Is Social Justice Just?

            Few things are of more importance to a society than its conception of justice, and few are capable of arousing more intense emotion,  because it is justice which provides the chief criterion for the legitimate use of force.  In the name of justice people are arrested, handcuffed, put on trial, fined, sent to prison, and sometimes put to death.  The concept of justice provides every society with its most fundamental rule of social order.

            During the twentieth century, however, a revolution took place in the Western world's conception of justice. Our ordinary idea of it, which we employ in dealing with other individuals in the ordinary transactions of daily life, making an agreement, paying a bill, resolving a dispute, putting criminals in jail, a conception of justice at least as old as recorded history and familiar to all people everywhere, was superseded by a new conception which focuses instead on society as a whole.  The question the new theory seeks to answer is not: what is the right and the wrong thing for a particular person in particular circumstances to do?  but:  how should power be distributed in society?  This question has now been widely elevated to the status of the main concern of ethics.  "The primary subject of justice," according to John Rawls, celebrated proponent of the new theory, is no longer the individual person in his actions towards others but "the basic structure of society."  According to the new theory, which goes by such names as "social justice," or "economic justice," "justice as fairness," or "the liberal theory of justice" (in the U.S.), justice demands equality of power in society.   It is no longer merely unfortunate or regrettable that some people should be poor and powerless while others are rich and powerful; it is unjust. 

            "Social justice" is a demand addressed to society as a whole and not to the individual; and as such it is a demand that can be met only by the state. To make "social justice" into the basic principle of social order is to endorse the wholesale transfer of responsibility from individuals to the state, and inevitably to endorse the expansion of the state and the increase of its coercive powers. "The more one considers the matter, the clearer it becomes that redistribution is in effect far less a redistribution of free income from the richer to the poorer, as we imagined, than a redistribution of power from the individual to the state." (Bertrand de Jouvenel, The Ethics of Redistribution, Indianapolis, Liberty Press, 1990, p.72.)  By contrast, to emphasize the ordinary conception of justice, as the regulative principle of individual transactions, is to advocate individual freedom and accountability, in the face of the coercive powers that are opposed to them.  

            Many people have welcomed the new theory, seeing the changes it has wrought as desirable and necessary.  For some Christians, "social justice" is the implementation of the message of the Christian Gospel to love and help the poor.  Governmental programs of "social justice" have provided substantial economic and other benefits to many individuals and groups.  On the other hand, these benefits come at the expense of other citizens and at a substantial cost to society as a whole, including hidden costs to those it is intended to benefit.  If "social justice" is merely an extension of ordinary justice, this may be right and proper.  However, "social justice" is not merely an extension of ordinary justice, but essentially conflicts with it.  Some recent examples will show the contrast between the two. 

The Conflict     

            In Philadelphia a new social-justice policy of the city has evicted a noble organization, the Boy Scouts, from their historic home.  In 1928 the then newly inaugurated organization constructed a large building for their own use which they donated to the city in return for the right to rent it back for an annual payment of $1.  Now it is a basic rule of ordinary justice that contracts must be followed, agreements must be kept.  And it has been one of the rules of the organization since its inception, and a rule that in no way goes against ordinary justice, that no one who is openly homosexual can be a member.  However, in 1993 the city passed a "social justice" ordinance prohibiting the use of public funds to support any organization that engages in "discriminatory practices."  In 2003 a local scout challenged the organization's policy by announcing on television that he was homosexual, and was expelled from membership.  The city thereupon demanded that the Boy Scouts either change their policy or pay the market rent for the building, which would be about $200,000 per year, far beyond their means.  Consequently the Scouts are being forced to leave their historic home.  The requirements of "social justice" here clearly contradict the demands of ordinary justice.

