Social justice

Concept

The social justice is a socio-economic concept which, on the basis of the principle which the company has of the unjust aspects (what leaves a certain place to subjectivity) request that these injustices are corrected.

Social justice can be defined in a negative way: is unjust what is not acceptable socially. For example, the inequalities of wages between trades of different qualifications are generally regarded as right, because they are socially accepted by the majority: it is very rare that is asserted for a workman the wages of an senior officer. One thus should not confuse social justice (or equity) and equality. Social justice is also a concept which evolves/moves in time, which is just socially can become unjust if the context changes.

It is primarily a projection towards a company righter, it is not really an end in itself, there are always injustices. One can see it either like a Utopia, or like a progressive step. The actions having for objective social justice aim at giving to each one the same chances of success, one speaks then sometimes about “equal opportunity”. The corrections necessary can be social, financial or cultural.

Part of dynamics Altermondialiste uses this concept rather present in the speeches of left.

The work which continues to refer as regards social justice today is the Théorie of justice (1971) of John Rawls (professor of philosophy in Harvard, died in 2002). According to him, the company is right if it respects three principles, in the order: 1) guaranteed basic freedoms for all; 2) “realizable” equality of the chances; 3) maintenance of the only inequalities which benefit most underprivileged.

Religion

The concept of social justice belongs to the social Doctrine of the Church and was approached within the framework of several encyclicals, of which Rerum Novarum, Quadragesimo Anno, MATER and Magistra and Centesimus Annus. The movement of the social Gospel of Dorothy Day has work in favor of the poor and of excluded.

Criticisms

For the liberal nothing is more ambiguity than the term of social justice. Hayek saw even a " there; mirage" (it is the title of volume II of its book Droit, legislation and freedom ). For him, speech of justice here is to consider that individuals made wrongs to the detriment of other individuals and thus who should be repaired them. To speak about a distribution right or social justice, it is to make return a concept which does not have its place. Justice would consist in for him saying " with each one according to its efforts". Thus a distribution has minimum by the State.

The tax just socially it is thus for Hayek the flat tax: a single rate of x% with which the State thus takes as much expressed as a percentage with each taxpayer and thus more in absolute value with those which gain much.

Even if Hayek is regarded today as the figurehead of liberalism, one can earlier note that his conclusions are hardly original compared to those which the economist free-Switzerland Leon Walras defended, one century, in a more systematic way. For this author, indeed, the authority, exorbitant, State could be justified only if it treats all the citizens in an absolutely equal way. From where the prohibition of an public assistance in favor of the poor, handicapped people, etc and the choice of an identical tax for all, the “capitation” which was founded in France at certain times under the Old Mode. But Walras was not really favorable to the tax, whatever it is, because it affirmed that any individual was sole owner of his personal faculties and what he could draw. The tax thus appeared in Walras like a form of spoliation and he recommended that the State is financed starting from the ground rent after the grounds were nationalized. He considered indeed that the natural resources, of which the ground, by definition, not being produced by the effort of the men, they belong to the common inheritance of humanity.

Quotations on social justice

  • “I never separated the Republic from the ideas of social justice, without which it is only one mot.” Jean Jaurès, 1887
  • “social justice, it is to put all the runners on the same starting line. It should not be confused with the egalitarianism, which consists in declaring that all arrived first. ” Louis Pauwels
  • “It is really the concept of social justice which was used as Trojan horse with the penetration of the Totalitarisme. ” Friedrich Hayek in Right, Legislation and Freedom
  • “Desire + rhetoric = social justice” Thomas Sowell

See too

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