“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

In recent months, the news has carried a familiar and chilling refrain. Gunfire on a university campus. Innocent people killed or wounded in places associated with learning, safety, and ordinary life. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, at Brown University, and on Sydney’s Bondi Beach, innocent lives were shattered in moments of violence that defy easy explanation or consolation.

In the immediate aftermath of such attacks, we grieve. We mourn the dead. We express solidarity with the injured and the traumatized. And rightly so. But once the vigils end and the headlines fade, an unavoidable question lingers—one that no press release or criminal proceeding can fully answer:

Where is justice for those who were killed and injured?

Some perpetrators are arrested. Some are killed or kill themselves at the scene. Some motives are uncovered; many remain opaque. But even when legal accountability is achieved, it is partial at best. A prison sentence does not restore a life. A conviction does not heal a family. And for the dead, no earthly remedy arrives at all.

It is against this backdrop that a familiar phrase is often invoked for reassurance: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” First sermonized by the 19th-century abolitionist Theodore Parker and later popularized by Martin Luther King Jr., the maxim has become a rallying cry in moments of moral outrage and despair. It is offered as a reminder that, despite the apparent triumph of evil in the moment, justice will somehow prevail in the end.

But before we accept this claim holus bolus—especially in the face of such senseless loss—we should pause and ask whether it can bear the moral weight we place upon it. Several questions immediately present themselves.

First, who is responsible for meting out the justice being contemplated? History does not act; people do. Nations, institutions, and movements rise and fall, but they do not judge in any comprehensive or final sense. Appeals to “history” risk personifying an abstraction while evading the harder question of agency. Justice requires an adjudicator with both authority and moral competence. History possesses neither.

Second, who sets the standard by which justice is measured? Justice is not merely the redress of grievances or the triumph of one group over another. It involves judgments about guilt and innocence, intention and consequence, culpability and mitigation. Without a fixed moral standard—one that transcends time, culture, and power—the concept of justice becomes elastic, malleable, and ultimately meaningless. A justice defined only by prevailing norms is indistinguishable from power exercised retrospectively.

Third, does this supposed “bending toward justice” apply retrospectively, prospectively, or both? Are the victims of past atrocities—slavery, genocide, ethnic cleansing, mass repression—ultimately vindicated by history itself? Or does the arc bend only forward, leaving countless victims without recompense and countless perpetrators beyond accountability? A theory of justice that excludes the dead is not justice at all; it is historical bookkeeping.

Fourth, is there credible evidence that history actually bends toward justice? The historical record offers, at best, an ambiguous answer. There have been genuine moral advances: the abolition of slavery, the extension of civil rights, the recognition of human dignity. Yet these gains have been uneven, reversible, and often secured at extraordinary human cost. The 20th century alone—an age of unprecedented education, technology, and political organization—produced two world wars, the Holocaust, Stalinist terror, Mao’s famines, the Cambodian killing fields, and the Rwandan genocide. History does not read like a steadily bending arc; it looks more like a series of violent oscillations punctuated by fragile moral achievements.

Fifth, how and when is justice ultimately administered, and what are the consequences? If history is the arbiter, what becomes of those who die before vindication arrives? What of crimes never exposed, never punished, never even acknowledged? Justice delayed is not merely justice denied; for billions of human beings, it is justice rendered impossible.

This leads to a deeper and more fundamental problem—one often overlooked in contemporary invocations of this maxim: there can be no meaningful notion of absolute or ultimate justice unless human beings possess an existence beyond this life.

Justice, by its nature, presupposes continuity between moral action and moral consequence. Yet the vast majority of human beings who have suffered grievous injustice have died without seeing it remedied. If human existence ends at death, then those individuals never experience the justice that the arc of history is said to deliver. In such a framework, justice becomes a purely symbolic exercise, bestowed upon memory, monuments, or collective conscience, but never upon the persons who were wronged.

Without an eternal dimension to human existence—without the notion of a soul that does not perish—the concept of ultimate justice loses coherence. Billions of victims are excluded by definition. Justice becomes something others may observe, discuss, or commemorate, but never something the victims themselves receive. A justice that arrives too late for those it concerns is not justice; it is consolation for the living.

This is not a marginal theological add-on. It is a logical necessity. If justice is to be complete—if it is to be more than an aspirational metaphor—it must reach beyond the grave. Otherwise, the claim that history bends toward justice collapses into a claim that injustice can be tolerated so long as it is later condemned.

Here again, the theological foundations of Parker’s and King’s thinking become decisive. Theodore Parker did not believe that history bent toward justice autonomously. His confidence rested in a moral universe governed by a higher authority. Martin Luther King Jr. was even more explicit. His hope for justice was inseparable from his Christian belief in a sovereign God who

sees all, judges rightly, and redeems fully. Crucially, King’s vision of justice presupposed not only divine judgment, but eternal human existence—an inescapable moral accounting that does not end at death.

Detach the maxim from these foundations, and it becomes something quite different. Without a transcendent moral lawgiver, justice has no fixed standard. Without divine judgment, justice has no final adjudicator. And without eternal human existence, justice has no enduring subject. What remains is not justice, but moral optimism—comforting, rhetorically powerful, and philosophically thin.

This is not an argument against striving for justice in the present. On the contrary, recognizing that justice is neither automatic nor inevitable makes moral responsibility more urgent, not less. Progress is not self-executing. Rights are not guaranteed by historical momentum. Each generation inherits the task of defending human dignity against the ever-present temptation toward cruelty and indifference.

Nor is this an argument against hope. It is an argument for anchored hope—hope grounded in a sober understanding of the human condition and sustained by a moral order that transcends it. Ultimate justice, if it exists at all, cannot be the by-product of historical processes alone. It must rest on the existence of a sovereign Creator who defines justice perfectly, judges without error, and administers recompense in a way no human system ever could—and on the reality that human beings endure to receive that justice.

Ironically, then, the famous maxim is most defensible precisely where it is least often acknowledged: within the theological worldview that originally sustained it. Severed from that worldview, it risks becoming a trite expression of idealism—one that comforts the present while abandoning the past.

The arc of history may indeed be long. But whether it bends toward justice depends entirely on whether justice itself is anchored beyond history—and whether human lives extend far enough to receive it.

• The Hon. Ed Fast served as Canada’s Minister of International Trade from 2011 to 2015. He also chaired the Standing Committee of Justice & Human Rights for three years. He is the recently retired Member of Parliament for Abbotsford and serves as senior counsel for the Sussex Strategy Group.