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'Social justice': Utopian fantasy or foundation of prosperity?

By James Franklin - posted Tuesday, 22 January 2008


Calls for “social justice” normally do not arouse much opposition, much like party leaders’ calls for unity or the Pope’s annual call for peace. That’s good news: it suggests that most of the political spectrum finds social justice theory not too offensive. The bad news is the reason for that: no one can keep straight for five minutes with what Christian social justice theory actually says.

In late 2007 Tony Abbott gave a speech to an Institute of Public Affairs/Quadrant dinner on the misuse (as he thought) of the concept “social justice”, especially in its Catholic understanding. What he had to say is summarised in a single sentence in his speech. “On examination, what’s called social justice usually turns out to be socialism masquerading as justice.”

Now, it may well be that some wet-behind-the-ears bishops with little understanding of economics do use the term “social justice” to give a colour of moral dignity to views that are a touch socialist. But what was missing in Abbott’s speech was any sign of examination, in the sense of explaining what social justice theory actually says, before hoeing into it.

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There has been no more understanding of the concept from the left, either. There’s a story that whenever Andrew Theophanous (the Victorian Labor member and author of a book on social justice) had to consider the latest amendments to dairy industry regulations, or whatever, his left-wing colleagues would ask him with heavy-handed humour: “What are the social justice implications, bruvver?”

From the point of view of the hard left, social justice theory is just Catholics being weak-minded, but if they’ve got the numbers, you have to humour them.

Now, admittedly, social justice theory has not presented itself very well. It’s neither left nor right, nor is it another flabby “third way” (more like a zeroth way, really, since the basics of it go back quite some time). Nor is it naïve or utopian. The point of the new book Life to the Full: Rights and Social Justice in Australia is to explain in straightforward terms what it says, why, and with what implications.

What social justice theory says is summed up in five propositions:

Ethics is objective, founded on the intrinsic worth of persons.

The first chapter of the book is on the right to life, because that’s where ethics starts. When you see the victims of the Srebrenica massacre dug up, you know something objectively terrible happened to those people; it could have been you, and you know your own worth. Christians express the worth of persons by saying “humans are made in the image of God”, but you don’t have to believe in God to have a solid sense of why the death of a human is a tragedy.

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Because humans have a certain nature, they have certain rights.

For example: they have an intellectual nature, and so a right to education (violated in a narrow education in a madrassah, for example); and a spiritual nature, and therefore a right to pursue God as they reasonably see fit. Several chapters of Life to the Full deal with rights of that sort - to education, to choose whether to be married or not, to change jobs, and so on. It is important that “social justice” theory is not just about politics and economics but is continuous with a complete theory of how humans should live.

As humans are social and political animals, how society is organised is subject to the same ethics as personal morality and rights.

Humans get things done by organising into groups, from families up to the state, so principles of ethics are just as applicable to public and co-operative actions as they are to private ones. Concepts like “reason of state” or “market forces” can’t be invoked to pretend that the decisions of powerful people are not decisions subject to ethical standards.

But it takes some subtlety. The left is inclined to make a fetish of equality, the right of freedom. Both good values, if carefully understood. But single-value ethics is bad in the same way as single-issue politics, and you wouldn’t want it in charge. It’s social justice theory that includes all of ethics and fits it in with a sufficiently complex politics and economics.

It is actually possible to take planned action to improve society.

This is arguably obvious, but in these economic rationalist days we have to take account of Hayek’s argument to the contrary. He has a whole book on the “mirage of social justice”, according to which markets “self-organise” in much the same way as eddies do in flowing water, and any attempt to order them from above will just make things worse.

That view requires a certain blindness to the results of organisation in the society we live in, and the successes of business, among others, in large-scale planning. I hear it’s possible for tycoons to sew up the cardboard box market if the nanny state doesn’t step in to prevent them … but (as the book’s introduction (PDF 55KB) argues) the more important kinds of large-scale organisation are the ones that create the structures under which business, labour and everyone else operate - for example, the law of contract that enforces contracts but voids them in cases of fraud or duress; or the system of industrial safety and compensation.

“Market forces” only exist within the framework created by those constraints, and those constraints were only established over centuries by people committed to justice. Further, the general acceptance of those constraints means that regulation is possible more by principles than by detailed and oppressive bureaucratic rules.

It is true that we need to be more aware than 50 years ago of the unwanted side-effects of social engineering, for example the shocking effects of welfare dependency in remote Indigenous communities. But the solution isn’t to let the problem self-organise into a worse mess, it’s to send in the army. As John Howard said in his concession speech on the night of the election, one of the worst outcomes of the election was Mal Brough’s loss.

“Social justice” is not just the job of the state, but of a large array of special-purpose societies between the individual and the state.

Catholic social justice theory in particular is committed to a principle confusingly called “subsidiarity”, according to which tasks are better done as far as possible by the smallest possible group.

Society ought to be a mix of co-operative groups devoted to particular tasks, from families looking after themselves and children (and owning property to do so), up to labour unions, clubs, professional associations, churches, law courts and so on, all with the freedom to pursue their tasks and to negotiate with the state and one another.

This is where, “on examination”, social justice theory differs most forcefully from socialism. The Sydney philosopher David Stove explained how Mao understood that:

The essence of totalitarianism is contained in the great helmsman’s injunction to “put politics in command”. This is not just Communist-Chinese baby-talk. What it means is this: that you are to take over every institution, whatever it may be, and empty out everything which distinguishes it from other institutions, and turn it into yet another loudspeaker for repeating “the general line”. Destroy the specific institutional fabric of - a University, a trade union, a sporting body, a church - and give them all the same institutional content, viz. a political one. Contrapositively, the essence of resistance to totalitarianism must consist in trying to maintain the specific institutional integrity of different institutions.

Finally, is social justice theory naïve and utopian? No, it isn’t. This is what is least understood about social justice: it’s already here. The society we live in is much closer to the social justice ideal than it is to either of the ideals of classical socialism or classical laissez faire capitalism.

When people point to the successes of the market in creating goods and employment, it’s a very constrained market that they are talking about - constrained by legal requirements like compensation, contract and intellectual property law and a vast number of semi-legal compliance regimes. It’s because markets operate in that framework that they can deliver benefits. It’s because markets operate in that framework that market forces don’t create a free market in slaves and kidneys.

I’d suggest intellectual property as the perfect model of social justice: it’s because creators of books and inventions morally deserve to be rewarded that there ought to be such protections; implementing IP law is possible but it took several centuries and as we all know China hasn’t caught up even now. And there are major economic benefits from it, through the encouragement of the bright ideas that drive technological progress.

There is nothing utopian in looking for the secret of our own society’s success, social justice, and urging it to be implemented more consistently.

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About the Author

James Franklin is Professor in the School of Mathematics and Statistics, at the University of New South Wales. He is the author of Corrupting the Youth: A History of Philosophy in Australia and Catholic Values and Australian Realities. The author's website is here. James Franklin is the author of Life to the Full: Rights and Social Justice in Australia.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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