What is Social Justice?
“Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust.”
-John Rawls
Social Justice is often the bogyman of the contemporary conservative right. Nowhere is this notion more prominent than at Prager U, a right wing Youtube channel that posits itself as an educational institution. On 24 March 2014 they published a video entitled ‘What is Social Justice’ in which Jonah Goldberg spends five and a half minutes lambasting ‘the left’ for using such a meaningless term. This article hopes to settle the score by giving a basic answer to the question posed: What is social justice?
In the aforementioned video, Goldberg proclaims that if you ask 10 liberals what social justice means you will get 10 different answers and that this is because it means “anything their champions want it to mean”. I am a liberal. I like to think of myself as a ‘champion’ of social justice. So what do I think it means? Well contrary to the view of probably 90% of the audience of Prager U, social justice is not a meaningless term made up in the 2010’s to support ‘woke’ social movements. Social Justice has a rich history within academia, going back decades. Just pick up the, arguably, most influential piece of political philosophy of the last century, which was published 50 years ago this year- John Rawls’s ‘A Theory of Justice’, and you will see the central role that social justice plays.
In this book Rawls describes justice as the “first virtue of social institutions”. But what does it really mean? To Rawls, social justice is what is demanded of a social system to allow for “fair terms of cooperation between citizens regarded as free and equal”. It is not, as Prager U suggests we liberals think, “equal access to education”, “income equality”, or “women’s rights”. While all of these things may come under a conception, social justice itself is much broader than any of these. It is what sort of background social context is required to allow all citizens to realise and carry out their own conceptions of what is a good life.
You may say that this is just the sort of vague, moral vacuous statement that Prager U is talking about. Firstly, I’d like you to say that after reading the thousands of pages that Rawls produced on the topic, and the thousands more articles and books written that directly respond to his theories. But, more importantly it is broad because its endeavour is so ambitious. It is an ideal that we must strive towards. Injustices, defined as hindrances to individual ability to realise and play out ones own conception of a good life, are everywhere in our society and these must be rectified. Yes, equal access to education is an ideal of justice. Yes, income equality is an ideal of justice. And yes, the rights of women, people of colour, and people of all sexual identities are an ideal of social justice. But we can say why that is. It is because the absence of all these things are a hindrance to peoples ability to lead the life they wish to leave. A ‘good’ society is one that allows people to do this (something that I hope even Prager U would disagree with)- that is all that social justice is.
And, let me make clear, that social justice is not merely a left leaning project. In the video, Goldberg appeals to Hayek whom he portrays at deeply concerned with social justice being used as a cover for the real claim- that “freedom must be sacrificed in order to redistribute income”. To go into the flaws of this line of argument requires more space than I wish to give it. One can easily make the argument that inequalities in income distribution lead to a loss of freedom and that actually there is a case for income needing to be sacrificed in order to maximise freedom (see my article on Republican Liberty for more on this). Furthermore, Rawls argues that so long as the background context of justice is secured, then any distribution that arises is a just one, therefore implying that only minimal redistribution is required in an ideally just society. But regardless of this, it is simply not true that this is the actual meaning of social justice. And if you want to argue that it is, you will need to argue that Robert Nozick, Rawls’s ‘right wing’ counterpart, wanted to sacrifice freedom for the redistribution of income.
For all the emphasis right wing conservatives put on libertarianism I doubt that many of them have even heard of, let alone spent any time reading, Robert Nozick-whose version of social justice is generally accepted as the most academically compelling argument ever made in favour of right wing libertarianism. Nozick evokes an ideal of social justice in his ‘principles of entitlement’ which argue that justice demands free and voluntary exchange. These principles of justice, interestingly for Prager U, denounce any income redistribution as the epitome of injustice and suggest any state larger than one necessary for the protection of ones liberties is a threat to justice. So, there are many theories of social justice ranging from ‘far right’ to ‘far left’. To say that it is merely a leftist tool to sneak in more and more government power is, patently, a lie.
In short, social justice is not a meaningless political buzzword. It is one of the most important concepts in political theory all across the political spectrum and shows no signs of becoming less so. By talking to someone with even a basic understanding of the topic you could get a better explanation than any Prager U video on the subject. This article is intended to be a simple introduction into the topic, and a basic rebuttal of the Prager U video in question. I urge any readers who have taken issue with what I have written, or whom think that I missed something, to bring it up in the comments and I will be happy to give you my thoughts. Alternatively, if you have learnt something new I encourage you to research further into the various academic perspectives on social justice, particularly the works of John Rawls.
