The cry for justice is as old as recorded human thought. When people believe that they have been treated unfairly, they cry to their god or their comrades that justice must be served. In the most generic sense, justice exists when there is reciprocity between what the agent has done and the circumstances of their life. When circumstances are out of balance with the character and actions of the agents, then the cry of injustice is raised. The deep assumption that underlies the demand for justice that everyone should get what they deserve. This demand underlies the law of karma and the laws of the land; it informs ideas of the fairness of contracts and the legitimacy of democratic law-making.

Considered from a social perspective, justice in general takes on different concrete forms: criminal justice, economic justice, etc. Although theories differ, the sense of fairness at work in theories of social justice is easy enough to understand in terms of reciprocity between action and outcome. I follow the law, I should not be arrested; I upheld my side of the contract, I should get paid. But what about when there is no action on the part of the agent as the basis of the claim that they deserve something in return? Do human beings deserve anything simply in virtue of being born? If the answer is ‘yes,’ then I think we can talk meaningfully about “existential” justice.

I have been turning the idea of existential justice over in my head for years without really committing myself to trying to systematically unpack it. These reflections might be the beginning of a commitment to formally develop the idea, or they might be the end. In any case, they are offered here in the spirit of thinking out loud. But sometimes the thinking out loud is more important than rigorous argument. It can be the source of the intellectual energy of a philosophical idea that opens up a new perspective on an old problem.

Let us take a couple of concrete examples to begin the exploration of existential justice. Everyone will agree that there is such a thing as economic justice or criminal justice. Different political perspectives will provide different answers to what arrangement is actually just, but no one would agree that it is meaningless to ask what a defendant accused of a crime deserves or what a fair economic arrangement is. We might say that those charged with an offence deserve a fair trial and that those who work deserve to reap the fruit of their labours. In these concrete cases, ‘justice” is a function of interests generated by participation in a social institution. If there were no crime there would be no criminal justice system, and if we did not have to work on nature in order to produce the goods that we need and devise a means to distribute the products there would be no economic system and therefore no question about what economic agents deserve.

But since there are laws and we do have to produce and distribute the product of collective labour there are important questions about justice in these domains. But what would “existential” justice mean? If there is such a thing, then it would be the answer to the question of whether there is something human beings deserve simply in virtue of being born, i.e., coming into existence. I think that there is a meaningful answer to this question.

Since we do not choose to be born or to be the sort of organisms that we are, we come into the world requiring access to certain non-optional resources and goods. Thus, I think that it is meaningful to say that everyone born deserves to come into existence in social circumstances that ensure that their basic human life-requirements can be met. Those include the biologically obvious: nurture, shelter, clothing, but also the less physically quantifiable: care and love. Since we do not choose the identity that others will recognize us by I think one can also say that people deserve to be born into social and cultural contexts in which they will not suffer from belonging to a demonized and oppressed group. We are owed these things by the circumstances of life because no one chooses these life-requirements and they cannot, at least initially, satisfied them by their own individual efforts. Infants are not capable of working for the sake of satisfying their own needs or changing who they are. People who are born into situations of social collapse, war, systematic poverty and oppression against the group that they belong to are victims, I think, of existential injustice.

By calling it existential injustice I intend to put the stress on the circumstances and not the parents. Some people might reasonably argue that parents who conceive and give birth in war zones or racist regimes are causally responsible for the harms that their babies will suffer. But even if that response has some truth to it, it focuses on the parents and not the infant. Whatever the parents were doing or intending, once the infant exists it faces a set of problems it did not choose to face and cannot solve on its own: the very circumstances of its existence, therefor, are unjust. Whomever or whatever is causally responsible does not matter from the infant’s point of view. It emerges into a world that it cannot control but which poses serious threats to its present and future well-being. It does not deserve to suffer for social problems it had no role in creating. Everyone is therefore born, if this argument is correct, with a basic set of legitimate claims on life-protecting and health-promoting resources, institutions, and relationships. Any circumstances which systematically restrict access to these goods are existentially unjust.

Another way of putting that point would be to say that some social circumstances are inhuman because they impede the ability of parents or surrogates to care for the new life that is constantly coming into the world. There might be justice in punishing a criminal if they are guilty of a crime, but there can be no justification at all, ever, for imposing harms on infants who did not and could not choose to come into being. There can be no defence for existential injustice on grounds of political expediency or guilt on the part of the victim when the victims are one second old infants. They cannot be causally responsible for their emergence into existentially unjust, inhuman circumstances. Therefore, I conclude, every birth is a protest against existential injustice and a demand to transform the world so as to ensure that every child is born into a nurturing, caring, loving world,

