In yesterday’s
posting we looked at the basic definition of social justice — that it is not a
replacement or substitute for individual justice or charity, but a “particular”
virtue in its own right and with its own focus ("directed object"). That focus is to restructure society’s
institutions (it’s “social habits”) to make individual justice and charity
possible, not to try to focus on what the individual virtues are supposed to be directed to.
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| "The common good must be inviolate." |
Having settled
that (at least for the purposes of this discussion), we can go on to the laws
and characteristics of social justice, the first of which is, “That the common
good be kept inviolate” —
First Law: That the Common Good Be Kept Inviolate
The first great law, the one mentioned in Paragraph 57 [of Quadragesimo Anno] itself,
is “that the Common Good of all society be kept inviolate.” The meaning of this
law is that in all private dealings, in all exercise of individual justice, the
Common Good must be a primary object of solicitude. To attack or to endanger
the Common Good in order to attain some private end, no matter how good or how
necessary this latter may be in its own order, is social injustice and is
wrong. The Common Good is not a means
for any particular interests; it is not
a bargaining point in any private quarrel whatsoever; it is not a pressure that one may legitimately
exercise to obtain any private ends. It is a good so great that very frequently
private rights — even inviolable private rights — cannot be exercised until it
is safeguarded.
Thus, in a time when the Common Good of a whole nation is threatened
by military attack, every man in it has an inviolable right to live in his own
home with his wife and children — and none of them who are drafted can do it.
Thrown at you
like that, however, Father Ferree’s explanation raises more questions than it
answers. Some people might not even
understand what “inviolate” means, as it has passed out of common usage. (It means “must not be violated.”)
The more
important question, however, is What is the common good? a question that has
baffled people for quite some time, especially when social justice is the main
topic under consideration. After all,
social justice is the particular virtue that looks directly to the common good,
and only indirectly to individual good.
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| "Legal justice along directly looks at the common good." |
This comes from what
amounts to a throwaway line in the Summa
Theologica of Saint Thomas Aquinas: “Legal justice alone directly looks to the common good” (1-2: 61: 5, 4m) . . . which raises another question: weren’t we
discussing social justice?
Well, yes. Skipping over all the pages and explanation
in Father Ferree’s doctoral thesis, The
Act of Social Justice, Pope Pius XI realized that Aquinas used the same
term for two related, yet profoundly different things: “legal justice” as the effect
that the practice of individual virtue has indirectly
on society, and “legal justice” as the direct effect that some unspecified type
of virtue has directly on society!
Very confusing,
no?
Very confusing,
yes!
So Pius XI took a
look around, and decided that a term that had popped up in the previous century
might be useful: “social justice.” As
first used by Msgr. Aloysius Taparelli in the 1840s, “social justice” meant the
“uplift” of society, with special emphasis on the needs of the poor and
oppressed, but firmly within the framework of the natural law and scholastic
philosophy, of which Taparelli was one of the leading proponents.
Taparelli’s idea,
evidently developed at the instigation of Pope Pius IX based on the work of Gregory XVI, was to counter the
allure of what had recently (1833 or thereabouts) become known as “socialism”: the “democratic
religion,” also known as “the New Christianity” or “Neo-Catholicism.” As articulated by Henri de Saint-Simon, one
of the guiding lights of the New Christianity, the chief precept of which is,
The whole of society ought to strive towards the amelioration of the
moral and physical existence of the poorest class; society ought to organize
itself in the way best adapted for attaining this end.
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| Henri de Saint-Simon, socialist, New Christian |
As construed by
Saint-Simon and later socialists, all things — even the natural law (which in Catholic
belief IS God) — are to be subordinated to this goal. Whether we’re talking about life, liberty, or
(especially) private property, nothing is to come between people and the
achieving the goal of uplifting society . . . even other people, if those
others have been deemed unworthy (ungodly) for some reason.
