"My brother, who is 12 years my senior, witnessed my mother repeatedly slapping infant me, not stopping til my father restrained her."

"He told me some 30 years later, with visible guilt. I was appreciative. I had always felt fearful and alienated by my mother from an early age, but without knowing about that incident, thought it was due to some defect in my own character. Truth is a disinfectant, even if it hurts, initially."

That's the highest-rated comment on a NYT advice column, "My Sibling Was Abused as a Baby. Should I Share What I Saw? The magazine’s Ethicist columnist on the disclosure of a horrific event in a family’s past."

The columnist, Kwame Anthony Appiah, concludes "To insist on disclosure when the knowledge would only cause long-term distress would be acting on that old maxim fiat justitia, ruat caelum — let there be justice, though the heavens fall. That, I fear, would be a kind of moral fanaticism."

There's a Wikipedia article on fiat justitia, ruat caelum. I'll just quote some of the famous examples of the use of the Latin phrase, which The Ethicist used to warn against doing something for the sake of justice. Is that the way it always goes, or is it often — more often? — used to mean put justice first and let the chips fall where they may?

The phrase is engraved on the wall behind the bench in the Supreme Court of Georgia... The Tennessee Supreme Court uses the phrase as its motto; it appears in the seal of the Court and is inlaid into the floor of the lobby of the court's building in Nashville. 

During World War II, the 447th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force used the phrase as its motto, which appeared on the group's official unit markings....

In the Oliver Stone 1991 film JFK, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) uses a variation, "Let justice be done, though the heavens fall", in reference to his investigation of the assassination of President Kennedy....

George Eliot has Mr. Brooke mangle and misattribute this phrase in Middlemarch, where he says, "You should read history – look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know. But what is that in Horace?—fiat justitia, ruat ... something or other."... 

In the Better Call Saul episode "Chicanery", the character Charles McGill utters the phrase "Let justice be done though the heavens fall!" before making an argument to appear in open court in a trial against his brother Jimmy. Jimmy would later echo the phrase in the episode "Fun and Games", as the series flash-forwards to his most successful period under the persona Saul Goodman.

In the Designated Survivor episode "Target", the character Seth Wright utters the phrase "Let justice be done though the heavens may fall!" referring to President Kirkman's intention to "do what is right" in the face of former President Moss's announcement of his candidacy for the next presidential election in order to undermine Kirkman's administration.

During President Clinton's Impeachment Hearings, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, "Let justice be done though the heavens fall"....

In 1991, before Clinton got elected, Moynihan used the phrase in this WaPo op-ed about the then-new movie "JFK."

Here's that op-ed, "The Paranoid Style":

It happens I was in the White House at the hour of John F. Kennedy's death. There were a dozen or so of us (I was an assistant labor secretary at the time) seated in a circle in presidential assistant Ralph Dungan's large southwest corner room on the first floor. We were a few doors down from the Oval Office, where the rug, or something, was being changed and the furniture emptied out. The president's famous rocking chair was resting on top of a pile of cabinets and such in the little anteroom just outside. (Come to think of it, this may be the only "proof" of a conspiracy that Oliver Stone's movie "JFK" somehow overlooks.)...  

Late in the afternoon I learned on the radio of the arrest of a man who had been involved with Fair Play for Cuba, or something like that. Oh, my God! I thought, the Texans will kill him. Keep in mind that this was a nation only just coming out of a period of near hysteria on the part of some about the menace and influence of communism.

At midnight I went out to Andrews Air Force Base to meet the plane bringing back the Cabinet and subcabinet members, who had been halfway across the Pacific, heading for Japan, when the assassination occurred. I pleaded with any who knew me: "We must get hold of Oswald." No one had the foggiest idea what I was talking about. I went away with the sense that not enough of these people had ever been in a police station.

Oswald was killed presently, whereupon a complicated thing happened. I did not think there had been a conspiracy to kill the president, but I was convinced that the American people would sooner or later come to believe that there had been one unless we investigated the event with exactly that presumption in mind.... [I] got nowhere... The Warren Commission did not see its work in anything like the perspective I had hoped for. It was Lyndon Johnson at his worst: manipulative, cynical. Setting a chief justice of no great intellect to do a job that a corrupt FBI was well content should not be done well...

More relevant to the present moment, however, is Richard Hofstadter's incomparable essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics".... Hofstadter begins with the panic in New England in the 1790s over the dangers to religion of the Bavarian Illuminati. On to the anti-Masonic era: them that is what drank wine from human skulls. Next "Catholics and Mormons -- later Negroes and Jews lent themselves to a preoccupation with illicit sex." (Probably the most widely read contemporary book in the United States before "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was "Awful Disclosures" {1836}, one Maria Monk's "account" of her escape from a convent/brothel in Montreal.) On to the John Birch Society.

