I finished a book by Walter Kaufmann, “Decidophobia” that tried to deal a death blow to justice and then indirectly to guilt. He tries to do this by introducing arguments that discourage the belief in the infallibility of justice or it’s attempts to give each what he deserves. This, he holds, is impossible. Judgements are given, but no one can really know that “Justice” was done. It merely was one outcome among many other outcomes.
It all hinges on the idea of legitimacy. One outcome is held above others as one figure is held as a legitimate authority. Moral codes may disagree all they want but we don’t accept them all as equally valid or legitimate. One can dismantle their accounts as well as our own moral accounts as fictions. That does not matter in the end. The legitimacy is given irrationally. It is as rational as love, let’s just say, and so any argument can demonstrate our incompatibility with a certain person whom we love but that does not mean that one leaves the person he loves. One does not love a person because reasonable arguments demonstrate that we should, or ought to love this or that person, no matter how demostratibliy matched you both are.
Guilt is relative to the legitimacy one sees in the censuring body. If one loves his wife, for example, one is affected by her criticisms. But if one despises the woman, no condemnation of hers will affect him greatly. One can be punished by a governing body, but the person who does not accept the jurisdiction of the court simply feels as a victim and not as a perpetrator- he cannot feel guilty in being unjustly condemned by the unjust, even though they call themselves the “just”, and their treatment of him as “justice”. Those would then be empty words. Guilt can only come when the words have weight and are full of meaning. This occurs not independently of the accussed. He is an active (but not necessarly conscious) particicpant in the creation of his guilt.
I don’t believe that a book bent on destroying the idea of authority is logically inconsistent. How else will the book affect the reader? If I abandon outdated ideas of justice it is because I believe that the book had it “right”, and so, from the authority this gets, moved me. So even if it succeds, it does so by the prolungation of the mechanism it apparently had successfully destroyed. The success of the book and it’s author, paradoxically, would be found in the book’s irrelevancy. That is perhaps not expected, and what could be the alternative is that the author seeks out to destroy the legitimacy of others by getting legitimacy for itself.
I don’t know if Kaufmann ever thought of it in this manner. I liked the book very much and the previous words come not as a critique of the book’s content but a critique on the author’s goal and the impossibility of the author’s method. The last words of the book come from the mouth of the Serpent in the Garden of Eden:
"You still want to be told what to do. Perhaps your children will be ready for autonomy.â€
They still want to be told but the serpent is not without a certain need to tell them. He tells them what to do, thus prohibiting the very autonomy it challenges them to:
“Nobody knows what is good.”
Speaks the new authority on the matter.
"Once upon a time God decided, but now that he is dead it is up to you to decide. It is up to you to leave behind guilt and fear. You can be autonomous.â€
If they believe it and don’t do what it says, what would you want to bet that they will feel guilty?