Social Justice Activism

Reisch • Defining Social Justice in a Socially Unjust World
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
however, the gap between the ideal of social justice and
the reality of persistent inequality and injustice became
more apparent, as did the difficulty of reconciling the goal
of social equality with the preservation of individual liberties
(Berlin, 1958). The elites that dominated emerging
nation-states rationalized their power by distinguishing in
both rhetoric and practice between political and economic
justice, and separating the abstraction of justice from the
legal concept of individual or social rights (Mill, 1971;
Sandel, 1982). This enabled them to withhold political
rights from the majority of the population, virtually ignore
the issue of social and economic rights (the so-called “Social
Question,” and even deny the humanity of large numbers
of people, particularly women and persons of color
(Miller, 1999; Nussbaum, 1999). The growing recognition
of the gap between social justice as an abstraction and
injustice as a fact of life produced a torrent of critical ideas
that inspired most of the reform movements and revolutions
of the period between 1815 and the outbreak of
World War I.
Foremost among the critics of these contradictions was
Karl Marx, who applied a rigorous, “scientific” politicaleconomic
analysis to the philosophic arguments of those
he pejoratively labeled “utopian socialists.” In contrast
with many contemporary economists (and twentieth century
Marxists), Marx expressed a holistic view of the
human condition and the social reality from which it
emerged. He argued that human beings did not have a
fixed, innate nature, but were defined by their social relationships
that, in turn, were dependent on the economic
structure of society and the classes it produced. Unlike
Hobbes, Marx rejected the idea that injustice was the byproduct
of natural human competition, selfishness, and
aggression. He asserted that the roots of injustice lie, instead,
in the political-economic structure that was based
on subjugation, discrimination, exploitation, and privilege
(Berlin, 1996). Justice would prevail, therefore, when individuals
received what they needed on the basis of their
humanity and not merely what they deserved on the basis
of their social class origin or productivity (Marx, 1964).
Thus, in the West, the idea of social justice gradually became
closely associated with the concept of a social contract
involving mutual rights and obligations. Nineteenth century
Liberals and Marxists differed sharply, however, in their
interpretation of the terms of this contract. The former emphasized
the preservation of individual liberty, including
property rights, and the latter stressed the attainment of social
equality (Tomasi, 2001; Ackerman, 1980; Barry, 1989;
Berlin, 1978; Bird, 1967; Campbell, 1989; Nozick, 1974).
In one sense, the debate revolved around distinctions between
contributive and distributive views of justice and the
implications of these concepts for the allocation of social
rights, goods, and responsibilities (White, 2000; Roemer,
1996; George & Wilding, 1994; Held, 1984).
During much of the twentieth century, although differences
emerged over the relative balance of these rights
and responsibilities, there was broad agreement in the
West that a social justice paradigm must incorporate various
means of achieving a fair distribution of societal
goods—tangible and intangible. In addition, there was
agreement that the ways in which society should pursue
such goals must be based on some accounting for either
the contribution of the individual to society or the individual’s
past, present, and potential role and status.
Summarizing this perspective, Miller (1976, 1999, 2001)
asserts that social justice reflects
the distribution of benefits and burdens throughout
a society, as it results from the major social institutions
such as property systems and public organizations.
It deals with such matters as the regulations of
wages and … profits, the protections of persons’
rights through the legal system, the allocation of housing,
medicine, welfare benefits, etc. (1976, p. 222)
Miller’s view of social justice is one of “just distribution”
that is not dependent on the nature of the goods allocated
or the policy domain, but on “modes of human relationship”
(Miller, 1999; Grogan, 2000). Recently,
feminist philosophers like Nussbaum and Held have added
a gender dimension to this conception of social justice
(Nussbaum, 1999; Held, 1995).
Yet, there has been little consensus about the balance
within a social justice framework between individual and
group entitlements and social obligations. In brief, there
have been six different ways in which distributive justice
has been described:
• Equal rights (to intangibles such as freedom) and equal
opportunity to obtain social goods, such as property
• Equal distribution to those of equal merit
• Equal distribution to those of equal productivity
• Unequal distribution based upon an individual’s needs
or requirements
• Unequal distribution based upon an individual’s status
or position
• Unequal distribution based upon different “contractual”
agreements
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