            Likewise in Philadelphia under the same law a sandwich shop owner has been charged with discrimination for asking his patrons to order their sandwiches in the English language.  Joe Vento, a locally famous vendor of cheese-steak sandwiches in an area containing large numbers of immigrants put a small sign up which said, "This is America. When ordering, please speak English." From the perspective of ordinary justice such a sign is fully within the proprietor's rights. It commits no crime or injustice and inflicts no harm on anyone.  However, the sign offends against "social justice" because it suggests a certain kind of inequality between those who speak English and those who do not.   The city's Commission on Human Relations summoned the vendor to appear before it to answer the charge of discrimination.  The Commission has recently found in favor of Mr. Vento by a vote of 2 to 1 in the wake of heavy publicity supporting him,  but the charge itself, together with the fact that the outcome was long uncertain and that one of three members of the Commission agreed with the charge,  points to the contradiction that exists between the demands of ordinary justice and those of "social justice."  During 2006 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a U.S. federal agency, filed over 200 lawsuits against employers over rules requiring employees to speak English.

            In April 2008 the New Mexico Human Rights Commission ordered a Christian photographer to pay a fine of $6,600 for declining to photograph a commitment ceremony between two lesbians.  (Report in the Washington Times, April 13, 2008.)

            In January 2008 the City Commission of Gainesville, Florida, passed a "gender identity" ordinance which affords any man the right to use a female restroom if he perceives himself to be a woman, and vice-versa. Specifically, the ordinance reads: "'gender identity' means 'an inner sense of being a specific gender, or the expression of a gender identity by verbal statement, appearance, or mannerisms, or other gender-related characteristics of an individual with or without regard to the individual’s designated sex at birth.'”  The City’s Legal and Equal Opportunity staffs confirmed that an individual merely has to articulate an inner sense of being of a particular sex to be legally protected under this ordinance.  The conception of "social justice" evidenced here is in fairly obvious conflict with our ordinary conception of what is right and wrong.  Last week a citizens' group announced it had collected enough signatures to have a measure to repeal the ordinance placed on the ballot in 2009.

Self-defense:

            On the traditional view of justice, as explained for example by John Locke in 1688, the right of self-defence entitles one to kill an intruder who uses force.

 "This makes it lawful for a man to kill a thief, who has not in the least hurt him, nor declared any design upon his life, any farther than, by the use of force, so to get him in his power, as to take away his money, or what he pleases, from him; because using force, where he has no right, to get me into his power, let his pretence be what it will, I have no reason to suppose, that he who would take away my liberty, would not, when he had me in his power, take away everything else.  And therefore it is lawful for me to treat him as one who has put himself into a state of war with me, i.e. kill him if I can; for to that hazard does he justly expose himself, whoever introduces a state of war, and is aggressor in it." (Second Treatise, Ch.III.)

            But from the perspective of "social justice," the criminal should also be considered a victim, namely of disadvantaged societal or perhaps biological circumstances. This entails a very different and much weaker view of the right of self-defence, which tends to defend the rights of the criminal as ardently as those of his victim, and construe strictly the penalties that can be levied against him.

            The New York Times reported last week that a city transit worker, Maurice Parks, who was attacked by a would-be robber, one Marcus Meyers, shot and wounded him in self-defense. Parks, the victim, was charged with attempted murder, but Meyers, the robber, only with attempted robbery.

            In the United Kingdom. In 1973, a young man running on a road at night was stopped by the police and found to be carrying a length of steel, a cycle chain, and a metal clock weight.  He explained that a gang of youths had been after him.  At his hearing it was found that he had been threatened and had previously notified the police.  The justices agreed he had a valid reason to carry the weapons.  Indeed, 16 days later he was attacked and beaten so badly he was hospitalised.  But the prosecutor appealed the ruling, and the appellate judges insisted that carrying a weapon must be related to an imminent and immediate threat.  They sent the case back to the lower court with directions to convict.[1]

            In 1987, two men assaulted Eric Butler, a 56-year-old British Petroleum executive, in a London subway car, trying to strangle him and smashing his head against the door.  No one came to his aid.  He later testified, "My air supply was being cut off, my eyes became blurred, and I feared for my life."  In desperation, he unsheathed an ornamental sword blade in his walking stick and slashed at one of his attackers, stabbing the man in the stomach.  The assailants were charged with wounding.  Butler was tried and convicted of carrying an offensive weapon.[2]

