“Social justice” is a broad concept. The definition links certain ideas or other concepts–coercion, poverty or disadvantage, legitimacy, etc.–together in [...]]]> I’ve hard a hard time understanding why David Friedman and a few other commentators (e.g., Ryan) are so resistant to the account of “social justice” I’ve given.  I think I’ve figured out the issue now.

“Social justice” is a broad concept. The definition links certain ideas or other concepts–coercion, poverty or disadvantage, legitimacy, etc.–together in a particular way. Each of these concepts that form part of the definition of “social justice” are themselves like variables. They admit of a certain range of interpretations when you fill them in, but as long as you stay in that range, you’re still talking about social justice. There is probably no sharp cut-off for these ranges, but that’s fine, since that’s true of almost all definitions. (E.g., bachelor = an unmarried adult male intelligent being*, but “unmarried”, “adult”, “male” and “intelligent being” are all vague concepts without sharp boundary lines.) Different conceptions of social justice fill in these variables in different ways. So long as they stay within the range, they count as conceptions of social justice. See here.

Given the character of Friedman’s objections and what he’s calling (incorrectly on two counts) “dishonest mush,” I suspect that if I given David a definition in which I filled in all the variables in one particular way, such that there were no further questions about it other than whether it’s true, he would have then said it has a clear and precise definition. So, for instance, if pressed, I could give you my exact conception or theory of social justice, I suppose. Had I done that, David would have seen the definition not as mushy, but as precise. He could then decide whether he accepts social justice or not, but he would no longer hold that it’s concept without a definition.

However, had I done that–had I defined social justice simply as my theory of social justice–I’d have been wrong about the definition. Or, had I defined “social justice” simply as Rawls’s second principle, with the full attendant theory, I’d have given David all the precision he wants, but I would then have been wrong about the definition. There are a range of views that count as views of social justice. You can see my previous post or Kevin’s post today for more on that. If I want to define social justice correctly, I have to give the definition that explains what those views have in common. I have done that many times already. The reason I can’t give Friedman what he wants he is that he wants (de re, not de dicto) a definition of “social justice” that would be wrong.

By analogy, there are a range of views that count as consequentialist. The word “consequentialist” has a definite meaning in philosophy. But if I were to define it, I’d define it in much the same way as I define “social justice”. The definition of “consequentialism” does not give you a particular moral theory or moral principle. Rather, it tells you have certain ideas fit together, and it specifies a range of views or theories that count as consequentialist. The same goes for many other words in philosophy, such as “liberalism,” “deontology,” “civic virtue,” “libertarianism,” and so on.

*You might be tempted to define “bachelor” as an unmarried male, but it seems strange to call a male toad, dog, or infant a bachelor. You might be tempted to say that “bachelors” must be human, but that’s not right, because it seems fine to call Mr. Spock a bachelor. “Married” might seem like a sharply defined concept, but if you look at all the historical variations on marriage in the world, it’s probably not.

As a final note, I’m suspicious that what’s underlying all this at this point is not a disagreement about politics, but that Friedman and some others might subscribe to naive views about how language, concepts, and definitions work. (Note that by “naive” I don’t mean dumb or not sensible, but rather held without awareness of the relevant philosophy of language or linguistics.)

I differ a bit from J about how to understand social justice, so I thought I’d offer [...]]]> David Friedman has recently challenged BHLers to clarify our understanding of social justice (also see here). David has expressed some frustration that BHLers have sometimes offered definitions of social justice that seem inconsistent with one another.

I differ a bit from J about how to understand social justice, so I thought I’d offer another answer to David’s question (see J’s reply here, and David’s reply to J here). To do so, I’m going to focus on social injustice rather than social justice. I think we can get a clearer grasp on what social justice is by focusing on its opposite.

I take it that the term “social justice” can be used to cover individual rights-violations. For instance, if John rapes Reba, he has committed a grave injustice, one that could be called a social injustice. However, this is not the conceptual home of the concept of social injustice. A social injustice is often taken to contrast with an individual injustice. In particular, one core intuition that grounds the coherence of social injustice is that social justice need not be the result of any deliberate action on the part of individuals to realize socially unjust states.

In other words, social injustice comes about through human action, but not necessarily human design. Sound familiar? It should. Social injustice is an emergent property of certain kinds of social, moral and political practices. Let’s illustrate with the familiar example of institutional racism. I take it that an institution is racist insofar as it reliably outputs states of affairs where a racial group fails to receive its due based solely on the racial properties of its members. Thus, even if no one in the institution is racist, they participate in practices that result, say, in blacks having fewer opportunities than whites simply because they are black. In other words, the institutional rules operate such that unequal outcomes are caused primarily by racial differences, even if no one person is acting in a racist fashion. Institutional racism is a paradigmatic case of social injustice. It is an emergent property of a social institution that commits an injustice without any individual acting in an unjust fashion.

