The Social Justice Syllabus Project

Objectivity and the Status of the Social Justice Literature

Published Jan 17, 2014  printer-friendly

[The following is a response to a question posed on OTConnections. It provides a mini-literature review of social justice (Length: 16 pages)].

Hi Carly,

          I wanted to respond to two of your statements at one time. You wrote:

           ONE: “I don't think the literature provides anything objective from which to base our positions on this issue

          AND TWO: That you question my position that “if one’s conclusions are shown to be false by reference to the literature or because of an error in thinking, then members should change their minds. The failure to (1) articulate reasons for one’s position, or the failure to (2) change one’s mind once one’s conclusions are proven false either through reference to the literature or faulty thinking, indicates (3) that one is not approaching the subject in a rational, scientific manner.

          I would like to show you in response to ONE that the literature does provide objective information from which to base our positions on, and in response to TWO that one’s conclusions can be shown to conflict with the literature and that it is then irrational NOT to change one’s mind.

          Let’s assume there are two people, A and B.

          PERSON A says: “I object to social justice being in our code of ethics because it's a political statement about the redistribution of wealth. It's a political statement supporting the government mandating leveling the economic playing field.

          Then PERSON B says: “I disagree. Social justice does not demand the redistribution of wealth. It just doesn't. Social justice is not a political statement about the redistribution of wealth. Your view is not the view of the mainstream contemporary literature. You are twisting the meaning of the term. If you were to do a comprehensive review of the social justice literature you would see that your statement is false.

          So now we have a conflict. Person A says social justice is a political statement about the redistribution of wealth, and Person B says it is not a political statement about the redistribution of wealth and that a comprehensive review of the mainstream contemporary literature would prove that A has made a false statement.

          How do we solve this conflict? We need to do a review of the mainstream contemporary literature.

Section One: The AJOT “Resource Utilization” Bibliography

          We cannot do a comprehsensive review, but we can approxiamte one in what follows. To avoid the allegation that the review is based on cherry-picking sources, we should start our review of the social justice literature with a source trusted by the establishment professors in occupational therapy. This would be the 2009 American Journal of Occupational Therapy (AJOT) special social justice edition.

          On page 13 of that edition is an article titled “Social Justice and Resource Utilization in a Community Based Organization” (Braveman & Suarez-Balcazar, 2009). The bibliography to this article provides a rich set of sources for beginning a review of the literature. Note that I will use this symbol ¶ to reference the paragraph in which the quotations below are found.

          1. Most scholars would agree that one of the most important books on the subject of social justice is John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971). Fortunately, this book is listed in the “Resource Utilization” bibliography. One of the distinctive features of Rawls’s social justice is the elaborate scheme of social engineering he tries to accomplish through four branches of government.

          The Allocation Branch, for example, is supposed to control the business and production end of the economy (p. 276, ¶ 1). It is supposed to stop companies from getting larger than government officials think they should get, and provide subsidies for those companies the government officials think are too small (p. 276, ¶ 1). The Stabilization Branch works on the employment side of the economy (p. 276, ¶ 1). Together these two branches control the entire economy.

          The Distribution Branch serves two functions, one punitive and the other confiscatory (pp. 277-78). These can easily be confused as confiscation is often felt as punitive. But the purpose of the punitive aspect of the Distributive Branch “is not to raise revenue . . . but to correct the distribution of wealth” (p. 277, ¶ 3). The goal is to stop those who are financially successful from becoming more successful than the government authorities think is appropriate. Where the limit for success lies, Rawls does not say. He just says that “where this limit lies is a matter of political judgment guided by theory, good sense, and plain hunch” (p. 278, ¶ 1).

          The second part of the Distribution Branch is confiscatory, “using a scheme of taxation to raise the revenues that justice requires” (p. 278, ¶ 2). The euphemism offered by Rawls for taxation is “releasing resources to government” (p. 277, ¶ 3). The released resources are then redistributed to those with less money to make them more economically equal.

          2. A second book listed in the “Resource Utilization” bibliography is Beverly and McSweeney’s Social Welfare & Social Justice (1987).

          This book can be described as “John Rawls in cliff notes.” Where Rawls’s book was almost 600 pages, this one is less than 200. The general story, however, is the same, as these authors devise goals and functions for government that require the redistribution of wealth.

