Regarding Henry, J. J. Abrams’s first solo attempt at writing a screenplay, is one of the most underrated films of the nineties. Not only does it feature Harrison Ford at his best (which already makes it worth the price of admission), but also—more importantly—it has a clear, powerful storyline concerning one of the most important philosophical topics of all: ethical transformation. Consequently, what I’d like to do in this chapter is to examine ethical transformation—especially the ethical transformation of Henry Turner, Regarding Henry’s protagonist—vis-à-vis philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff’s theory of justice. Ultimately my goal is to answer the question posed in this chapter’s title: Do we all need to get shot in the head (in order to become better, happier people)?
Henry Turner is a man who at the beginning of the movie seems to have it all: he’s a successful Manhattan attorney with a beautiful family and all the worldly goods one could hope for. If pleasure were the same as happiness, Henry would be a happy man indeed. However, they aren’t the same, and Henry isn’t happy.
According to Abrams’s screenplay, the chief source of Henry’s unhappiness is his unethical behavior. Henry’s injustice extends to his wife, Sarah, whom he cheats on and to whom he “never apologizes”; his daughter, Rachel, whom he neglects; and those on the opposite side of the legal bench, whose cases he distorts. While few will disagree that these are in fact instances of injustice, most can’t clearly articulate why. Thus, justice needs to be defined to get at the precise nature of Henry’s immorality and subsequent misery.
In Justice: Rights and Wrongs (2008) Nicholas Wolterstorff argues that justice is ultimately grounded in rights, wherein rights are normative social relationships or proper bonds between persons and things.1 People have rights to certain goods, and justice means rendering to each his, her, or its rights—treating each person or thing as he, she, or it ought to be treated.2 For instance, Sarah Turner has a right to the good of being apologized to when she has been wronged, and Henry acts unjustly when he denies her this.
We’ll notice from this that Wolterstorff thinks it’s better to approach justice from the point of the recipient (rights) than from the point of view of the agent (duties and obligations) since “if one thinks exclusively in terms of obligations, and if, furthermore, one thinks of guilt as guilt for violating the moral law rather than guilt for wronging the other, then the person who has been wronged falls entirely out of view.”3 This is a helpful observation (especially if we remember that he is not denying that there are obligations and a moral law as well). Let’s say that after cheating on his wife, Henry felt bad about it, but let’s say that he felt bad because he violated the universal moral law that states that a person should, all things being equal, keep his promises (in this case, keep his marriage vows). While this sense of violating basic moral injunctions is extremely important, it’s incomplete; something more needs to be said. For the sake of argument, let’s agree with Wolterstorff that breaking the moral law by performing such acts as lying is to wrong God, who is the lawgiver behind the moral law and who has the right to be obeyed by his creatures. Yet even here if Henry were to ask only God for forgiveness, he would—if this were all there is to it—still be acting imperfectly since he has wronged his wife and justice demands that her rights be respected and upheld as well.4 In other words, in order to be just Henry must somehow make things right with not only God (whose rights as the creator he has trampled on) but also his wife (whose right to have a faithful husband Henry has disregarded) and even, if we wished to push the case, his daughter (insofar as children have the right to be raised in a stable household).
While some may say this is all fine and well, others may want more clarification on the matter, namely, to know what kind of rights Henry has violated. Has he violated (leaving God aside for the moment) his wife’s and his daughter’s socially conferred rights or natural rights? Socially conferred rights are rights that people have been given by society. For instance, my being free to give my students the grade they deserve has been conferred on me by my university. In contrast, natural rights are rights with which people are born. While all agree that there are socially conferred rights, not all agree that there are natural rights. Since I want to argue that Henry has violated the natural rights of his wife and his daughter, we need to see why there must be natural rights.
Wolterstorff argues for natural rights by distinguishing objective obligations, which are obligations that hold in general, such “do not lie,” from subjective obligations, which are obligations attached to a subject or person, such “Henry should not lie to his wife.” Wolterstorff then argues that all who accept that there are objective obligations (he has nothing to say to those who don’t) will also accept that there are subjective obligations, since obligations aren’t given in a void. Following this, Wolterstorff introduces his “principle of correlatives,” which states that “if Y belongs to the sort of entity that can have rights, then X has an obligation towards Y to do or refrain from doing A if and only if Y has a right against X to X’s doing or refraining from doing A.”5 For instance, if Sarah is the sort of entity who can have rights (and presumably, as a human being, she is), then Henry has an obligation to refrain from lying to her if and only if Sarah has a right to Henry’s refraining from lying to her. What this means, of course, is that if Henry’s subjective obligation not to lie to Sarah is natural, then the correlative subjective right—Sarah’s right not to be lied to by Henry—is also natural.
