Why Do Supporters of the Social Justice Requirement Often Get Their Facts Wrong


Nov 8, 2014

          Much of the foolishness in the statements from those who support the social justice requirement in the AOTA Code of Ethics stems from the inability to state a very simple, obvious, and fundamental truth. And that is that the social justice requirement in the AOTA Code of Ethics promotes a left-wing political agenda. This is why they regularly get their facts wrong.

          The foolishness in avoiding this fundamental truth involves various rhetorical strategies and behaviors. One behavior is that those who support the social justice requirement will never engage in a sustained public discussion focused on the social justice literature in occupational therapy. A sustained discussion focused on the literature will absolutely kill any credibility in their position, which is that social justice is not a political agenda. Therefore, in the context of a public discussion where an informed opponent of the social justice requirement is present, supporters of the requirement must (1) avoid detail, (2) eschew specifics, and (3) conflate issues. The goal appears to be to simply use words to make various pronouncements, giving the impression that something was said, when in fact nothing was said; and usually the facts presented are wrong.

          So, when you read something written by a social justice supporter, it is always helpful to ask:

(1)    is this person avoiding the fundamental truth about the social justice requirement?

(2)    What details are they not talking about?

(3)    What issues are they conflating?

(4)    What important distinctions are they failing to make?

(5)    What facts of reality do their comments ignore?

          These questions will usually help you determine what is regularly the case when a supporter writes on the subject: and that is that they get their facts wrong.

          Recently, in October of 2014, after writing a paragraph about social justice, Dr. Brent Braveman, the occupational therapy profession’s most outspoken advocate for the social justice requirement in the Code of Ethics, stated  that “disagreement over the issues I address[ed] in this paragraph are likely never to be resolved” in the context of the discussions in OT Connections. What were the unresolvable issues discussed in Dr. Braveman’s paragraph? There were four sentences stating the following:

          1.           The application of social justice can take many forms.

          2.           While people often seek social justice through governmental involvement or changes in policy this is not a mandatory condition for all application of social justice principles.

          3.           Social justice does not require government redistribution of wealth.

          4.           That he understands that there are those who believe that any form of taxation or any use of government resources is a defacto redistribution of wealth

          In essence, we can reduce the first three statements into one: The application of social justice can take many forms depending on the belief systems of those using the term social justice, and these forms may or may not require government involvement or the redistribution of wealth. (As to number 4, I will not address that one here).

          Now, as to the statement that there are various views of social justice, Dr. Braveman claims that there is likely never to be resolution of the issue on OTConnections, the AOTA professional chat website. So we have to ask, has Dr. Braveman stated something that is even remotely true?

          The answer to the question is no. Dr. Braveman’s conclusion that this issue would never be resolved on OT Connections is bizarre because it has actually always been conceded. Contrary to his statement, it has already been resolved ad nauseam.

          If one bothers to examine the objective facts of the matter, which the social justice supporters in occupational therapy are not very good at, we see that this position has been conceded from the beginning and the concession has only been elaborated in more and more depth over the years of the debate. In fact, here is the VERY FIRST POST by an opponent of the social justice requirement in the Connections forum created for debating the issue:

          Professor Ron Carson (Mon, Feb 21 2011 9:52 AM): “A big problem is just defining social justice. The term has different meanings based on one's political and social viewpoints” (See post here now dated as having been posted Feb 21, 2011 2:52 PM:here:(http://otconnections.aota.org/public_forums/f/79/t/9285.aspx?pi239031353=1, accessed Oct 30, 2014. As to why the dates differ from the original transcript of the debate and what is listed now I cannot say).

          No unresolvable conflict here. And in fact, Professor Carson repeated this point several times in the forum. Here is a second post by Professor Carson:

          (Thu, Feb 24 2011 8:47 PM): “The term social justice is politically charged and used by both liberals and conservatives to fuel agendas.  One's political ideology is the filter through which social justice passes.” (See this post listed now with a date of Fri, Feb 25, 1:47 PM here: http://otconnections.aota.org/public_forums/f/79/t/9285.aspx?pi239031353=5).

           Dr. Christopher Alterio, another opponent of the social justice requirement, conceded the same point:

          (Fri, Feb 25 2011 5:35 PM): “In this particular case, we seem to have a problem with application of the term 'social justice' because although it represents a high minded/aspirational ideal to some people it also represents a specific political ideology to other people” (See this post listed now as having been made Fri, Feb 25 2011 10:35 PM here: http://otconnections.aota.org/public_forums/f/79/t/9285.aspx?pi239031353=5, accessed Oct 30, 2014).

           And again in that same post:

          “I really understand that you [Dr. Braveman] are defining social justice in the way that makes sense to you, but we have a real problem in that there are many other people who make other political and social assumptions when that phrase is used. . .  Use of the term 'social justice' is strongly referent to political ideology for some people - even if we don't want it to be!” (see previous citation).

          Next we have the following post from Kathy Grace, who was the lead author of the motion to remove the social justice requirement from the Code of Ethics:

          (Sun, Feb 27 2011 5:09 PM): “There are many theories of social justice. There is communitarian, egalitarian, libertarian, utilitarian, and cosmopolitan (that was built on egalitarian, sort of a spin-off) … Often what happens is people throw the term social justice around as having one base but it does not” (See this post listed now as having been made on Sun, Feb 27 2011 10:09 PM here, http://otconnections.aota.org/public_forums/f/79/t/9285.aspx?pi239031353=8, accessed Oct 30, 2014).

