Justice: a premium virtue

In the third of his series on virtue, Andrew Davison weighs what justice says today, particularly on impartiality.

Andrew Davison

Andrew works at the intersection of theology, science and philosophy. He is Canon and Regius Professor of Divinity at Christ Church, Oxford.

A statue of Justice holds a sword aloft in one hand, and set of scales in the other.

The statue of Justice on London's Old Bailey court.

Sang Hyun Cho, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Next after prudence comes justice. Our guide in this series on the virtues is Thomas Aquinas and, for him, virtue is about justice. Indeed, it is in justice (quoting Cicero) that

‘the lustre of virtue appears above all.’

Placing such a premium on justice might seem a little deflationary. Yes, we might think, by all means be just, but is that enough? Later in this series, we will see that Aquinas does, indeed, think that all human virtues – including justice – need to be set aflame with faith, hope, and love. But that doesn’t stop him from also thinking about the virtues from a human point of view, at least as a first pass. And within that frame – one in which he might also talk to a non-believer, for instance – he insists that to be virtuous is to be just. Indeed, we could make that comment even more deflationary, and say that the gold standard of justice is simply to be fair. Justice, again drawing on Cicero, is simply to give to each person what is due.

‘However true it might be that our communal life cannot attain its fullest realization through just exchange alone',

wrote the German writer Josef Pieper,

‘it is no less true that it is in the exemplary form of just this sort of justice that the irreducible core of social relations finds expression’.

We can wish for something that outstrips justice. Nonetheless, there is a steely realism in Thomas’s insistence that the foundation for virtue is acting justly, even simply being fair. Fortunate is the country at the moment where day-by-day newspaper coverage need not draw attention to people in positions of public trust failing to live even by that standard.

I once attended a lecture course as an visitor in Rome on ‘Justice and Allied Virtues in Thomas Aquinas’ that lasted for an entire semester, so there’s a lot that can be said on this front. I will limit myself to three angles: impartiality, dues, and the role of a useful minimum.

On impartiality

On the first, Aquinas offers an extended discussion of justice in terms of being no ‘respecter of persons’: which is to say, in terms of showing impartiality. His example strikes home for anyone, such as myself, who works in a university:

if you promote someone to a professorship on account of his having sufficient knowledge, you consider the due cause, not the person; but if, in conferring something on someone, you consider in him not the fact that what you give him is proportionate or due to him, but the fact that he is this particular person (e.g. Peter or Martin), then there is ‘respect of the person’, since you give him something not for some cause that renders him worthy of it, but simply because he is this person… for instance if a man promote someone… because he is rich or because he is a relative of his.

As I write this, the newspapers are full of a story about an ex-Prime Minister promoting someone to a position of public honour and trust in a torturous story that involves both wealth and a relative.

On dues

Justice is the lodestone of virtue, according to Aquinas. Above all things, ‘do justice’. Justice is not quite the foundation, however. Justice looks beyond itself to ‘right’, or ‘what is due’. Justice is secondary, because it recognises and responds to ‘right’ or ‘due’ (today, we might say to ‘rights’ or ‘dues’); it does not create them. Those comments would mean a great deal to a group of Spaniards in the sixteenth century, all followers of Aquinas, who rose above the rapacious expansion of the West, and fought for the rights of indigenous people. They left the foundations of international law as part of that legacy. Among them were Bartolomé de las Casas (1484–1566) and Francisco de Vitoria (c. 1483–1546), both Dominican friars. They offer, to my mind, perhaps the most glorious moment in the whole history of the river of writing and thinking that has sprung from the life and works of Aquinas.

Opposing, at various time, pretty much the entire establishment of the Spanish Empire, they argued that the indigenous people of the ‘New World’ had inviolable rights, such that justice required Europeans to recognise their right to their lands, and to self-government. This rested on the idea that justice deals with what is due, or right. We do not make this up; we are confronted by it. It is attached to, it springs from, human nature simply as such. And, ultimately, it springs from the fact that to be faced by a human being is to be faced with a creature, which is to say, by the handiwork of God.

When he was still in his twenties, and earning his spurs as a teacher, Aquinas had tackled this subject:

something is said to be just not only because it is willed by God, but because it is due to a certain created thing according to the order of creature to creature. For nothing can be due to anything except by reason of its own nature or condition. However, the cause of a thing’s nature and properties is the divine will; and therefore the whole order of justice can be traced back to the divine will as to its origin.

Justice is secondary to right, is responsive to right, and justice is the backstop of the virtues precisely for that reason. If it set its own terms, if it ruled its own roost, it might determine, for instance, that dispossession is just. Who would be to say otherwise? But justice does not set its own terms; it bows before what is right or due. That is why, in the estimation of those Spanish Thomists, it inclines its head in reverence before the dignity and rights of native South Americans, rather than to the Spanish Crown: or at least, it should.

The useful minimum

Approached another way, we might say that justice is a sort of minimum, but also that minima are important because they mark out the limits of human relationships. The twentieth century Dominican Herbert McCabe wrote compellingly about this. The Ten Commandments are all about justice, and while they don’t lay out the beating heart of a good and cohesive social life, they do mark its limits. McCabe (again following Aquinas) thought that the best emphasis in thinking about ethics ought to be on friendship, since that is characteristic of human life at its fullest. It’s clearly not enough, for friendship, simply not to steal, bear false witness, or commit adultery. Nonetheless, those precepts are of enduring worth, because we can be sure that to transgress those bounds is to bring friendship to an end. It’s because of that emphasis on friendship, and guarding against whatever endangers it, that ‘bearing false witness’ was such a major concern for Aquinas. In his long treatment of justice, the subject of theft or murder each receives only a single section. On the other hand, misrepresentation of others – sins of the tongue (and, today, of the keyboard) – receive four (on ‘reviling’, ‘backbiting’, ‘tale-bearing’, and ‘derision’). As the Book of Proverbs has it, which Aquinas quotes at this point, ‘A good name is to be chosen rather than great riches’. The weakness of so much writing on ethics in the past century has been a tendency to make it about difficult problems that are so rare that it’s usually other people who face them. The niggling, awkward glory of the virtue tradition is that it lands squarely in the middle of life, for instance in being just – simply fair – in what we next type on Twitter.