So Henry Turner begins the movie as a man of the deepest kind of injustice—a man who doesn’t respect the natural rights of others, a man who doesn’t treat each person as he or she ought to be treated in the depths of his or her very nature. Nevertheless, it still remains to be seen why this makes Henry miserable, which is to say it still remains to be seen how happiness is connected to justice.
One evening Henry runs out to a convenience store to buy some cigarettes but in the process interrupts a robbery, resulting in his getting shot. One bullet enters his chest, which causes internal bleeding, and another pierces his frontal lobe, which controls some rudimentary behavior. Combined, this causes anoxia or a lack of oxygen to the brain, resulting in brain damage. Henry survives but experiences total memory loss. However, with the help of his physical therapist, Bradley, and his family, Sarah and Rachel, Henry starts to recover physically. But that’s not all. Henry, we are told, is “in some ways . . . starting from scratch,” meaning that Henry’s having been shot in the head affords him the opportunity to look at ethical situations from a proper perspective and choose do to what is right. And this is what we see happen in three instances.
First, Henry starts to spend time with his daughter, which is to say that he respects her right to enjoy quality time with her father. Both Henry and Rachel, moreover, like spending time with each other, which suggests that there is some connection between happiness and justice. The final scene in the movie, when Henry essentially rescues Rachel from the boarding school she hates, says it all.
Second, Henry discovers that the malpractice suit he won in defending a crooked hospital against an elderly plaintiff is unjust since the plaintiff did in fact warn the hospital of the problem and so had a right to compensation. After turning his back on his own firm for the sake of justice, Henry is told by the plaintiff, “I like you much better now.”
And third, Henry is shocked to discover both that Sarah had cheated on him and that he had also cheated on her. Nevertheless, now free from the stranglehold of vice, Henry sees that such behavior is unjust and so apologizes to his wife, who reciprocates. This leads to a renewed marriage.
Abrams’s point in all this is to show that ethical transformation toward justice leads to happiness. Nevertheless, it’s not clear from Abrams’s screenplay what exactly happiness is, nor whether the desire for happiness is prior to the desire for justice or whether the desire for justice is prior to the desire for happiness. Both of these questions need to be answered.
Happiness is a difficult word to define, but the ancients weren’t so far off when they spoke of it as “flourishing.” A happy life was a “flourishing life”—a life wherein one becomes one’s true self and, at least in the case of Aristotle, actively enjoys certain physical or worldly pleasures as well. Because one’s true self is a rational soul, one is most one’s self when one acts rationally. And because reason teaches us that we ought to obey the moral law and cultivate virtue, the happy person is he who is moral and just (plus, according to Aristotle, also enjoys certain pleasures of the body as well). Already on this model it’s easy to see why Henry becomes happier as he becomes more just—why he speaks truly when he says, “I don’t like who I was.” Nevertheless, Wolterstorff thinks that such an account of happiness—even the Aristotelian account, which would make Henry’s renewed health and beautiful family genuine factors in his happiness—is incomplete.6 Why?
To begin with, rights are what philosophers call “states of affairs,” which in English grammar typically take the form of gerunds, such as “Sarah’s not being lied to” or “Rachel’s receiving quality time with her dad.” More specifically, rights are states of affairs of which a person is a constituent. For example, Sarah doesn’t have a right to the sun setting. But she may have a right of being free to watch the sun set. Additionally, not all states of affairs of which a person is a constituent are legitimate rights. For instance, Sarah doesn’t have the right of being happy. But she does have the right of being free to pursue, and of possessing a legitimate means to achieve, happiness.7
To go deeper, it needs to be stressed that rights are not purely individualistic. Consider Henry’s treatment of his wife. By cheating on and lying to her, Henry violates Sarah’s right of being told the truth and having a faithful husband. Yet, as I suggested earlier, when Henry violates Sarah’s rights, their marriage becomes unstable. This instability in turn affects Rachel, who has the right of enjoying a stable family and respectable parents. Henry’s injustice toward one indirectly affects another. Truly no man is an island.
