We have built a society that runs on the promise of justice, and it is quietly making us miserable. We wait for the verdict, the apology, the firing, the settlement. We believe that when it comes, the wrong will be righted and we will finally feel whole. But, to me, the idea that justice rights a wrong is not true. We only think it makes us feel better. But does it?
I have spent my career in labor and delivery, where outcomes are sometimes devastating and the search for someone to blame begins almost immediately. I have watched families wait years for a resolution. I have watched colleagues wait for years too. Very few of them, on either side, walked away healed.
This essay makes the argument that our attachment to justice, to the belief that we deserve a certain outcome and are owed repair when we don’t get it, is a root cause of the anger and resentment that saturate our culture. Nowhere is that clearer than in health care.
Justice, as most of us practice it, is accounting. Somewhere in our heads we keep a ledger: what I gave, what I was owed, what was taken from me. When the columns don’t balance, we feel wronged, and we want someone to pay the difference. The ledger rests on a single assumption: that we deserve things. A good outcome. A fair boss. A healthy baby. A career that rewards effort. A body that doesn’t fail us.
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The word resentment comes from the French re-sentir: to feel again. That is exactly what the pursuit of justice does. Every time we replay the injury and the debt it created, we feel the wound fresh. The recovery community understood this decades ago. Resentments are treated as one of the most dangerous things a person can carry, because they hand control of our peace to someone else. Holding a grudge until justice arrives means letting the person who hurt us decide when we get to feel better.
Does it actually make us feel better?
We are remarkably bad at predicting how justice will feel. In a well-known 2008 study, psychologists Kevin Carlsmith, Timothy Wilson, and Daniel Gilbert let some participants punish a player who had cheated them. The punishers expected to feel better. They felt worse, and they kept thinking about the cheater longer than people who never got the chance to retaliate. The reason is simple. Punishment keeps the offense alive. The person who lets it go moves on; the person who pursues the debt keeps returning to it, re-feeling it, rehearsing it.
The same pattern shows up when researchers Marilyn Armour and Mark Umbreit compared families of homicide victims in Texas, which carries out executions, with families in Minnesota, which has no death penalty. The Minnesota families, freed from years of appeals and hearings, generally reported better physical and emotional health. The Texas families were tethered to the process, and to the person who killed their loved one, for a decade or more.
Health care: a system built on blame
Medicine may be the clearest case study of justice failing everyone it claims to serve. Our malpractice system exists to right wrongs: compensate injured patients and deter careless doctors. By its own measures, it does neither well. Not only does it miss most harm, but most claims have no error at all, and claims commonly take years to resolve. Every one of those years is spent re-feeling the injury.
Ask families why they sue, and the answer is rarely money. Research going back to Charles Vincent’s work in the 1990s points to the same reasons again and again: They wanted an explanation, they wanted someone to acknowledge what happened, and they wanted to make sure it never happened to anyone else. Many say they sued because no one would talk to them.
The legal system cannot give them those things. It is adversarial by design. The moment a claim is filed, the people who know the most about what happened are told to stop talking. The family wanted honesty and got silence.
Meanwhile, the clinician becomes the “second victim.” Physicians who are sued report high rates of depression, burnout, and thoughts of leaving medicine, and in some specialties, being sued is close to a career certainty rather than an exception. Many practice defensively afterward: more tests, less trust. The resentment travels in every direction, and none of it makes the next patient safer.
The problem with “just” culture
Health care tried to fix this from the inside. Inspired by aviation and by thinkers like James Reason and David Marx, hospitals adopted “just culture”: a framework that separates honest human error from risky behavior and from genuine recklessness. Console the first. Coach the second. Hold the third accountable.
It was a real step forward. It told frontline staff that a slip is not a sin, and it made reporting safer. But notice the word we kept. Just. Even our most compassionate safety model is still organized around a sorting question: What does this person deserve? In practice, many institutions use just culture algorithms less as tools for learning and more as tools for deciding who gets disciplined. The event review becomes a quiet trial. Staff learn the language of the framework and still feel judged.
What actually heals
When we stop asking what people deserve and start asking what they need, things start to get better for everyone. The University of Michigan proved it in the early 2000s. Instead of deny-and-defend, the health system began disclosing errors, apologizing, explaining what happened, and offering fair compensation when care fell short. A 2010 study in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that claims, lawsuits, time to resolution, and legal costs all dropped. Families got answers sooner. Clinicians got to stay human.
That approach now has a name and a toolkit. Communication-and-resolution programs, including the federal Communication and Optimal Resolution (CANDOR) model, rest on a few plain commitments:
- Tell the patient and family what happened, promptly and honestly.
- Apologize, and mean it.
- Find out why it happened, and tell them what will change.
- Compensate fairly when care was unreasonable, without forcing a lawsuit.
- Support the clinicians involved, because a broken caregiver cannot help anyone heal.
None of this abandons accountability. Accountability that looks forward, owning the harm and fixing the system, is far more demanding than punishment.
Letting go of deserving
I am not arguing that harm doesn’t matter, that negligence should go unanswered, or that people should never sue. Some situations demand protection, and some institutions only change when they are forced to.
I am arguing that we have confused justice with healing. We chase the verdict believing it will give us back what we lost. It can’t. The baby is still gone. The career is still damaged. The trust is still broken. And while we wait for the ledger to balance, resentment quietly takes its place at the center of our lives.
The alternative is acceptance, which is not the same as approval. Acceptance says: This happened, it should not have, and I will not let my peace depend on someone else paying for it. From there, we can ask better questions. What do I need? What does the person who hurt me need to learn? How do we make sure it doesn’t happen again?
That is harder than demanding justice. It asks us to give up the belief that the world owes us a particular outcome. But it is the only path I have seen that actually leaves people lighter instead of heavier.
So the next time we reach for justice to fix what hurts, in our families, our hospitals, or our courtrooms, it is worth asking the question honestly. Will this make us feel better?
Or have we only been told that it will?
Anthony Grandelis is a fellowship-trained OB/GYN hospitalist, medical educator, author, and person in long-term recovery from addiction. He holds an academic appointment at SUNY Downstate and a hospital affiliation with Maimonides Medical Center.
Recovery saved his life, and he believes it also made him a better doctor. The longer he has practiced medicine, the more convinced he has become that health care does not need another wellness initiative. It needs recovery. He founded Recovering Healthcare on a simple idea: The principles that help people rebuild their lives after addiction are exactly the principles that medicine is missing. Through speaking, writing, and education, he brings the principles of addiction recovery into clinical spaces, including honesty, presence, surrender, community, and humility, not as a metaphor but as a practice.
He is the author of The Recovery Prescription: What Addiction Can Teach Us About Fixing a Broken Healthcare System. He shares his work at AnthonyGrandelisMD.com, on Instagram, and on LinkedIn.
