Today’s blog posting is a selection from the book, Economic Personalism, which you can get free from the CESJ website, or from Amazon or Barnes and Noble.
As we may have mentioned a few thousand times on this blog, personalist social justice is distinguished from the collectivist and individualist version by not being a substitute for charity or a euphemism for redistribution. Need-based distribution is individual charity, except in cases of “extreme need” when it falls under distributive justice as an expedient. Personalist social justice is the virtue concerned with restructuring the social order to make it possible for people to take care of themselves.
Fr. William J. Ferree, S.M., Ph.D.
Social justice does not therefore replace or substitute for the individual virtues. Instead, social justice enables the individual virtues to function properly. As CESJ co-founder Father William J. Ferree explained in his pamphlet, Introduction to Social Justice, after first noting a just wage is due in commutative justice in all cases, never social justice, “[W]hat Social Justice demands is something specifically social: the reorganization of the system. For it is the whole system which is badly organized (‘socially unjust’) when it withholds from the human beings whose lives are bound up in it, the power to ‘meet common domestic needs adequately’.”
In the previous posting on this subject, we covered the seven “laws of social justice,” i.e., 1. That the Common Good Be Kept Inviolate, 2. Cooperation, Not Conflict, 3. One’s First Particular Good is One’s Own Place in the Common Good, 4. Each Directly Responsible, 5. Higher Institutions Must Never Displace Lower Ones, 6. Freedom of Association, and 7. All Vital Interests Should be Organized. These are not exhaustive, and there are probably others to discern as well.
In addition to the laws of social justice, social justice also has certain characteristics. These, too, are probably not complete, but are,
Only by groups.
1. Only by Members of Groups. The principal characteristic of social justice is possibly the most difficult concept to grasp. That is, social justice cannot be performed by individuals as individuals, but only by individuals as members of groups.
Addressing flawed institutions under social justice does not mean making up for the failure of individual justice or charity. The proper course of action is to organize with others, then, as members of groups, work on correcting the institutions so that they function so as to allow individual virtues to function once again.
2. It Takes Time. All virtue is the habit of doing good, and habits, especially social habits, take time to build, just as vice (the habit of doing evil), individual or social, is not something that happens overnight. In social justice, time must be taken to educate, persuade others, and organize with others to “fix the system.”
3. Nothing is Impossible. In social justice there is never any such thing as helplessness. As Ferree stated, “No problem is ever too big or too complex, no field is ever too vast, for the methods of this social justice. Problems that were agonizing in the past and were simply dodged, even by serious and virtuous people, can now be solved with ease by any school child.”
4. Eternal Vigilance. The work of social justice is never finished. This is not the same as saying that social justice takes a long time. Rather, it means we must be constantly prepared to respond to what Pius XI called “the radical instability of society.” Different people come into the picture, conditions change, technology advances, and our institutions must be restructured and reformed to meet the new conditions. This change is always happening; therefore, the work of social justice is continual.
5. Effectiveness. Work for the common good must be effective. You cannot just do something and simply hope it works. A good intention to benefit the common good is not good enough. We may gratify ourselves with a feeling of great virtue, but we have not fulfilled our responsibilities under social justice until we have organized and acted with others to correct a particular defect in the common good.
Off the menu.
6. You Cannot “Take It or Leave It.” As Ferree stated, social justice embraces a “rigid obligation.” Each of us is directly and individually responsible for our level or area of the common good, and we must organize with others to bring about necessary institutional reform.
Social justice is not, however, something we add to the tasks of everyday life. Rather, it is a fundamental change in how we do what we do as political animals — acting in an organized, social manner with others, rather than ineffectually as isolated individuals.
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