Wolterstorff, as I said, thinks the ancients’ understanding of happiness is incomplete. We can now start to see why. When Henry was shot by the robber, the robber didn’t just violate Henry’s rights; he also violated the rights of Sarah and Rachel in that he deprived them of a husband and father and all that those offices entail. Sarah can’t be completely happy if her husband is injured by another. But that’s not all. When Henry’s lawyer friends slander him behind his back (that is, without Henry having any knowledge of it), Henry has been wronged (even if he hasn’t been hurt) since he has the right of not being slandered, period. Or again, if Henry and Sarah hadn’t reconciled, then they would have wronged their future (unborn) grandchildren, whose rights of having a stable extended family would have been violated.
Thus, because the ancient (so-called eudaimonian) conceptions of happiness are strongly agent centered, they fail, or so Wolterstorff argues, to account for many of the recipient aspects of happiness.8 We should say, then, that happiness entails not only being a virtuous person—which is the most important aspect of happiness—and possessing certain worldly goods, such as health, money, and so on, but also enjoying the goods to which one has a right, which is to say, being treated as one ought to be treated.
If all this is required in order to be happy, then who could ever be happy? It’s true we can’t speak of any person being perfectly happy since every person has, at the very least, been slandered unapologetically once in his or her life.9 Nevertheless, we can state the obvious truth, namely, that the closer one comes to being perfect and enjoying the goods that constitute happiness, the happier he or she will become. Thus, since Henry manages to reform his character, he has achieved the most important aspect of happiness. Indeed, even though he suffers financial problems as a result of quitting his job at the law firm and endures ridicule by his former colleagues, Henry is still happier than when he was immoral but rich and well liked by his peers. In this way, getting shot in the head was a bad thing (a violation of his right of not being shot) but it resulted in a greater good: a more moral life.
Before we can conclude, there remains an important question that has been raised but not answered: Is the desire for justice (the desire to treat each as he or she ought to be treated) prior to the desire for happiness (the desire to be a certain kind of person and enjoy the goods to which one has a right), or vice versa?
Those who say that the desire for justice should be prior often deem those who consider the desire for happiness prior to be somehow selfish or egotistical. Conversely, those who think the desire for happiness is prior often consider those who think the desire for justice prior to be cold, robotic, and frankly, inhuman.
Although Wolterstorff doesn’t equate selfishness and self-interest, he doesn’t provide a clear solution to this problem. Thus I suggest we take a page from C. S. Lewis, who develops the critical distinction between selfishness and self-interest.
For Lewis, selfishness is a form of injustice: it’s an instance of taking or desiring to take what doesn’t belong to oneself, which, of course, entails violating the rights of others. Nonetheless, it doesn’t follow from this that unselfishness is a virtue: simply to deny oneself goods and pleasures that one may have a legitimate, natural right to is good only in certain circumstances, such as if Henry gave up his right to eat his lunch so that Rachel could eat; such unselfishness is not good in all circumstances. To defend one’s rights, to desire that one’s rights be respected and thus to desire one’s own happiness, is hardly selfish or unjust in and of itself.10 For instance, if Sarah married Henry simply for his money, we could say that Sarah would be selfish or unjust, since she wouldn’t be treating Henry as he ought to be treated, namely, as an entity that is more than a means to money. However, it’s hardly selfish or unjust of Sarah to make financial stability one of the considerations in her decision to marry Henry, since it’s proper that a husband take care of his wife and having money is one of the ways he can achieve this.
Because happiness has to do with both what one does (especially the performance of one’s obligations to develop a virtuous character) and what one receives (especially, though not exclusively, having one’s rights safeguarded), it seems odd to speak about the desire for justice and the desire for one’s own happiness as being totally different things. The desire for justice is part of the desire for happiness. For example, Henry is shown to have a desire to make Rachel happy, a desire that ultimately leads him to buy her a puppy. However, this desire to treat Rachel justly—that is, to respect her right of being loved by her father—is, of course, on one level connected with Henry’s own desire to be happy, since he can’t be happy without being just. My sense is that language is the problem here. If we say Henry shows love to his daughter out of a sense of justice, then we applaud; but if we say he does it out of a desire for his own happiness, we pause. This, however, just goes to show that we still falsely think that to desire our own happiness is always selfish, rather than properly self-interested. Perhaps this is unavoidable. More than a few of the greatest philosophers and religious leaders see man in a broken condition such that man, naturally unnaturally so to speak, desires not proper self-interest (and hence justice) but rather selfishness (and hence injustice). Perhaps in this kind of situation Abrams is wise, for by not saying what desire motivates Henry’s acts of justice, he can show everyone the obvious and all-important truth, which is that justice and happiness are inextricably linked.
