“Having come to this point, we arrive at the question of the ultimate finality of the act of judging. Returning to our analysis of the act of judging starting from the far-reaching operation that consisted in the State taking from individuals the direct exercise of justice, and in the first place of vengeance as the means of justice, it turns out that the horizon of the act of judging is finally something more than security-it is social peace. How does this ultimate finality throw any light on our initial definition of the act of judging in terms of its short-term finality, that is, its putting an end to uncertainty through the act of rendering a decision? To decide, we said, is to separate, to draw a line between ‘yours’ and ‘mine.’ The finality of social peace makes apparent something more profound that has to do with mutual recognition. Let us not say reconciliation; even less ought we to speak of love and pardon, which are not juridical categories. Let us speak instead of recognition. But in what sense? I think that the act of judging reaches its goal when someone who has, as we say, won his case still feels able to say: my adversary, the one who lost, remains like me a subject of right, his cause should have been heard, he made plausible arguments and these were heard. However, such recognition will not be complete unless the same thing can also be said by the loser, the one who did wrong, who has been condemned. He should be able to declare that the sentence that condemns him was not an act of violence but rather one of recognition.

To what vision of society does this reflection lead us? Somewhere beyond, I think, the conception of society as distributing shares, which do always need to be apportioned in order to determine which one belongs to this or that person. This would be the vision of society as a model of social cooperation. After all, this expression appears in the opening lines of John Rawls’s Theory of Justice, a work in which nevertheless it is the analysis of society as a system of distribution that carries the day. The question is worth asking: what is it that makes society something more than a system of distribution? Or better: what is it that makes distribution a means of cooperation? Here is where a more substantial element than pure procedural justice has to be taken into account, namely, something like a common good, consisting in shared values. We are then dealing with a communitarian dimension underlying the purely procedural dimension of the societal structure. Perhaps we may even find in the metaphor of sharing the two aspects I am here trying to coordinate in terms of each other. In sharing there are shares, that is, those things that separate us. My share is not yours. But sharing is also what makes us share, that is, in the strongest sense of the term, share in….

I conclude then that the act of judging has as its horizon a fragile equilibrium of these two elements of sharing: that which separates my share or part from yours and that which, on the other hand, means that each of us shares in, takes part in society.

It is the just distance between partners who confront one another, too closely in cases of conflict and too distantly in those of ignorance, hate, and scorn, that sums up rather well, I believe, the two aspects of the act of judging. On the one hand, to decide, to put an end to uncertainty, to separate the parties; on the other, to make each party recognize the share the other has in the same society, thanks to which the winner and the loser of any trial can be said to have their fair share in that model of cooperation that is society” (Ricoeur 2000:131-132).

Ricoeur, Paul
2000[199] The Just. David Pellauer, trans. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

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