Ethics and morality
A brolly unjust world
John Edwards writes.
12 May 2017
In his April letter on fame ('Fame – who's gonna live for ever') Adrian Furnham is quite right in pointing out that the rain falls upon everyone, without regard to probity. The point was made in Matthew 5:45, as well as by one or two of Shakespeare's fools – and was given well-known expression in Portia's famous speech. For a more rounded sense of the 'Just World' phenomenon, we might also recall the verse attributed to Lord Bowen and later cited (a little altered) by George Orwell:
The rain it raineth every day
Upon the just and unjust feller,
But more upon the just because
The unjust has the just's umbrella.
John Edwards FBPsS
Lunenburg, Nova Scotia
