Social justice

This is one of those popular words today. I know what social means . And Justice, is a bit more complex. 

In general being just is being fair or impartial.  In a quick perusal of the literature I came across the idea of four concepts of justice and found it information

1. Distributive - determine who gets what

2. Proecedural - determining how this is done, how fairly people are treated.

3. Retributive - this is based on punishment models got dealing with “wrong doing.

4..Restorative - this tries to restore relationships to ‘rightness’

Key principles add equality and fairness to the above. 

The first principle of justice is apparently equal and maximal feasible liberty for all.

Now I don’t know this field but know that every word uttered in the realm of law like theology and philosophy has a library devoted to it and immense controversy.  I’m dependent here on a ‘google search’ 

When I searched Social Justice definition I got an AI overview that said

“Social justice is the concept of fair and equitable distribution of resources, opportunities, and rights within a society for all its members.  It’s is grounded in the principles of equality and solidarity, aiming for a society where everyone has accesss to what they need to succeed regardless of background, and where human rights are protected and respective for all. This includes addressing systemic inequalities based on factors like race, gender, age, ability or economic status.” 

Now I’m concerned already with

A) who distributes what. There is a vast distinction in this between DEI and Meritocracy , between government socialism, which Stalin called ‘communism lite’ and capitalism or free enterprise. There is a difference between indiviualist, family, community and collectivist models.  

Mostly it’s idealistic and overlooks history and human nature and fundamental deception.  The Trojan Horse , the Taquiuya, the carrot and stick are all considerations .

In my first course in political science as a ‘young person’ the professor put up three excerpts and asked the class to vote on them.  We later found one was from Das Kapital , the communist manifesto, the next from Mein Kamf , the Nazi creed and finally the last one was from the Us Bill of Rights Or Gettysburg Address. I don’t remember which but I do remember that the majority of students, myself included thought communism and nazism sounded good.  There has been hundreds of millions of deaths associated with both and Nazisim , national socialism versus communism, international socialism have always failed and lead to dictatorship and committee dictatorship.  

B) What are ‘opportunities’ and ‘rights’. Are we even agreed on that.  I remember thee story of Alexander asking they greatest philosopher of the day what he wanted and the philosopher said to Alexander, the greatest leader of all time then, ‘move out of the sun.’ There is obviously metaphor in the reply but just as importantly this poor man was telling the great man not to block the sun rays.  In cities there are laws against ‘blocking views’ today’s.  How high you can build where and what you can build. A view affects housing price.

There’s a whole issue of money and currency too.  The gold standard is different form many different earlier standards which included cows.

Unpacking this definition would be a major issue.  I jumped at the word ‘solidarity’.  My goodness. That’s not something I expected but it’s very popular I believe to the leftist and activist and mobs and gangs and the question arrises about this word and democracy.  Democracy is a virtue signalling pretty word but it only has value when it’s couple with anonymity and closed ballots.  When it was just a raise of hand it was open to ‘retributive justice’ from the big boss or the gang or sore losers.  We are seeing ‘tribal’ ‘block’ voting in the west again with the Muslims hiring the mayors as once unions functioned in that ‘tribal’ way.  A kind or reverse racism is going on.  But this is in practice not ‘ideally’. Some say you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette and the whole concept of what a ‘few’ means when governments are making decisions that affect millions or billions.  

I rather enjoyed Thomas Sowell suggested social justice is what used to be associated with the sin of envy.  His latest book is called Social Justice Fallacies. 

I love the Oxford Dictionary which says that the earliest use of the term is the 1820’s.  Today’s terms is different and tied to other ideas like ‘diversity’.  Then the term ‘privilege’ comes up but it’s in these political group constructs. Obviously there are immense differences between individuals and indeed the differences within a  groups are considered greater than the differences between groups.  

Equity is another catch word.  The trouble is that people talk about equality of outcomes versus equality of opportunity.  

Rawls is quoted by some as the political philosopher of today but when I read his book I found him to be simply a neo Marxist and Marx is not only outdated but painfully so. 

I really can’t even say yet if ‘social justice’ is a good thing.  I suspect reading Thomas Sowell’s book Social Justice Falacies will answer that.