          They write, for example, about “the role of government in its efforts to regulate our economic system and the degree to which it ensures social justice in this process” (p. 40, ¶ 1). According to this book, “social justice in social welfare policies can be achieved only through the political process,” by which they mean the government (p. 14, last ¶). Since they believe the government is absolutely necessary to achieve social justice, they write that "we must change the structure of government if we are to achieve social justice” (p. 15, ¶ 1).

          These authors even denigrate charity because it involves inequality: “justice assumes equality between people as humans, whereas charity assumes inequality” (p. 12, ¶ 5). This is why they say government, functioning as a confiscatory and redistributing entity, is at the core of social justice.

          3. A third book in the bibliography is Iris Young’s Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990). The importance of this book in this context is that Young gives us a summary of the literature of social justice. She wrote that:

          “Nearly all of the writers I cited earlier who define justice in distributive terms identify questions of the equality or inequality of wealth and income as the primary questions of social justice” (pp. 18-19).

          Young is reporting here that the “primary questions of social justice” have to do with the distribution of money.

          Young adds the following:

         “Public discussions of social injustice tend to revolve around inequalities of wealth and income, and the extent to which the state can or should mitigate the suffering of the poor” (p. 19, ¶ 3).

          And again:

          “Contemporary debates among theorists of justice, as Charles Taylor points out, are inspired largely by two practical issues. First, is the distribution of wealth and income in advanced capitalist countries just, and if not, does justice permit or even require the provision of welfare services and other redistributive measures?”(p. 18, ¶ 5).

          Young is saying that “nearly all of the writers” she has discussed deal with social justice as a question about the distribution of wealth and income and the extent to which the government should be involved. Again, this is more evidence that such a view is the common and predominant view of those who write about the issue.

          4. A fourth book found in the “Resource Utilization” article is the first edition of An Occupational Perspective of Health (1998) by Ann Wilcock, one of the two most important scholars on social justice in the field of occupational therapy (the other being Elizabeth Townsend). In the first edition, Wilcock wrote that social justice was based on “Political Science” (p. 230, Table 9-1). Furthermore, her notion of social justice includes “political lobbying” (p. 230, Table 9-1). In the second edition of An Occupational Perspective of Health (2006), Wilcock endorsed the politically progressive Green Party because it “holds ecology, social justice, grassroots democracy, and nonviolence as its political values” (2006, p. 231, ¶ 2). According to Wilcock, then, social justice is a “political value” founded on "Political Science" and involves "political lobbying." The purpose of this lobbying is to have the government redistribute more money.

           Wilcock even acknowledges that the level of confiscation and redistribution involved in promoting her social justice agenda would be tremendous. It would be so tremendous that she reports that even most of the advanced economies of the world, which are already very robust welfare states, would oppose it. She wrote:

          “The rhetorical commitment to social justice and egalitarianism in most [advanced] economies cannot be achieved without structural change and ‘there is no sign that any Western democracy has the political will to make the massive redistribution involved [to deal with inequalities in health]’” (1998, p. 236, ¶ 2).

         This statement was made in the context of a document on inequalities in health titled The Black Report (1980). This is how that document has been described:

          “Redistribution, increased public expenditure and taxation and unashamed socialism are flaunted on almost every page”(see http://www.sochealth.co.uk/public-health-and-wellbeing/poverty-and-inequality/the-black-report-1980/, accessed Oct. 12, 2012).

          Wilcock is saying that the goals of social justice – “the rhetorical commitment to social justice” – requires massive changes in the legal, political and bureaucratic structures –“structural change”– but these changes require so much redistribution of money collected through taxation – “massive redistribution” – and who knows what other massive rearrangements of society by the government, that no single country in the Western world could muster up the political will to commit to social justice in health care. Keep in mind that as a Brit living in Australia, Wilcock is writing from the perspective of someone already accustomed to expansive welfare states. Since, according to Wilcock, social justice is not even met by these more expansive welfare states, the “massive” redistribution she is contemplating would be something extraordinary in the United States.

          5. A fifth source mentioned in the bibliography is by the other monumental figure in occupational therapy, Elizabeth Townsend. Townsend’s view of social justice echoes that of Wilcock. In her 1993 lecture, “Occupational Therapy’s Social Vision,” Townsend stated that the “parameters” of social justice “are ethical, political, economic, and legal” (1993, p. 176). It should be noted that three of these terms fit the definition of “political”: the term “economic” refers to government economic policies, and the term “legal” has to do with laws passed by the government to effectuate its policies.