After discovering that his wife cheated on him, Henry, in a moment of confusion, seeks out the company of his physical therapist, Bradley, who tells Henry a story of how he, Bradley, had his dreams of being a football player crushed by a bad knee injury. He goes on to tell Henry how he used this bad situation for ethical transformation, saying, “It was a test . . . I had to find my life.” This, we know, Bradley did, for he became a brilliant physical therapist and, by doing his job justly (that is, well), he also found a lot of happiness. Bradley’s story, of course, foreshadows Henry’s own story of ethical transformation—of being shot in the head, only to become a better man, which is also to say a happier man, for it.
Now at last we come to the question asked at the beginning of this chapter: Do we all need to get shot in the head (in order to become better, happier people)? In a perfect world—in a world where love of justice is strong enough—then the answer is certainly no. But we don’t live in such a world; in our broken world, where legitimate self-interest usually becomes selfishness, most of us would probably do well to be shot, as Henry was, in the head.
1. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Justice: Rights and Wrongs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 4.
2. Wolterstorff traces a version of this definition all the way back to the Old Testament, though such a definition also has its roots in Aristotle’s proportionate equality and, most clearly, in Augustine, who writes, “The righteous man is the man who values things as their true worth; he has ordered love, which prevents him from loving what is not to be loved, or not loving what is to be loved, from preferring what ought to be loved less from loving equally what ought to be loved either less or more, or from loving either less or more what ought to be loved equally.” Augustine, On Christian Teaching, trans. R. P. H. Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 27.28. For both Augustine and Wolterstorff, God is the ground of ontology and axiology; it is God who created all things and his creational laws—the universal moral law being just one instance that reveals to the righteous man or the man of prudence how each thing ought to be treated.
3. Wolterstorff, Justice, 9. This is partly what C. S. Lewis means when he says of the universal moral law, “Only a Person can forgive.” C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (London: HarperCollins, 1999), 339.
4. Although he doesn’t discuss it, Wolterstorff, as a Christian, must somehow deal with the dynamics of rights being violated by one person yet being made right by another. For instance, even if Christianity is correct in maintaining that God, in Jesus, can forgive people for violating his right to be obeyed, what can be said of the person who has been wronged but never made right by the person who has wronged him? Is injustice thus ever enduring? I expect that Wolterstorff would like to say that God rights the wrongs that have been inflicted. This may work if we think of it in this way: if person A stole ten dollars from person B and person C gave person B the money to make up for the loss, person B’s wrongs seem to have been made right. However, there is still a sense—perhaps an unreasonable sense—in which person B is still in a state of being wronged. Perhaps this sense is that the emotional damage hasn’t been made right; there is a sense that person B is owed something, namely, an apology from person A. Again, Wolterstorff could say that person C’s surplus of kindness is both financial and emotional and hence in both ways it makes up for the deficiency felt at the hands of person A. This seems to be a tolerable solution to the problem, but obviously even if there is a God who is willing to forgive all things and right all wrongs in the next life, this hardly changes the fact that people in this life ought to have their rights respected by all people.
5. Wolterstorff, Justice, 34.
6. Ibid., 136.
7. See C. S. Lewis, “We Have No ‘Right to Happiness,’ ” in C. S. Lewis Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces, ed. Lesley Walmsley (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 388–92.
8. Wolterstorff, Justice, 176.
9. Moreover, if Wolterstorff is right, then it’s not clear to me how he would be able to maintain that God is the perfection of happiness, since surely God has been wronged many times. I suppose he could argue that because God is simple and impassable, God can’t be affected by others. But this, then, would mean that God couldn’t have a real relationship with his creatures: He could relate to them only via his ideas of them. While it’s not the purpose of this chapter, I’d suggest that the problem Wolterstorff’s position raises is one that is best left unresolved. It’s best to take a page from the sceptics who would suggest temporary agnosticism in this matter since it seems equally intolerable to deny both that rights and material objects are goods and that God doesn’t actually relate to his creatures in a genuine way.
10. C. S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” in C. S. Lewis Essay Collection, 99.