            In 1994, an English homeowner, armed with a toy gun, managed to detain two burglars who had broken into his house while he called the police.  When the officers arrived, they arrested the homeowner for using an imitation gun to threaten or intimidate.  In a similar incident the following year, when an elderly woman fired a toy cap pistol to drive off a group of youths who were threatening her, she was arrested for putting someone in fear.  Now the police are pressing Parliament to make imitation guns illegal.[3]

            In 1999, in a celebrated case, Tony Martin, a 55-year-old Norfolk farmer living alone in a shabby farmhouse, awakened to the sound of breaking glass as two burglars, both with long criminal records, burst into his home.  He had been robbed six times before, and his village, like the majority of rural English communities, had no police presence. He sneaked downstairs with a shotgun and shot at the intruders.  Martin received life in prison for killing one burglar, 10 years for wounding the second, and a year for having an unregistered shotgun.  The wounded burglar, having served 18 months of a three- year sentence, is now free and has been granted ?5,000 of legal assistance to sue Martin.[4]

            My point so far has been that, whether social justice is right or wrong, it is not merely different from ordinary justice, but is in conflict with it. Wherever it is applied, it trumps ordinary justice.  We cannot have both.  Let us now look a little more deeply into the reasons for this conflict.

 Ordinary Justice

            The traditional conception of justice is well summarized in a statement of Roman law (the preface to Justinian's Institutes):  "Cause no harm to others, and give to each person what belongs to him."  (Iuris praecepta sunt haec: honeste vivere, alterum non laedere, suum cuique tribuere.)  The outstanding or paradigmatical instances of injustice in this view are crimes, things such as murder, robbery, and rape.  These are considered unjust because they inflict undeserved harm on individuals.  The individuals who commit them are viewed as responsible for their actions, and therefore it is believed that they deserve to be punished.

            These instances of injustice share certain features.  A first feature to notice is that  they are actions  performed by individuals. There is a difference between an action and a state of affairs.  An action is something someone does.  A state of affairs is not something someone does.  For ethics the difference between these two is crucial, because ethics has to do with actions.  An action can produce a state of affairs, as its effect, but the distinction always remains between the action, which is the cause, and the state of affairs which is its effect.  A state of affairs is the way things are at some particular time and place.  It is a static condition: a state of affairs just is;  it is the kind of thing we would describe as a fact or a situation.  An action, by contrast,  is an event, a transient happening, carried out by a person, usually for some purpose.  A robbery is not a state of affairs, but an action.   Poverty is not an action, but a state of affairs.  Some states of affairs are the result of actions, but many, especially in the realm of nature, are not the result of any action, but just happen.  Poverty can be one of these.  In traditional ethics, human actions are at the center of the stage.  I am using "action" here as an umbrella term which includes all those ways in which the will can produce an effect in the world, for example through omission, neglect, culpable ignorance, and weakness of will.

            An action has certain features that are especially important in the traditional view of ethics.  One of these is its interior dimension, the state of mind in which it is done.  From the viewpoint of traditional ethics the intention and the interior mentality with which the person does the action is a vital consideration.  When we judge an  action to be ethical or unethical, we pay attention not only to the external or visible action, but to the state of mind in which it is done.  When I put the $100 lying on the shop counter in my pocket, it makes a difference ethically whether I believe it is  mine or yours. 

When a person performs an action intentionally, in the view of traditional ethics he is responsible for his action.  If it is a good action he can be praised for it, and if it is an evil action he can be blamed for it.  There can be guilt, and there can be innocence.  There can be reward, and there can be punishment.  If a person does an action which has the effect of causing harm to someone, but that was not his intention, then he is not considered to be fully responsible for the harm, and is not to be blamed for it.  Sometimes the intention alone is sufficient to condemn an action or a person, sometimes in addition we recognise a range of other internal states of mind, such as negligence, inattention, or mistaken belief as relevant to the action's moral status.  All of these things the Common law has traditionally taken into consideration, in judging a criminal act, under the concept of mens rea.  St. Augustine wrote: "Without mens rea there is no crime."  In other words, to have an injustice, somebody must have done something wrong.