Hofstadter (as also Daniel Bell) was at this time primarily concerned with the conspiratorial fantasies of the right -- Ike as a tool of the Reds etc. -- and certain of their characteristics, such as the redemptive role of ex-communists in exposing the conspiracies (similar to that of the ex-Catholic priests of yore). But he knew well enough the paranoid style of the left also, as is illustrated in this passage:

". . . the clinical paranoid sees the hostile and conspiratorial world in which he feels himself to be living as directed specifically against him; whereas the spokesman of the paranoid style finds it directed against a nation, a culture, a way of life whose fate affects not himself alone but millions of others. Insofar as he does not usually see himself singled out as the individual victim of a person conspiracy, he is somewhat more rational and much more disinterested. His sense that his political passions are unselfish and patriotic, in fact, goes far to intensify his feeling of righteousness and his moral indignation."

It is in that sense a rationalizing mode. Facts are everything -- and facts are never accidental. "For every error or act of incompetence one can substitute an act of treason." And always, of course, this is proof of "the existence of a vast, insidious, preternaturally effective international conspiratorial network designed to perpetrate acts of the most fiendish character."

And so to "JFK." It could be viewed as parody. The homosexual orgies in the New Orleans town house of the villain Clay Shaw are straight out of Maria Monk's nunnery in Montreal. The generals boozing it up as they plan the murder of their commander-in-chief are straight out of Ramparts in a slow week in the '60s. The black waiter who hears nothing is, well, MGM in the '30s. A John Birch look-alike is the fake erudition. Garrison is forever going on about those who practice to deceive, about riddles wrapped in mysteries inside enigmas. Of particular note: "Let justice be done, though the heavens fall." At one point I all but yelled out: "Jim! Use the code! Fiat Justicia Ruat Coelum."

But it is not parody, and it is not funny. It could spoil a generation of American politics just when sanity is returning.

All of us in politics ought to see it: This is what citizens under 30 or 40 are going to be thinking soon. But don't despair. We have got through worse. As a matter of fact, an inadvertent illustration is there in the movie itself.

In one of the longer scenes, Jim Garrison meets with a renegade Pentagon officer who explains the whole plot. They sit on a park bench, with the Washington Monument at some distance in the background. Now if you just look closely at the monument, you will see that about a quarter of the way up, the color of the stone changes, gets lighter. That is because in the 1850s the pope donated a block of marble to the private association that was building the memorial. It was widely believed that there was a secret purpose in this act -- that when the block was actually set in place, it would be the signal for the Masonic-Papist seizure of the White House. A band of alert citizens saw to it that the marble ended up on the Potomac instead. Work stopped, only to be resumed by the Corps of Engineers 30 years later, in time for the 1888 centennial, and that is the reason for the difference in color.

Don't despair, but maybe do read a little. The members of the Warren Commission could have done that for us. They could have known our past better.

I haven't got the place in the transcripts of the Clinton impeachment hearings where Moynihan says "Let justice be done, though the heavens fall," but I can see that a clip of it was shown during a CNN discussion on November 27, 2019, when the issue of the day was impeaching Trump (again) and they dipped back into the Clinton impeachment:

BLITZER: There was, in fact, semen on that dress.   

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Many viewers may find it somewhat offensive.  

ZAKARIA: Starr released a detailed, X-rated account of the scandal.  

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Bringing her to orgasm on two occasions.  

ZAKARIA: Listing 11 possible grounds for impeachment, including lying under oath and obstruction of justice. It's easy to forget in hindsight, but Bill Clinton was in real danger of being pushed out of office. Many of his fellow Democrats were furious with him.  

DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN (D), FORMER NEW YORK SENATOR: Let justice be done though the heavens fall.  

P. BAKER: If they came to the White House like the Republicans did with Nixon in 1974 and said your time's up, that would have been it.  

ZAKARIA: But Clinton, the ultimate comeback kid -- 

CLINTON: I never should have misled the country.  

ZAKARIA: -- was able to rally the party and the country back to his side.  

CLINTON: I will continue to do all I can to reclaim the trust of the American people and to serve them well.  

ZAKARIA: His behavior may have been reprehensible, his allies said, but he was hardly the threat to the republic that impeachment was designed for. The American public agreed. The Democrats scored a shocking upset in the midterm elections, gaining seats in the House.  

BOB WOODWARD, JOURNALIST: The Lewinsky issue didn't carry any weight. 

TUCKER CARLSON, FORMER CNN COMMENTATOR: I'd say Republicans got stumped.  

ZAKARIA: Newt Gingrich, who had predicted a big Republican victory -- 

GINGRICH: We have a chance to win some very startling victories all over the country.  

ZAKARIA: -- lost his job as speaker.  

We've come far afield in this post about slapping a baby, long ago. Should you tell the former baby what you saw or are you now too implicated by your decades-long silence? 

There's much more in this post, notably the big principle: Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.

We don't follow that principle, in fact, we tend to say the phrase when we, like the NYT Ethicist, mean that it would be fanatical and destructive to isolate the principle of doing justice.

In that light, please don't overlook this line in Moynihan's op-ed: "Setting a chief justice of no great intellect to do a job that a corrupt FBI was well content should not be done well."