The Just

I do not ground the good. I refuse euphemism. The just is the living move: one that opens a passage, maintains it, or makes it possible again. Such a move can also, paradoxically, close off what is living. Its legitimacy does not change the nature of what it destroys.

I. Cutting a living bond

Léa’s father has never raised a hand. At every visit, he compares his eight-year-old granddaughter to her cousin, who reads better, has better table manners, says hello and thank you. Images, always images. He never misses a chance to diminish her father. Not head-on, of course, he is too intelligent for that, but by suggestion, by comparison. The child is intelligent, he knows it, sooner or later she’ll understand that her father is a loser. In any case, he plants the idea, all finesse, all contrast. It’s not so much to hurt, but to make sure she’ll admire him more. The exceptional grandfather who surpasses her father in every way. Then he opens the sideboard drawer where he keeps their cards. Humiliations disguised as tenderness, and tenderness all the same, to make the whole thing more credible and also, perhaps, because he loves her a little. Harm is often unremarkable.

Léa talks to him. She sets limits, twice, the second time in writing. He starts again. She suspends the visits.

In the car on the way home, the child cries. She loves her grandfather. There were happy Sundays, the card game, the story of the dog who took the tram and whom the conductor let on. They have not become false. Something is still alive in this bond, and that too is what the cut takes away.

Declaring this bond dead would make the decision easier. We would act as though the cut no longer took anything away. That would erase in advance what it makes us lose.

Yet protecting the child does not depend on everything that connects them having disappeared first. The humiliations continue despite the limits set. For now, Léa has no other way of stopping them. She suspends the visits without waiting to exhaust every imaginable mediation. The cut can be legitimate while the bond still contains something living.

This move is living for the child: it gives her back the room to speak and grow without having to forestall the next humiliation. It also takes away the moments when she could find, with her grandfather, a way of playing and telling stories that belonged to them alone. It is the same child who is protected and who loses.

Léa can be entirely right to suspend the visits. She cannot make it so that her daughter has lost only humiliations.

II. The direction of the move

I call maille a place where a move can be received, leave a trace, and change what follows: a relationship, a team, an institution. This place stays alive when something new can enter it and what enters leaves something to be taken up. It is habitable when one can take part in it and what one brings can still change something.

The just names the move in what it opens, maintains, or makes possible again. A difficult word can open a passage; a silence, a refusal, or a departure can too. The form of the move does not decide its justness. A crossing can be courageous and close off what is living. Justness lies in what the move does to the maille .

Getting an answer is not enough. A humiliation can draw from the child exactly the words expected while closing the place where her words could count. Taking away the grandfather’s means of silencing her stops a closure. The living thing the suspension destroys is not his grip on her. What it also takes away are the encounters that remained possible between them.

A move can act on several mailles , reopen one and close another, sometimes in the same person’s life. Its justness is real where it makes passage possible. It does not extend to all its effects. Léa’s move opens a passage for her daughter and closes a bond that is still alive. These effects coexist without being subtracted from one another. A move that closes off what is living can make a form succeed. Its vitality does not tell us what remains possible for those who sustain it.

Legitimacy concerns the reasons for making the move in a situation. These reasons can be sufficient, even when the loss is considerable. They allow us to understand why the act is chosen. They do not change what it takes away. They do not make up a balance in which the living preserved would make the living lost disappear. The destruction, for its part, does not prove that another decision would have left more life possible.

The opening itself still has to be established. Naming it does not prove it. A mother can call protection what tightens her control; an institution can call improvement what makes objections impracticable. The passage opened is recognized by what someone can now do or say, and by the place this takes in what follows. The name given by the one who decides is not enough. The question becomes precise in the effects: what passage becomes possible, for whom, and what can still change what follows?

III. Harm and fault

I call harm what closes off or dissolves the living and makes a world less habitable. The word has a structural sense here. It describes what happens to a life, a relationship, actual possibilities of taking part in it. It does not designate a fault on the part of the one who acts. It does not pass judgment on the whole life of the one who acts. It allows us to follow the move into what it destroys.

Not every option set aside constitutes harm. Choosing one occupation over another is not enough to establish it. Not all pain constitutes harm. An effort can be costly and open a passage; a closure can happen without a sound. Harm appears when possibilities of living, speaking, or taking things up again become impracticable in a life or a relationship that could still have continued and changed. In Léa’s case, encounters were taking place. They could still have had a continuation. The suspension makes that continuation impracticable.