Responsibility in the traditional sense presupposes that the person, that is, the sane conscious adult,  has free will, that he has the power to choose either to do the action or not to do it, that he could have done something else. If an action is not performed freely, it is not a human action. In the traditional view, ethics without free will is nonsense.

Since the person has the power to act freely, he can deserve, by the nature of his action, to receive from others a certain kind of response. If he deliberately does harm to someone who does not deserve to be harmed, in the traditional understanding of justice the perpetrator deserves to be punished.  Our traditional legal system was built on that  principle. The purpose of legal punishment was not to rehabilitate the criminal, nor to sequester him from society, but to make him suffer in some proportion to the harm he caused others, to "redress the balance of justice."  The just punishment is not the one that cures or rehabilitates or deters, but that is deserved.  Perhaps we could rehabilitate thieves by providing them with a five-year fully paid vacation in the Bahamas, but that would not be just because not deserved.

              For all these reasons, in the traditional view only actions can be directly  just or unjust. A state of affairs can be good or bad, but it cannot be unjust except as the result of an unjust action.  So for example if I have $100 in my pocket, that will be an unjust state of affairs if I have stolen it from you, but the real injustice was my action in stealing it.  The bare fact that I have $100 in my pocket of itself is neutral.  Similarly the situation created by a law can be unjust because a law is an action.  In the traditional view, an injustice cannot exist unless someone has done something wrong.

This applies also to distributive justice.  A just distribution of goods is first and foremost a just act of distribution carried out by some person.  Aristotle, who provides us with the classic description of distributive justice, says it is the virtue of not giving more to oneself than to others of what is good, and not giving less to oneself than to others of what is bad  (as when, in the kind of example he may have had in mind, one partner divides up the profits or losses from the voyage of  a trading ship among the other partners). 

            In the traditional theory there is an important distinction between justice and charity, or as it is sometimes called, benevolence or humanity.  An obligation in justice is one that can rightly be enforced by the threat of punishment, but an obligation in charity or humanity cannot. 

          The traditional theory embodies a strong conception of the individual. It presupposes that individuals have free will, that they are responsible for their actions, and if they wrong others they deserve punishment.

Social Justice

            The new theory of "social justice" rejects each of these presuppositions.

             It rejects the central importance of actions, because it understands justice as a quality of society, independently of any actions.  Because it rejects the centrality of actions, it rejects the central role of intention, of mens rea.  There is no internal dimension to social justice.  Because it  rejects the importance of actions and intention, it rejects belief in free will: it views the actions of human beings as the predetermined product of their social environment. And because it rejects free will, it rejects individual responsibility.  Society is responsible.

Category Mistake

            In modern philosophy there is a fallacy called a "category mistake."  This mistake consists in attributing to a particular object a quality of a kind that the object cannot possibly possess.  For example, if I were to say of this podium that it was "kind" or "caring" or "thoughtful," if I were speaking literally and not poetically or metaphorically, you would say I was crazy.  A piece of wood cannot be moral or immoral.  Similarly, the idea of "social justice" involves a category mistake, because it attributes a moral quality, justice or injustice, to something that cannot possibly possess it, namely a state of affairs that has arisen in society without anyone doing wrong.  Justice and injustice are ethical categories, and ethical judgements are always and everywhere about human actions.  The basic principle is this: if there is injustice somewhere, somebody must have done something wrong.  If nobody has done anything wrong, there is no injustice.

Civil Rights

            The chief form in which social justice asserts itself at the present time is through the concept of civil rights and the related idea of human rights.  The watershed event in this regard was the  Civil Rights Act of 1964.  All together there have been some dozen civil rights acts, six of them passed before 1964.  In the earlier legislation, the idea of civil rights was understood very differently.  The term referred originally to what would be called today "liberties" or "freedoms," such as the liberty to vote, the liberty to travel, to work, to marry, to make contracts and to give evidence in court.  But since 1964 civil rights means the principle of non-discrimination.

