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Conclusion to the Work THINKING ABOUT and ACTING TO Conclusion to the Work THINKING ABOUT AND ACTING TO ADVANCE SOCIAL JUSTICE: A DILEMMA Paul Gomberg Even many who are not philosophers know John Rawls’s name, as his renowned A Theory of Justice (Rawls 1999) gave new life to political philosophy and sparked dis- cussion across the world. Rawls gave theoretical foundations for both the basic liber- ties and equality of opportunity and argued that the only allowable economic inequali- ties should be those that benefit the least advantaged members of society (assuming that inequalities might create incentives that sparked such big gains in production that even those with least had more than anyone would have if there was complete equali- ty). Ronald Dworkin (2000) and others also challenge current social inequalities. Dworkin was vexed that some people are harmed by pure bad luck and argues that egalitarians should be concerned to mitigate such harms; others (see the essays col- lected in Clayton and Williams 2002) debate whether egalitarians should strive for equality or for maximum benefit to those who are worst off. All these theories emphas- ize distributive justice, particularly how the material benefits of social cooperation are spread among people. Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) challenged these egali- tarian views of distributive justice from the right; he argued that any distribution, no matter how unequal, is just if it came about from actions that were just. Distributive justice also was challenged from the left: in How to Make Opportunity Equal (2007) I proposed that the focus on who gets what is misguided because it sets up contests for limited resources; a just society would make it possible for all to develop complex abilities, to contribute those abilities back to society, and to earn esteem from others for those contributions (I called this contributive justice). There could be unlimited opportunity to contribute complex abilities if both simple and complex labor are shared. Philosophical views of social justice range from macro-views like Lawrence Hanks look at barriers to truth concerning social justice or John Davis’ assessment of international perspectives in social justice, views that are more targeted, such as Wazir Mohamed’s look at the limits of Western Democracy, or Jerome Mahaffey’s consider- ation of anonymity and social activism. Returning to concerns about how to apply the concept of social justice rather than just discuss it, Amartya Sen (1992, 1999) has challenged the distributive egalita- rians. He argues that economic development should be measured by whether it en- hances people’s capabilities to engage in central human activities (have self-respect, participate in a community); health and education are more relevant than material goods per se as measures of whether people have the capability to function in these ways. Now Sen’s (2009) The Ideal of Justice argues that describing an ideally just society is not especially helpful to what really counts: to oppose injustice, improve people’s conditions of life, and to measure those improvements. 180 PAUL GOMBERG So philosophical theories can seem irrelevant to the concerns of people fighting social injustice. The great virtue of the essays collected in the present anthol- ogy is that they are grounded in real struggles and the practical concern to teach social justice. For example, Margaret A. Syverson argues that the poor education received by most disadvantaged inner city students is worsened by current testing policies. Dwight G. Watson describes how the death of a Mexican American Vietnam veteran at the hands of police who beat him and pushed him into a bayou led to a transformation of the Houston City Council and more scrutiny of police practices. Several chapters in this work review efforts to teach social justice to students – such as Randall E. Osborne and Paul Kriese who focus on the development of a sociocentric world view, Karon LeCompte and Stephanie Sefcik who focus on teach- ing the teachers to focus on learning as it relates to social justice, Marilyn Moore who questions access to education and the lack of social justice in such a reality, and Kevin D. Blair who wishes to develop in undergraduates a commitment to ending poverty. What these chapters have in common is a desire to make social justice an integral component of education and to encourage students to examine their values. In the third section of this work, the authors provide their views on practical applications of knowledge about social justice, poverty and race. These chapters ad- dress relations between ethnic groups – such as Joanna Zubrzycki’s chapter on justice for indigenous peoples, Cecilia Giusti’s concerns over problems of poverty in Texas border colonias, Sabry Shehata’s desire to develop more productive cultivars or ani- mals as a method of relieving hunger and malnutrition, Elvinet Wilson’s effort to re- conceptualize the story of U.S. cultural adaptation and John E. Valdez’ look at how migrant workers were able to push for social justice in their fight for fair labor practic- es. Yet focus on real struggles and immediate practical issues raises problems of its own: Would better means of evaluating students and schools change the way that education sorts children into some who enter high wage professions and others (much more numerous) who work mind-numbing jobs for low wages or—worse yet—suffer from recurrent unemployment? With a new city council, do black and Hispanic resi- dents of Houston now have equal opportunity? What evidence is there connecting more effective teaching about social justice with greater social justice? Are poverty and tensions between disadvantaged groups in decline? Can we look forward to a fu- ture where all people receive a nutritious diet and flourish in good health? We seem to be faced with a dilemma. In thinking about social injustice we can describe forms of social organization in which all live well and prosper together in a human community. The utopianism of John Rawls and my own work illustrate such descriptions. But how do those theories engage the concrete injustices that people face? Charles Mills (2005), anticipating Sen (2009), has taken to task Rawlsian “ideal theory” for evading concrete racial injustices to Americans of African descent. So utopian schemes of perfectly just societies can be just so much useless fantasizing. But the other horn of the dilemma is that, in focusing on concrete achievable reforms, we may take too much injustice for granted. The African National Congress’s ascent to power in South African leaves in- tact the townships filled with poverty and unemployment even though it eliminates the stigmas of the pass laws and white rule. The rebellion against Mubarak’s brutality in Egypt brings to power generals who will, I predict, reproduce the old political and social order. Even worse, efforts to relieve poverty may ignore large scale social forces that create poverty; the net result may be that we feed the hungry as hunger increases .
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