The child’s pain makes this loss felt. It does not constitute it. The child may not know how to name what she misses; she may also, later, stop missing it. The closure has taken place, independently of how long her sorrow lasts. Conversely, pain can accompany the end of a grip without that grip having been a living passage. We need not demand that she forget in order to justify our decision, or demand lasting pain as proof of her loss.

Harm is measured neither by the tears of the one who loses nor by the remorse of the one who decides. Léa’s pain could take up the whole conversation without anything yet having been said about what her daughter misses. Léa may not regret her move and may make it again in the same circumstances. The loss remains describable without regret coming to attest it.

A torturer can describe faithfully what he destroys; that description does not make his destruction living. Naming harm does not make the move living. Description alone does not change what has taken place. It can, however, enter a relationship and change what becomes possible there.

IV. Harol

In Le Courage du Réel , Harol is a pediatric surgeon in South Sudan. He patches up the children mangled by the conflict, at the pace of chocolate bars on a factory line. He sells their organs. Construction of his Philippine villa is running late, the jacuzzi had to be sent back because of a crack. He’ll need more cash and more butchering. Before, he stuck to paired organs — too many deaths look bad. Now we’ll shift into second gear. Right, on to the heart, the pancreas, the liver. He congratulates himself on his choice of children: they take up less room in cold storage and they’re worth much more.

I wrote: “ killing Harol can be legitimate, but it will always do harm. ”

Suppose no other means can stop the children’s deaths in time. Killing Harol can be legitimate. His death prevents the murders he was about to commit. It also takes away every possibility for him to live, including differently. What is destroyed is not limited to what is prevented. The reason for killing him does not change what killing does to a life.

The harm here is not Harol’s inability to continue his crimes. It is the destruction of his life. What a being does to the living does not exhaust what lives in him. The legitimacy of killing him does not make him a thing already dead.

A war can be legitimate for those defending themselves. That does not justify each of their acts. But even when an act of war is justified, the deaths it causes remain lives destroyed. I can be right to fight. If I kill, I destroy a life. This destruction remains real when it is the only way to save others. The difference between aggression and self-defense remains intact; it does not transform what killing does to the one who dies.

Justified harm is still harm because its justification does not cancel its effect on the living. The sentence adds no obligation of remorse to the action. It describes a destruction that justification leaves intact. What has disappeared does not depend on the feeling of the one who decided.

V. What justification leaves

“It had to be done.” The sentence can be true. It becomes a problem when it excuses us from hearing what comes after.

I call remainder what a justified decision has taken away and its justification does not give back. This remainder may concern an interrupted relationship, exhausted strength, a destroyed life. It does not constitute a debt attached to the one who decided. It names what is still missing after the decision has been explained; it does not, by itself, say who can respond to it, or what can still be taken up. For the child, it is the visits that can no longer take place, the stories she no longer hears in that voice, a way of being with her grandfather that is taken away along with the danger.

One evening, at bedtime, the child asks when she will see her grandfather again. Her drawing for him is still on the refrigerator. Léa hears in the question a challenge to everything she has done to protect her.

“But you know why.”

The child may know. She would still like to see him.

If Léa demands that she no longer miss anything, she imposes a second closure. It is no longer enough for her daughter to be protected; she has to experience the cut only as protection. Her sorrow becomes an objection to be made to disappear. After closing access to the grandfather, Léa closes the possibility of speaking to her about what is missing.

The lack is to be seen, inhabited, or left cleanly. It does not ask to be filled, but to be recognized as a move suspended in a fabric that has closed again.

The first protection remains real. What it opened does not disappear because Léa later uses it to stop hearing. But another move is taking place: past protection becomes a reason to make present speech inadmissible. The necessity of suspending the visits did not make this second closure necessary.

The remainder is what this answer erases. It concerns the life of the one who has lost. The pain of the decision-maker is neither necessary nor sufficient to respond to the remainder. Léa can feel guilty and refuse to hear anything. She can be certain of her decision and let her daughter speak.

Going along with a decision does not mean regarding all the losses it causes as good. The child can understand the suspension of visits and miss the happy Sundays. Assent to what protects does not contain assent to everything that is lost. No reason, however good, buys that assent.

VI. Responding without giving everything back

The loss can be named without anything changing. Léa can say she knows her daughter is unhappy and let nothing through of what she is trying to address to her. Recognition becomes living when these words can change the way the absence is accompanied, even if the visits remain suspended.

