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Social Justice Simplified: How to Teach a Contested Concept

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Social Justice Simplified: How to Teach a Contested Concept Social Justice Simplified: How to Teach a Contested Concept Dr. Louis Tietje // Metropolitan College of New York Dr. Steven Cresap // Metropolitan College of New York ABSTRACT Social or distributive justice refers to just distributions of income and wealth. Because social justice is an essentially contested concept, it has no true or core meaning, only several conflicting interpretations. This pluralism creates a problem for teachers who must explain to students how the various interpretations differ and underlie policy disputes. We propose that the plurality of interpretations can be understood as differences between a basic set of norms: equality, merit, contribution, effort, and choice. These norms are associated with familiar political ideologies. We illustrate each of these norms in a series of cartoons and suggest that moral opinions about the best norm result in irresolvable conflicts between the norms. We apply our theoretical analysis to these ideological conflicts in the policy areas of income, education, and discrimination in employment. INTRODUCTION Since the term emerged in the 19th century, “social justice,” also known as distributive justice, refers to just distributions of income and wealth. Philosophers have been on a quest for the single best interpretation of the term. They have not been successful. In Gallie’s (1964) opinion, the reason is that social justice is an essentially contested concept: There is no true or core meaning, only several conflicting interpretations (pp. 157- 191). This pluralism creates a problem for teachers who must explain to students how the various interpretations differ and underlie policy disputes. We believe that our kind of analysis improves teachers’ understanding of the perennial disputes about income inequality. Using it puts teachers in a better position to help students understand how disputes about the justice of economic distributions and policy derive from commitments to different norms of social justice. We will use the term “norm” in this article. Feinberg (1973) uses the term “principle,” as do others (Miller, 1999). Terms such as “criterion” and “standard” are possible, but, in our opinion, “norm” more clearly conveys the moral connotation of social justice. Based on the work of Feinberg (1973), we propose that the plurality of interpretations can be understood as differences between a basic set of norms: equality, merit, contribution, effort, and choice. Choice is our addition to Feinberg’s set of principles. Merit, contribution, and effort are desert norms. Karl Marx is famous for the formula, from each according to _____, to each according to _____. Filling in the second blank with one of the norms is one way to differentiate political philosophies, theories and ideologies. For example, to each according to “need” yields the communist norm. We illustrate each of the norms in a series of cartoons.1 Moral opinion about the 80 best norm accounts for irresolvable conflicts between equality and the desert norms of merit, contribution, and effort. All of these norms conflict with choice. To demonstrate the usefulness of our analysis to teachers and students, we describe these ideological conflicts in the policy areas of income, education, and discrimination in employment. Our approach to teaching social justice is a proposal, which we have not actually implemented. We hope to try it with students in the near future. Then, we will ask students to fill in the balloons in the cartoons and describe what they see and understand. We have filled in the balloons with what the characters might say and offered commentary, which we intend to share with students at appropriate points in the discussion. HISTORICAL ORIGINS The idea of justice as a fitting reward for desert is found in the three major Western religions. As expressed in the Christian version, “Whatever a man sows that shall he also reap” (Galations 6:7). At judgment day, each one of us will be rewarded or punished according to our good or bad works. The first philosophical definition is found in Book I of Plato’s Republic: “justice consists in rendering to each his due.” According to Aristotle in his Nichomachean Ethics, rewards and punishments should be distributed in proportion to merit (Pojman, 2006, p. 17). In early understandings, desert is a matter of individual responsibility and distributive justice mainly applies to the distribution of benefits and burdens by political authorities (Feinberg, 1973, p. 107). Aristotle’s organization of the subject matter of justice and the classical concept of justice as desert remained unchanged until the nineteenth century. In Utilitarianism, published in 1861, Mill (1979) was the first to link social and distributive justice but only implied that society itself is ultimately responsible for the distribution of goods. Karl Marx did not say anything about social justice, and he identified justice only as part of bourgeois ideology which he argued would disappear with the end of capitalism. He is famous for the communist slogan, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” which appeared in the Critique of the Gotha Program published in 1875. In the same letter, he also provided the reasoning behind a lesser known socialist slogan, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his contribution” (Marx, 1972). These slogans should be understood as descriptive, not normative, propositions. They introduced contribution, which will later be understood as a basis of desert, and need into discussions of the meaning of social justice. In his 1931 encyclical, Quadragesimo anno, Pope Pius XI shifted the focus from individual to social responsibility and from political to economic distribution. He also introduced equality as the norm of social justice (Burke, 2011, p. 72). Pius’s concept of social justice was widely disseminated as official Catholic social teaching. This is one reason for the association of social justice with the left. Another reason is the dominance of the views of philosopher John Rawls in intellectual circles in the twentieth century. Rawls (1999) argued that income and wealth should be distributed equally unless economic inequalities are “to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged,” which is his well-known Difference Principle (p. 266). He also accepted the attribution of injustice to impersonal states of affairs and offered a critique of desert as an acceptable principle of social justice that persuaded many philosophers. Equality became the assumed norm of social justice for progressives and welfare liberals. 81 Nozick (1974), who was critical of Rawls’s A Theory of Justice of three years earlier, introduced choice as an alternative norm of social justice. Choice became the assumed norm of social justice for classical liberals and libertarians. Since the nineteenth century, philosophers have argued for the liberal and libertarian norms of equality and choice, but desert norms continue to be part of the popular imagination. IDEOLOGICAL FORMULATIONS OF SOCIAL JUSTICE Historically, as we have seen, social justice became associated with liberalism in which equality is the ideal, but, in principle, any norm can be the ideal of social justice. Depending on the norm, social justice can be a libertarian, liberal, conservative, socialist, or communist concept. Using Marx’s formula, the norms and political ideologies are related in the following way: Libertarian: from each as they choose, to each as they are chosen Liberal: from each as they choose, to each an equal share Conservative: from each according to ability, to each according to desert (merit, contribution, effort) Socialist: from each according to ability, to each according to contribution Communist: from each according to ability, to each according to need The libertarian formulation is taken from Nozick (1974); the socialist and communist formulations are from Marx (1972). The liberal and conservative formulations are the authors’. Contrary to popular opinion, Marx was not opposed to the classical notion of justice. In fact, he thought that in the absence of economic abundance, a socialist society would be regulated by contribution, which is a desert norm. Libertarians and liberals share the first part of the formula, from each as they choose, because they belong to the same family. Their common ancestor is classical liberalism, represented by such historical figures as John Locke and Adam Smith. Libertarianism is the twentieth century child of classical liberalism. What is today called “liberalism” is a reformed version of classical liberalism and sometimes known as modern or welfare liberalism (Ball & Dagger, 2011). Liberals have usually not insisted upon absolute equality, that is, exactly the same share of economic goods for everyone, but they believe that wide disparities in income and wealth can lead to economic instability and stagnation (Stiglitz, 2013). For liberals, equal shares is an ideal toward which we should strive. Liberals also support distribution according to basic needs. SOCIAL JUSTICE AS AN ESSENTIALLY CONTESTED CONCEPT Which of the norms of social justice is correct? The majority of philosophers favor equality as the norm and assume that society, not individuals, is responsible for distributive outcomes. Some philosophers, however, have recently begun to reconsider the merits of desert (Olsaretti, 2003). Aside from philosophers, there is significant popular support for the desert norms and individual responsibility. Based on cross-cultural research,
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