          Even when Townsend discusses having social justice focus on people, she cannot escape its focus on government policies. For example, when Townsend states that social justice is a people-centered concept, she makes it clear that such a concept must be “supported by public policies and laws” (1993, p. 176).

          Townsend also states that social justice is about inclusiveness, which “depends on … public policies, economic patterns and laws” (1993, pp. 177-78). All of these refer to government policies.

          Townsend further states that social justice is about collaboration, which “needs to be embedded in budget processes, public policies, and laws” (1993, p. 177).

          All of these references to politics, public policies, laws, and economics entails the government’s role in doing the kinds of things described by Rawls as well as Beverly and McSweeney in their views of social justice.

          6. A sixth source found in the “Resource Utilization” article is a piece co-authored by Wilcock and Townsend titled “Occupational Terminology Interactive Dialogue” (2000) published in the Journal of Occupational Science, 7:2, 84-86. An article on terminology is usually the best place to start when trying to understand what certain terms within a profession refer to. Townsend and Wilcock stated that:

          “Social justice is an important concept because it draws attention to the ways in which humans treat and relate to each other, and to the distribution of material wealth and the opportunities which accompany that wealth” (p. 84) (emphasis added).

          7. Another article in the bibliography was written by law professor Bill Bowring titled Forbidden Relations? The UK’s Discourse of Human Rights and the Struggle for Social Justice.” There Bowring wrote that:

          “Whether it is the influence of the Pope or of the imams is hard to say, but the objective of social justice, too, is, in the UK, a central part of government rhetoric” (pagination not available).

          Bowring then quotes Friedrich Hayek’s The Mirage of Social Justice (1976):

          “indeed ‘the prevailing belief in ‘social justice’ was at present probably the gravest threat to most other values of a free civilisation’ and  ‘So long as the belief in ‘social justice’ governs political action, this process must progressively approach nearer and nearer to a totalitarian system.’” (pagination not available).

          In discussing a famous case involving the government of Britain confiscating the property of a landowner, Bowring quoted the following passage from the court’s decision on the matter:

         “The taking of property in pursuance of a policy calculated to enhance social justice within the community can properly be described as being ‘in the public interest’. In particular, the fairness of a system of law governing the contractual or property rights of private parties is a matter of public concern and therefore legislative measures intended to bring about such fairness are capable of being ‘in the public interest’, even if they involve the compulsory transfer of property from one individual to another.’

          This points to the central conflict involved in social justice: the violation of individual property rights by the government. And the British court went even further, specifying that social justice extended beyond confiscating one’s land, and entailed limiting or reducing compensation for the taking below fair market value:

          “Legitimate objectives of ‘public interest’, such as pursued in measures of economic reform or measures designed to achieve greater social justice, may call for reimbursement less than the full market value. Furthermore, the Court’s power of review is limited to ascertaining whether the choice of compensation terms falls outside the State’s wide margin of appreciation in this domain.” (pagination not available).

          Bowring closes with a quote about the “struggle for social justice” and concludes that:

          “political action must be undertaken for a purpose, and that purpose presumably is to effect political change, which one way or another will be reflected in law if it is to be sustained”(pagination not available).

          8. An eighth source in the bibliography is “Social Justice and the Research Curriculum” by two scholars in social work, Longres and Scanlon (2001). It is found in the Journal of Social Work Education, 3, 447–463. The authors start with a literature review of social justice, noting that two authors have greatly influenced the field of social work: these are John Rawls and Iris Young, with their books A Theory of Justice and Justice and the Politics of Difference. Of Young they write:

          “While Young’s writing is rooted in Marxian political economy, which defines capitalism as a set of (unjust) relationships built around the means of economic production, her emphasis is in the social domain” (p. 449,¶ 1).

          This is also a recurrent theme in the social justice literature: it is in the main anti-capitalist and can be described as leftist, progressive or liberal in its orientation. I do not know the difference between Marxian or Marxist, but any view founded on Marx will be to the left of the political spectrum.

          Another interesting point in this article is that in interviewing the professors for their research, Longres and Scanlon noted that most of them had not done any reading on the subject. They wrote:

          “It was clear that most had not spent time reading and thinking about the concept. Rather than give concrete definitions, respondents tended to free associate, coming up with broad concepts . . .  Thus faculty members did not provide formal definitions of justice nor did they usually demonstrate familiarity with the literature” (p. 453, ¶ 1).

