Perhaps because I have spent hours sermonizing to students about the sins of the...

Perhaps because I have spent hours sermonizing to students about the sins of the passive voice-how it can obfuscate meaning, deaden vitality, and abandon the task of assigning agency or responsibility-I find the grammar of justice maddening. It's always "rendered," "served," or "done." It always swoops down from on high-from God, from the state-like a bolt of lightning, a flaming sword come to separate the righteous from the wicked in Earth's final hour. It is not, apparently, something we can give to one other, something we can make happen, something we can create together down here in the muck. The problem may also lie in the word itself, as for millennia "justice" has meant both "retribution" and "equality," as if a gaping chasm did not separate the two.
If you really want to know what justice is, don't only ask questions and then score off anyone who answers, and refute him, roars Thrasymachus to Socrates in The Republic. You know very well that it is much easier to ask questions than to answer them. Give an answer yourself and tell us what you say justice is. When justice is done, writes Anne Carson, the world drops away. This does not seem to me a happy thought. I am not yet sure I want the world to drop away.