ABSTRACT
Two ethical imperatives – doing justice and loving one’s neighbor – are lodged at the heart of our own cultural tradition in numerable ways (and ways surely taken for granted). This chapter concerns itself with the manner in which our own culture, and Western culture in general, approaches ethical issues and engages in moral reasoning. Specifically, its concern is to address the perceived opposition between – when not the outright divorce of – justice and charity. This perceived tension is widely on display both in scholarly literature, whether among professional ethicists or philosophers or behavioral theorists, and at the popular level. And yet it is a tension that is rarely – if ever – addressed at the presuppositional level. This antagonism, moreover, typifies secular as well as religious thinking; both tend to assume either a tension or some measure of conflict between the two virtues. The conflict or tension itself issues out of the widespread presumption that justice, at its base, is cold, rational, harsh, and exacting, while charity is considered to be personal, compassionate, forgiving, and thus “humane.” The chapter offers an anatomy of both the “conflict” and the “concord” perspectives, giving particular attention to seminal thinkers who have perpetuated inaccurate and accurate understandings of the relationship between these two “cardinal” virtues.