Parents must of course think about the world into which they are bringing new humans, but if the human project is to continue then new people must be born. No group should be prevented or prevent themselves from bringing new life into the world because current conditions are existentially unjust. Birth is also a protest against inhuman conditions and hope in the problem solving capacities of human beings. Unless we want to voluntarily declare an end to the human project, agree to stop reproducing, and let ourselves peacefully die out, the solution to the inhuman conditions into which some people are born is to solve the problems, not to scold parents for bringing new life into the world. While the critters might be happy if human beings disappeared, our disappearance would risk allowing the only fully self-conscious beings in the universe to disappear thus cause a loss that might be a sort of existential injustice in its own right

In a sense, we are nature’s highest ‘creation.’ If there are other fully self-conscious beings in the universe, we have not discovered each other. If we go, we risk contributing to a universe in which there is no entity capable of fully valuing and honouring it. Only human beings, so far as we know, can value the universe aesthetically and scientifically and build higher unities of beauty and understanding through the creative work we alone are capable of doing. While it makes no sense to argue that we owe a debt to the Big Bang and blind evolutionary forces, we can impose an obligation on ourselves to work to solve our problems and keep going, not only for the sake of our individual and collective enjoyment, but also because our extinction would remove capacities which are perhaps so improbable that they have never fully evolved before and might never again.

If that argument seems a rather long way around to a banal political conclusion– do not allow inhuman, existentially unjust social situations to fester– consider it a means of expanding the circle of our care and concern beyond the little patch of earth each individual occupies from moment to moment. It is true that just as no individual is born deserving to suffer, so too no individual is born owing already existing people anything. Human beings are not born guilty in any sense. Neither the brutally oppressed nor the privileged chose the life they are born into. Everyone comes into the world with the same legitimate claim on sufficient resources for the purposes of living meaningful, valuable and valued lives. Each is also a being with the potential to develop into a social-self-conscious intelligence that can encompass the whole expanse of time and space in mind: to both feel and know themselves part of a greater reality; not a heaven beyond, but the real, physical heavens above. One can realize that and say: “great, now pass my beer.” Or one can realize that they just as well could have been born in a rubbish heap, hunted and despised, and conclude: there is nothing special about me other than the undeserved luck to be born in a safe environment, with people who did enough to care for me and a society that educated me to the point where I can comprehend my living connections to everything else.

From that recognition it does not follow that the fortunate individual owes every other individual a personal debt. What does follow, I suggest, is a general obligation to try to understand why the world is as it is and contribute to the progressive solution of the causes of existential injustice. The undeserved benefits of birth here rather than there should not rob anyone of the capacity to enjoy life. First, wallowing in guilt but otherwise doing nothing does not solve the problems, but even more deeply, everyone has just this one life to live. There is nothing wrong with enjoying the life that you did not choose to begin. At the same time, we are all in the world together, with senses and minds that bring us into contact with the circumstances of others’ lives. We cannot, reasonably, turn totally away from reality, but we are also not individually responsible for how reality came to be the way it is or for changing it. I do not think that Simone Weil, who starved herself to death because she could not bear the thought eating while others went hungry is an example of saintliness. However much one can learn from her otherwise, self-mortification to the point of death is not existential justice but moralistic irrationality.

Yet if we are born blameless we are not born without implicit responsibilities. As we develop we incur debts to those whose labour sustained us and the the natural world which supports all life. We cannot eat and claim that others are not harmed by starvation. We cannot enjoy the protections of law and deny that others equally need its protection. When we see situations which manifestly deny other’s access to what they need as social-self-conscious intelligences, our own intelligence must rebel. As Gandhi once wrote to Rabindranath Tagore “When war comes the poet must put down his lyre.” In other words, we have responsibilities to our time. No one is obligated to sacrifice every moment of their lives for the sake of others, but no one is free to completely ignore the realities of the world either. Existential injustice sensitizes us to the implications of the circumstances of birth. We do not choose to be born or where we are born, so the initial circumstances of life are not deserved. But as we mature we become aware of our surroundings, first in our immediate environment, and then outward in expanding circles. We cannot not be aware of our world (whether narrowly or broadly construed), but we can choose and work to ignore information.

No one is guilty for being born, but we are responsible, and therefore are guilty, for the choices we make to ignore the reality of existential injustice. We are parts of a world, not monadic worlds unto ourselves. We can wall ourselves off and be happy– ignorance is bliss- but no one is ignorant naturally, one must make themselves so. As the great neo-Confucian philosopher Wang Yang Ming wrote, if we open ourselves to it, we can recognize the humanity (jen) that connects all people (and all people to all animals and inanimate things). This recognition requires no special intelligence. “Even the mind of the small (uneducated) man is no different,” he says, “he himself makes it small.” Making our minds small, cultivated ignorance about what other people must somehow live through does, is culpable. When the war is over the poet can return to their beautiful harmonies, Gandhi adds, but when others are fighting one must join the cause.

