Yesterday we
looked at the common good, that vast network of institutions that create the
environment within which human beings as political animals carry out daily
life, suggesting that a justly structured common good is a fundamental building
block of the Just Third Way. Having gone
over the basics of the common good, we are now prepared to do more than suggest
such a thing. We can come right out and
say it:
We start as a given that dignity and sovereignty begin
with the human person, and not with any institution. Still, the institutions of the common good — “social
habits” — are important, because they are thus the social manifestation of the
common good, within which people acquire and develop individual habits.
Preferably what people acquire and develop are habits of
doing good (“virtue”), but they can also be habits of doing evil (“vice”). While institutions do not actually force
people to do wrong (there is always a choice, even if the choice is to do wrong
or die), they can make wrong seem right, and encourage evil if the institutions
are poorly structured. In that case,
having become structures of injustice instead of justice, the institutions are
in need of reform.
Nor is it proper to sit back and wait for “somebody else”
(usually the State) to do what needs to be done. Social justice places a responsibility on each person to work with others to
perfect the social order and all its institutions to support the empowerment
and development of every person. This is
“the act of social justice” — restructuring institutions so
that virtuous action becomes the optimal choice again.
“Social
virtue” is not everyone in society acting virtuously, or collective acts of
individual virtue. Rather, it is concern
for the common good, which must be maintained properly in order to provide the
optimal environment for people to acquire and develop virtue.
Social
virtue is therefore not a substitute for individual virtue, but the means by
which individual virtue becomes possible. It is a different “order” of virtue, not a
combination of individual and general virtue with a good intention for the
common good; the common good is something specific, not vague, and is directly
attainable by human beings.
Social Justice (the
feedback and corrective principle): the balancing of participatory and
distributive justice, and the responsibility of each person to work with others
to correct the system when participative and distributive justice are not
operating. Louis Kelso and Mortimer Adler labeled this third principle as the
“principle of limitation,” “anti-monopoly principle” or “anti-greed
principle”); it has also been referred to as the “principle of economic
harmony.”
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