Sunday, November 29, 2009

A Fairly Digressive Argument for Naming Names

How many of you have read the Plato quotation that heads this blog? I had not really noticed until today when I sat down to write a post about why I think naming names is so important. Aside from the typo (sorry Dr. J), I realized how pregnant the quotation is and just how relevant it is to our discussions of truth commissions and how those discussions have probably colored our ideas on the abstract idea of justice. I'll reproduce the quotation here, just in case that statue distracts you:
"Justice in the life and conduct of the state is possible only as it resides in the hearts and souls of the citizens"

On first reading, there is a pretty explicit argument that, in order to achieve the form of Justice, there is a need for it to somehow be instilled in every heart and soul. Simply put, the form of justice on the state level depends on the presence of justice within every human being contained by the state.

But re-reading the phrase "as it resides" made me wonder a bit. Could that phrase hint at another meaning? Of course, I would say yes. I believe that the phrase could mean that a collective notion of justice already exists inside of everyone. The truth of justice is not something outside of us, something to be searched for beyond us, or even something that an external force necessarily injects into us. Justice, at least so it seems with this reading of the quotation, is not some distant, abstract––objective––notion. If anything, justice lies within each human being. It is, thus, subjective. Or to be more precise, the truth of Justice lies in the inter-subjective notions of justice mixing with each other.

And this is what is so promising about truth commissions, for they are the closest things we have to realizing Justice's very innate intersubjectivity, or as I have called it, the truth of Justice. It is the very act of humans reconciling with other human beings, of hearts and souls actively realizing a notion of justice collectively. And what's more, the truth of Justice is no longer sought in the shadow of some authoritative, arbitrarily prescribed morality, but in exactly the opposite. The truth is constantly being discovered under the light of publicity; humans are reconciling the truth "with other humans" in the truest sense of the prepositional phrase.

But why is publicity necessary? My answer: In what other mode is a truth commission going to be considered as true? Striking names from records seems, to me, to invalidate the "truth"of these commissions. Not only does any form of non-disclosure reek of dishonesty in general, the act contradicts the sense that justice truly "resides in the hearts and souls of the citizens". If we fail to give victims (and perpetrators) a completely honest environment, one in which they are completely free to express their notions of justice, then they both lose some responsibility for reconciling the truth of the matter. Thus, if we support a system in which the full truth is not disclosed to the collective individuals that compose a society, then we contradict our overwhelming sense that the truth of Justice lies in the hearts of every heart and soul. If we truth commissions do not fully disclose the truth, then they become the arbiters of the truth of Justice. And if we allow that to happen, then we have effectively relinquished our own capability to decide what is truly just.

5 comments:

  1. Reading your critique of the Plato quote it seems really similar to the Hume "natural justice" approach to me.

    I understand the naming names works really well if you want to restore a society but I still can't help but think it only works if

    1) the victim is truly capable of forgiving the perpetrator
    2) The perpetrator is capable of undergoing a "change of heart"

    If the victim still has a deep sense of hatred towards the perpetrator, how can it restore that bond more if their name is named versus kept secret?

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  2. I agree with your point that, from the Plato quote, it seems as if we all have our own internal sense of justice, and that justice is found in the larger society because of its "intersubjectivity." I also agree that names should be named, because full disclosure of the truth is the theoretical point of truth commissions in the first place. As for Guy's point regarding a victim deeply hating the perpetrator, I think that's a normal response for a person to have. But victims who harbor such hatred obviously will have problems restoring that bond whether they know the perpetrators name or not, since they already blindly hate that person. Restoration and forgiveness are not immediate, nor should one expect them to be. It takes time, and truth, for such hatred to be overcome. That's just my personal opinion.

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  3. I admire your reworking of the Plato quotation, though I imagine he himself would probably roll over in his grave at the dismissal of Justice as an objective higher concept. For my part, faith in the ability of a truth commission as a state organ to truly instill any quality (much less justice) in the hearts and souls of its citizens seems a bit hubristic. As you point out, Justice is relational, between individuals (per Aristotle) and I am inclined that it cannot be measured as an intrinsic quality of individuals; one who does Justice mnay do so for a variety of reasons, from simple pragmatism to a sense of duty to love for his fellow man, but none of these things are Justice itself.

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  4. Going a little off Guy’s point, even though the truth of justice “is the very act of humans reconciling with other human beings, of hearts and souls actively realizing a notion of justice collectively,” it seems like there is also a lot of potential for humans to come together only to discover that their subjective conceptions of Justice are discordant. Although naming names may provide the truth to a whole society and increase the potential for the community to come together as individuals in order to decide upon a shared notion of justice, what happens to those who disagree that naming names is effective, or who use the names to promote their own subjective understanding of justice rather than trying to reconcile with anyone else? It could be the case that promoting the truth through naming names only serves to further inflame the different subjective opinions of what Justice is, and erode the possibility for reconciliation.

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  5. I would argue that neither "naming names" or anonymity is always the right answer. In each individual truth commission there are such sensitive factors, that a blanket statement about anonymity cannot be made. Perhaps anonymity will lead to a better understanding of what happened, and thus will lead to a less corrupt state in the future. Of course this implies that the stabilization of the state is in some cases more important, or just, than reconciliation for the victims. Which of these is more important is a very different question involving much of Mill and Kant, which we have already discussed.

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