Social justice entails a "redistribution" of resources from those who have "unjustly" gained them to those who justly deserve them, and it also means creating and "ensuring" the processes of truly democratic participation in decision-making. Égalité is a quite different notion from the English "equitable." This French/ Continental usage is captured in the American Sociological Review:Īs I see it, social justice requires resource equity, fairness, and respect for diversity, as well as the eradication of existing forms of social oppression. "This" on one side is equal to "that" on the other side. In European languages, most thinkers followed the model of the French term égalité. And note what has happened to the word "equality." In English, equality usually suggests fairness, equity, or the equitable but what is equitable is often not to give people the same portions, but rather to give what is proportionate to the efforts of each. This definition expresses a whole ideology: that equality is good and ought to be enforced.
Indeed, I take that social justice is intimately related to the concept of equality, and that the violation of it is intimately related to the concept of inequality. Consider this professorial definition:Īlthough it is difficult to agree on the precise meaning of "social justice" I take that to most of us it implies, among other things, equality of the burdens, the advantages, and the opportunities of citizenship. Furthermore, the expression "advantages and disadvantages" supposes there is a norm of equality by which to measure disadvantages. Worse, this newly added term suggests that some extra-human force, "the visible hand," does the distribution: that is, some very powerful human agency, usually the state.Įquality. Most people's sense of social justice is generic, amounting to nothing more than what we find in the dictionary under "social justice": "The distribution of advantages and disadvantages in society." Now, notice that the dictionary definition introduces a new key term, "distribution." Alas, the original notion of social justice had very little to do with distribution. When the Academics Take Over: Five Common Usages of Social Justiceĭistribution. What social justice actually is turns out to be very different from the way the term is now used popularly. It is a Catholic concept, later taken over by secular progressives. After that, let us review how the term arose. Let us begin by asking what most people think social justice is. This is one of the great skills of Americans and, ultimately, the best defense against statism. If people are to live free of state control, they must possess this new virtue of cooperation and association. Social justice is really the capacity to organize with others to accomplish ends that benefit the whole community. Originally a Catholic term, first used about 1840 for a new kind of virtue (or habit) necessary for post-agrarian societies, the term has been bent by secular "progressive" thinkers to mean uniform state distribution of society's advantages and disadvantages. Abstract: For its proponents, "social justice" is usually undefined.
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