The arc of the moral universe: Does it truly bend toward justice?

Introduction

Humanity has never been promised an uninterrupted road to progression: it is purely the people who persevere with a starved desire for moral justice, even in the evil glare of injustice, who triumph over the oppressor and pave the way for future generations to thrive. Of course, this metaphor should be taken with a grain of salt, as there are such periods of time when the powerless remained powerless long enough never to see their oppressors toppled by the great smite of justice. Despite the prevalence of injustice throughout history, Martin Luther King. Jr reconstructed the quote best himself: “the arc of the moral universe is long,” but with collective contribution and a collaborative readiness to get scarred up in the fight, the arc of the moral universe can be pulled toward a more just and humane end. We are the benders, and we have seen the consequences of abandoning our civilian responsibility to think, judge, and act, and in this abandonment, we foster the perfect storm for evil to triumph.

The Imperfect Pursuit of Justice

But truly, how moral is justice anyway? In history, justice is often the shape the winners

choose to bend the arc into. In other words, do you think a trial can ever be truly impartial if it is handled by those who emerged victorious from a conflict? For example, when seeing the 2025 Nuremberg movie in the cinemas, a specific line stood out to the audience as a jailed, cornered, and desperate Hermann Göring protested to the Americans, “I am in this prison because we lost and you won, not because you are morally superior.” While we don’t know if Göring muttered such words, the premise of the statement is important enough for us to reconsider the assumption that the arc naturally bends toward pure and impartial justice. After all, American bombs vaporized 150,000 Japanese people, and yet it was just the Germans who stood at the receiving end of retribution.

Nevertheless, imperfect justice is better than no justice at all. It is worth remembering that we could have done things Churchill’s way: execute the Nazis and get on with it, but what would that have said about the victors? Clearly, Churchill looked down upon Gandhi’s teachings that “An eye for an eye would make the whole world blind.” Thankfully, the Allies had decided upon the route of the rule of law and avoided the alternative methods of reckless retribution like executions without trial, and general consequences that would have been devoid of legal principle. The Nuremberg trials were responsible for establishing principles that extended far beyond Nazi Germany: they rejected the defence of “I was just following orders.” Furthermore, Nuremberg ruled that an individual’s responsibility to humanity supersedes their obligation to a military commander or head of state. Today, this framework forms the cornerstone of global accountability: the tribunals that prosecuted war crimes in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s relied directly on Nuremberg precedents to strike down the claim of “simply following commands”. This shows that the findings during the trials were transformative enough to ensure a permanent shift in the global definition of duty as well as set the foundations for international law. Therefore, by

replacing vengeance with due process, as the Nuremberg Trials show in the years of 19456, we bend the arc, or rather, individual lawyers, attorneys, and judges who led the courtroom proceedings bent the arc to its due outcome.

The Bend toward Justice

The American civil rights movement proves to be the strongest piece of evidence on God’s green earth that it is collective action, not fate, that bends the moral arc. The arc of the moral universe, as former President Obama put it, “only bends when people of conscience put their weight on it”; seldom does the arc have a mind of its own in pulling itself toward justice. Rather, it is the unconforming “rebels” who refuse to serve an evil and unjustified system, and it is the revolutionaries who engage with the masses that ultimately bend the arc. This is most evident during the American civil rights movement, when MLK Jr. and others refused to partake in thoughtless complicity that the Jim Crow system relied upon to function. Therefore, with the participation of the oppressed, we deny cooperation to the system and demand concessions. For example, following the Montgomery bus boycott of

1955, the Supreme Court had no choice but to concede that segregated buses were unconstitutional; admittedly, this was not a legal victory as a result of a change of hearts in the judges, but an acknowledgement that 381 days without the economic input of 40,000 black residents was simply a cost the system could no longer afford. Nevertheless, progress is progress. The arc of the moral universe had thus been dragged closer toward justice, but King knew that their work was not yet done. Justice did not appear out of thin air, just like the 1865 abolition of slavery did not immediately make black Americans equal to their white counterparts. Rather, justice was secured through organised resistance and collective sacrifice to right the system’s wrongs. Ergo, we can conclude that the arc of the moral universe is unmistakably long, and at times resistant to change, but the arc is never conclusively rigid, and the metaphorical arc can bend toward a favourable end when courageous individuals tug it toward greater justice.