Léa can let her daughter speak of the happy Sundays. She also knows the story of the dog, Mastardette, and can tell it if her daughter asks; she will not have the grandfather’s voice to play the conductor. The memory can nevertheless find a continuation, instead of becoming what it is forbidden to speak of.

Recognizing the loss does not oblige anyone to resume the visits. There remains an absence to accompany, something to seek that can still be passed on without putting the child back in danger. Some losses are irreversible. Others diminish or find compensation. Another relationship can be born without restoring the previous one intact. What is taken up does not produce a past in which nothing was lost. It changes present possibilities. Uptake may also remain impossible: the persistence of harm does not, by itself, create a means of responding to it.

The situation can also change. If the grandfather’s moves change, the reasons for maintaining the cut can change with them. This change can be examined by other adults without putting the child back within his reach to verify it. The legitimacy of the initial decision does not describe all future situations in advance. A decision defensible at the outset can cease to be so if we persist despite what it teaches us.

Recognizing a remainder therefore means neither maintaining an infinite debt nor keeping the decision forever open. A just decision obliges no one to have lost nothing.

VII. The price of repair

An employee gets a work schedule corrected after going back over the files in the evenings at the kitchen table and gathering her colleagues’ accounts of their difficulties. At the first meeting, she is asked to put everything in writing; at the second, the boss is absent. The schedule is corrected at the third. The organization thanks her in the internal newsletter, two lines. The institution has learned. The employee is exhausted.

Her move was received and changed the rule. It opened a real passage. But at the next problem, she may keep quiet. The organization may see agreement in her silence. An institution can improve by exhausting those who improve it. It keeps the correction obtained and risks losing the next one, for lack of someone still able to bring it. What stays alive for it has been taken from another’s life.

The closure is not limited to that risk for the institution. This woman has stopped seeing two friends, left a project unfinished, spent her evenings preparing words that could finally be received. Her life exceeds the service she has just rendered. Her exhaustion would count even if the organization could find someone else tomorrow to correct it.

There may have been no less costly way of obtaining the correction. The move remains living in what it reopened. The institution’s opening does not stand as an answer to what closed in her life. A one-time effort can be taken up in a life that continues. If this burden continues until she is left without a life of her own, the institution’s maintenance is paid for by her dissolution.

“She agreed” can serve, like “it had to be done,” to stop the examination. Consent does not give back the evenings; thanks leave her no more time next time.

Time allowed for preparing objections, accessible information, or help that does not depend on the manager being challenged can change the conditions of the next correction. These means do not restore everything that was lost. They change what produced it. If the organization keeps the result but dismisses any word about its cost, part of what was addressed to it remains without effect on it. The opening obtained then coexists with the maintenance of what exhausts those who make it possible. Thanking this woman while leaving her exactly the same burden next time would be receiving the correction without receiving what it reveals.

VIII. Naming harm

The grandfather has lost too. The card games and the stories counted in his life. In preventing him from continuing to humiliate his granddaughter, the suspension also takes away this still-living relationship. This harms him too, even when the cut is legitimate. Saying he got only what he deserved would allow us to stop looking at what closed for him. His responsibility does not make his loss nonexistent.

This loss gives him no right to visits. Nor does acknowledging it designate the child as a means of repairing it. Other adults can hear what he has lost, remind him of the moves that led to the cut, and examine what remains possible without exposing his granddaughter.

Protection does not need to become a story in which everything it does is good for the one it protects. The just does not ask the one it protects to agree with it on everything.

What closed for the grandfather can therefore be described without reopening access to the child. What the child misses can enter her relationship with Léa without canceling the protection. Suspending the visits and keeping silent about their loss are two distinct things.

Léa can maintain what she has protected without closing off speech about what her protection has destroyed. The visits remain suspended.

Her daughter can stay safe and say what she misses.

Bearings

Three words, kept separate: loss, a possibility actually removed; harm, what closes off or dissolves the living, justified or not; remainder, the loss that justification does not turn into nonexistence. An entirely justified act can produce a real remainder: that is what the title says.

Lineages

Bernard Williams examines what remains of an ethical conflict when one has acted for good reasons. The remainder stands in this neighborhood, with a shift: here it names an actual loss in the living, independently of felt regret or a moral judgment on the act. Attention falls on what has been made impracticable and on what can still find a continuation.

Joan Tronto examines the distribution of responsibilities for care. The cost of uptake meets this question: a correction can benefit the institution while exhausting the person who made it possible.