Human beings make decisions based in part on their emotions and in part on their reason. Most people regard the use of reason very highly and treat reasoned decisions as preferable to those based on emotion, but at the same time emotion tends to be a much stronger motivator than reason.

In Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue, Paul Woodruff writes:

[J]ustice has very little motivational power. It is a fairly dry virtue, guided more by judicious thought than by trained feeling. Virtues such as sympathy, reverence, and courage, by contrast, are capacities for emotions, and where they are actively present they move people to act or refrain from actions. (That is because, roughly speaking, emotions are feelings that motivate)

So the weak cannot rely upon justice to restrain their powerful overlords, because justice, unlike reverence, is not a motivational restraint. Nor can the powerful rely on justice to secure the obedience of their subjects... Justice does nothing to turn the winner of a contest into a leader or a loser into a willing follower. The trouble with justice is that it allows there to be winners and losers in the first place, and such an outcome is hard for leadership to overcome.

Far from being a support to leadership, justice in small matters may actually be an obstacle. For this reason a good leader may not insist on everything that is due him under justice.

In describing justice as the product of “judicious thought,” Woodruff is describing it as a product of reason — a just decision is one arrived at through careful reasoning and logic. While a just decision may be correct, it also doesn’t appear to be the sort of thing that inspires people to act. The Civil Rights movement, for example, sought racial justice — but wasn’t it most strongly motivated by the indignation and anger people felt as a result of injustice? Who in the Civil Rights movement was primarily motivated by an abstract commitment to the principle of justice?

Because emotion is such a strong motivator, it may overcome even the correct use of reason. Thus, as Woodruff describes, people may be inclined by their emotions to react against a decision which is undeniably (at least from an independent, objective perspective) just and fair — because fairness doesn’t always feel good to those who get the short end of the stick. Justice means that people get what they deserve, but not everyone wants what they deserve.

 

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