"Nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.” (F.A. Hayek)
You might think that only rogues and scoundrels would oppose Social Justice, but you would be mistaken, as the quote (above) from F.A. Hayek demonstrates. For another example, the late theologian Michael Novak, steeped as he was in the tradition of Catholic “social thought,” nevertheless found the idea of “social justice” annoyingly vague. Moreover, he suspected the motives as well as the reasoning of those who claimed to believe in it:
"...whole books and treatises have been written about social justice without ever defining it. It is allowed to float in the air as if everyone will recognize an instance of it when it appears. This vagueness seems indispensable. The minute one begins to define social justice, one runs into embarrassing intellectual difficulties. It becomes, most often, a term of art whose operational meaning is, “We need a law against that.” In other words, it becomes an instrument of ideological intimidation, for the purpose of gaining the power of legal coercion."
Unfortunately for Novak’s argument, his complaints about “social justice” could also apply to the basic term “justice,” a term which itself famously leads to “embarrassing intellectual difficulties,” as Socrates and his various interlocutors discovered. We cannot define “justice” with any precision; attempting to do so inevitably forces us to use equally imprecise words like “fairness” or “deserves”. “Justice” and “injustice” are not like “up” and “down”; one person’s “justice” is another person’s “oppression”. 1 The uncomfortable reality is that all law is, or can be viewed as, “an instrument of ideological oppression” enforced by “the power of legal coercion,” although making that argument is unlikely to help your chances in any court.
Novak’s objections to “social justice,” then, were not really about its conceptual ‘vagueness’ but about his ideological opposition (he was a committed social, cultural, and economic conservative) to the progressive policies and perspectives which “social justice” advocates tend to promote. 2 Social Justice Warriors aren’t the only ones who come to the table with an agenda.
More recently, Australian academic Ben O’Neill wrote (for the Mises Institute) about “The Injustice of Social Justice”. O’Neill offered a brief but full-throated libertarian manifesto; “Since the program of social justice inevitably involves claims for government provision of goods, paid for through the efforts of others,” he explained, “the term actually refers to an intention to use force to acquire one's desires. Not to earn desirable goods by rational thought and action, production, and voluntary exchange, but to go in there and forcibly take goods from those who can supply them!” 3
One can dispute O’Neill’s claim that “social justice inevitably involves” forcible takings; sometimes it means demanding a seat at the table, being listened to, and being treated with respect, none of which necessarily takes anything away from anyone else (you can always just get a bigger table). It is undeniable, however, that some of the “program of social justice” involves redistribution of resources, some of which were forcibly and unjustly taken in the first place—but libertarians prefer not to get bogged down in the historical record, the invocation of which they see as a ploy to rationalize injustices in the present.
O’Neill objects as well to what he considers the misuse of the language of “rights”:
The notion of "rights" is a mere term of entitlement 4 indicative of a claim for any possible desirable good, no matter how important or trivial, abstract or tangible, recent or ancient. It is merely an assertion of desire, and a declaration of intention to use the language of rights to acquire said desire.
His objection is bolstered by his entirely different idea of what constitutes “rights”:
An actual right is a moral prerogative derived from the application of moral philosophy to the nature of man. The term is a term of philosophy designating an actual moral principle, a principle that should be derived objectively by an examination of the nature of morality and the nature of man. Rights are not mere subjective constructs, as they are so often treated. Rather, they are objective principles validated by moral philosophy (in particular, by political philosophy, which is the sub-branch of moral philosophy that deals with the morality of the use of force).
It may be that in Ben O’Neill’s native land of Australia, rights are considered “objective principles validated by moral philosophy,” but in America, rights are “validated” by political deliberation encoded into law (including our founding Constitution) and interpreted by courts. Rights are neither objective principles nor “mere subjective constructs”; they are collective achievements which have been fought for (literally, at times) over the centuries.
O’Neill is correct that “rights talk” is often used as part of a rhetorical strategy. Since rights are, practically speaking, what a given society (its populace, its government, and its courts) accepts as rights, establishing or securing them often requires argument and persuasion. In America, our Constitution specifies and guarantees certain rights while leaving the door open for the assertion and protection of others—if our assertions convince our fellow citizens and/or the courts. When we speak about “rights,” we are trying to convince our fellow citizens, the government, or the courts that our claims or our actions are valid, or that someone else’s claims or actions are not valid.
In other words, there is nothing wrong with “rights talk”; it is how we define, clarify, extend, modify, and defend our rights. The alternative, as history demonstrates, is violence.
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https://mises.org/library/injustice-social-justice
1 In its infinite wisdom, Wikipedia explains “justice”:
“Justice, in its broadest sense is the principle that people receive that which they deserve; with the interpretation of what then constitutes "deserving" being impacted upon by numerous fields, with many differing viewpoints and perspectives, including concepts of moral correctness based on ethics, rationality, law, religion, equity, and fairness. Consequently, the application of justice differs in every culture.”
2 Decades before Novak, F.A. Hayek (The Road to Serfdom) made much the same argument. Hayek “rejected the very idea of social justice as meaningless, self-contradictory, and ideological, believing that to realize any degree of social justice is unfeasible, and that the attempt to do so must destroy all liberty.” Hayek’s argument hinged, to some extent, on his contention that the concepts of “justice” and “injustice” apply only to individual moral agents. “Society,” according to Hayek (and Margaret Thatcher), is a convenient fiction devoid of moral agency; as such, it cannot be judged “just” or “unjust”. With all due respect, that conclusion is preposterous on its face; social arrangements and institutions do not exist in a realm somehow removed from ethical and moral consideration. When one’s conclusion is so far astray, one should go back and check one’s premises; in this case, Hayek failed to note that “individual moral agents” sometimes decide, and act, collectively and that the “justice” of such decisions and actions is open to debate.
3 “Force,” as it is used here, includes the force of law and especially the force of tax law: taxation, in the libertarian view, is theft. The elasticity of words like "force" and "compel" enables libertarians and conservatives to call government regulations "tyranny" and to equate (as did Ronald Reagan) "single-payer healthcare coverage" with totalitarianism.
4 “Term of entitlement” should not be confused with the classic tear-jerker “Terms of Endearment”; nor should O’Neill’s pejorative use of the phrase distract us from the fact that libertarianism’s basic premise is that individuals are entitled to what they produce, what they earn, what they have worked for, etc. To put it another way: libertarians believe that individuals have a right to keep what is theirs. “Entitlement” and “right” are at the heart of the libertarian ethic.
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