Ice Cream and Social Justice
Social justice is one of the more confusing and controversial terms in popular culture as well as in many professional organizations. One of the reasons why discussions over social justice tend to be confusing has to do with the term’s dual function in our language. The term functions as both a genus and a species. In other words, it functions as both an abstract category and a specific item within that category. A good way to get an understanding of the challenges this can pose is to think of social justice in terms of ice cream.
A.The Difference Between a Genus and a Species
When you go to McDonald’s – at least the ones where I live in Pasadena, California – and order an ice cream cone, you get an ice cream cone with vanilla ice cream. The cashier will never ask what flavor of ice cream you want and you will never need to specify. That’s because in the world of Pasadena McDonalds, there is no other flavor of ice cream. So, when you say, “I would like an ice cream cone,” it's understood that your cone will be filled with vanilla ice cream.
But this approach to ordering an ice cream cone would not work if you went into Baskin Robbins. If you go into a Baskin Robbins and say, “I would like an ice cream cone,” the cashier will politely ask that you specify what flavor of ice cream you want in your cone. This is because Baskin Robbins has over 30 wonderful flavors of ice cream and if you want an ice cream cone, you will have to specify at least one of these flavors.
The examples of ice cream at Baskin Robbins and McDonald’s teach us two things.
First, the Baskin Robbins example teaches us that there is no such thing as "ice cream in general" in the real world of concrete things. If you are going to actually eat some ice cream, you will have to eat a specific flavor of ice cream - you can't eat ice cream in general. The reason for this is that the term ice cream is an abstract category; it is a word that functions as a genus. Each genus has a number of species that fall within it.
Second, the McDonald’s example teaches us is that in certain contexts a term that is a genus can also function as a species. At a McDonald’s, where there is no other flavor of ice cream but vanilla, simply saying “I want an ice cream cone” is perfectly acceptable as no one will be confused regarding the specific flavor of ice cream in the cone.
The term social justice functions like the term ice cream – it functions as both a genus and a species. As a genus, it refers to a system of social interaction chiefly mediated through government – whether through specific government bureaucracies such as the IRS or other laws setting the terms of various relationships such as those between workers and employers. As a genus it functions as a category about how to structure a society according to some set of moral values. This means that, as a genus, social justice is concerned with questions regarding who gets what and why. This is what is termed “an allocation principle.”
As a species, the term social justice identifies a specific allocation principle(s). Communists, for example, believe the allocation principle should be “from each according to his ability to each according to his need.” For libertarians, the allocation principle is premised on the idea of voluntary interaction. And so on. It should be evident, then, that as a species, the term social justice can be used in an endless number of ways depending on what allocation principle(s) one finds morally required. This means that as a species it refers to . . . to almost anything. It can refer to being pro-abortion or anti-abortion, to being pro-free market or anti-free market, etc.
All of this means that just as there are a lot of different flavors of ice creams, there are a lot of social justices. But this does not mean that we are forever lost as to meaning. Just as we know what flavor of ice cream we get if we order an ice cream cone at McDonald’s, we can also know what the term social justice means within various contexts. We can do this in occupational therapy by looking at the main documents in the profession.
B. Looking to the Practice Framework for Meaning
In occupational therapy, the term social justice is chiefly used to refer to what is considered the politically progressive, liberal or leftist agenda of using government’s coercive powers to confiscate and redistribute wealth to fund a never ending stream of programs. According to the profession’s orthodoxy, to be considered an ethical occupational therapist one is supposed to engage in policy advocacy to enact this version of social justice.
One document that provides guidance on meaning is The Occupational Therapy Practice Framework: Domain and Process (2nd Edition) (AOTA, 2008). In the glossary of this document we have two sources for a definition of social justice. The first is 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 in Great Britain, the Labour Party. 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. Social justice activists usually have a hard time stating the resource sought explicitly. But it is money.
The second book in the Practice Framework’s glossary for social justice is Ann Wilcock’s second edition of An Occupational Perspective of Health (2006). There Wilcock endorses the Green Party for holding social justice as one of its political values (2006, p. 231). The Green Party is one of this country’s most far left political parties, whose social justice agenda entails massive wealth redistribution. In discussing inequalities in health in the 1998 edition of An Occupational Perspective of Health, Wilcock reported that “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’” (1998, p. 236,). She continued the discussion in the second edition, stating that this was still true (2006, pp. 255-256).
These two entries in one of the foundational documents in the field give a consistent meaning to the term social justice: it is an agenda of wealth redistribution, one typically labelled as politically progressive, liberal, or leftist.
In other words, the use of the term social justice in occupational therapy is like asking for an ice cream cone at McDonald’s. When you say social justice, it is clear what kind of ice cream will be put in your cone.
Hopefully this discussion has shown why the term social justice can be confusing yet how we can nonetheless still make some sense of the term’s meaning within occupational therapy
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