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.
Louis Kelso’s and Mortimer Adler’s breakthroughs in moral philosophy (with the principles of economic justice) and in economics and finance (with future savings) were “the missing links” in Catholic social teaching. Combined with Pius XI’s definition of social justice, Kelso’s and Adler’s financial systems concept and principles of economic justice — connecting economic personalism with economic justice — made a truly personalist social order possible as explicit policy for the first time in history.
Louis O. Kelso
This was a Just Third Way that addressed the moral and structural flaws of collectivist socialism and individualist capitalism. People without capital or savings could now become capital owners without redefining private property, committing injustices against existing owners, or harming the common good.
Understanding how Kelso’s and Adler’s breakthroughs fit into the Just Third Way, however, requires a more detailed analysis of social justice — both as a particular and overarching social virtue and then how it is applied as a principle within a system of economic justice.
In this posting we will examine social justice as the overarching virtue under which economic justice must function.
As a particular virtue aimed at the perfecting of the common good, social justice has certain definable characteristics as well as basic requirements or “laws” regarding how the act of social justice is to be carried out. In his analysis of the social doctrine of Pius XI, Father William Ferree discerned seven specific laws of social justice, but added that there are probably many more. As he presented them in his pamphlet, Introduction to Social Justice, they are:
. . . in social terms.
1. That the Common Good Be Kept Inviolate. However great our desire or need, we may not usurp the institutions of the common good to serve our private ends, no matter how important they may be to us or to others. We cannot, for example, legitimately redefine a natural right or ordinarily violate even an unjust law on our own initiative, unless the law forces us personally to do wrong. Deciding for ourselves what laws to obey is pure individualism and is tantamount to anarchy.
It is not that we may not exercise private rights until the common good is corrected. Rather, it is that exercising individual rights when the common good is flawed or under attack is often impossible.
This is because the common good provides the environment within which individual persons become virtuous by exercising rights. When that environment is flawed, it must be materially restructured to the point where the exercise of individual rights once again becomes possible. A just system, for example, would discourage greed and prevent monopolies.
2. Cooperation, Not Conflict. Given the uniqueness of each human person, the particular good of each individual is different. Any particular good that is falsely made into an ultimate principle and exercised without any limits whatsoever must necessarily be in conflict with every other particular good.
To take an economic example, a truly free market recognizes that there are necessary limits to the exercise of rights within it, such as private property and freedom of association. To be just, a free market is not laissez-faire, “anything goes,” but implies an effective juridical order that clearly defines the exercise of individual rights, provides a level playing field, and enforces contracts when necessary. A just system would encourage virtue and discourage vice; no one is free to use his rights to harm or limit the rights of others.
Only through cooperation — people organizing for the common good — can society be structured and restructured for the good of every member. This does not mean overriding or ignoring individual goods, but it does mean that individual and social goods should not be in conflict.
We are both individuals and members of groups
3. One’s First Particular Good is One’s Own Place in the Common Good. The first particular good of every individual or group is how that individual or group is able to access through the institutions of the common good the means to fulfill one’s human needs, acquire greater virtue or fulfill a social purpose.
This also means that each person and organization directly relates to and is responsible for the care and perfecting of a particular aspect or level of the common good. As Ferree put it,
It must be admitted that this is not the way most of us think at the present time, but that is because we have been badly educated. It must be admitted also that to carry out such a principle in practice looks like too big a job for human nature as we know it; but that is because we are individualists and have missed the point. Of course it is too big a job if each one of us and each of our groups is individually and separately responsible for the welfare of the human race as a whole. But the point is that the human race as a whole is social.
Each of us, as members of families, communities, organizations, religions, nations — i.e., groups — relates to the common good in many ways and at many levels. Through our groups and institutions we interact with others, at some levels more directly or at a higher level of expertise and authority than others.
Put another way, each of us as human persons is entitled to equal access to the entirety of the common good, that vast network of laws and social institutions within which we realize our individual goods. In practical terms, then, we derive our particular or individual goods most directly through our immediate points of interaction within the common good.
This is not socially just.
4. Each Directly Responsible. Pius XI noted in § 53 of Divini Redemptoris that the individual is frequently helpless when confronted with socially unjust situations. That being the case, putting personal responsibility for the whole of the common good on each and every individual would appear to be an unconscionable burden.
We realize, however, that in accordance with humanity’s political nature, we are not in this alone. When confronted with a situation that is impossible for the individual, the solution is first to organize at that level of the common good, even all the way up to the whole of the common good itself, if that is what is required to bring the proper forces to bear on the problem.
5. Higher Institutions Must Never Displace Lower Ones. As Ferree explained, “Another law of Social Justice which stems from the institutional character of the Common Good is that no institution in the vast hierarchy which we have seen can take over the particular actions of an institution or person below it.” This is the principle of “subsidiarity.” For example, the principle of subsidiarity is violated when the government sets wage and price controls instead of allowing the market to function within the parameters established by individual and social justice.
It is not a question of the lower order(s) always being right, or the State taking over when the individual or group proves to be helpless in the face of an unjust situation. Rather, it is a case of action being carried out by individuals and groups at the most appropriate level of the common good. This is the individual or group that is “closest” to the problem, that which “subsides” within the milieu or institution, hence “subsidiarity.”
6. Freedom of Association. “If every natural group of individuals has a right to its own common good and a duty towards the next highest common good, it is evident that such a group has the right to organize itself formally in view of the common good.” This “liberty” or “freedom of association” is a natural right, so important as to be ranked with the triad of life, liberty, and private property as the means whereby each individual can pursue happiness, that is, become virtuous, fulfilling the purpose for which the social order exists.
Freedom of association has frequently been interpreted in economic and social justice as limited to the right of labor to organize and demand higher fixed wages and more benefits. This increases costs and raises prices to customers, harming the poor and restricting global trade.
Consequently, workers usually fail to organize for ownership, the recommended solution to many of the social problems they attempt to address by raising wages and benefits. Others assume that it refers to organizing for civil rights, which soon become meaningless without the economic rights to sustain them.
7. All Vital Interests Should be Organized. All real and vital interests of life should be deliberately made to conform to the requirements of the common good. As Ferree noted, social justice “is a full-time job that never ends.”
This can make the task seem overwhelming until we realize that, as social justice is the virtue directed at the common good, the bulk of the work is done once we as individuals have internalized the basic precepts of the natural law that underpin the social order, summarized as “good is to be done, evil avoided.”
After that, it is not a question of adding more tasks to an already overloaded life, but of doing the same things in a different way — more effectively, as we might expect, and certainly in a manner more consistent with our own nature, but still the same basic tasks directed at becoming virtuous or maintaining us in that endeavor.
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