           And here is Ms. Grace’s co-author, Dr. Rosanne DiZazzo-Miller, making the same point:

          (Sat, Feb 26 2011 7:53 PM): “It’s very interesting to see such debate on this motion, and it certainly goes to the very point of bringing about this motion in the first place. As you can see through the various posts, the notion of social justice has various definitions and is used in a variety of contexts” (See this post listed now as having been made on Sun, Feb 27 2011 12:53 AM here, http://otconnections.aota.org/public_forums/f/79/t/9285.aspx?pi239031353=7, accessed Oct 30, 2014).

          The Supporting Document to the motion to remove the social justice requirement stated the following:

          “There are, and always have been two main perspectives in terms of social justice. One comes from Judeo-Christian beliefs that call for charity and good will toward others. This supports giving freely of selves and resources (Novak, 2009). The other, comes from the political ideology that policies should be in place to redistribute wealth and resources among all members of society” (Grace et al., 2011). 

          The point on multiple perspectives was also made by Dr. Ruth Zemke in discussing the words used to define social justice in the AOTA Code of Ethics:

          (Sun, Feb 27 2011 6:51 PM): “It is hard not to support such positive words as ‘fair,’ ‘equitable,’ or ‘impartial,’ but I don't believe that we would all agree on exactly what is fair and what is not, what is equitable (characterized by fairness, ‘just and right,’ ‘reasonable’), much less what is ‘appropriate’ for each purpose, person, occasion, and how to be impartial (again-- fair, just).  I believe that ‘good people’ of many kinds will differ in their interpretation of application of any of those concepts and that we must hesitate to think we would agree, even if we all wish to be fair, equitable, impartial and appropriate” (See this post listed now as having been made Sun, Feb 27 2011 11:51 PM here: http://otconnections.aota.org/public_forums/f/79/t/9285.aspx?pi239031353=9, accessed Oct. 30, 2014).

          I also have written extensively on the issue. At one point, because Dr. Braveman’s debate with Professor Carson on OT Connections distorted the subject, I penned a three-volume article analyzing his statements in the forum. It can be found under its current title, “The Distorted Portrayal of Social Justice on OT Connections” here http://uscotindoctrination.com/aota.php. In the conclusion I wrote:

          “The technical (and meaningless) truth suggested in [Dr. Braveman’s] statement is that different groups can use the term differently and [that] some of these groups do not support government involvement and higher taxation. This paper has already quoted the Heritage Foundation’s president on the point of different usage. [The Heritage Foundation’s president] clearly distinguished what he meant by the term from what is the predominant liberal/leftist/progressive meaning of the term. The predominant meaning ties it to left-wing redistributive schemes.

          Additionally, I have written a book chapter on the different meanings given to social justice in my online book, Beware the Googlers, which was up on my website for at least a year. Chapter Three was titled “Abortion, Affirmative Action and Gay Marriage,” and examined how various groups saying they favored social justice had opposite views on these issues. (The book is no longer online as it is being edited under its new title, The Practice of Political Filtering in Occupational Therapy). Also, in a booklet I published in 2014 titled Why Social Justice Should Be Removed from the Code of Ethics, I even came up with the name The Fallacy of Universal Social Justice to describe the false idea that there was only one definition of social justice. I sent this book to several hundred professors and AOTA leaders and also passed it out at the 2014 AOTA conference. For those interested in a copy, please let me know and I will be happy to mail you one.

          Given that every single person who has debated Dr. Braveman on OTConnections agrees that social justice has different applications depending on the people defining the term, it is curious why he writes about it as if it were an unresolvable issue.

          Here we need to recall the list of questions I posed above for analyzing the statements of a social justice supporter. You must ask: is this person avoiding the fundamental truth about the social justice requirement? What details are they not talking about? What issues are they conflating? What important distinctions are they failing to make? What facts of reality do their comments ignore?

         These questions will usually help you determine what is regularly the case when a supporter writes on the subject: and that is that many words were used but nothing was said.  Here we see that there is no unresolved issue in OT Connections regarding the view that social justice can be viewed differently as all those who have debated Dr. Braveman on the issue in the forum have conceded its multiple meanings by various groups. We also see that Dr. Braveman failed to state what the actual issue is in the debate: the meaning of the term in the Code of Ethics, which promotes a left-wing political agenda. This is the art of saying nothing and not dealing with a fundamental truth. This is why social justice supporters regularly get their facts wrong.

          The actual issue involved has always been reduced to two points: One is, what does social justice mean in the Code of Ethics, and two, what is currently the predominant meaning of the term, which is found by reviewing the academic literature on the subject. The answers to these questions utterly destroy the reasoning used for the social justice requirement. As was explained in the motion to remove the social justice requirement by Grace et al., the meaning in the Code of Ethics is taken from the left-wing Rawlsian egalitarian redistributionism found in the biomedical ethics textbook by Beauchamp and Childress cited in the Code of Ethics itself. I have also written extensively on this, showing how the language in the social justice requirement tracks the egalitarian theory presented in that book. I have bolstered this analysis with exact quotations from members of the Ethics Commission who authored the social justice requirement.

          For those interested in what the social justice literature says you are invited to read my articles “Objectivity and the Status of the Social Justice Literature” found on this website here http://socialjusticesyllabus.org/mynewscmt.php?beid=147&b4pid=1 and “The Political Significance of Social Justice the AOTA Code of Ethics ” found here http://socialjusticesyllabus.org/mynewscmt.php?beid=130&b4pid=1 and “The Divisive Nature of Social Justice” here  http://socialjusticesyllabus.org/mynewscmt.php?beid=137&b4pid=1