Yesterday we began our refresher course on social justice. We looked at what social justice is. Today we look at what social justice is not,
that is, how it is distinguished from individual justice and, especially,
individual charity. This can get a
little complex. The most important thing
to realize here is that there is a difference between individual goods and social
goods, and thus individual justice
and social justice.
Individual goods are things that directly meet our personal
wants and needs, or those of the people for whom we are responsible, usually
members of our family, such as children and spouses. Such individual goods may be either tangible
or intangible, material or spiritual.
Ordinarily, and limiting this discussion to those individual
goods in the form of marketable goods and services, we obtain goods and
services by producing them. Either we
produce goods and services ourselves, for our own consumption, or we produce
goods and services to exchange for goods and services produced by others so
that we can consume them.
This is commutative
justice, the justice of contracts or exchange, the justice of individual to
individual. It works this way. I have a good or service worth five cows that
I do not want or need to consume, but that you do want or need to consume. You have a good or service worth five cows
that I want to consume, but that you do not want to consume. Both things being worth five cows, we trade,
thereby obtaining what each of us wants or needs.
How do we know, however, that what each of us has is worth
five cows? That is a matter for distributive justice.
Distributive justice is the justice of how parts relate to
the whole. To determine the value or
price of anything marketable, i.e., anything
that can have a price, each “part” of (participant in) the market for a thing (each
consumer of that thing) “votes,” that is, gives his, her, or its subjective
opinion as to the value of one thing (a part of the market) relative, pro rata,
or proportionate to all other things available for trade to that consumer (the
whole of the market) measured by the utility of each thing to the consumer.
The aggregate of all these subjective opinions (votes), when
totaled, result in as objective as possible a determination of the real value
(price) of a thing compared to all other things for which the consumer could
trade. Because the determination of
values of things in the market is “distributed” proportionately among all
possible consumer choices based on relative inputs (i.e., what each consumer has available for trade relative to what
all other participants in the market have available for trade, combined with
each consumer’s perceived utility of a thing relative to the perceived utility
of that thing of all other participants in the market), the determination of
value comes under distributive justice.
Similarly, when individual participants in the market join
together in a productive activity, such as going into a business partnership, they
come to some agreement as to how the profits will be divided or the
losses suffered. Unless all the
participants are fully informed and freely agree that the distribution of
profits and losses is commensurate with the relative value of each
participant’s contribution, however, there will be the perception of injustice.
Thus, distributive justice governs the determination of a
just price or value for something, while commutative justice governs the delivery
or exchange of a thing for which the value has been justly determined.
