Ask anybody. Go ahead. We dare you. For best results, carry a microphone and have somebody pointing a videocam at you and whoever (or whatever) you are asking. And the question? “What is social justice?”
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You can phrase it different ways if you like, e.g., “Can you define social justice?”, “How would you describe social justice?”, “What does social justice mean to you?”, or “What do you, as a woke commie pinko progressive, think of all those socially unjust people who disagree with everything you say?”
On second thought, don’t ask anybody any form of that question. Chances are, regardless what you ask or say, what you will get is some variation of the answer we got from AI —
In simple terms, social justice means everyone deserves equal rights, opportunities, and treatment, regardless of who they are (race, gender, wealth, etc.). It’s about fairness, ensuring resources, privileges, and opportunities are distributed equitably and challenging systems that create unfair advantages or disadvantages for certain groups, aiming for everyone to have a fair shot at a good life, health, and dignity.
Believe it or not, that is a good answer. It just isn’t the answer to the question we are asking in this blog posting. These are all very good things and are either themselves applications of various forms of justice or close enough for everyday purposes that it probably shouldn’t matter what you call it.
The problem is all the things AI listed, good as they are, are not social justice! No, they are individual justice (or charity, or whatever other virtue they are). This is shown by the fact the definition starts out by clearly stating, “social justice means everyone, etc.” and goes on to describe the desired results accruing to individual persons “regardless of who they are.”
Again, we have absolutely no quarrel with the claim everyone deserves all these things. Our “quarrel” (if you even want to call it a quarrel) is — these are not social justice! They are related to social justice, but social justice is not the same thing as individual justice or even individual charity.
Shocking, right? Why would we say such a horrible thing?
For one simple reason. Social justice is not directed at individual goods. Individual goods are the indirect object of social justice, not its direct object. Why? Social justice is directed to the common good, not to any individual good.
Of course, that raises a few eyebrows as well as another question, viz., “What is the common good?” Once again, let’s see what AI has to say on the subject:
The common good is the benefit and well-being of everyone in a society, encompassing shared resources (like clean air, roads, security) and conditions (like justice, education, health) that allow all individuals and groups to thrive, achieved through collective action, participation, and ethical decisions that prioritize the whole community over just individual interests. It’s about what’s good for all, not just a few, requiring cooperation and sometimes individual sacrifice for the greater public benefit.
Again, close, but no cigar, to use an outdated idiom. We have the same problem with this definition of the common good as we do with the above definition of social justice: both definitions describe something individual in nature, not social or common. Yes, the listed items are related to the common good, but are not themselves the common good, at least as construed in AI’s response.
It is important — as in absolutely critical — to understand the common good must be something common, something common to all, to every single person in its entirety. The definition, however, explicitly states “[t]he common good is the benefit and well-being of everyone in a society, etc.”
Do you see the “problem” or at least the difficulty? “Every-ONE in society.” In other words, AI defined the common good in a way which is not truly common, but as individual goods applied collectively.
Analyzing this, it is a fundamental principle of human thought — the first principle of reason, in fact — that nothing can both “be” and “not be” at the same time under the same conditions. This is called “the principle (or law) of (non) contradiction.” (It can also be stated in a more “positive” way as the principle (or law) of identity: “That which is true is as true and is true in the same way as everything else that is true.” The same thing said in a different way.)
What is the significance of this? It means if we are trying to define the common good, we cannot at the same time declare it is individual or even collective in nature. Why? It violates the first principle of reason to claim the common good can both be the common good and at the same time be a pile of collectivist individual goods.
You don’t have to know anything about the common good, social justice, or much of anything else to know it is impossible for something to contradict its own nature. This is the case even in religion, presumably (if erroneously) based exclusively on faith. According to sound thinkers on the subject, the idea God can do anything necessarily implies a Supreme Being can do anything that does not contradict its own nature. To declare with the pseudo intellectuals trying to be clever, “If God can do anything, then God can make a weight so heavy God cannot lift it” is to misunderstand this.
