Should We Fight For ‘Social Justice’?

Ah, the Senator is probably channelling Hayek. A couple of paras from my entry on Social Justice in _The Elgar Companion to Development Studies_ (ed. David Clark):

bq. …. But it is to John Stuart Mill in his Utilitarianism that we probably owe the entry of the term into the modern literature, though earlier uses can be traced in the writings of socially conscious Roman Catholic priests. Mill characterises as ‘the highest abstract standard of social and distributive justice; to which all institutions, and the efforts of virtuous citizens should be made to converge’ that ‘society should treat all equally well who have deserved equally well’ (ch. 5). The distributive currency that Mill employs here is a utilitarian one, although indirectly, since he writes not of making the equally deserving equally happy, but rather of furnishing them equally with the ‘means of happiness’. The scope of Mill’s concern, at least tacitly, is that of a nation, and the agency with the duty to realize standards of social justice is the state.

bq. Mill’s conception, and others of similar nature, was witheringly criticised by Friedrich Hayek in the second volume of his Law, Legislation and Liberty.

bq. For Hayek, justice is first and foremost an attribute of individual conduct and the suggestion that it be treated instead as a property of something as abstract as an income distribution represents a fundamental misapplication of the idea. Moreover, it is, in Hayek’s view a misapplication with extremely pernicious consequences, since it suggests that some agency has a responsibility for realizing a just outcome. For Hayek, the distributive outcomes of a market order are not suitable objects of evaluation using concepts of justice. Since those outcomes are not the result of conscious human intentions but are rather the unintended result of individuals cooperating together the issue of justice does not arise so long as everyone has acted in accordance with market norms and laws governing the ownership and transmission of property.

bq. The great danger, in Hayek’s view, of the misapprehensions involved in the concept of social justice, is that the state will be called upon to intervene more and more in search of ‘just’ social outcomes and will thus thwart the anonymous information-gathering process that enables the spontaneous market order to be such a successful engine of growth. As a consequence, the search for ‘social justice’ will leave everyone worse off. Hayek further argued that attempts to realise social justice. would require continuous ex post interference in the transactions entered into by individuals, and would thus undermine both the freedom of the individual and the predictability charactacteristic of a society governed by the rule of law. Interestingly, though, Hayek explicitly exempted from his criticisms the theory of social justice advanced by John Rawls.

I tend to associate “social justice” with the social thought of the Catholic Church (in which Beck was raised). In the days when I was active in left politics, it was definitely a term to be used with care, and avoided entirely in certain circles.

It seems to me that the term “social” justice implies that society is unjust, and hence someone should do something (this is apparently exactly what Hayek dislikes).
This is an implication through pertinence (you wouldn’t mention society if you weren’t implying that) but is not a logical implication, so that it’s more connotation than denotation.
I agree that speaking of economic justice would be more straightforward.

#7 Yes, and see also “incomplete contracts”. This is one reason why the Rawlsian hope of getting justice though the incentives embedded in procedures of the “basic structure” won’t secure what Rawlsians want. You also need, Jerry Cohen was right about this, an ethos of justice.

Not really, just so long as enough of those people are antecedently committed to acting justly. The “system” helps them co-ordinate around the specifics. Of course, Rawls believes that there is such an antecedent commitment (“the reasonable” etc), he’s just wildly optimistic about what you can get out of procedural design.

I think Random Lurker (#7) and Chris (#9) have expressed the real salience behind employing the “social” prefix when talking about a certain aspect of justice: that is, justice can be applied–by way of articulating a goal, as well as by way of mounting a critique–to both the economic structure and the ethos of society as a whole. And this also exposes why it is, in my view at least, a mistake to use the term absent any kind of reference to or acknowledgment of its religious origins. Not that you need some form of Christianity to think about the social and economic applications of justice necessarily, but that absent any language for taking up the whole of social relations–not just the sum of individual ones, but the patterns that inhere to how the structures of power and class and opportunity themselves are conceived–within which the human personality develops and subjecting it to an ethical evaluation, the work which you want references to “social equality” and the like to do will be lacking. This is a criticism I have of Erik Wright’s book, thus far (but that criticism may disappear; I’m not even halfway through it yet).

I tend to associate “social justice” with the social thought of the Catholic Church (in which Beck was raised).

How odd. I’ve always assumed it entered Western thought by way of the Hebrew word צדקה (tzedakah) and Deut. 16:20. (“Irreconcilable moral differences” between medieval Catholic and Jewish sources are a surprisingly good predictor of right- and left-wing core positions today, which may in large part explain the unusual demographics of the US Supreme Court.)