            To understand what happened in 1964 we need to distinguish between two different kinds of discrimination: forcible or coercive, and peaceful or non-coercive.  Forcible or coercive discrimination is the use of force to discriminate.  The chief example of this is slavery.  The next is "segregation," which properly means the use of the force of the law to keep the races separate.  Forcible discrimination was what the Ku Klux Klan practised, and the governments of the Southern states, with their Black Codes and the Jim Crow laws.  Peaceful or non-coercive discrimination, by contrast, consists mainly in refusing to do business in some way or to some extent with the  members of a particular group.  Forcible discrimination was always contrary to ordinary justice.  But peaceful discrimination was never contrary to it, for the same reason that boycotts were not.  In the Common law of England and America, there was never a crime of discrimination.  The basic principle was that a refusal to do business could not be construed as causing harm.  In a free society everyone had the right not to do business with anyone else.  In the traditional view, peaceful discrimination was a human right.

            The original Civil Rights Movement, from the beginning of the NAACP in 1910, was aimed mainly at eliminating segregation and other forms of coercive discrimination, and that was the purpose of the first six Civil Rights Acts.  But in 1964 something very significant happened.  The concept of civil rights was expanded from the prohibition of forcible to peaceful discrimination, or from the Ku Klux Klan and the Jim Crow laws to the ordinary actions of private individuals.  The effect of the 1964 law is to compel persons to do business with the members of certain groups, if they do business at all.  Unlike the earlier civil rights laws, from the viewpoint of economics the new law was a form of protectionism.  But from the viewpoint of the new theory of justice, it was fair and therefore just.  Interestingly, however, the 1964 Act makes a special exception for discrimination against communists.

            Something else happened in 1964. The civil rights movement of the 1960s, led by Martin Luther King, Jr., was concerned solely with the question of race, and this was also true of the first version of the Civil Rights bill.  At that stage, the proposed bill was thought of as a particular remedy for a particular problem in a particular country with a particular history.  But a strange thing happened on the way to passage.  The chairman of the House Rules Committee, one Howard Smith, was adamantly opposed to the bill, and determined to sink it. The cunning method he devised to do this was to add to the bill an amendment which prohibited discrimination on the ground of sex as well as race. His reasoning was apparently that no one would vote for that.  The amendment was indeed added, as a result of his influence, but he had reckoned without President Lyndon Johnson, who used the weight of his office to persuade Congress to pass the bill despite the added amendment.

            Unlike with the question of race, there had been no large, popular movement in the United States to eliminate differential treatment of the sexes.  In 1964 the feminist movement was still small.  Betty Friedan had just published her "Feminine Mystique" (a product of the labor union movement), the year before. (Horowitz, Daniel. “Rethinking Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique: Labor Union Radicalism and Feminism in Cold War America.” American Quarterly, Volume 48, Number 1, March 1996, pp. 1-42)  Gloria Steinem did not publish Ms Magazine till 1972.  American society at large in 1964 still generally accepted that men and women had in many respects different desires and different needs, and that there was a natural division of labor between them.  There was no political constituency for a law imposing gender equality. It is true that the Equal Pay Act had been enacted some months earlier, but the motive for that was very different: it was put forward by the labor unions in order to ward off "unfair competition" for men from women doing the same job at lower wages.  The Civil Rights Act of 1964 had a different motive, was far broader in scope, and its consequences have been much more far-reaching.

            By this accident of history discrimination as such was absolutised as an evil, and universalised.  For once discrimination on the ground of sex was prohibited, every other form of discrimination became illegitimate in principle (except, of course,  for affirmative action).  And this condemnation of discrimination was soon exported to other countries around the globe.  In remote New Zealand the law now prohibits discrimination on the grounds of sex, which includes pregnancy and childbirth, marital status, religious belief, ethical belief, colour, race, ethnic or national origin or citizenship, disability, age, political opinion, employment status, family status or sexual orientation.