Why? There is a contradiction built into the claim rendering it neither true nor false, but utter nonsense, like “Everything I say is a lie.” It is a variation of the so-called “Liar paradox.” As AI explains,
The “everything I say is a lie” statement is the famous Liar Paradox, a self-referential puzzle where “This sentence is false” or “I am lying” creates a contradiction: if true, it’s false; if false, it’s true, meaning it can be neither true nor false, challenging basic logic. Solutions propose it’s nonsense, neither true nor false (fuzzy logic/third option), or that such self-reference breaks logic rules, suggesting it’s not a true proposition in formal systems, which is why it's a timeless philosophical puzzle without a single agreed-upon answer.
To return to the subject at hand, what is the common good if it’s not the aggregate of individual goods or goods owned in common?
We find the answer in classical Aristotelian philosophy. The common good, the good common to all humanity which defines us as human, is (hold on to your teeth) — the capacity to become more fully human. This is the “same” for every person. (There are complex reasons “same” is not the correct term, but it will do for now, unless you are a college professor or a nitpicker supreme.)
And what does it mean to “become more fully human”? Aristotle as corrected by Aquinas would say becoming more fully human means becoming virtuous. Becoming less fully human means becoming vicious.
Note at no point does becoming virtuous make you more than human, nor does becoming vicious make you less than human. No, everyone is as fully human and is human in the same way as everyone else. Becoming virtuous means becoming more fully human, while becoming vicious means becoming less fully human. This is an important point and must be always kept in mind.
So, how does this understanding of the common good relate to social justice? To answer, we need another bit from Aristotle. An important point in his Politics — considered a continuation of his Nicomachean Ethics, which details how to become individually more fully human — is “man is by nature a political animal.”
Political does NOT mean “social” or “collectivist”. No, Aristotle said political, which means individuals who become individually virtuous (hopefully) living together in a consciously structured social environment called the pólis, hence “political.” To oversimplify, the social order, the pólis, is the structured environment within which human beings ordinarily become more fully human.
A structured environment is (obviously) composed of structures. We call these social structures “institutions.” Just as individual virtues are individual habits, social structures — institutions — are social habits. The difference between an individual habit and a social habit (between a virtue or vice and an institution) is an individual habit makes an individual person virtuous or vicious, while a social habit encourages, inhibits, or even prevents individual persons to become virtuous or vicious.
You see the difference?
A person is (or is not) virtuous, while an institution assists or inhibits or prevents persons in becoming virtuous (or vicious). Thus, in this context, virtue is an individual good, while an institution is a social good, a part of the common good; the former is the desired end, while the latter is the means by which the desired end is reached.
Put another way, virtue is what people (presumably) want to acquire and develop, i.e., become more fully human. Institutions are social tools which assist people in becoming virtuous, i.e., more fully human. The common good, then, is defined in this context as the vast network of institutions within which people work out their goal of becoming more fully human.
What happens, however, when the institutions of society are not structured in such a way as to enable or assist people — all people — in becoming virtuous? Then (again obviously), the task becomes to re-structure the social order, so it fulfills its job of assisting everyone to become virtuous. Institutions can never make people virtuous, of course. That would be impossible. The best that can be done is to create as far as humanly possible a social environment within which people can become virtuous.
Restructuring the social order is the “job” of social justice, the virtue directed not to any individual good, but to the common good, that is, to the repair of institutions. This gives us a different definition of social justice than the one AI gave us: social justice is the particular virtue directed to the good of institutions. In contrast, the different forms of individual justice (such as commutative justice and distributive justice) as well as charity and the other individual virtues are the virtues directed to the good of actual people, of individuals.
Put another way, individual virtues make human beings virtuous, while social virtues (such as social justice) make it possible for human beings to become virtuous; social virtue enables individual virtue. Social virtue does not and cannot replace or substitute for individual virtue; both individual and social virtue go together, and both are essential to assist people in becoming more fully human.
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