No virtue — and
social justice is a virtue — can be imposed by force, a monopoly of the State,
(human) nature’s only legitimate monopoly.
Force can be used to prevent injustice or punish wrongdoing, but not to
impose virtue. Everyone is free to be
unvirtuous, as long as in being so he or she does no harm thereby to others or
to the common good.
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| Father William J. Ferree, S.M., Ph.D. |
That does not
mean, however, that people who refuse to act in a socially just manner are
doing right. They may only be refraining
from doing wrong — but, even so, are completely safe from coercion . . . or
should be.
It often shocks
the “Social Justice Warrior” to discover that social justice is not whatever a
ruling élite or “the People” find
expedient or convenient. As Father
Ferree noted, “Social Justice is not at all the vague and fuzzy ‘blanket word’
that gets into so many popular speeches.
It is an absolutely clear and precise scientific concept, a special
virtue with definite and rigid obligations of its own.” (Ferree, Introduction to Social Justice, op. cit.,
12.) As he explained further,
Social Justice . . . embraces a rigid obligation. In the past when it was not seen very clearly how
the duty of reform would fall upon the individual conscience, the idea became
widespread that reform was a kind of special vocation, like that to the
priesthood, or the religious life. It was all very good for those people who
liked that sort of thing, but if one did not like that sort of thing, he left
it alone.
All that is changed! Since we know that everyone, even
the weakest and youngest of human beings, can work directly on the Common Good at the level where he lives, and since
each one “has the duty” to reorganize his own natural medium of life whenever
it makes the practice of individual virtue difficult or impossible, then every
single person must face the direct and strict obligation of reorganizing his
life and the life around him, so that the individual perfection both of himself
and of his immediate neighbors will become possible. (Ibid., 52.)
Three, construing social justice as a
religious thing tends to alienate people who have mild to extreme “allergies”
to religion and anything connected with it.
They see words or concepts with religious connotations and, without
bothering to discern the underlying principle, automatically reject anything
that is said.
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| The "language" of social justice comes from the Catholic Church. |
The fact remains,
however, that it is impossible to discuss social justice intelligently (or at
all) without mentioning religion. Worse,
from some people’s perspective, the “language” of social justice derives from
that of the philosophy and theology of the Catholic Church, and the concept was
developed within that milieu. A true
understanding of social justice cannot be gained without understanding the
religious concepts, beliefs, and situation that led to its development, any
more than it is impossible to understand biology without knowing something of
the environment within which creatures live.
Does that mean,
then, that only Catholics can understand social justice? Of course not. It is, for example, possible to speak German
without being a German, and use the products of German ingenuity (such as the
diesel engine or aspirin) without having any sympathy for or even liking for
Germans or Germany. Learning to speak
German, however, is much easier if one knows something about German culture,
attitudes, beliefs, and so on.
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| Columbus: right idea, wrong result . . . more or less. |
Thus, gaining a
true understanding of social justice requires at least being aware of how, why,
and by whom the concept was developed, whether or not one accepts anything
except the final result as true. After
all, Christopher Columbus was apparently convinced to the end of his days that
he had found a short-cut to the East Indies, but North and South America did
not disappear in a puff of smoke because his belief happened to be wrong.
The issue, then,
is not one of religion, or even which god or gods (if any) has one’s
allegiance. It is not even whether
“Church” or “State” should be supreme, although that gets closer to the main
point.
And that is? Identifying a new (and incorrect) conception of the human person, of
human dignity, that takes sovereignty away from people, and vests it in some
form of society, whether civil (State), religious (Church), or domestic
(Family) that has taken over from real social justice. Often called "social justice," this is really the basis of socialism, modernism, and the New Age.
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