          Imbuing the term social justice with positive-sounding words without doing any reading on the subject is a common practice. For most people the word is indistinguishable from the word good. Social justice is good and good is social justice.

          The authors conclude by asking:

         “should research courses promote activist researchers?” (p. 461, ¶ 7).

          For Longres and Scanlon, the answer is yes:

          “we argue that the motives of the political activists and researchers are often the same” (p. 462, ¶ 4).

           Furthermore:

          “promot[ing] our findings in the service and political arenas should be a central preoccupation of social work educators in the years to come” (p. 462, ¶ 4).

         And now we get an elaboration on a theme regarding social justice: social justice research is supposed to entail a political agenda which promotes the redistribution of wealth. The next item, 9, will show the left-wing political partisanship involved in the social work literature dealing with social justice.

          9. The following is from a column by George Will, who wrote about the social justice requirement adopted by the social workers code of ethics:

          “In 1997, the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) adopted a surreptitious political agenda in the form of a new code of ethics, enjoining social workers to advocate for social justice ‘from local to global levels.’ A widely used textbook – ‘Direct Social Work Practice: Theory and Skill’ -- declares that promoting ‘social and economic justice’ is especially imperative as a response to ‘the conservative trends of the past three decades.’ Clearly, in the social work profession's catechism, whatever social and economic justice are, they are the opposite of conservatism” (G. Will, “A Code of Coercion,” Washington Post, Oct 14, 2007).

          Thus social justice, among the left-leaning social work professoriate, is used to mean a political agenda that serves to counter what it perceives are the consequences of conservative trends.

Section Two: The AJOT “Social Justice and Health Disparities” Bibliography

          10. That social justice research entails a political agenda was the message of the introductory article in the AJOT special social justice edition. That introductory article is titled “Social Justice and Health Disparities” (Braveman & Bass-Haugen, 2009). In it the authors provide a summary of an article by Gamble and Stone (2006), which states that distributive justice research entails “recogniz[ing] the political structures that have the authority and power to change the cause of disparities” and “uses moral language and passion that includes stories of injustice and oppression to develop political will and move people to action to redress disparities” (Braveman & Bass-Haugen, 2009, p. 9).

         So again, social justice research is about developing “political will” to change “political structures.

         11. A book mentioned in the bibliography to the “Social Justice and Health Disparities” article by Braveman and Bass-Haugen is Introduction to Occupation: The Art and Science of Living. The most recent edition of that book has a chapter co-authored by Elizabeth Townsend, Ann Wilcock and Robin Stadnyk, titled “Occupational Justice.” In it they wrote:

          “Distributive justice is prominent in laws and policies that address fair distribution of income, pensions, housing, resources such as health care, and social services. The social safety net is an example of a distributive form of social justice that indicates that resources such as social assistance income, public housing, and other subsidies will be reserved for those ‘in need’” (2010, p. 331-32) (emphasis added).

         So again, even in the occupational therapy literature we have recognition that the subject deals with the distribution of income and welfare programs such as subsidized housing and income.

          12. Another source found in the introductory article’s bibliography is a book titled Social Justice: Strategies for National Renewal (1994). It is a British book, written by a commission created by the left-leaning political party of Great Britain. The name should make it clear that this is about a political agenda for the country's government. The book's goal was “Building an Intelligent Welfare State” (p. 7). This entails “Redistributing resources from richer to poorer members of society” (p. 8). It must be pointed out that the main and ultimate resource being distributed is money.

          The book, though, did acknowledge negative aspects of social justice:

          “There is also, however, another image, only too familiar, of social justice as a subtractive and inhibitive force which busies itself, from reasons ranging from asceticism to sheer envy, in taking away things from successful people and giving them away to the unsuccessful” (p. 19).

           13. Another article found in the introduction to the AJOT social justice edition of 2009 is on counseling psychology by Vera, E. M., & Speight, S. L. (2003) titled “Multicultural Competence, Social Justice, and Counseling Psychology: Expanding Our Roles,” (Counseling Psychologist, 31, 253 –272). The authors express dissatisfaction at the apolitical nature of their multicultural competency standards and express a desire to politicize their work to take on a social justice agenda:

          “In our view, the notion of multicultural competence must be expanded to include interventions beyond the context of counseling. Accordingly, multicultural competence includes the ability to function as a change agent at organizational, institutional, and societal levels” (p. 255, ¶ 2).