But the problems of the world are vast and the powers of individuals small. But individuals do not live in the ‘world,’ they live in concrete times and places. We are not responsible for each other in the moralistic abstract. We are responsible for recognizing our shared humanity and acting in accordance with capacity. Those of us who live in democracies act responsibly by electing politicians who refuse to fan the flames of war, life-destructive violence, and environmental degradation. Those of us who think for a living must work to find the connections between whatever it is that interests us and the existence of the wider world that enables us to be active philosophically or scientifically. Everyone who becomes aware of what actually goes on in the world can at the very least state clearly what goes on, whether or not they have a full grasp of the causes and even if they do not (and no one does) have an immediately workable solution. And what goes on in the world is that some infants are in reality and through no fault of their own born on rubbish heaps, starved, and bombed, and killed.

I have made my career as a social philosopher, but the questions that drew me into philosophy– before I knew that I was being drawn into philosophy- were how and whether we can enjoy life if it has no ultimate, transcendent meaning. In recent years I have moved away from directly political-economic problems to address that problem explicitly from (what I regard, anyway) as a historical materialist perspective. I think that materialists above all have to provide an answer to the question of why life is worthwhile if it is a contingent emergent product of one possible evolutionary pathway that energy took and destined to die out, forever. And historical materialists, who are concerned not with the evolution of energy but the development of human institutions, should be concerned with the problem of meaning because if life is not meaningful, or no cogent answer can be supplied to the question of why it is meaningful if the universe of which it is a part is not, then it hardly makes sense to worry about what institutions organize human societies. If we are concerned with good lives then we must assume that life is worth living, but the answer to the question why it is worth living if death is permanent annihilation is not obvious.

Although they were submerged in my first four books and most of the papers I wrote and talks I gave over the first twenty years of my career, my existential concerns always coloured my thinking. Having said enough on the question of what is to be done (I do not mean that there is nothing more to say, but I have nothing more to contribute on that front) I have taken up the problem of meaning and life-value in my past few projects. The overarching concern with problems of meaning and life-value in a godless universe of light, heat, and mostly empty space led me back to Dostoevsky’s three masterpieces: The Possessed, The Brothers Karamazov, and Crime and Punishment. My first encounters with these novels took place at intervals of roughly ten years: Crime and Punishment as teenager, The Possessed in my twenties, and The Brothers Karamazov in my thirties. After so many years almost all the details of the plots had faded, and along with them my appreciation of the literary value of the novels. What I retained was a general impression of the stories and the philosophical conflicts that Dostoevsky’s characters explore.

Since I was not re-reading them simply for the pleasure of reading but because I wanted to re-immerse myself in the philosophical struggles and contradictions the protagonists exemplify, there was a danger that I would read them too instrumentally. I rarely read philosophy for pleasure anymore, not only because most philosophers are uninteresting writers, but also because every time I open the hottest new thing I tend to think: new packaging, old ideas. I do not mean that in a dismissive way, but only that I have realized (as I think most philosophers do at a certain point) that we work on a very few fundamental problems, and there are only so many ways that one can try to solve them. There can be important variations on a theme and I certainly still learn from philosophical reading, but that exhilarating feeling I had when I was a student and young professor of an almost physical expansion of self when I read philosophy has long been absent from my research related reading. I only read philosophy these days when I am working on a project that forces me to look at what others have thought about it. I come to philosophical texts as foils or supports for my own argument. Consequently, I pay selective attention to the arguments and take from them what I need to question or help make my case. But when it comes to reading literature, one wants to be involved with the whole text and not simply whatever ideas the author is exploring.

But any danger that I that would read the novels too narrowly, too ‘philosophically,’ was dispelled as soon as opened The Possessed again. From its first page to the epilogue of Crime and Punishment that I just finished I delighted in the richly painted scenes, the often humorous counterpoint to the tragic narratives, and the often salacious undertones to the inner lives of Dostoevsky’s unforgettable characters.

Dostoevsky’s genius was to combine in the highest degree soaring philosophical insight into the most fundamental problems of mortality, purpose, and the value of human life in the absence of transcendent foundations and his ability to paint scenes and craft characters that draw the reader into their own internal logic of development. His cityscapes are evocative without wasting words, the dialogical interactions between characters seem natural and express the full range of human emotions and tensions, but the real power of the novels comes through in his unmatched power to capture the inner turmoil of his protagonist’s lives. Dostoevsky’s own convictions are not difficult to discover, but his greatness as an artist lies in his not allowing them to silence his protagonist’s attempt to live free of what they regard as illusions but Dostoevsky regarded as the highest truths. The dramatic tension of the novels centres on the ambivalence that drives the central characters Stavrogin, Ivan Karamazov, and Raskolnikov (especially the later two- Stavrogin and the other main characters in The Possessed are a bit more cardboard caricature’s of the nihilists that Dostoevsky wanted to expose and skewer).

