Today’s subject, social justice, involves us in a double
difficulty. First, there is a problem
with defining it. To many people,
“social justice” means State action to take up the slack when individual
justice and charity just don’t seem adequate, and people are in need. When that happens, so the theory goes, the
State steps in and mandates or imposes desired results. Not surprisingly, this error is virtually
identical to the error many people make with distributive justice. Even less of a surprise, many people confuse
distributive justice with social justice by defining both in the same way, and
thus both incorrectly.
As we have seen in a number of postings on this blog, social
justice is the particular virtue directed to the common good. Social justice does not mean that the State takes care of everybody’s individual goods,
e.g., food, clothing, and shelter,
when they cannot take care of themselves or private charity fails. Rather, social justice means restructuring
the institutional environment in such a way as to enable people to take care of
themselves through their own efforts.
That’s the general concept of social justice. As applied in the economic common good,
social justice is the feedback principle that detects distortions of the input or
outtake principles and guides the corrections needed to restore a just and
balanced economic order for all. Unjust
barriers to participation violate this principle, as do monopolies, or when
some people use their property to harm or exploit others.
Economic harmony results when participative justice and
distributive justice are operating fully for every person within a system or
institution. The Oxford English
Dictionary defines “economic harmonies” as “Laws of social adjustment
under which the self-interest of one man or group of men, if given free play,
will produce results offering the maximum advantage to other men and the
community as a whole.”
Social Justice offers guidelines for controlling monopolies,
building checks-and-balances within social institutions, and re-synchronizing
distribution (outtake) with participation (input). The first two principles of
economic justice flow from the eternal human search for justice in general,
which automatically requires a balance between input and outtake, i.e.,
“to each according to what he is due.”
Social Justice, on the other hand, reflects the human
striving for other universal values such as Truth, Love and Beauty. It compels people to look beyond what is,
to what ought to be, and continually repair and improve their systems
for the good of every person.
It should be noted that Louis Kelso and Mortimer Adler
referred to the third principle as “the principle of limitation” as a restraint
on human tendencies toward greed and monopoly that lead to exclusion and
exploitation of others. Given the potential synergies inherent in economic
justice in today’s high technology world, CESJ feels that the concept of
“social justice” is more appropriate and more-encompassing than the term
“limitation” in describing the third component of economic justice.
Furthermore, the harmony that results from the operation of social justice is
more consistent with the truism that a society that seeks peace must first work
for justice
