Chapter Six
6.3 Summary remarks: Why can’t we all just get along?
not be able to speak on their own behalf, and so their interests in how the social goods get divided up may go unrepresented, and they may thus end up unjustly deprived of a fair share. Finally, Rawls’ toughest critics have noted that Rawls’ theory concerns the distribution of goods, and says nothing about what is owed to people, and nothing about what qualities or attributes a person might possess which entitles him or her to a share of the society’s goods. Therefore, it may be argued, Rawls’ theory is not a theory of justice at all, but rather a disguised form of Utilitarianism.
incidents in the United States, 170 people were killed, not including the shooters themselves (five of whom took their own lives). 20 The shooter’s reasons ranged from the calculated, such as the desire to terrorize people who held differing political beliefs, to the absurd, such as the desire to be seen on the media. Let’s re-phrase the question a little bit. What must people do to have at least a chance, even if only a small one, to get along with each other? That I think I can answer: we have to talk to each other. We have to be willing to speak truly and listen attentively to each other. There is a logical disjunction between speaking and hating; there’s a gulf as wide as the ocean between dialogue and murder. You might want to ‘send a message’ to someone (as the euphemism goes) by beating him up, or depriving him of his rights or his dignity, or even by killing him. But the recipient of that kind of message is never in a position to hear it: the very means of delivery itself logically excludes meaningful communication. Think of old Lucretius here, who taught us to have no fear of death because “While one lives one does not die; when one dies there is no one there for death to claim; thus death never reaches you.” In the same way, a message whose means of delivery kills the recipient finds no one at the point of delivery able to receive the message at all. It’s very similar for a message delivered by shouting, threatening, bullying, stealing, hating, or any other oppressive or dehumanizing act short of killing. The message whose means of delivery oppresses or dehumanizes the recipient quickly finds that the recipient’s ability to hear the message is stripped away. But if we talk to each other, without threats, without violence, and without oppression, we acknowledge each other’s humanity. This is because to speak to someone is to assume that the other person can hear and understand what you are saying, and to assume that the other person is capable of responding to you. The ability to understand and to respond, so it seems to me, is an important part of what it is to be human. Even to criticize and to disagree with someone is still to treat that person as a human being with a mind of her own, because criticism and disagreement hopes to persuade the other person to change her mind. (Thus
6.3 Summary remarks: Why can’t we all just get along? Why is there so much violence, conflict, fear, and hate in the world? Why can’t people just get over it and be friends? These are, of course, among of the oldest and most difficult of moral questions. There are hundreds of answers, and none of those answers were easily discovered. It might be that there are just not enough of the good things in life for everyone to have as much as they want. So as people discover this they end up distrusting each other, and they compete with each other to get as much of those things as they can. Or so Thomas Hobbes argued. It might be that most people cannot stand the presence of others whose thinking and reasoning is radically different from their own, as David Hume once claimed. Perhaps it is as Plato said, that as people grow accustomed to pleasures and luxury goods, so they eventually become unable to restrain their appetites for those things. Therefore, like “a city with a fever”, they turn to their neighbours, to take by stealth, or even steal by force, what they think they need to satisfy their feverish demands. Or, it might be that some people are just naturally, inexplicably evil. “Some men just want to watch the world burn,” as Alfred said to Bruce Wayne in The Dark Knight (2008), although that answer always seemed to me too superficial, too quick, and too easy. People have reasons for doing things - reasons that are irrational, faulty, silly, or perhaps demonstrably insane – but they have their reasons, nonetheless. In the ten worst public shooting
20 Jane Gerster, “The 10 deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history” The Globe and Mail, 14 December 2012
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