          And they clarify that:

          “A commitment to social justice would require redefinition of multicultural competence to include advocacy and other forms of intervention” (p. 259, ¶ 1).

          By this they mean political advocacy. They want to move beyond just treating patients individually, and become social change agents. This would occur as practitioners and as researchers. One explicitly left-wing form of research is what is called Participatory Transformative Evaluation research, which the authors acknowledge is political:

          “Because Transformative Participatory Evaluation research is concerned with promoting social action for change and with transforming power relations to empower the marginalized, the process is necessarily political and cannot be objective or neutral” (p. 266, ¶ 3).

          14. Although not cited in the AJOT articles, Professor Rob Hunsaker, who teaches counseling psychology, had some trenchant comments about the turn in counseling psychology to social justice activism. He wrote that:

          “the bare statement that social justice is ‘controversial’ is essentially meaningless. It does, however, make sense from a strategic point of view, because if activists had to admit exactly how the movement is controversial, it would be like shooting themselves in the foot. They would have to admit that social justice can only be practiced by those on the political far-left. Consider, for example, how incongruent it would be for republican, objectivist, pastoral, independent, and perhaps even moderate democrat counselors to advocate for gay marriage, or a variety of other group-level minority issues” (“Social Justice: An Inconvenient Irony,” Counseling Today OpEd, April 2008, available at http://sjirony.blogspot.com/2008/09/social-justice-inconvenient-irony.html).

          Furthermore:

          “Why don’t social justice activists, who are by-and-large academics, present the explicit political nature of social justice? I suggest that it’s because of the movement’s most inconvenient irony: while claiming to fight against oppression, social justice actually perpetrates its own form of oppression by seeking to impose a far-left political agenda on all mental health professionals. Social justice’s most ironic turn, then, is that it seeks to erase difference, impose its values, and proclaim only one standard of ethics” (“Social justice: An Inconvenient Irony,” Counseling Today OpEd, April 2008, available at http://sjirony.blogspot.com/2008/09/social-justice-inconvenient-irony.html).

          And finally:

          “It would be contradictory for many (perhaps most) practitioners who identify as political or religious conservatives or even moderates to engage in activism based on identity politics. To make matters worse, social justice activists rarely – if ever – acknowledge the ways in which their agenda is incompatible with other political positions” (“Counseling and Social Justice,” Academic Questions, Aug. 19, 2011, p. 327).

          All of this bodes ill for students who want to be counseling psychologists but reject left-wing politics.

          15. The problem of how left-wing social justice has come to dominate psychology was addressed in the article “Social Justice in Community Psychology” by Lillis et al. found in the edited book Destructive Trends in Mental Health: The Well Intentioned Path to Harm (2005). These authors note that:

          “Critical analysis in community psychology has been absent with respect to defining social justice problems and methods of change, which has led to a dominant bias associated with a liberal worldview” (pp. 273-274).

          These authors argue that the liberal dominance of the field has served to block out approaches to social justice articulated by political conservatives:

          “Moreover, social justice has taken on a powerful rhetorical function, implying the “goodness” of the motives and actions of the community psychologist. However, passive acceptance of the construct of social justice serves to limit critical evaluation of the goals and interventions of community psychology and ignore other, more conservative approaches to defining and achieving social justice. Specifically, the liberal world-view of community psychology has resulted in a complete lack of conservative ideas in the literature, depriving the field of potentially useful alternative conceptualizations of social justice problems, goals, methods of change, and interventions” (Kindle Locations 6472-6476).

         Such an approach has the obvious consequence of stifling intellectual diversity:

         “Ironically, community psychology advocates another important value— respect for diversity— yet does not practice this when it comes to sociopolitical ideas. . . Indeed, community psychology does not show any significant diversity of opinion in terms of defining social justice problems, goals, methods of change, and interventions” (Kindle Locations 6477-6478).

Section Three: Other Occupational Therapy Professors

          16.  Ruth Zemke and Gelya Frank are two occupational therapy scholars whose writing echoes everything we have read so far. In one co-authored article, they quoted the following:

          “The term [social justice] gained in ascendancy throughout the decades before World War I because it offered an alternative to charity as the justification for public policies that intervened in the relationships between capital and labor, and signified a redistribution of resources based on fairness rather than pity or fear” (R. Zemke and G. Frank, “Occupational Therapy Foundations For Political Engagement and Social Transformation” in A Political Practice of Occupational Therapy (2009) quoting Social Justice Feminists in the United States and Germany by Sklar et al. 1998, p. 6).

