Occasionally, we feel the urge to explain a little about social justice. This is usually prompted by a comment or question from a faithful reader or two. This time it was sparked by a comment someone made on FaceBook about how they aren’t interested in helping people one-on-one, but in changing the system that makes it necessary to help people.
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| Aristotle |
Strange as it may seem to many people today stuck in the modern either-or paradigm that insists you must be either a selfish individualist or a mindless collectivist, there is an alternative: be political, that is, what Aristotle described in the Nicomachean Ethics and Politics (two halves of the same work, according to some authorities). That is, human beings are both individual and social, a possibly unique combination political, because our natural environment is the pólis, the consciously organized community within which we realize our individuality — human beings are individuals that have a social nature, or social creatures with individuality, whichever way you want to look at it; we are political; we create our own social environment . . . which means we can also change it, for better or for worse.
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| Leo XIII- Rerum Novarum |
In moral philosophy, then, it is not a choice between individual virtue and social virtue, but how to combine the two into a human whole. Moral philosophy covers both.
Thus, direct aid to individuals, even on a massive scale, is individual charity, sometimes (under certain conditions, see Rerum Novarum § 22) justice. On the other hand, reforming the system to make individual justice and charity (as well as the other virtues) operative or effective, is social justice and social charity.
The key to this is understanding that the social virtues do not substitute for the individual virtues. Instead, the social virtues “enable” the individual virtues by reforming the system that inhibits or prevents the practice of individual virtue.
Individual and social virtue therefore go together, both are commanded or directed acts, and one does not substitute for the other — it is not an “either-or” choice or situation. The so-called “Social Justice Warriors” have it wrong . . . but then, so do those who reject the concept of social justice, asserting that individual justice is sufficient.
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| Pius XI-A theory of social justice |
Yes, the individual virtues are sufficient . . . as individual virtues. What, however, do you do if it is impossible to practice the individual virtues or they are ineffective due to circumstances or prohibitions or something else? In that case, social justice does not replace the individual virtues that are not functioning or are not operating properly. No, what social justice does is make it possible for the individual virtues to function properly.
For example, individual justice says pay a just wage, individual charity says give someone what he or she needs. Social justice, however, says make it possible to pay a just wage or give others what they need. Social charity commands us to “love our institutions as we love ourselves” enough to reform them. Both individual and social justice are essential and go together.
Economic justice is a type or subset of social justice. Again, economic justice does not mean doing the economically just thing, but in making it possible to do the economically just thing; “economically just” does not mean the same thing as “economic justice.”
The economically just thing is already either commutative or distributive justice applied to economics. Economic justice makes it possible for commutative and distributive justice to function, i.e., for a worker to be paid a just wage (commutative justice) or for a shareholder to receive his or her proportionate share of corporate profits (distributive justice).
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