Truth or Justice – That Is the Question

Abstract

The article explores the operational interaction between two fundamental ideals of liberal-democratic societies: truth and justice. Truth may be assigned three aspirations: an empirical one striving to describe the world as it is, a logical one using reason to do so, and a social one favoring openness and honesty about perceived facts and opinions.

Justice, on the other hand, is a normative upshot of social cooperation, nation states being a primary example. Its quasi-contractual base integrates three closely tied operational dimensions: the common cause dimension, the reciprocity dimension and the order dimension.

The various aspirations of truth and the different dimensions of justice may reinforce each other, but may also collide. Law and liberal-democratic institutions, while committed to truth and justice simultaneously, are charged with managing the interplay. To be sure, they themselves suffer from basic imperfections, incl. time and budget constraints or agency-problems. As a result, truth or justice or both may be seriously compromised in legal and social practice.

The demands of truth and justice continue to test the resilience of liberal democracies. At least three practical guiderails can be set for coping with the challenge: One against suppressing the quest for truth in the name of justice, the second against disregarding justice bedrocks while searching for new truths, and the third in recognizing the ongoing role of moral virtue in the pursuit of the two ideals.