Social Justice Definitions

Published Apr 24, 2013 printer-friendly

Definitions

1. “‘Distributive justice,’ also called ‘social justice’ . . . in its modern sense calls on the state to guarantee that property is distributed throughout society so that everyone is supplied with a certain level of material means”(S. Fleischacker, A Short History of Distributive Justice, 2004, pp. 1, 4).

2. “Debates about distributive justice tend to center on the amount of means to be guaranteed and on the degree to which state intervention is necessary for those means to be distributed” (S. Fleischacker, A Short History of Distributive Justice, 2004, p. 4).

3. “Social Justice: An application of the concept of justice to the wealth, assets, privileges and advantages that accumulate within a society or state. . . [W]ith the rise of socialism, the concept became attached to that of distributive justice, so as to denote an obligation of the state” (R. Scruton, The Palgrave MacMillan Dictionary of Political Thought, 2007, p. 643).

4. “‘Social justice’ is a demand addressed to society as a whole and not to the individual; and as such it is a demand that can be met only by the state. To make ‘social justice’ into the basic principle of social order is to endorse the wholesale transfer of responsibility from individuals to the state, and inevitably to endorse the expansion of the state and the increase of its coercive powers”(T. P. Burke, The Concept of Justice: Is Social Justice Just?, 2011, p. 3).

5. [Editor’s Note: These are critical definitions from UrbanDictionary.com; which contains about an equal number of uncritical definitions]

“social justice: Common meaning for equality. Typically among the social classes. Leftist in nature.”

[Sample Sentence]

"That 19 year old college kid had her 2006 BMW stolen before it ever got the new plates."

"Who stole it? Robin Hood? That's social justice."

* * *

“social justice: A euphemism for an economic mugging by political force”

[Sample Sentence] “Teacher's union rep: ‘We will not stand for any cuts in our benefits or salaries. Even if we make six figures with guaranteed employment regardless of performance. Even if the state is on the verge of bankruptcy. Why? Because this is about social justice’"

* * *

“Social Justice: Socialism.”

(definitions from UrbanDictionary.com, retrieved from http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=social+justice&defid=1552360&page=2, accessed April 24, 2013).

6. "The words themselves are among the most successful deceptions ever conceived. Ask a variety of people to define what 'social justice' means, specifically, and you will get as many answers as people queried. Ask the same person at different times and you will get different responses. All 'definitions' of social justice boil down to any of the following:

(1) Somebody should have the power to determine what you can have, or

(2) Somebody should have the power to determine what you cannot have, or

(3) Somebody should have the power to determine what to take away from you in order to give it to others who receive it without any obligation to earn it." (B. Vazsonyi, America's 30 Years War: Who Is Winning, 2000, pp56-57).

7. “Social justice is the belief that it is the duty of the government to redistribute the wealth of a society so that each person enjoys at least the right to a basic minimum and so that, poverty having been abolished, certain equalities prevail” (K. Minogue, “Social Justice in Theory and Practice” in Social Justice: From Hume to Walzer, 1998, p. 254).

8. “what is social justice, then? It’s the kind of justice demanded by socialism. . . . Social justice appears to mean (1) an ever-greater equality of outcome through forced wealth transfer and/or state-run economies; (2) a prediction — surely falsifiable — that forced transfers enhance the dignity and autonomy of the poor, [and] (3) state-subsidized status enhancement for members of aggrieved groups” (J. Kuznicki, “Rawls the Irrelevant” May, 1 2012, http://www.libertarianism.org/blog/rawls-irrelevant, accessed July 5, 2012).

9. "Demands for social justice take two different forms, which I will call welfarism and egalitarianism. According to welfarism, individuals have a right to certain necessities of life, including minimum levels of food, shelter, clothing, medical care, education, and so on. It is the responsibility of society to ensure that all members have access to these necessities. But a laissez-faire capitalist system does not guarantee them to everyone. Thus, argue the welfarists, capitalism fails to satisfy its moral responsibility and so must be modified through state action to provide such goods to people who cannot obtain them by their own efforts.

According to egalitarianism, the wealth produced by a society must be distributed fairly. It is unjust for some people to earn fifteen, or fifty, or a hundred times as much income as others. But laissez-faire capitalism permits and encourages these disparities in income and wealth, and is therefore unjust. The hallmark of egalitarianism is the use of statistics on the distribution of income. In 2007, for example, the top twenty percent of U.S. households on the income scale earned fifty percent of total income, whereas the bottom twenty percent earned only 3.4 percent. The goal of egalitarianism is to reduce this difference; any change in the direction of greater equality is regarded as a gain in equity.

The difference in these two conceptions of social justice is the difference between absolute and relative levels of well-being. The welfarist demands that people have access to a certain minimum standard of living. As long as this floor or "safety net" exists, it does not matter how much wealth anyone else has, or how great the disparities are between rich and poor. So welfarists are primarily interested in programs that benefit people who are below a certain level of poverty, or who are sick, out of work, or deprived in some other way. Egalitarians, on the other hand, are concerned with relative well-being. Egalitarians have often said that of two societies, they prefer the one in which wealth is more evenly distributed, even if its overall standard of living is lower. Thus, egalitarians tend to favor government measures such as progressive taxation which aim to redistribute wealth across the entire income scale, not merely at the bottom. They also tend to support the nationalization of goods such as education and medicine, taking them off the market entirely and making them available to everyone more or less equally " (D. Kelley, "The Fourth Revolution,"http://www.atlassociety.org/tni/fourth-revolution, accessed May 17, 2013).

10. “Central to the concept of social justice is the notion that individuals are entitled to some share of the wealth produced by a society, simply by virtue of being members of that society, and irrespective of any individual contributions made or not made to the production of that wealth. Whether they are entitled to a full share or a smaller share—perhaps only some minimum of ‘decency’—is a question answered variously by different social thinkers in this tradition, but the crucial point is that everyone is seen as entitled to some share as a matter of justice, not simply as a matter of charity” (T. Sowell, A Conflict of Visions: Idealogical Origins of Political Struggles, 1987/2007, pp. 215-216, Basic Books. Kindle Edition).

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