Justice: an Epistemological Trojan Horse

From Moral Language to Metaphysical Grounding. A Personal Ascent Toward the Moral Coherence of the Objectivity of Justice – by Charbel Eltarraf

I am not an academic. I am not a philosopher. I do not claim originality when it comes to the classical arguments for the existence of God or the structure of moral reality. I have simply read them, critically, patiently, and repeatedly. And I have found them to be, quite simply, the most rational and coherent explanations available.

Most of what I now believe was not developed by me. It was discovered by others... by sharper, older, more disciplined minds. I owe much to thinkers like Thomas Aquinas, whose 'Summa Theologica' laid out the most consistent rational ascent I’ve encountered. One that begins with existence, proceeds through logic, and concludes in the claims of Christ.

What I present here is not a rehashing of those arguments in technical detail. Rather, I lay out the sequence of conclusions that I found impossible to ignore, and from those conclusions, I introduce a contribution of my own... A framework for understanding how moral language, particularly the use of terms like “justice” functions as an epistemological Trojan horse. Moral language presupposes truths that secular worldviews cannot support. These truths, once accepted, eventually lead to Christ, not with intent, but by necessity.

The question of whether God exists was never a matter of blind belief for me. It was a matter of coherence. Why does anything exist at all? Is all reality contingent, and must there be a necessary cause?

These are not emotional questions. They are logical ones. And while I will not reproduce Aquinas’ Five Ways here, I will say this... when I encountered them, they made sense. They reflected a universe governed not by chaos or brute fact, but by ordered causality, reason, and ultimately, necessity.

Aquinas argues for a first cause that is uncaused, eternal, and necessary, a being which all men call God. I accepted this. Not because I wanted to, but because it seemed unavoidable. To reject it was to embrace incoherence.

What kind of being must this first cause be? If God is the necessary source of all contingent things, He must be:

1. Eternal (not bound by time),
2. Simple (not composed of parts),
3. Immutable (unchanging),
4. Powerful (cause of all that is),
5. Rational and personal (possessing will).

Creation, after all, is a willed act. A non-personal force does not choose. God is not an impersonal cosmic equation. He is someone. If He is personal, then it is rational to ask: Can we know Him? Can we relate to Him?

That leads not just to spirituality, but to religion.

If God is personal, relationship with Him is rational, involving communication, worship, and structure, which are elements of religion.

But which religion?

Many claim divine revelation, yet their claims cannot all be true. Either God is Trinity or not. Either Christ is God or not.

Islam emphasises a God of supreme command, where morality is divine command. Buddhism often dissolves the self, or calls one to see through the illusion of a fixed identity. Hinduism multiplies divinity. Each offers sophisticated frameworks, yet, Christianity is uniquely coherent. It is a personal, eternal, good Creator whose nature is love and whose entry into history as Christ is not myth but a rational consequence of His nature. Other traditions provide valuable insights, but Christianity’s integration of historical revelation and personal relationship aligns most consistently with the rational ascent I’ve described.

If Christ is who He claims, His teachings are not opinions but revelations, reshaping our understanding of morality. Justice Is not a feeling, nor an act, Justice flows from God's very essence.

Having established that it is most coherent to believe in the God of classical theism, and, by extension, to accept the authority of Christ, it becomes possible to speak about moral objectivity without collapsing into arbitrary personal belief. 

I do not begin with the assumption that moral truths are religious in nature. I begin with the rational conclusion that if God is who He reveals Himself to be... perfect, eternal, personal, and just, then moral truths are real, and they are grounded in Him. And from there, the question arises. What is justice?

Initially, I believed justice to be subjective. It appeared to be something experienced. An emotional resolution, a sense that fairness had been achieved. And when that sense was absent, I noticed that even in morally sound outcomes, people still claimed that “justice wasn’t served.” This led me to conclude that justice was largely subjective. Defined by perception rather than principle. But the more I reflected, the more I saw that this was a confusion of categories. Justice is not the action that aims to produce fairness. Nor is it the emotional state that follows it.

Those are separate things:

- The action is a morally guided response to a wrong. (which is objective)

- The emotion is an attempt to grasp fairness. (which is subjective)

- Justice, however, is neither of these. It transcends both of these. 

Justice is inherently objective. It is not a virtue we perform or a feeling we possess. It is not the punishment that rights a wrong, nor the satisfaction that follows it. Justice is the perfect ideal, the ultimate standard by which all rightness is measured. And if God is perfectly just, then justice is not merely from God... justice exists in God's very nature as the embodiment and foundation of all justice itself.

The fullness of justice (the complete alignment of right action and emotional resolution) can only be experienced in its perfect form in God Himself. Any human attempt to approximate justice inevitably involves subjectivity. While actions can be guided by the objective moral law revealed by Christ, the emotional response to those actions is always personal and therefore subjective.

This is evident when two individuals suffer the same wrongdoing, receive the same redress, yet respond differently. One feeling that justice has been served, the other not. This discrepancy reveals that true justice is not fully captured by action or emotion alone. At best, we approximate it. Only in God is justice fully realised.

This is not theological wordplay. It is the only definition of justice that preserves its objectivity while explaining why humans disagree about it. Because we are finite and morally limited, we experience justice only as an approximation. Our actions may be guided by objective morality, but they are fallible. Our feelings may reflect our conscience, but they are shaped by wounds, bias, and perspective. So when we speak of “justice being served,” we are not accessing justice itself. We are referring to a morally-informed attempt to mirror true justice.

This resolves the tension I had felt with classical thinkers like Aquinas, Aristotle and Plato. They were right to insist that justice is objective. But they spoke of it in terms of what humans can apply or perform. That is, in my view, insufficient. Justice is not in the action, and it is not in the feeling. It is in the nature of God. To confuse any of these three, action, emotion, or divine standard, is to diminish the gravity of what justice actually is.

Justice is not a tool we wield. It is a reality we fail to grasp. And that is precisely why we must ground it in the only place that can sustain it... the perfect, eternal nature of God.

5. Conclusion: Every Moral Cry Is a Prayer

When we cry out against injustice, we are not just voicing discomfort. We are echoing the nature of God. And when we name evil for what it is, we acknowledge that there is a rightness built into the fabric of reality.

That is the Trojan horse. Secular language borrows theological structure. People reject God, yet speak with His vocabulary. Justice is a perfect example of that. 

Justice is not what we make it. It is what we long for, what we approximate, and what only God can finally deliver.

In the end, every moral judgment is either incoherent or divine. And every cry for justice is a veiled prayer to the One in whom perfect justice resides.