I recognize that the “emergent property” aspect of social justice hasn’t been talked up that much on the blog. But that’s what all the talk about justifying institutions rather than individual actions ultimately presupposes.

The common libertarian reply to these cases is that only individuals can act unjustly. There’s no such thing as a group or collective agent that could commit an injustice. Thus, if, say, blacks and whites have different opportunities due to their racial differences but no individual acted in a racist fashion to bring about the inequality, then there can be no injustice by definition. Unequal racial outcomes may be morally regrettable, but they can’t be unjust. I think this view is mistaken. And I think even Rothbardians can acknowledge as much, since left-Rothbardians have pioneered using the concept of social justice prior to us neoclassical liberals. Consider Charles Johnson’s paper “Women and the Invisible Fist” as an illustration of a left-Rothbardian approach to social justice.

So in light of all this, let me try to define a social injustice:

Social Injustice: A social injustice obtains when an institutional arrangement generates a distribution of goods [broadly construed] that is unfair [broadly construed], independently of the deliberate design of individuals comprising the institutions.

There is a lot to unpack here. First, yes, I use the term “distribution” fully aware that in some important sense there is no “distribution” of certain goods by a central authority. I mean something much more innocuous –a pattern of holdings. Second, by “goods” I mean the “currencies” of injustice offered by philosophers (primary goods, capabilities, opportunities, or welfare). We don’t need to settle on a currency to make sense of the concept of social injustice.

The last clause allows social injustice to occur independently of the deliberate design of individuals, which means that we can usefully understand social injustice as a kind of emergent property of institutions and the distributions they generate.

The key term, and the one that risks making the definition circular and/or question-begging is “unfair.” By “unfair” I just ask people to input their preferred system of moral and political principles. “Unfair” is a placeholder term.

To illustrate, insert Rothbardian libertarian principles into “unfair.” For a Rothbardian libertarian, a distribution is unfair if it comes about through violations of the non-aggression principle (there are some caveats here I can’t review). So, imagine a spontaneous order process that imposes negative externalities on a property owner (call him David). Say, for instance, that David lives next door to a public park where people are allowed to smoke (call it Smoker’s Park). The smoke produced by any one smoker would normally dissipate quickly, and have no noticeable impact on David’s person and property. But since so many people smoke in Smoker’s Park, David’s home and possessions begin to reek of smoke. And on some afternoons, he and his family choke from smoke inhalation. Arguably David’s person and property have been aggressed against in the sense that people together have imposed a cost on him that they could only do so fairly with his consent. But no one person caused the rights violation. In that case, I think it is fair to say that a Rothbardian social injustice has occurred.

The problem with some of the definitions of social justice that David has reviewed is that they run together social justice with Rawlsian social justice. A Rawlsian conception of social injustice involves inserting Rawlsian principles into the “unfair” term. This is how we reach the definitions of social injustice that my Rawlsian buds and I have offered. For instance, on a Rawlsian view, a social injustice obtains when economic institutions fail to provide sufficient primary goods to citizens to allow them to enjoy the worth of their basic liberties, even if no individual participant in those institutions tries or intends to thwart said enjoyment. Similarly, if we focus on political liberalism, a social injustice obtains when coercive economic institutions generate distributions that some can reasonably reject.

Different theories of justice can employ the ideas of coercion, aggression, sufficientarian principles, primary goods, minimally decent lives, and the like to specify a conception of social injustice. But I take it that the concept of social justice is that of injustices arrived at via a spontaneous order process. Social injustice is an emergent property of individual activity. It is the kind of injustice that results from human action, not human design.

Given the way I have defined “social injustice” many libertarians will reply, “Oh, ok, that’s fine. Big deal. Is that all you BHLers care about?” I can’t speak for my co-bloggers, but from my vantage point libertarians all too often ignore social injustices because of their sometimes flat footed (dare I say “cartoon”?) moral individualism. I’m a moral individualist in the sense that I think injustices can only be done to individuals, families or to voluntary associations. In a real sense, I don’t think injustices can be committed against “Americans” or “blacks” understood as groups defined independently of their members. So traditional libertarians are right that emphasize that the idea of social justice can sometimes be deployed in inappropriately collectivist ways.

But social injustices can be committed independently of human design. That’s a significant claim that departs from many threads of libertarian thought popular today. And my view on the matter is one of the reasons I joined the blog.

A second reason I joined the blog was to draw connections between political liberalism and libertarianism for anyone interested. I hope to draw another connection in my next post, where I will explain what I think is cool and neat about Rawls. Then I can explain why I adopt a broadly (’93, not ’71) Rawlsian understanding of social injustice. That will complete my answer to David’s question.

Update: Mark LeBar, a friend and fellow philosopher, has an outstanding criticism of this post that you can find here.