The first thing that came to mind reading this was Gerald Cohen’s idea about the right not just to rise above your class, but to rise with your class. I think something in that idea points to a need to conceive of justice as necessarily social, insofar as its by definition rooted in solidarity, where political justice can exist and be theoretically conceived in isolation from our relation to society/community. ‘Social justice’ perhaps implies a right to meaningful expression of solidarity with those around you.

You could, I think, look at the connection between ‘political justice’ as ‘meaningful participation,’ as implying that social justice is a necessary precursor to political justice. ‘Social justice’ would be that which enables ‘meaningful’ participation, with the qualifier ‘meaningful’ needing far more attention than I think it tends to receive, and raising questions regarding the quality of human interactions, critical thought, quality of information, and social structures. Again, this would seem to point to the importance of specifically highlighting justice as social.

One way of slicing it is to first use the general term ‘justice’ to refer to the standard that should be used to evaluate institutional arrangements and how those institutions treat persons. Then use the term social justice to refer to the obligations of justice that arise from the existence of a scheme of mutually advantageous cooperation amongst persons (this seems to be broadly in line with Chris’s account and Mill’s definition). Political justice in E Olin Wright’s definition seems to refer to respect for civil and political liberties that pertain to questions of the legitimacy of authority; Hayek wants to restrict justice to concern with criminal justice and commutative justice.

As E Olin Wright is a socialist I don’t think it’s surprising that his particular account of social and political justice are similar, as democratic socialism insists on the democratisation of both the economy and the state.

I can’t speak for all the possible ways that the term is used, but my thought has always been that “social justice” focuses on getting just outcomes for groups as being the most important way to secure justice for individuals, while unmodified “justice” focuses on getting just outcomes for individuals as the most important way to secure justice for groups.

“Social Justice” strikes me as best when used more as a critique than as a governing virtue (when it shows how systemic features end up skewing individual justice outcomes rather than trying to make group oriented justice a goal in itself).

It may just be my basic temperament, but it is easy to see how a priority focus on social justice could regularly hurt individual justice, but it is difficult to see how a strong ethos of individual justice could regularly hurt group justice.

(Of course we don’t really have a particularly strong ethos for either kind of justice, so maybe a serious move toward either would be an improvement).

@geo, there are some instructions on how to do this in Book 2 ch 7 of Du Contrat Social, however users are advised to proceed cautiously and the publishers take no responsibility for unforseen accidents.

@23 – sarcasm? Surely not…

So what I get from Chris Bertram @ 1 is that Mill said we should consider justice as applied to the whole society in addition to what we normally do in considering justice as applied to individual situations, and Hayek said something like that Mill was wrong to consider justice as applied to the whole society because we normally consider justice as applied to individual situations. Which seems to me to be a perfectly valid way of arguing.

Similarly, Hayek has long appeared to me to argue that certain considerations are inappropriate because they assume a state with certain powers, which does not and cannot exist. This seems fine as far as it goes, but can’t explain why Mill’s contemporaries accepted that such a state did exist. The standard, conservative reasoning (which most of them would not dare to apply to John Stuart Mill!) seems to assume some kind of category mistake in which political actors who think government institutions interfere in society are doing something like immanentizing the eschaton.

Sebastian @ 21: more as a critique than as a governing virtue

But it seems to me that critique includes the moral charge of the idea that things ought to change (and why else would the person making the critique bother?). That is, a critique is a statement by an individual that the way things are is objectively wrong, that this specific thing here is provably what makes them wrong, and that people engaged on the same political project the writer claims ought to begin work harder to get this thing changed. So, “we fight for social justice” can be used to mean “these problems are the only ones we ought to work on right now,” and that seems useful.

Zamfir, I think you have misunderstood me. I disagree with Hayek, not least with his apparent belief that real states don’t actually do anything to further what is called social justice, in any way at all. As for what someone who agrees that there is no such thing as social justice might say about the cases you describe, I suppose they might invoke a concept like “God’s will,” or alternatively, a concept like “chance.” I suppose they might even say that the people who starved ought to have worked to try to get their government to provide for social justice, and if they had done just that and failed, they ought to feel satisfied at having lived a good life. They might even educate those who barely managed not to starve and remind them why this happened, that it was because their parents didn’t give them a good education so they could get good jobs, or maybe because they were born into an unlucky part of the country, and so now the only way they can make their living is through despicable jobs like prostitution and thievery. These last two do seem far-fetched, but they might invoke a concept like “evil.”