          Again, we see that social justice is not about charity, but about government policies that redistribute money from those who are financially successful to those who are not.

Section Four: Dictionaries

          17. Now we will leave the world of occupational therapy altogether and continue our review of the mainstream contemporary literature. But where would be a fair and safe place to start? I would suggest we start with the most prestigious and well-respected dictionary in the English language: the Oxford English Dictionary or OED, as it is commonly referred to.

         For starters, the OED tells us that the term social justice is “chiefly political.” It then tells us it is also “philosophical.” We should note that when it says “philosophical” it points to what political polices would be right or wrong. In other words, it points mainly to political philosophy. This comes across in both (1) the OED’s explanation of the term and in (2) the sample sentences it provides to show readers how the term is used among professional writers. First, to how the OED explains the term.

          The OED explains the following about social justice:

          “Much of the debate surrounding social justice has been concerned with the precise nature of fair distribution, and to what extent this may conflict with individual rights of acquisition and ownership.” (OED entry for “social justice”).

          Notice what two features the OED explains as being essential to the term: that social justice is (1) a debate dealing with (2) how the values of social justice conflict with individual rights. The entity involved in that violation of individual rights is the government. It is the government, through taxation and other laws controlling how people live their lives and interact with others, where the debate over the violation of individual rights arises.

          This comes through in the sample sentences used by the OED. Part of what makes the OED so valuable is that it collects sample sentences from expert writers to show readers how the term is used. The two most recent sentences are from 2002 and 1982.

          The sentence from 2002 is about the Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick, who had just recently died:

          “[Nozick] forced the philosophical advocates of egalitarian social justice onto the defensive, by showing how the state cannot be justified as the redistributor of wealth without violating the rights of the individual.

           So here we see how the term is both chiefly political and philosophical. It is talking about how the state – that is the government – violates people’s rights by confiscating their money to redistribute it to others. It should be noted that Nozick was a colleague of John Rawls, who wrote A Theory of Justice. Nozick’s writings were meant as a critique of that book.

          The sample sentence from 1982 is from the philosopher Roger Scruton’s book, The Dictionary of Political Thought. This is the sentence quoted in the OED:

          “Robin Hood acts unjustly (by taking what he has no right to take) in order to bring about social justice (through redistribution).

         Again we have a reference to the immorality of social justice, which requires the taking of people’s money for the purpose of redistributing it.

         At this point it would be useful to review Scruton’s dictionary to see what its entry for social justice says.

         18. The 2007 edition of Scruton’s book is titled The Palgrave MacMillan Dictionary of Political Thought. Its entry for social justice is explicit regarding the government (“the state”) as the agent of distribution:

         “with the rise of socialism, the concept [of social justice] became attached to that of distributive justice, so as to denote an obligation not of the individual but of the state. As currently applied the idea seems to be this. Consider a state or a system of laws; this identifies a society and ultimately determines, through those laws, the distribution of distributable benefits within it” (p. 643, entry for social justice).

           The evidence-based researcher now has this dictionary as well to serve as yet another source connecting social justice with the redistribution of wealth by the state.

Section Five: Philosophers

          This next section will look at the work of three philosophers who have written relatively recent books on the subject of social justice. The first is the left-wing philosopher Brian Barry.

         19. In his book, Why Social Justice Matters (2005), Barry wrote:

         “it goes without saying that it would be a complete waste of time to talk about the just redistribution of resources unless the redistribution of property by the state was on the agenda” (p. 22, ¶ 3).

         Barry, an accomplished philosopher from Columbia University who has written two books on social justice, is saying that it is a complete waste of time to discuss social justice unless you are also talking about the confiscation and redistribution of people’s money by the government. If the redistribution of money by the government was not part of the agenda, then you would be merely talking about private charity. And this is not what social justice refers to in the academic literature.

         And for Barry it is not enough that everybody in the country has a certain minimum. For him, social justice requires that the government exercise total control over people’s income to make sure there is what is deemed the right amount of equality between the highest and the lowest earners,  and it does not matter how much money the lowest have if the highest have what the political authorities consider too much. For Barry, “the whole idea of a standard of poverty unrelated to the incomes of others is nonsense” (p. 173, ¶ 1). Thus, even in a country where the lowest 5% of people all lived in 4 bedroom houses, Barry would find it unjust if the other 95% lived in 15 bedroom mansions.  