Affirmative Action

            Perhaps in the light of this someone may be inclined to respond that the question then is about discrimination, which is an action, after all, rather than about equality, which is a state of affairs.  But to see that this is not so, but that the real question is about equality, you have only to consider the question of affirmative action.  Affirmative action is clearly a form of discrimination.  There can be no doubt about that whatever.  But it is discrimination for the purpose of creating equality, and so from the viewpoint of "social justice" it is not only permissible but necessary.  New Zealand law makes an explicit exception for affirmative action, which it terms a legitimate form of discrimination.  This is why the proponents of social justice have condemned the moves to eliminate affirmative action as destructive of the very purpose of the civil rights law.

Is Inequality Inherently Unjust?

            Equality and inequality are not actions, but states of affairs. Nor are they products of actions.  In the Western world, at least, poverty is not the result of anybody's deliberate intention. If justice consists in equality, and if inequality is inherently unjust, no matter how it came about, then the most fundamental conception of traditional ethics, the basis on which its entire structure is built, has to be abandoned.  Ethics is then no longer primarily a matter of what is done, but of the way things are.  States of affairs which are considered desirable are by that fact ethical and right, while states of affairs which are considered regrettable and undesirable are also ethically unjust.  Individual actions may still be unjust, but this injustice is derivative from and subsidiary to the states of affairs to which they lead.

"Disparate Impact"

            An example of this from our current legal system is the concept of "disparate  impact."  In 1971 the Supreme Court interpreted the 1964 Civil Rights Act to mean that in order to prove discrimination it was not necessary to show that discrimination was intentional, but only that an unequal state of affairs followed from some action.  Thus in 1996 a certain Martha Sandoval sued the state of Alabama over a regulation that driving tests be conducted only in English.  She could read enough English to cope with street signs but not enough to pass the written test.  She sued on the grounds that the law inadvertently discriminated against her because of her national origin.

The Abandonment of Causation

            In the traditional view, when harm has been done, the crucial question is who caused it.  But in the new theory this is not necessarily the case.  Instead, the question is how to relieve it.  In one actual case out of many that could be cited, a woman in tied up her dog outside a supermarket while she went in to shop.  Another woman came up and left her baby in a baby stroller nearby while she did the same.  The dog bit the baby.  Now once upon a time the baby's mother might have been held responsible. But in this case the baby’s mother herself sued.  Whom did she sue?  The supermarket, which, by some strange coincidence, alone had the money to pay the desired damages.  And she won!  This is known as the "deep pockets" theory of liability.  A bank robber, hurrying off with his loot, stepped on a glass skylight and fell through.  He sued the bank, and won.

Praise and Blame

            In the traditional theory, individuals, provided they are adult, sane and conscious, are responsible for their actions.  It follows from this, as we have noted, that there is such a thing as innocence, and there is such a thing as guilt, and these deserve praise on the one hand, and blame on the other.  Those who have done good deserve recognition and reward, and those who have deliberately injured others deserve condemnation and punishment.  In the new theory, however, things are very different.  There is, strictly speaking, no room for individual responsibility, since injustice consists in the mere fact of  poverty or inequality, without regard for how it came about.  The poor cannot be held responsible for their poverty, for that would be to "blame the victim."  The wealthy or powerful are automatically considered responsible for the condition of the poor.[5]   But in proper social-justice theory even the powerful are "responsible" only in a weak or relative sense, for ultimately their actions too are predetermined by their place in the societal structure.

            From the fact that we do not deserve our natural endowments, John Rawls concludes that we do not deserve anything we gain by using them.  This applies even to our moral character, for a person's "character depends in large part on fortunate family and social circumstances for which he can claim no credit."[6]   If an institution explicitly promises us something on condition that we fulfill some requirement, and if we fulfill the requirement, then can we be said to have a "legitimate expectation" of receiving what is promised, and in this sense, and only in this sense, to "deserve" it.  If you enter a race where it has been announced that the first past the post wins the prize, and if you are the first past the post, then you "deserve" the prize.