It may just be my basic temperament, but it is easy to see how a priority focus on social justice could regularly hurt individual justice, but it is difficult to see how a strong ethos of individual justice could regularly hurt group justice.

Perhaps it’s just a matter of abstraction; from individual cases to a higher, more general level. Like this.

Real social justice would also allow people and groups to fail, to the point of not having sustenance, if they fail to exercise appropriate virtues

Because society works best when it gives its members no reason to adhere to a social contract. I mean, who doesn’t want more desperate neighbors with nothing to loose? Surely starvation and ostracization wouldn’t create more social problems, would they?

The video is of the song “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” It tells the story of an individual, while making it clear that it’s described a more general phenomenon. And if it is indeed a phenomenon, a category, then it doesn’t seem to make sense to address every individual case separately.

Real social justice would also allow people and groups to fail, to the point of not having sustenance, if they fail to exercise appropriate virtues

The author of this comment appears to be calling for ‘people and groups‘ in America, who are poor, to be made to starve to death as a deliberate aim of government policy (in the name of ‘justice’). I would like to be wrong about this but as far as I can see the author is advocating genocide.

I feel that discussion on this blog would be much better if comments like this were deleted. I also feel that intelligent conservatives like Arben Fox would be better off not responding to them, or dignifying them with references to Aristotle.

On the Marx point I mostly agree with Lemuel. However, I think Geo is wrong to say that what Marxists mean by ‘exploitation’ is ‘take unfair advantage’. Exploitation is an economic concept, not a moral one, in classical Marxism. In a famous essay, CT’s favourite Marxist, G. A. Cohen, has argued that Marx’s claims about exploitation can be re-cast (to avoid the labour theory of value) by adopting Geo’s moralised definition. However, he never claimed that this is what Marx or Marxists meant, and I think this claim is clearly incorrect.

I write about folks who lived during Roosevelt’s day, and he was a master at what is now called “framing.” I think you’re on to something here–I’m going to start replacing “social justice” with simple “justice.”

The problem is that for most people who are not academics ‘justice’ mainly concerns the operation of the legal system rather than distributive justice, far less anything dreamed up by John Rawls. (Maybe this is the reason why the phrases ‘social justice’ and ‘distributive justice’ were introduced in the first place?) I have never to my knowledge seen anyone on the evening news saying ‘we want justice for our son’ and meaning by it ‘we want him to receive the primary goods he would have under a basic structure that he would have chosen from behind the veil ignorance’ or anything similar…

(Just to be clear, my last comment isn’t meant as a dismissal of the idea of justice but is strictly addressed to the suggestion that ‘re-framing’ the debate by replacing ‘social justice’ with ‘justice’ will mark a big step forward for the forces of Radical Activism. Btw doesn’t this

“social justice” should be dropped in favor of the simpler, and non-question-begging, term “justice”

sound a bit like something out of the Guardian style manual?)

very often you see someone argue on TV that we need lower taxes because justice requires that certain people are entitled to primary goods x, y and z, which the law does not currently entitle them to.

Really? Examples?

Yeah but he doesn’t use the word “justice”. That’s the point. That word is used more or less exclusively for stuffing falling under criminal law. You might think it should mean something broader, but in American political discourse, it doesn’t.

And then there is what justice dictates you should get, largely because it would be more socially desirable for everyone if this were the case as a rule.

Too bad — you were making progress there for a bit. Used in this way, of course, the phrase “social justice” is merely a redundancy. But the reason people bother tacking on the extra couple of syllables is because they don’t generally use it that way, except maybe temporarily when they want to slip something by. In this case, for example, slipping by the notion that even Hayek, who wrote a book with the subtitle “The Mirage of Social Justice”, is really arguing for, yes, social justice. And then we can flip back to the notion of social justice as some kind of distributive justice, and voila! — Hayek is a (kind of) social-ist!

We can do a similar sort of trick with “pattern” — because everything results in some sort of pattern, we can mush that with the notion of trying to aim at a particular pattern — and voila! Everyone’s aiming to produce patterns!

Hayek’s theory of justice is procedural, sometimes called commutative. In this schema, the administration of justice deals mainly with two parties who deal with each other.