         20. Another philosopher who recently published a book on social justice in Thomas Patrick Burke, whose The Concept of Justice: Is Social Justice Just? was published in 2011. Burke calls the modrn conception of social justice socialistic. He wrote that:

          “'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” (p. 3, ¶ 3).

         21. Burke’s view of social justice is echoed by the Yale philosopher Samuel Fleischacker. In his book, A Short History of Distributive Justice, where he says social justice and distributive justice are the same thing, he wrote that 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” ( p. 4).

         He emphasized that it is:

        “The state, and not merely private individuals or organizations, [that] ought to be guaranteeing the distribution [of money]” (p. 7).

         This means social justice is not about charity, but about the government taking money from some and giving it to others.

Section Six: Linguists

         22. George Lakoff is a Democrat Party activist and professor of linguistics at U.C. Berkeley. In Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think (1996), Lakoff examined the language of liberals and conservatives to see how each side thinks about moral and political issues. Lakoff uses the term social justice to describe the values of liberals. According to Lakoff, liberals have a “Nurturing Parent” view of government that sees government redistribution as a means of helping the poor. In contrast, conservatives have what he calls a “Strict Parent” view of government, which promotes self-reliance and individual responsibility.  

         After examining the conservative Strict Father worldview, Lakoff wrote:

        “In such a worldview, the concept of social justice does not make sense” (p. 203, ¶ 2).

         23. Paul Postal, like Lakoff, is a giant in the field of linguistics.  Although his political views are the opposite of Lakoff’s on many issues, he shares a similar view of social justice: that in common usage it is a term about the redistribution of wealth, belonging to those labeled left, progressive or liberal. Evidence indicating that Postal sees the term social justice as belonging to the left can be found in his article, “Noam Chomsky and the Quest for Social Justice” (see: http://theanti-chomskyanredoubt.blogspot.com/2006/03/noam-chomsky-and-quest-for-social.html, accessed Aug. 20, 2013). There he criticizes fellow linguist and left-wing icon, Noam Chomsky, for Chomsky’s endorsement of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These are Postal’s words:

         “the [U.N.] declaration serves as a global roadmap toward what the Left often refers to as the concept of ‘social justice.’ The driving principles of the ‘social justice movement’ are:

         [1] the view that poverty exists because wealth does, so that the rich are responsible for the poverty of the poor; [and]

         [2] the idea that the way to deal with poverty is for the wealth of the wealthy to be transferred to the poor” (see previous citation).

          Postal adds that this left-wing view of social justice can only work “by seizure and redistribution” of money by the government.

Section Seven: Political Scientists

         24. Kenneth Minogue is an emeritus professor of politics at the London School of Economics. This is how he defines social justice:

         “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” (“Social Justice in Theory and Practice” in Social Justice: From Hume to Walzer, 1998, p. 254, ¶ 2).

         Minogue then explains why some may get confused when reading the social justice literature. It has to do with the fact that the government is rarely specified as the distributor of the “resources” so often talked about:

         “Those who write of social justice seldom specify who would be the agent of this redistribution, but it can only ever be the state, which alone has the immense power needed to compel people with wealth to hand some of it, or perhaps all of it, over to those without” (“Social Justice in Theory and Practice” in Social Justice: From Hume to Walzer, 1998, p. 254, ¶ 2).

         What social justice writers generally do is invent other terms or ways of talking about it to avoid stating the obvious fact that it is the government that must rearrange things, either by directly confiscating wealth through tax collection to redistribute money, or indirectly, with laws that burden one group for privileges received by another. According to Minogue:

         “concealment of this agency – what is hard at times not to regard as a certain furtiveness about realities – is so instinctive to social justice theorizing that it invents another concept to be the surrogate bearer of agency: namely the thing called ‘society’” (“Social Justice in Theory and Practice” in Social Justice: From Hume to Walzer, 1998, p. 254, ¶ 2).

         25. David Miller is a professor of social and political theory at Oxford University. In his straightforwardly titled book, Social Justice (1976) he wrote:

          “The modern political theorist has to deal with ideas like liberty, equality, welfare, and social justice in terms of which government policies can be evaluated” (Social Justice, 1976, p. 1) (emphasis added).