Of all the characters Raskilonikov is, to my mind, the most finely drawn and tragic. He is naive, arrogant, unoriginal, vastly more brilliant in his own mind than in reality. But he is also receptive to the suffering of others. In a fit a empathy he gives his last 20 roubles to the widow of a man who was at best a drinking buddy, and eventually falls in love with (and is redeemed by) the man’s prostitute daughter, Sonya, who accompanies him to Siberia. He convinces himself that he is one of the great men morally permitted to kill in the service of loftier ends, but he is undone almost immediately by conscience, which debilitates him and makes him easy prey for the investigator of the murder that he committed. He pretends to be intellectually aloof but his main motivations are sentimental. He wants to be Napoleon but undoes any future career prospects by driving away his sister’s suitor because he knows he is exploiting her and threatening to kill another man who once tried to rape her when that man reappears in Petersburgh. Raskolnikov is not just a refutation of nihilism, he is a case study in self-deception, guilt and conscience, the undoing of youthful arrogance by the contradictions of life, and of devotion and love as well.

While Raskolnikov is the most finely drawn of Dostoevsky’s characters, Ivan Karamazov is the most philosophically compelling. In an unforgettable scene with his devout brother, Alyosha, Ivan articulates a breathtakingly powerful and beautiful vindication of life in a a meaningless universe. He not only demolishes the idea that life has to have some cosmic purpose to be enjoyed, he exposes the complicity of cosmic purposes with vicious indifference to existing human life. Best known for his notorious assertion that if there is no God then nothing is true and everything is permitted, his deeper commitments lead in the opposite direction: not towards indifference to life, but the embrace of its contingency, vulnerability, and simple pleasures: He tells Alyosha that he “loves life more than the meaning of it”(Dostoevsky, 1971, 252).  While reason suggests that there is no greater value in a long rather than a short life if both end in timeless oblivious, he rebels, as Camus insisted we should against the absurd, declaring that “I go on living in spite of logic.  Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky leaves as they grow in the spring” (Dostoevsky, 1971, 252).  But his argument reaches a crescendo when he convicts the believers in divine plans with an inhuman indifference to actual living beings: “If all should suffer to pay for the eternal harmony, what have children got to do with it?  It is beyond comprehension why they should suffer.  Why should they, too, furnish material to enrich the soil for the harmony of the future? … I renounce the higher harmony altogether.  It is not worth the tears of that one tortured child” (Dostoevsky, 1978, 268).  I have read no more perfect synthesis of poetry and philosophy.

The characters of The Possessed are less nuanced and riven by inner turmoil. As I noted above, Stavrogin, the protagonist of The Possessed is more caricatured than either Ivan Karamazov or Raskolnikov; more of an obvious reductio ad aburdem of the youthful nihilists of the 1860’s that Dostoevsky wanted to attack. The chapter which contains his ‘confession” included in some versions of the novel seems rather too convenient and unmotivated, unlike Raskolnikov’s eventual conversion, which has its roots in the empathetic and devoted side of his character. In general The Possessed is the most didactic of the three novels. but even though it takes no effort to grasp the argument that Dostoevsky wants to make against the nihilist and early socialist movements, there are also wonderfully humorous scenes. The meeting of the nihilist cell will reduce anyone who has been to any sort of student radical meeting to convulsions of laughter. And Kirilov, the other main nihilist figure who kills himself to prove that human beings are ultimately free (we are the power of life and death), is both mocked for the absurdity of his ideas and treated with tenderness. Kirilov mourns the murder of his traveling companion by Stavrogin and his plan, as idiotically self-undermining as it is, was conceived as self-sacrifice for the sake of all future humans who would be able to recognize the value of and enjoy life once freed from the metaphysical burden of worrying about eternal punishment.

Walter Kaufmann wrote that philosophy should be considered a minor subset of literature (Philosophy and Tragedy). I believe that he is correct, at least as regards existential and ethical philosophy. Philosophy is to literature as anatomy is to medicine: we treat trace the skeleton that supports life; the novelist and the poet (the best ones) follow the much messier paths of the full flesh and blood human beings who live the conflict between present and eternity, between desire and duty, between self and other. Philosophy raises the mind above the earth to consider the cogency of the principles by which life may be lived and evaluated; the novelist and poet stays on earth and brings to life the whole integrated and explosive inner life of people, with all their ambivalences, turmoil, self-undermining drives, and the seeing the better and doing the worse (Spinoza) of concrete living individuals and the contexts of their lives. Philosophy is world-analysis, but literature is world-creation.