The Mysticism of ‘Social Justice’

[Geee]

National Review:

If there were a Hall of Fame for political rhetoric, the phrase “social justice” would deserve a prominent place there. It has the prime virtue of political catchwords: It means many different things to many different people.

In other words, if you are a politician, you can get lots of people with different concrete ideas to agree with you when you come out boldly for the vague generality of “social justice.”

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said that a good catchword can stop thought for 50 years. The phrase “social justice” has stopped many people from thinking for at least a century — and counting.

If someone told you that country A had more “social justice” than country B, and you had all the statistics in the world available to you, how would you go about determining whether country A or country B had more “social justice”? In short, what does the phrase mean in practice — if it has any concrete meaning?

In political and ideological discussions, the issue is usually whether there is some social injustice. Even if we can agree that there is some injustice, what makes it social?

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Surely most of us are repelled by the thought that some people are born into dire poverty, while others are born into extravagant luxury — each through no fault or virtue of his own. If this is an injustice, does that make it social?

The baby born into dire poverty might belong to a family in Bangladesh, and the one born to extravagant luxury might belong to a family in America. Whose fault is this disparity or injustice? Is there some specific society that caused this? Or is it just one of those things in the world that we wish was very different?

If it is an injustice, it is unjust from some cosmic perspective — an unjust fate, rather than necessarily an unjust policy, institution, or society.

Making a distinction between cosmic justice and social justice is more than just a semantic fine point. Once we recognize that there are innumerable causes of innumerable disparities, we can no longer blithely assume that either the cause or the cure can be found in the government of a particular society.