            But if a person does not deserve his good character, he also does not deserve his bad one.   From which it must follow that a murderer does not deserve punishment unless there is some law which has threatened him with punishment antecedently.  And this is in fact now the view of many criminologists.  Outside of institutions and their promises, "social justice" allows no room for desert. 

Interior and Exterior

            In traditional ethics, as we have noted, one's interior intention plays a key role, since it can decide whether an action is just or unjust. The interior dimension of the ethical life is its most crucial dimension.  In the Christian moral tradition, ethics is a question about the state of our soul.  But in the theory of social justice, since poverty or equality are external facts in relation to the individual, our soul is irrelevant.

            Social justice raises a question about our inner identity.  One of the great achievements of Western civilization has been the discovery of the individual.  This happened especially during the Middle Ages, when people became conscious of the depth of the interior emotional life, beginning with St. Augustine's Confessions, which created the literary form of the autobiography.  This interior individuality we possess is fashioned by our choices, by our freedom.  We live in a dialogue with ourselves, in which the demands of justice play a basic role.  But from the viewpoint of social justice, what counts is not our individuality, what we choose to do as individuals, or what is done to us: what counts is the group we belong to.  Justice means "getting ours" as a group.  The effect of the focus on social justice is to dry up the deepest sources of the interior life.

Animals

            On the traditional view, the concepts of justice and injustice apply only to human or rational beings, since only they have free will and  a conscience. Rights go together with duties, and only a being that is capable of having duties can have rights.  But in the new theory animals have rights even though they do not have duties, because the concept of equality can be applied to them.  Thus Peter Singer argues that the suffering of animals should be counted equally with that of human  beings.  In the traditional view, causing unnecessary pain to animals was considered, not an injustice, but a form of inhumanity.

Economics

            Ordinary justice and "social justice" have very different consequences for the material well-being of the community.  Ordinary justice makes possible a constant improvement in people's material standard of living, because it creates the conditions under which the free production and exchange of goods and services can be maximized.  Economic development results from economic freedom, and ordinary justice secures that freedom.  "Social justice", by contrast, hinders the material improvement of life because it hinders that freedom.  Supporters of "social justice" argue, it is true,  that the improvement in the standard of living that results from ordinary justice is restricted to a particular group in society and is not experienced equally by all.  It may be true that it is not always experienced by all immediately, and only after a lapse of time.  On the other hand, economic studies have shown that in the normal course of events, in the absence of unjustified coercion,  the chief beneficiaries of economic freedom are the poor, because what the poor most need are plenty of jobs and low prices, and these are fostered by a regime of ordinary justice.

            From the perspective of the science of economics, social justice or "economic justice" is a form of protectionism, the harmful effects of which have been closely studied and are well understood by economists.  Unlike protection from coercion, which makes it possible to compete freely, economic "protection" from the voluntary actions of the market renders the "protected" persons incapable of competing.  Supporters of "social justice" tend to downplay the significance of the discipline of economics, and even to reject it altogether as immoral.  But the basic concepts of economic science, such as the law of supply and demand or the concept of marginal utility, are neither good nor bad but simply express the logic of human interaction, as Ludwig von Mises among others has demonstrated.  Over the last hundred years "social justice" has caused a truly immense amount of economic harm among the peoples of the world.  Of course, hostility to commerce and its values has been an important motive for "social justice".  But those who deliberately inflict this harm have a great deal to answer for.  It is a consequence of this that in the twentieth century the principal opponents of "social justice" have been outstanding economists, such as Mises, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman.  Hayek wrote: "I have come to feel strongly that the greatest service I can still render to my fellow men would be that I could make the speakers and writers amoung them thoroughly ashamed ever again to employ the term 'social justice'."[7]   "It seems to be widely believed that 'social justice' is just a new moral value which we must add to those that were recognized in the past, and that it can be fitted within the existing framework of moral rules.  What is not sufficiently recognized is that in order to give this phrase meaning a complete change of the whole character of the social order will have to be effected."  He concludes: "The prevailing belief in 'social justice' is at present probably the gravest threat to most other values of a free civilization."

