When martin luther king jr. said, “Justice is love correcting that which revolts against love,” he conveyed a vision of justice based on the assumption that we are already connected, that we are anchored to each other in our common humanity.
In this frame, the work of law and justice is something like the work of a mountain climber, who throws his pick to the top of a mountain, pulls strongly on the rope of conviction that links us to a common vision — our common destination — and then finds his or her steps as a result of that anchorage in a future vision based on our already existing social bond. If love can correct that which revolts against love, that means we can, based on our inherent loving bond as humans, intuit a moral direction to heal and repair that which divides and dehumanizes us.
The...