In a number of speeches, the President has outlined his views on the legitimacy of government. Following the Tea Party success in 2010, he resolutely responded to those [...]]]> (Author’s note: this is a post about ideas, not politics. It is unrelated to current events. It simply examines the philosophical views expressed by our Chief Executive.)

In a number of speeches, the President has outlined his views on the legitimacy of government. Following the Tea Party success in 2010, he resolutely responded to those who attack government. In his words:

The democracy designed by Jefferson and the other founders was never intended to solve every problem with a new law or a new program. Having thrown off the tyranny of the British Empire, the first Americans were understandably skeptical of government. Ever since, we have held fast to the belief that government doesn’t have all the answers, and we have cherished and fiercely defended our individual freedom. That is a strand of our nation’s DNA… But what troubles me is when I hear people say that all of government is inherently bad…For when our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening foreign entity, it conveniently ignores the fact in our democracy, government is us. We, the people, hold in our hands the power to choose our leaders, change our laws, and shape our own destiny. (Michigan 2010 speech)

And again recently:

Unfortunately, you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems; some of these same voices also doing their best to gum up the works. They’ll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our brave and creative and unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we can’t be trusted. (Ohio State 2013 speech)

In a sense, there’s little that is new. The President’s view is not necessarily statist in the sense that everything must come from government. He holds the fairly standard view that markets should be robust, but that market failures and other societal needs require government action. His views about the size of government are of course more expansive than that of most readers of this blog, but they are not out of the mainstream: they summarize the standard progressive position.

Yet it is not this antinomy between large versus small government that I want to discuss here. It is, rather, the President’s concept of legitimacy of government action. His view is disarmingly simple: the government is us. The government is not morally separate from us. We are part of it; indeed, that is the centerpiece of the “brave and creative and unique experiment in self-rule” that the President evokes. This view seems to suggest that when the government acts, it’s we who act. So if (say) the government snoops on journalists, then it is us who are snooping on journalists. This is because government and people are one undifferentiated entity. In our democracy, the government can never be tyrannical by definition, because whatever harm the government may inflict, it is self-inflicted. The people has harmed itself, and, of course, volenti non fit injuria (to the willing no injustice is done.) So when you lash out against government you are not lashing out against some sinister entity that is alien to you, but at an institution of which you are an integral part. Such view owes much to Rousseau and his concept of the collective will. Immanuel Kant flirts with this idea as well (see the Doctrine of Right on legislation, and his claim that the concept of revolution is an oxymoron). It is also reminiscent of some of Hegel’s organic conceptions of the state.

The idea, however, does not stand scrutiny. The government is an agent that we hire to do a certain job. The government is not us. It is contractually related to us. It has a fiduciary duty toward us, the duty to provide the services for which it was hired. This does not prejudge the question of how large that mandate should be. As any economist knows, fiduciary relationships often generate agency costs. The government sometimes acts ultra vires, it oversteps its powers, it spins out of control. When that happens, the position that the government is separate from us, that it has turned against us, is perfectly intelligible and justified. With the possible exception of Rousseau, the view that democratic procedures are sufficient warrant for government action is not supported by any credible philosophical view.

Let me put the matter a different way. In a well-functioning democracy, a government is composed of officials who play certain roles defined by laws, by rules. When officials perform coercive acts unauthorized by those rules, they violate the rights of the subjects. Those acts are impermissible acts of coercion. If this is correct, then the insistence that our “unique experiment in self-rule” somehow preempts us from warning about the dangers of government must be rejected. With the exception of anarchists, few people take the view that government is a “separate, sinister entity.” What libertarians and others do is to warn against the excesses of government, its threats to our liberties, its inefficiencies. Above all (and this is something the President overlooks), critics of government, armed with the tools of public choice, point out that the bigger government becomes, the greater is the threat it poses, the larger is the probability that it will malfunction and exceed its rightful function.

At a more general level, we should reject the President’s organicist theory of the state, this notion that we’re “in it all together,” that we are moving parts of an organic whole where we are all responsible in unspecified degrees for government excesses because we are the government. While Obama is right to reject the view that our constitutional democracy is “a sham with which we can’t be trusted,” we must and should retain our healthy skepticism about it, our Lockean intuition that governments are never the appropriate object of unlimited trust.

David Friedman is worried that the term “social justice” has no definite meaning, despite my claims to the contrary. He has two arguments to this effect:

Holbo on Robin on Hayek on Neitzsche, [...]]]> Will Wilkinson on the reasonable suspicion of racism about bad social science that purports to prove conclusions that just happen to be tropes of racism. (See also– this is me, not Will– Mearsheimer and Walt on “The Israel Lobby,” Summers on women’ in math and science.)

Holbo on Robin on Hayek on Neitzsche, and my reply.  Speaking of Will, another commentator on the CT thread points to this old WW post on Hayek, Rand, and Schumpeter.  Schumpeter was a lot more Weberian– and to that degree more Nietzschean– than Hayek.

Click for enhanced magnitude.