And why must we be careful? Because most people who use the term either have no idea what it means, or they just won’t come clean and admit in plain language that they favor socialism. My guess is the former, but in either case, it is scary that people are throwing around this word because Obama does, when he probably doesn’t know what it means either. Catholic philosopher Michael Novak wrote an insightful article summarized here on social justice, based on the writings of Friedrich A. Hayek, the esteemed Austrian-born economist and philosopher. According to Wikipedia, Hayek is “known for his defense of classical liberalism and free-market capitalism against socialist and collectivist thought,” and is “considered to be one of the most important economists and political philosophers of the twentieth century.” If you are interested in political philosophy and haven’t heard about or read Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, you are missing out on a masterwork warning against the dangers of the collectivist idea of empowering government with increasing economic control. History has shown that when the government promises utopia if you will simply cede more control of your life to them, as the Obama administration is doing, then you won’t achieve utopia, and will lose the liberties you once appreciated to boot. But it will be too late then.
The trouble with “social justice,” points out Hayek, is the very meaning of the term, as most of those who write about social justice never provide a definition. It is a vague term with serious intellectual difficulties, but generally is an instrument of ideological intimidation whose purpose is to gain power through legal (i.e., government) coercion. The term “social justice” has been around since the 1840s, but John Stuart Mill gave the term it’s canonical status years later in his classic work Utilitarianism:
Society should treat all equally well who have deserved equally well of it, that is, who have deserved equally well absolutely. this is the highest abstract standard of social and distributive justice; towards which all institutions, and the efforts of all virtuous citizens, should be made in the utmost degree to converge.
The problem, according to Hayek, is that Mill imagines societies as being virtuous in the same manner that individuals are. This could be the case in a personalized society with a king, tyrant, or tribal chief, where one person makes all crucial decisions. But the demand for social justice did not arise until modern times and complex societies where rules are applied impersonally according to law. The birth of this concept coincided with two important shifts in human consciousness: the “death of God” and the rise of the “command economy.” When God supposedly “died,” people began to trust only in reason and the concomitant inflated ambition of man to do what God couldn’t. The now divine reason (i.e., science) led to the command economy that would command and human beings would follow collectively. The death of God, the rise of science and the command economy would allow the intellectuals to rule.
So it would follow that “social justice” naturally leads to a command economy where individuals are told what to do, with those in charge being easily identified. But that presumes people are guided by external direction instead of by their internal rules of right conduct. The point is individual choices made by people in a free society are not distributed according to some recognizable principle of justice. Thus no one individual, congressional committee, or political party can design rules that can anticipate each individual merit or need. Quite simply, no one person can possibly have sufficient knowledge of the personal details of another. The problem here, and what is so destructive about the term “social justice,” is that the term “social” doesn’t describe the virtuous actions of many individuals, but rather some utopian goal whereby all institutions and individuals are made to converge by government coercion. This is what we have historically seen in command economies such as that of Nazism and communism. Hayek notes that the “social” in “social justice” does not emerge organically and spontaneously based on the behavior of free individuals, but from an “abstract ideal imposed from above.”
Hayek is not someone who is against social justice, as long as it is “rightly understood.” He sees himself as someone who wants to help others to grasp the intellectual keys necessary for a free and creative society. Social justice, rightly understood, is a way of bringing about justice that is “social” in two senses. The first is people coming together, inspiring and organizing each other to work together to bring about a particular work of justice. This would be where free citizens, exercising self-government, do for themselves what needs to be done without turning to government. This is commonly seen as “giving back” for all that one has received from a free society. The second characteristic is aimed at the good of a group, and not at the good of one person only, where citizens come together to perform a civic duty such as building a school, a bridge, repairing a playground, or holding a bake sale for a charitable cause. The object in this second sense is primarily aimed towards doing good for others.
The virtue of social justice, according to Hayek, is that it is ideologically neutral. It doesn’t matter if a person is left, right, or center, and spans the whole spectrum of human social activities (scientific, religious, political, economic, etc.). The important thing here is that we not consider any use of social justice that is not oriented around the virtue of individuals. Otherwise, it is a fraud. My interpretation of this is that fundamentally, if you don’t have a virtuous society, then you will never have social justice. Thinking that you can have a society that is not virtuous, yet have a government that is virtuous, is a fundamentally flawed view because anyone from government comes out of society. Moreover, whatever virtue government has, or lack thereof, is magnified because its actions are concentrated in the hands of a few instead of being distributed throughout a society whose existence depends on virtue.
Neglect of social justice as an attribute of individuals, wrote Hayek, has moral consequences:
It is one of the greatest weaknesses of our time that we lack the patience and faith to build up voluntary organizations for purposes which we value highly, and immediately ask the government to bring about by coercion (or with means raised by coercion) anything that appears as desirable to large numbers. Yet nothing can have a more deadening effect on real participation by the citizens than if government, instead of merely providing the essential framework of spontaneous growth, becomes monolithic and takes charge of the provision for all needs, which can be provided for only by the common effort of many. [emphasis mine]
What I see today in America (which I believe is similar to what Hayek saw in Germany in the early 1930s) is a phenomenon that is no different than the intentions of societies in the past that adopted communism to deadly effect. We appear to be headed away from self-reliance and personal responsibility, moving towards daily reliance on government, with productive citizens coerced to accept responsibility for the able but less productive in the name of social justice. We look askance at the Constitution as an old and outdated document, instead of one that perceptively grasps human nature through time, and proposes a system of government that avoids tyranny through the creation of a virtuous society centered on individual initiative. We have some hard decisions to make in terms of the direction of this country over the coming months and years. Winston Churchill is quoted as saying: “The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative.” It is my hope that we will eventually “do the right thing.”
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