Explainer

Belief

Creed

6 November 2024

5 min read

Whether it's AI or us, it's OK to be ignorant

Our search for answers begins by recognising that we don’t have them.

Simon Walters

Simon Walters is Curate at Holy Trinity Huddersfield.

A street sticker displays multiple lines reading 'and then?'

Stephen Harlan on Unsplash.

When was the last time you admitted you didn’t know something? I don’t say it as much as I ought to. I’ve certainly felt the consequences of admitting ignorance – of being ridiculed for being entirely unaware of a pop culture reference, of being found out that I wasn’t paying as close attention to what my partner was saying as she expected. In a hyper-connected age when the wealth of human knowledge is at our fingertips, ignorance can hardly be viewed as a virtue.

A recent study on the development of artificial intelligence holds out more hope for the value of admitting our ignorance than we might have previously imagined. Despite wide-spread hype and fearmongering about the perils of AI, our current models are in many ways developed in similar ways to how an animal is trained. An AI system such as ChatGPT might have access to unimaginable amounts of information, but it requires training by humans on what information is valuable or not, whether it has appropriately understood the request it has received, and whether its answer is correct. The idea is that human feedback helps the AI to hone its model through positive feedback for correct answers, and negative feedback for incorrect answers, so that it keeps whatever method led to positive feedback and changes whatever method led to negative feedback. It really isn’t that far away from how animals are trained.

However, a problem has emerged. AI systems have become adept at giving coherent and convincing sounding answers that are entirely incorrect. How has this happened?

This is a tool; it is good at some tasks, and less good at others. And, like all tools, it does not have an intrinsic morality.

In digging into the training method for AI, the researchers found that the humans training the AI flagged answers of “I don’t know” as unsatisfactory. On one level this makes sense. The whole purpose of these systems is to provide answers, after all. But rather than causing the AI to return and rethink its data, it instead developed increasingly convincing answers that were not true whatsoever, to the point where the human supervisors didn’t flag sufficiently convincing answers as wrong because they themselves didn’t realise that they were wrong. The result is that “the more difficult the question and the more advanced model you use, the more likely you are to get well-packaged, plausible nonsense as your answer.”

Uncovering some of what is going on in AI systems dispels both the fervent hype that artificial intelligence might be our saviour, and the deep fear that it might be our societal downfall. This is a tool; it is good at some tasks, and less good at others. And, like all tools, it does not have an intrinsic morality. Whether it is used for good or ill depends on the approach of the humans that use it.

But this study also uncovers our strained relationship with ignorance. Problems arise in the answers given by systems like ChatGPT because a convincing answer is valued more than admitting ignorance, even if the convincing answer is not at all correct. Because the AI has been trained to avoid admitting it doesn’t know something, all of its answers are less reliable, even the ones that are actually correct.

This is not a problem limited to artificial intelligence. I had a friend who seemed incapable of admitting that he didn’t know something, and whenever he was corrected by someone else, he would make it sound like his first answer was actually the correct one, rather than whatever he had said. I don’t know how aware he was that he did this, but the result was that I didn’t particularly trust whatever he said to be correct. Paradoxically, had he admitted his ignorance more readily, I would have believed him to be less ignorant.

It is strange that admitting ignorance is so avoided. After all, it is in many ways our default state. No one faults a baby or a child for not knowing things. If anything, we expect ignorance to be a fuel for curiosity. Our search for answers begins in the recognition that we don’t have them. And in an age where approximately 500 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute, the sum of what we don’t know must by necessity be vastly greater than all that we do know. What any one of us can know is only a small fraction of all there is to know.

Crucially, admitting we do not know everything is not the same as saying that we do not know anything.

One of the gifts of Christian theology is an ability to recognize what it is that makes us human. One of these things is the fact that any created thing is, by definition, limited. God alone is the only one who can be described by the ‘omnis’. He is omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient. There is no limit to his power, and presence, and knowledge. The distinction between creator and creation means that created things have limits to their power, presence, and knowledge. We cannot do whatever we want. We cannot be everywhere at the same time. And we cannot know everything there is to be known.

Projecting infinite knowledge is essentially claiming to be God. Admitting our ignorance is therefore merely recognizing our nature as created beings, acknowledging to one another that we are not God and therefore cannot know everything. But, crucially, admitting we do not know everything is not the same as saying that we do not know anything. Our God-given nature is one of discovery and learning. I sometimes like to imagine God’s delight in our discovery of some previously unknown facet of his creation, as he gets to share with us in all that he has made. Perhaps what really matters is what we do with our ignorance. Will we simply remain satisfied not to know, or will it turn us outwards to delight in the new things that lie behind every corner?

For the developers of ChatGPT and the like, there is also a reminder here that we ought not to expect AI to take on the attributes of God. AI used well in the hands of humans may yet do extraordinary things for us, but it will not truly be able to do anything, be everywhere, or know everything. Perhaps if it was trained to say ‘I don’t know’ a little more, we might all learn a little more about the nature of the world God has made.