Love, Power, and Justice

by William S. Hatcher

published in Journal of Bahá'í Studies, 9:3, pages 1-23
Ottawa: Association for Bahá'í Studies North America, 1999

About: Human history is replete with systematic injustices, such as the persistence and ubiquity of slavery or the perennial domination of women by men. We hold that the pursuit of power, which has been the root cause of these injustices, was a moral choice to which there were viable alternatives, rejecting thereby the materialistic thesis that humans are inherently and ineradicably programmed to be powerseekers. Besides the fact of the abuse of power, there has also been the moral justification for this fact, provided primarily by various ideologies that attempt to legitimize interhuman cruelty as a defense of certain values which, though generated by humans themselves, are nevertheless presumed superior to humans. We hold that there are no such values—that the human being is indeed the highest value in creation. We can therefore escape the vicious cycle of ideologically justified cruelty by replacing the pursuit of power with the pursuit of authentic interhuman relationships based on altruistic love and universal mutuality.