Rawl’s theory of justice is patterned, sometimes called distributive. In this schema, the administration of justice must consider the interests of non-contracting third parties who are cut out of the best deals.

Hayek’s general point that political attempts to superimpose patterned justice over procedural justice would obliterate the latter without ever achieving agreement on the former.

The whole issue is re-emerging now in the debate over “disparate treatment” (procedures) v “disparate impact” (patterns). For various reasons, disparate impact law-suits are becoming more common.

Namely, realizing that what seems like a trick, to you, isn’t really a trick. It’s just a reasonable description of what’s actually going on. And now you understand Hayek!

It’s going to take more than an exclamation mark, John, to really put over these sorts of party tricks — more practice!

Re: your questions, you really should be able to answer them yourself, if you give them some thought. As a aid, let me suggest some questions for you: can you define the difference between “result” and “aim”? Is it possible that something, such as a “pattern”, can be a result without being an aim? And this should really help you: would it be possible for justice to reside in rules (of fair conduct, say) but not in the results of those rules, and if so would that be different from conceptions which look only at (i.e., aim for) the results (i.e., the pattern or outcome)?

Regarding the OP alternatives, I think “human justice” sounds awesome, “economic justice” sounds too wonky, and “political justice” sounds too Machiavellian. But I’ll stick with social justice, thanks.

But why burden yourself with redundancy that seems mostly to provide Glenn Beck and co. with fodder for dismissals that are lazy even by their standards?

Uh, because Beck is talking to church leaders and church attendees, not to us? First they come for the church pastors who dared to speak up about the injustices of poverty and the Christian responsiblity to attend to this with conscientious charity, and you intend to abandon them (rhetorically speaking, literally), because you are not a pastor who speaks about the injustices of poverty? Weak sauce.

For a while for reasons I won’t get into I was attending a variety of local churches’ sermons. OK, none of them mentioned social justice in lecture/sermon. The only place where I could find those kinds of messages was in pamphlet things which described work the church was doing in very celebratory terms, and these quite frequently talked about the “social justice mission” of the church, which apparently existed as a quasi-legal document. I was too shy to ask for a copy.

But anyway, Gregg and Beck are, from their political perspective, right to lay pressure on this: ‘social justice’ is the really one possible link between many mainstream churches and a compassionate worldview hospitable to progressive thinking. It’s the “treat thy neighbor as thyself” principle writ large. Not even talking political progressive thinking, I’m talking foundational principles like ‘people who have more ought to contribute to the welfare of people who have less,’ which is becoming more and more of a fringe left-wing view. Let’s maybe not abandon those folks who are attempting to propagate it in a hostile climate?

More generally, any supply-side argument, any Laffer Curve argument, is a social justice argument, because it is an argument for lower taxes based on an assumption about effects of l0wer taxes on overall distributions of primary goods.

This (and the explanation that follows) seems completely wrong. The supply-side argument is purely utilitarian, and against social justice: ‘yes, it is unjust that the rich get richer, but social justice must be sacrificed because only the rich can create jobs.’

“Social justice” is not the same as “more stuff for everybody”; “social justice” is distribution according to deservedness, and enforcing it may result in reduction in overall wealth, and even reduction in everybody’s wealth. And I think this is well-understood.

…in fact, voluntary poverty is a pretty common notion in some religious and anarchist doctrines.

HV: social justice must be sacrificed because only the rich can create jobs.

Isn’t this the best possible argument for taking the exclusive power to create jobs (ie, make new investments) away from the rich? Democratic control of the common wealth — it was a good idea a hundred years ago (to be precise, 121 years ago, when Edward Bellamy wrote the immortal Looking Backward), and it still is.

@74, from your link: “the pretence that anyone can determine what is justly due everyone is nonsensical and arrogant”. Sure. But what if we simply declare, as a basic principle, that everyone should get what is justly due them, and then address the grievances that may arise on a case by case basis?

This is how it’s usually done, isn’t it. They say, for example: “racial discrimination in hiring is forbidden”, but they don’t tell the employers who to hire in every case, they don’t pretend to know. Only when someone complains they will investigate and adjudicate.

What constitutes a grievance?

Oh, I dunno, whatever a reasonable individual would recognize as “social injustice”; violation of the (hypothetical) “social contract”. Basically, if you played by the rules, worked hard, and in the end you have nothing to show for it – you got a case.

I don’t know; it depends on the circumstances, I guess. I’m not interested in the technicalities. And I suspect when you get down to details you’ll have much more difficult problems with your “set of general rules of fair dealing”.