          Miller followed this book with a second one titled Principles of Social Justice (1999) and said the following:

          “There is no question that the state is the primary institution whose policies and practices contribute to social justice or injustice” (Principles of Social Justice, 1999, p. 11).

          Miller iterates this point:

          “The main agency here is obviously the state: theories of social justice propose legislative and policy changes that a well-intentioned state is supposed to introduce” (Principles of Social Justice, 1999, p. 6).

Section Eight: Social Justice and Ice Cream Sundaes

          David Miller serves as a good stopping point for this miniature literature review of social justice. What Miller’s work shows is that there are a multitude of values that go into creating views of what one considers social justice. Merit, equality, need, and a whole host of other values play a role in concluding what is just. And because people will emphasize different sets of values in their view of social justice, the subject can get very messy.

        And here it may be helpful to think about social justice in terms of something concrete such as ice cream. Ice cream comes in a lot of different flavors. So does social justice. For example, even an organization of pedophiles, The North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) calls social justice it's desired legal reforms to lower the age of sexual consent so they can have sex with teenage boys (see http://www.nambla.org/acall.html). We can acknowledge that this is not the typical kind of social justice, like pumpkin ice cream is not the typical kind of ice cream.

          And, although there are different kinds of ice creams, including some very strange ice creams like pumpkin, there are nonetheless some typical kinds of ice creams, like vanilla and chocolate. In fact, we even know which is by far the most common type of ice cream – vanilla.

         The equivalent of vanilla in the world of social justice is the idea of having the government redistribute wealth in all the various ways it can do that to equalize income or provide what some consider a minimum. And just like we can put all kinds of toppings on vanilla ice cream to make various kinds of sundaes, we can do that with various views of social justice. While some of these sundaes may look radically different, such as a hot fudge sundae compared to a pineapple sundae, at root they are both made with vanilla ice cream. That is the mainstream view of social justice.

Section Nine: Conclusion

         Now we can return to A and B and assess their comments in light of our review of the literature.

         Let’s recall what A said: “I object to social justice being in our code of ethics because it's a political statement on the redistribution of wealth. It's a political statement supporting the government mandating leveling the economic playing field.

          We have just reviewed 25 sources, and all of them point to this being true. Each one pointed to the term being political and requiring government involvement in the redistribution of wealth. Someone could say that the sources reviewed are not representative of the mainstream literature, but it seems that our method was able to capture the mainstream. The literature review, after all, used the Oxford English Dictionary  as well as John Ralws’s A Theory of Justice, a work all professionals would recognize as a foundational text on the subject. And everything else confirmed what was learned from these two sources. So, it seems fairly safe to conclude that Person A has stated a perfect summary of the mainstream contemporary literature: it is a political statement about the government’s redistribution of wealth.

         Now let’s examine the statement of Person B.

         PERSON B said: “I disagree. Social justice does not demand the redistribution of wealth. It just doesn't. Social justice is not a political statement about the redistribution of wealth. Your view is not the view of the mainstream contemporary literature. You are twisting the meaning of the term. If you were to do a comprehensive review of the social justice literature you would see that your statement if false.

         Here we can easily identify several statements as false. We do know that social justice, as it is expressed in the mainstream contemporary literature, does demand the redistribution of wealth - it is not about charity. Therefore we know that it is false to say that such a statement about redistribution “twists” the meaning of the term.

         Now, there is a way to read the statement by Person B in a limited way that would make it true. Here, context would be important. If Person B only said “Social Justice does not require the redistribution of wealth,” without making reference to the mainstream contemporary literature on the subject, then we could interpret the statement differently. Then we could acknowledge that there are other ice creams besides vanilla. There are things that people call social justice, such as gay marriage and abortion, which do not require the government’s redistribution of wealth. If the statement were made in that limited way, we could say that Person B said something true, though we would have to note that things such as gay marriage and abortion are still political.

         But that was not the situation we were contemplating. And, of course, the situation we were contemplating would have been made egregiously worse for Person B if Person B were the one responsible for creating the bibliographies in the “Resource Utilization” and “Social Justice and Health Disparities” articles that served as the foundation of our literature review.

          The result is that we can ascertain objective information from a review of the social justice literature. And that information can serve as a standard for determinig what statements are true or false regarding that literature.

          I would be interested in getting your thoughts on the analysis.

Sincerley,

Alex


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