Rethinking justice with Kierkegaard, Lévinas, and Derrida

For a long time the call for justice has been heard as a call to settle accounts—to give people what they deserve, to pay what is owed. It is widely accepted that the fair treatment of persons involves a certain economy of desert, a certain tracking of moral credits and debts. As such, justice seems to be wholly distinct from gift-giving. As Derrida has argued, to have a gift, there must be no exchange, no debt incurred or paid. Historically, philosophers have drawn this distinction between justice and gift-giving as a distinction between the moral and then nonmoral, between two different areas of ethics (the obligatory and the supererogatory), or between two different approaches to ethics (“justice-based” ethics and “care-based” ethics). I explore another way of viewing the dynamics of this distinction: How might justice operate within the asymmetries of gift-giving? Are there ways in which the rights and responsibilities of justice function outside the machinery of exchange? Through a careful reading of the works of Søren Kierkegaard, Jacques Derrida, and Emmanuel Lévinas, I explore how he paradoxical intersection of justice and gift could lead to transcending old borders, and thinking about justice in a new way. First, I examine the philosophical difficulties that have been associated with the gift, especially when it is placed in the context of ethics. Second, I argue that Lévinas\u27 analysis of asymmetrical responsibility and the tout autre, read through the lens of Kierkegaard\u27s Fear and Trembling, troubles the economy of justice. Third, I argue that forgiveness is a gift that is not only compatible with justice, but, in many cases, indistinguishable from it