In the previous posting in this series, we looked at how
social justice differs from other types of justice: where commutative and
distributive justice look directly to individual goods, and indirectly to the
common good, social justice looks directly to the common good, and indirectly
to individual goods.
What does this mean?
In essence, no more than charity is a substitute for justice, social
justice is not a substitute for commutative and distributive justice. Rather, social justice enables these other
forms of justice to operate properly.
Maybe we can think of it this way. A common distributist slogan is “Three acres
and a cow.” The implication is that you
don’t need anything else to live a decent life.
Of course, the slogan (like all slogans) takes a great deal for
granted. For example, there seems to be
the assumption that the cow will live off the grass of three acres, and you
will live off the cow.
Assuming that you can live exclusively on dairy products and
you actually know how to milk a cow and make butter and cheese, and don’t feel
the need for pasteurization or refrigeration, or proper sanitary housing for
dairy cattle, or a market to get rid of any surplus, or clothes to wear, nobody
ever seems to mention the one essential ingredient to getting a cow to give
milk: a bull.
Now, bulls don’t give milk, obviously. They also tend to be a little . . . testy,
let us say, and difficult to handle.
Notional, perhaps. We’re not
talking Ferdinand here, sitting under a cork tree and smelling the flowers. We’re looking at a ton or so of easily enraged
pot roast with horns.
Nevertheless, every dairy operation of any size whatsoever,
even a single cow, requires access to a bull.
A cow won’t give milk unless it has been “freshened,” which is a polite
way of saying a bull has done his thing and impregnated her, or some fortunate
farmer has done so artificially with bull semen from B-Mart in the handy,
no-waste six pack.
A good bull is worth its weight in gold — and its services
aren’t cheap. Nor is it considered neighborly
to “borrow” the neighbor’s bull for free.
(It’s also a bit dangerous. And
illegal.)
The point of this pastoral perambulation, however, is that,
while a bull does not produce milk directly, it enables a cow to produce
milk. Similarly, social justice does not
provide for individual wants and needs, but makes it possible for individuals
to provide for themselves through their own efforts.
People become virtuous — become more fully human (“virtue”
signifies “human-ness”) — by carrying out virtuous acts and building up habits
of doing good. People cannot be coerced
into virtuous acts, of course, but must do them of their own free will. Social justice is concerned with arranging
our social environment — our institutions — to make virtuous acts not only a possible
choice, but the optimal choice. You cannot
call it “social justice” if you force people to be virtuous, or are trying to
make up for the lack or failure of individual virtue.
The Aristotelian-Thomist argument for social justice goes
like this. Atheists and agnostics can
simply “bleep” out the mention of God and assume that humanity is an
essentially good thing that has the capacity to become better — or worse — for
whatever reason. The argument is the
same whether you start with God’s Nature, or with human nature. Non-theists simply get spotted a few points.
God created man in His own image and likeness. This is generally construed as meaning that
each and every human being has the capacity to acquire and develop the same
fullness of virtue that defines God as God — and thus human beings as human
beings.
Paradoxically, human beings are required by their nature to
strive for perfection, at the same time knowing that it can never be attained. This, incidentally, might be one way of
understanding Heaven: an eternity of a constant struggle to grow ever closer to
perfection that can never be reached.
Hell, on the other hand, might be the realization that, by
your own choice, you have become all that you presumably can be. You have given up. There is no more struggle for something you
can never attain. You face an eternity
of boredom, which some might think the worst form of torment ever devised — and
you inflict it on yourself of your own free will.
Whatever the reality or lack thereof of Heaven or Hell,
however, it is important to note that “having the capacity to acquire and
develop virtue” is not the same as “having virtue.” Only God has the fullness of all virtue, and
He didn’t acquire it. God IS virtue, His
Nature as “all virtue” being self-realized in His Intellect, i.e., His Nature, and His Thought are in
perfect accord.
Given that God is all “good,” and human nature is a
“reflection” of God’s Nature, we can apply human reason and discern that which
is “good” by observing human nature. In
general, as Aristotle said, “good” is that at which all things aim. If someone or something strives for that
which is not good, then he or it has the wrong idea about good.
“Virtue” is the habit of doing good, just as “vice” is the
habit of doing evil. Both vice and
virtue imply free will. If you are not
responsible for something, or do it only under compulsion or by accident, the
act itself may be good or evil, but you are not being virtuous or vicious,
respectively.
Human beings acquire and develop virtue (pursue happiness) and
conform themselves more closely to their own nature (and thus God’s Nature) by
exercising natural rights, primarily life, liberty, and property. Rights, of course, can only be exercised
“against” others, so the mere existence of natural rights necessarily implies
society, a political order — the pólis.
The pólis is
composed of a vast network of institutions, some as permanent as humanity
itself, others not so long, and still others so fleeting as to be almost
ephemeral. All these institutions have
one thing in common, however. They all
share the job of providing the environment within which individuals acquire and
develop virtue by exercising their rights in striving for the good and pursuing
happiness.
In this way people become more fully human by conforming
themselves more closely to human nature.
This has an added attraction for deists who believe that man is made in
God’s image and likeness: by conforming ourselves more closely to what is good
and true in human nature, we
automatically conform ourselves more closely to God’s Nature.
For Christians, there is even one more benefit. Jesus the Son is “king” under the “emperor”
God the Father, but does not rule the world in the conventional human
sense. Instead, sharing with God the
Father the fullness of virtue (goodness/happiness), Jesus “rules” the world by
offering the perfect example for the human political animal to emulate, and by being
the embodiment of the natural law. In freely
obeying the precepts of the natural law — the chief of which is “good is to be
done, evil avoided” — we “obey” the rule of Christ the King, even if we are not
Christian, or have never even heard of Jesus.
We’ve heard this before, in Posting II on “Saints as
Models.” Jesus is the perfect embodied principle,
while “saints” provide us with applications of the principle. In neither case, however, is anyone forced to
comply, at least with respect to obedience to God.
The case is different when it comes to human law that
applies the precepts of the natural law.
Being a human construct and thus imperfect, it requires coercion to
enforce, whether implicitly or explicitly.
The “rule” of Christ the King, however, must and can only be
accepted and complied with voluntarily by adhering to the precepts of the
natural law. All this, of course, is
carried out within the institutional environment of the common good.
Institutions being human creations, albeit based on the
absolute and eternal verities of God’s Nature, they are necessarily imperfect. Being imperfect, they require constant
maintenance and repair to keep them in working order.
The problem is that, as social creations, most institutions
are not amenable to maintenance and repair by individuals acting alone. As Pius XI explained, using the wage system
as an example, “It happens all too frequently,
however, under the salary system, that individual employers are helpless to
ensure justice unless, with a view to its practice, they organize institutions
the object of which is to prevent competition incompatible with fair treatment
for the workers.” (Divini Redemptoris,
§ 53.)
Thus, as Father William Ferree
pointed out in Introduction to Social
Justice (1948), problems that seem insoluble when approached as
individuals, become solved easily once addressed socially in an organized
manner.
That, however, is only if we
conform our conduct to the precepts of the natural law, discerned by applying
reason to human nature to determine right from wrong. In the next posting in this series we will
start to examine what happened when a key individual, Msgr. John A. Ryan,
violated the fundamental precepts of reason and of the natural law in order to
gain an end.