Institutions

            Civil society is created by institutions.  An institution is an organized form of cooperation.  Unlike ordinary justice, which makes organized cooperation possible, "social justice" works to undermine and enfeeble every kind of institution.  For particular institutions are created to serve particular purposes.  Schools are created to give children knowledge, businesses to make a profit, the military to defend the nation, police forces to enforce the law, churches to cultivate the spiritual dimension of human existence, symphony orchestras to offer music, universities to hand on and to increase the store of knowledge, language in order to communicate with one another, and so on.  Ordinary justice respects those purposes and helps to attain them. But under social justice, every institution acquires a new and additional purpose: to help create societal equality.  This additional purpose changes every institution because it makes it serve two masters.  It is no longer enough for schools to teach knowledge, they must in addition serve the cause of equality through their hiring practices, their curriculum, through social promotion and other measures.  It is not enough for business to benefit its customers, employees and owners, but it must also help to create equality by paying minimum wages, hiring certain classes of people whether that is in the interests of the business or not, as well as protecting the interests of its "stakeholders," those in any way affected by its decisions.  It is not enough for the military to defend the nation, but it must increase society's equality by recruiting and promoting particular groups of people, even though the military authorities may not consider them desirable for that purpose; it is not enough for the churches to care for the spiritual need of their members by following their ancient traditions of faith and order, but they must rewrite their scriptures and redefine the requirements for being a member of the clergy; and so on for every institution.  It is not enough for universities to teach and do research: the former president of a university (Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, George Washington University, DC) said on television recently that the social purpose of universities, the socialising of their students, was more important than their teaching purpose.  It is not enough for our language to serve as a means of communication, but it must be reformed and made "inclusive" in order to foster equality.  Even the institution of marriage, traditionally the quintessential institution of heterosexuality, must be redefined to permit the "marriage" of homosexuals.   

            Social justice not only changes all institutions, it also weakens them, because it deprives them of authority.  I do not say power, but authority. No institution can function without authority.  But under social justice the authority of parents is diminished in the family, the authority of teachers is reduced in the school, the authority of business owners to run their business is diminished, wherever there is authority, in the military, the police, the church, or even in literature, it is enfeebled, because now there is always a second master it must serve.  Under "social justice," all authority tends to be regarded with hostility as a potential source of exploitation and oppression.  One speaks of the "hermeneutic of suspicion."

Standards

            Another effect of social justice is on the concept of standards.  Every civilization has defined itself through certain standards. Without standards there is no civilization.  But the very concept of a standard is discriminatory.  For in any area of performance, the standard is set by the best. This implies the judgement that some activities are better than others, and so that those who do not perform up to the standard are inferior in that respect to those who do.  Standards create inequality, it is felt.  From the viewpoint of social justice and its accompanying idea of civil rights, therefore, standards should be abandoned, except perhaps for experts in particular circumstances. 

            To conclude, justice is a matter of how we treat one another. It is not a question of whether we have equal power or equal income or equal opportunity in society.  Immanuel Kant, who has some claim to be considered the greatest of philosophers, defined justice in this way: it is a quality of the individual will, by which it is in harmony with the liberty of other people's wills. In other words, an injustice is an action which infringes on the legitimate liberty of another person.

            Without going into the details  of that, it is clear that in his view justice is not a quality of society, it is not something collective, it is a quality of the individual, in his behavior towards other individuals. If Kant is correct, and there are very good reasons to think he is, then social justice is not justice at all.

            Since the 1960s Western society has experienced a diminution of the sense of individual responsibility. The best explanation of that lies in the almost universal adoption of the new conception of social justice. If we wish to have a society that recognizes once again the importance of individual responsibility, and which respects the harmless purposes of persons and their institutions, we need to abandon the gospel of equality, of social justice, and return to the ordinary and traditional view of justice that characterized the great legal systems of Roman law and the Common law: to cause no harm, and to give to others what belongs to them.