In short, the collective becomes God, and God becomes secondary to “the
People.” (In orthodox belief and thought, the natural
law applies to EVERYBODY: NOBODY gets excluded, however unworthy others might think them or anything else. PERIOD. If someone has committed a crime and there is proof — not opinion, but actual PROOF — the case is different, but that proof had better be there. Otherwise, the presumption is that someone is innocent, regardless how much we dislike them or disagree with them.)
What Pius XI did
was take the somewhat vague term that Taparelli had used and apply it to the type of
legal justice that works on the common good directly, which would now be known
as social justice. For the type of legal
justice that works on the common good indirectly, he kept the old term, legal
justice. As Father Ferree put it,
Here also we might note the great breadth of Pope Pius XI’s vision.
The older “Legal Justice,” both because of its imperfect beginnings in
Aristotle and because of the suggestiveness of its name, always tended to be
reduced to its narrowest possible meaning, for which we might invent the term “courtroom
justice.” There is evidence to support the belief that Pope Pius XI recognized
this tendency, and its almost complete triumph in modern times, and
deliberately decided to throw off this weight of tradition from his own
teachings. At the beginning of his Pontificate, in the Encyclical Studiorum Ducem, occurs the phrase in re sociali et in jure recta principia
ponendo de justitia legali aut de sociali:” — in social life and in
jurisprudence laying down correct principles for Legal Justice as well as for
Social Justice.” After this he abandoned “Legal Justice” entirely to the
jurists and never used it in his social teachings. The older theory did not
recognize the confusion in the term because, for it, Legal Justice was somehow
bound up with law; but in the completed theory of Pius XI, Social Justice, far
from playing any subordinate role to Law, actually makes the law itself: “It is
most necessary that it establish a juridical . . . order.” The Law in all its
majesty is simply one of the institutions which Social Justice creates for the
Common Good!
Now we can answer
the question, What is the common good?
Perhaps the best way to answer that is again simply by quoting Father
Ferree:
The Nature of the Common Good
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| Fr. William J. Ferree, S.M., Ph.D. |
Every higher institution depends on all those below it for its
effectiveness, and every lower institution depends on those above it for its
own proper place in the Common Good. It is precisely this whole vast network of
institutions which is the Common Good, on which every one of us depends for the
realization of our personal perfection, of our personal good.
It is wrong to conceive of the Common Good as a sort of general bank
account into which one “deposits” when, for instance he pays his taxes to the
State; and “withdraws” when he is appointed public coordinator of something or
other at a hundred and fifty dollars a week, or when the State builds a road
past his farm and thus raises its value. It is surprising how many people think
that distributive justice is the virtue that assesses taxes and Social Justice
is the virtue that pays them. Both of these actions are distributive, that is,
individual, justice; and become Social Justice only in a secondary way as they
promote the Common Good.
Nor must we think of the Common Good as something which we can “share
with another” like a candy bar or an automobile ride. Rather it is something
which each of us possesses in its entirety, like light, or life itself. When
the Common Good is badly organized, when society is socially unjust, then it is
each individual’s own share of
personal perfection which is limited, or which is withheld from him entirely.
Everyone Can Do It
When it is realized that the Common Good consists of that whole vast
complex of institutions, from the simplest “natural medium” of a child’s life,
to the United Nations itself, then a very comforting fact emerges: Each of
these institutions from the lowest and most fleeting “natural medium” to the
highest and most enduring organization of nations is the Common Good at that
particular level. Therefore everyone,
from the smallest and weakest child to the most powerful ruler in the world,
can have direct care of the Common Good
at his level. This is a far cry indeed from those social philosophers who
before Pius XI could say with complete sincerity and conviction, “the Common
Good is not something which can be directly
attained.”
In other words,
the common good is the institutional environment within which people realize
their individual goods. It is not itself
an individual good!
Thus, the first
law of social justice is necessarily that the common good must remain
inviolate, or attaining individual goods becomes, for all intents and purposes,
impossible.
But are there
other considerations? Most certainly —
and that is what we’ll look at in the next posting in this series.
#30#