Today we conclude our brief series on social justice. (We told you it was going to be brief.) So far we’ve covered the definition of social
justice, and why social justice and individual charity are two different
things. To grossly oversimplify, social
justice is directed to the common good, while individual charity takes care of
individual goods when individuals can't take care of their own goods.
What we’ll look at now is the massive confusion that many
people have over the distinction between the Family and the State. This has been a serious problem since at
least the Reformation, when the “divine right of kings” theory of political
science took root, turning the State, as Thomas Hobbes put it in Leviathan, into a “Mortall God.”
The basic idea of divine right is that the State is just an
extension of the Family, and the king, as Head of State, is the father of the
family. The State in the person of the
king is the ultimate owner of everything, and he must be obeyed as you would
obey God. This is why Sir Robert Filmer,
the chief theologian of James VI/I of Scotland/England titled his book on
divine right, Patriarcha.
Hobbes modified Filmer’s theory a bit. The king was, of course, Head of State, but
actual power — and thus quasi divinity — is vested in the State itself, which
may be controlled by either the legislature (parliament) or the executive
(king). In the United States, the
judiciary has achieved a status analogous to a combination of the legislative
and the executive branches of government, a development chronicled (and
deprecated) by William Crosskey in his book, Politics and the Constitution in the History of the United States
(1953). Hobbesian theory is the basis of
Walter Bagehot’s constitutional theories and, through Bagehot, the political economy
of John Maynard Keynes (John Maynard Keynes, “The Works of Bagehot,” The
Economic Journal, 25:369–375 (1915)).
The problem with regarding the State as an extended Family
is that different rules of justice apply to civil society and to domestic society. Where civil society is governed by
commutative, distributive, participative, social, and legal justice, domestic
society is governed by paternal and domestic right. Commutative, distributive, participative,
social, and legal justice regulate relations between persons of equal status;
all people are presumed equal before the law.
Paternal right and domestic right, however, regulate
relations between persons of differing status within the Family, and persons
who are more than mere partners (i.e.,
they are “spouses”), respectively. Thus,
paternal right governs the relations between parents and children, who are
unequal in status and dependent, while domestic right governs the relations
between husband and wife, who are equal in status, but not independent.
Providing individual goods for those people dependent on us or
more-than-partners with us is thus a matter of paternal right and domestic
right, respectively. In cases of
demonstrated need on the part of people who are not members of our family, we are
in charity to regard such people as if
they were members of our family, and — assuming that we do not thereby deprive
ourselves, or those for whom we are responsible of that which is ordinarily
required to maintain our station in life — are morally obligated to assist such
people out of our surplus.
In “extreme cases,” e.g.,
where people are in danger of death or permanent disability, or the distress is
so widespread that it endangers the common good, the State may levy additional
taxes to redistribute some wealth to help out as a temporary measure. Even though this is a “distribution,”
however, the redistribution is not distributive justice.
The distributive justice comes in because the situation
endangered the common good, and the State properly took action to safeguard the
common good. The just act was not the
redistribution. The just act was the
care for the common good attained by means of a redistribution; the common good
was the directed object of the State’s action, while the redistribution was
only the means by which the end was achieved.
Thus, civil society is not an extended family, although we
should sometimes act out of charity as if it were. If we confuse civil and domestic society, and
try to have the State take care of every need, we not only overload the State,
we keep people who should be adults in a condition of being children or slaves.
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