotent and transcendent or the Universe may be arbitrary. However, the dilemma is not limited to religion and is relevant to Sandy Hook.

The religious version of Euthyphro’s Dilemma as it pertains to Justice (Plato addressed it more generally as “the Good”) can be stated as:

I. Is Justice commanded by God because it is morally good, an inherent property of the Universe, an essential quality that transcends God, that He Himself is slave to?

or

II. Is Justice morally good because it is commanded by God? If Justice is commanded by God, then it’s arbitrary on His part, and we declare it “good” only because we have to.

Some break the dilemma down further. Justice may be an obligation or a value. When Justice is an obligation, doing it is right, required or permissible, and doing injustice is wrong, forbidden or impermissible – doing justice is right because it is commanded. However, when Justice is a value – its goodness (and, conversely, the evil of injustice) – is independent of the divine command to act in imitatio dei, with justice. According to this view, God, being the source of all goodness, is imbued with and is the source of Justice.

In Joan of Quebec, Joan believes God has commanded her to do His will in the world in leading the people to independence. Because it comes from God, she is confident that it is good, as Father Feuel maintains, but because the war will result in the death of children, she questions whether such injustice can be good, as Sister Thérèse maintains. Is goodness and justice a quality greater than God? She is on the horns of Plato’s Euthyphro Dilemma.

The dilemma doesn’t go away for the atheist and the humanist:

I. Does mankind love justice because it is good? This implies the existence of a metaphysical quality we are powerless to de-value – Justice is inherently good.

or

II. Do we deem justice good because we seem to be naturally compelled by it, we are driven to satisfying an internal (biological) imperative, and feel dissatisfied when justice doesn’t happen? In this view, justice is evolutionarily obtained because it contributes to the survival of our species, but it is only “good” in that utilitarian sense. Since evolution is indifferent to human values of good and bad, we are then mistaken when we deem justice good and injustice bad.

The debate raging now in America over mental health and gun violence is but another version of the Euthyphro Dilemma. Do we believe Adam Lanza was insane because he killed children, or did he kill children because he was insane? How we answer that question impacts how we think about and deal with mental illness. It will have implications for resources we allocate to mental health screening and treatment, gun control, and the laws we will pass to deal with the criminally insane.