Yet, economic pressure alone was not enough. Next, King sought to secure

enfranchisement for millions of African Americans. Indeed, had those involved decided to wait patiently for society to correct itself, they may have never seen the death of segregation. Waiting the system out was never going to be an option, as seen with the march on Selma in 1965 when MLK and his fellow activists had cleverly chosen to peacefully protest in Selma. Selma had been selected for a very specific reason: it was a city in the Deep South heavily resistant to civil rights reforms. Activists walked arm in arm with members of the clergy, nuns, black and white alike, down the streets, showing common solidarity against Jim Crow. Of course, the backlash they were met with for peacefully protesting was extreme physical and bestial violence by the segregationist community. In the chaotic blur of events, the racial terror only intensified further. White supremacists retaliated by murdering civil rights allies who had answered the call to Selma, cutting short the lives of a visiting minister and a mother volunteering for the movement. The graphic images of the attacks on unarmed citizens (provided to the Johnson Administration by national broadcasters invited to the scene by MLK) horrified middle America and forced President Lyndon B. Johnson and Congress to act. Just days after Bloody Sunday, President Johnson delivered a televised address to Congress, using the events in Selma to mobilise support for a strong federal voting rights bill.

Six months after the march on Selma, the Voting Rights Act was signed into law on 6 August 1965. The legislation outlawed discriminatory practices such as literacy tests and strengthened federal protections for African American voters. Selma matters because it exposed an uncomfortable truth: one of the greatest obstacles to justice is the passivity of those unaffected by injustice. King understood that evil survives when it is ignored. By forcing America to witness the brutality inflicted upon peaceful demonstrators, the movement transformed voter suppression from a local grievance into a national moral crisis. Selma therefore demonstrates that the moral arc does not bend simply because time passes, but because activists expose injustice in a way that makes it impossible to ignore.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed a year prior and promised African Americans a future devoid of racial prejudice, but the act did not end discrimination. Just like the Voting Rights Act did not end racism. Yet each victory moved society closer to justice; the arc of the moral universe is tediously long, but the fact that progress occurs at all suggests not that justice is inevitable, but that it is possible when people refuse to accept injustice as permanent.

When the Arc Stagnates

To assume that the arc of the moral universe has an inherent magnetism toward justice

would be to ignore the ethical failures associated with the darkest period of the twentieth century: the era of the Third Reich. Thinkers like Hannah Arendt resist the idea of a natural swing toward justice on the mere premise that evil is often carried out by ordinary individuals who stop thinking morally and simply obey systems and routines. Skilled architects designed death camps, train conductors transported millions of minorities to Auschwitz and Dachau, and clever chemists manufactured and distributed the very gases used to exterminate innocent civilians. Arendt, therefore, makes the point that the horrors of the Holocaust were not only the responsibility of the big-name fanatics we see in the history books like Hitler, Göring, and Goebbels but also the responsibility of educated professionals, bureaucrats, and labourers who simply failed to question the ethical standards of the system. Certainly, it is this lethargic apathy that allows injustice to persist; workers in Nazi Germany rarely stirred a fuss so they could get that paycheck at the end of each night; it's perfectly normal, it's purely human nature. Thus, the Holocaust stands alone as a stark reminder of the idea that the arc of the moral universe possesses any natural tendency toward justice. A system left unchallenged and unquestioned is most

likely a system that will survive and thrive through silent compliance.

Where We Stand Today: Unguaranteed Progress

All things considered, although we can do nothing but look back at the eras of history

where humanity has failed in its moral duty, we take solace in the reality that progress has been made since the darkest period of the twentieth century. Through education and remembrance, we make it such that we are far less likely to allow even worse atrocities of genocide and racial persecution, as these past failures of humanity are at least more widely recognised, condemned and resisted than before. Having said that, this progress should not be mistaken for inevitability. Evil occurs every day; just because it is not on the front page of the Daily Mail does not mean it is not happening. To assume that future injustice will announce itself is naïve and dangerous, and the risk of that assumption is dangerously misunderstanding how oppression functions. As the final line from the Nuremberg movie goes: “If you think the next time it happens, we're gonna recognize it because they're wearing scary uniforms, you're out of your damn mind!” The arc of the moral universe stagnates when people choose to look the other way and, yes, it is long, which only further reinforces the argument that justice is neither automatic nor inevitable. If the arc bends toward justice at all, it does so only because individuals choose to recognise injustice and act against it. The arc does not bend because history decides that it should, but because people decide that it must.