Love and forgiveness are ultimately more important than justice

Critics of philosophy say it is too much “on the one hand this, on the other hand that”; it’s too wishy-washy; it’s too impractical. Well, that ends here as today, emphatically, the Unthinkable column nails its colours to the mast.

At risk of being cancelled, I herein declare: Love and forgiveness are ultimately more important than justice.

Now before you think The Irish Times is giving a free pass to wrongdoers hear me out — because I love you, in a profound but not a weird way.

Leaving philosophy aside for a moment, there are some very practical reasons why we should put love in advance of justice. Tit-for-tat is no way to solve a conflict. Sectarian bloodshed on this island would not have ended without some degree of forgiveness.

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It seems unlikely, moreover, that the greatest challenges facing humanity can be tackled effectively unless we learn to love better, including learning to love the planet.

From a psychological perspective, the arguments for elevating love in advance of justice are bountiful. A relationship that keeps a strict ledger on what one person “deserves” from another will ensure both parties are full of resentment.

But to really understand why love matters most we must turn to possibly the greatest thinker on the subject of the past century: Dublin-born writer Iris Murdoch. Her “argument”, for want of a better word, is to redefine love.

Out goes the Christian ideal of wishing for your neighbour what you would want for yourself, something that requires superhuman virtue. In comes the idea of love as looking.

More precisely, Murdoch defines love as giving your attention — something that is a lot harder than it sounds. It means turning away from the “fat relentless ego” and to be aware of the world as it exists outside your own interests.

“Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real,” she writes.

So defined, “loving attention” is not about earning moral brownie-points, it is about gaining knowledge. More precisely, it brings you closer to an appreciation of moral truth, or the good.

Thinkers down the ages have tried to substitute different things for the good — Murdoch gives freedom, happiness and history as examples — but, she says, “they seem to represent in each case the philosopher’s admiration for some specialised aspect of human conduct which is much less than the whole of excellence and sometimes dubious in itself”.

Love stands apart because unlike history or the law, for example, it is not trying to fit reality into some kind of theory or narrative. As pure, egoless attention, love is simply trying “to understand other people ... a task which does not come to an end”. As Murdoch puts it: “Good is the magnetic centre towards which love naturally moves.”

Still not convinced?

A new book from The School of Life — the publishing house set up by philosopher Alan de Botton, among other writers — gives the case for love further backing.

A More Loving World makes the humanistic argument that we are all essentially flawed — the perfect person does not exist. So trying to guarantee everyone is judged against the letter of the law is a kind of self-hatred.

Put another way, if we think love is only for those who deserve it then we are setting ourselves up for being unloved.

In what goes for public debate today, such finer points don’t really get a look in. A very different form of “love” is celebrated — an egocentric, competitive one that is measured by likes, or followers, or, in the case of a successful TV show, whether you get enough votes to stay in Casa Amor.

Actual love — caring attention to others without an agenda — is in the shadows. This is most apparent in the hard cases. To give “loving attention” to a wrongdoer is making yourself a target, which is why we tend to stay silent during pile-ons.

Sarah Stein Lubrano, head of content for A More Loving World, says she sympathises with those who believe justice should take priority over love but “I also think the question is less straightforward than this”.

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First, love and justice operate on different “scales”, she tells The Irish Times. “In social justice the appropriate scale of thought is wide, and long-term, and it is not individuals by themselves that require changing or addressing. This means there is still room to have love and consideration for individuals.”

Second, it is only when we apply a particular kind of “loving understanding” that we can think about justice fully and, third, “often these things are just not in contradiction even if they seem so, because loving people does not require us to give them what we want, or forgive their actions”.

In everyday situations, however, love and justice do rub up against one another. Expressing love for the unworthy in the public sphere, for example, is an invitation for abuse. It can hurt the feelings of those who suffered from the offending party’s actions. How does one square this circle?

“There’s no simple answer,” replies Ms Stein Lubrano who is doing a PhD in political theory at Oxford, “but I do think it can be clarifying to point out why love is so valuable when we go about expressing love for the seemingly ‘unworthy’.

“Love is not valuable simply because it’s ‘nice’ or ‘feels good’ ... It provides an invitation for those who have done things wrong to rejoin a conversation, or alter their lives.”

In addition, “loving others via imaginative understanding brings us around to a sort of gentle warning that anyone can end up doing bad things”.

So understood, love is not necessarily better than justice but it is more fundamental.

That may sound a bit more wishy-washy than my own declaration at the outset but it is no less radical or potentially transformative. And A More Loving World contains some useful tips on how to develop loving attention, saying: “To stand any chance of maintaining our integrity, we need censorship.”

If “our hearts can be raised” by a beautiful poem or song then they can be damaged by “repeated contact with the callous and venomous tones of journalists and advertisers, pundits and trolls”. (Not very loving towards journalists but we’ll overlook that!)

Cutting yourself off entirely from vitriol is difficult but you can brace yourself for the daily deluge of emotion, the book argues, by doing a bit of meditation or saying a prayer before turning on the phone each morning.

Murdoch was a fan of spiritual reflection too despite being an atheist. Greatly influenced by the Christian philosopher Simone Weil, Murdoch saw prayer as a concentrated form of attention — and therefore a valuable and perhaps necessary tool for living a good life, even if it doesn’t seem to solve anything by itself.

“Learning can be praying, breathing can be praying,” Murdoch has a character say in one of her literary dialogues. “Prayer is keeping quiet and hoping for the light.”

A More Loving World: How to Increase Compassion, Kindness, and Joy is published by The School of Life Press (£12 hardback)