Why do you think otherwise?

The short answer, to avoid a potentially long detour on a side issue, is that I’m a market proponent but not a “market purist”.

One could write a set of rules for a just society in an afternoon. One could do it for any back-of-an-envelope definition of ‘justice’, social or otherwise, one chose. It wouldn’t really matter, because as soon as you put the rules into practice, individuals would start gaming them to their own advantage. That’s what they do with ‘justice’ now, that’s what they’d do, ceteris paribus, in any other system that didn’t constrain their actions ruthlessly – and necessarily coercively – to very narrow norms.

It does come back, oddly enough, to Chris’s point about the need for an ‘ethos’; but also, I think, to my point that that’s a Catch-22.

I’m curious what would’ve happened if that “economic bill of rights” from 1944 was passed as a constitutional amendment.

But of course the principle of justice can be gamed too, or, at least, interpreted in radically different ways, e.g.: the “death tax” controversy, moral objection to progressive taxation.

Okay, John, so you’re defining “social engineer” to be anyone who has any opinion whatsoever about social issues — i.e., anybody who is not “advocating anything”. I think even grade schoolers would be able to see that this is merely an attempt to obscure a distinction (though, admittedly, some grad students might not). I’ll just note that nobody else uses words in this way, and very few would ever be convinced of anything by so transparent a ploy.

Metamorf, I am somewhat exaggerating a point in an attempt to make you see it.

Well, so am I re: you and “the rules”. As you’ve said about another issue, this is complicated, and people have written books about it. I’m not denying the complications; I’m simply saying that it doesn’t help if we deliberately muddy the terminology right at the start.

Metamorf @82: There are only markets, the word itself being only a simple noun denoting collections of trades—and the people carrying out those trades really don’t have any particular end or pattern in mind other than their own particular ends. It’s true, of course, that at any one time, such trades result in a particular “distribution” of goods—where “distribution” is used in a purely physical sense, without any implication of a distributing agent—but that’s merely a result and not an aim.

This is to the heart of the matter. It’s admittedly a plausible formulation, but it’s misleading, and for essentially the reasons John keeps repeating. Many, even most, market participants may not have any particular outcome in mind. But every market theorist is certain that – given what may be safely assumed about human nature – the end result will not be universal impoverishment and collective self-immolation. One must make basic assumptions about the motives of market participants and the conditions of interaction. This foreknowledge is fundamental and intrinsic to the choice of procedures. A result that is clearly foreseen is to that extent aimed at, unless outweighed by other clearly foreseen and more desirable results.

There may be an instance of pure proceduralism somewhere in the universe (though I highly doubt it). But market theorists are plainly consequentialists.

But every market theorist is certain that – given what may be safely assumed about human nature – the end result will not be universal impoverishment and collective self-immolation.

Well, “certain” is too strong a word, but yes, in general, and overall, market proponents (not just theorists) have reasons for being market proponents. The reasons are not as simple nor as unanimous as you and John seem to think, but they’re reasons nonetheless. So, again, if all you’re saying is that anybody who has a reason for favoring one social arrangement over another is a “social engineer”, then fine, but you should note that you’re using the term in a way that others don’t, and which will be (maybe intentionally) confusing to others. In normal usage, “social engineer” relies on the distinction between a focus on the fairness or justice of the rules and a focus on the fairness or justice of the results or end state, with only the latter really requiring “engineering” in the true sense.

I can sense the blockage here, of course — I think within certain mind sets it’s almost impossible to imagine that anybody who thinks about politics in more abstract ways isn’t trying or wanting to bring about certain social results or end states. But it’s just not the case. There’s a difference here, for example, between being in favor of markets because they generate wealth and being in favor of markets simply because you’re in favor of human freedom, and you’re confident that free people generate wealth. As I said above, if free people wished to produce and share goods of their own free will, sans markets, that would be just fine. This may sound naive, and in practice it is naive — as I also said, there are lots of real-world complications. But in principle the primary reason why Hayek & co, as opposed to would-be social engineers like Rawls, are in favor of markets is simply because trading goods and services is usually and generally what people do when left to get on with their lives.

the primary reason why Hayek & co … are in favor of markets is simply because trading goods and services is usually and generally what people do when left to get on with their lives

I think you don’t really mean this. It’s possible, after all, that when “left to get on with their lives,” just as many people would plunder, pillage, and rape as trade goods and services. (Organized crime already controls around a fifth to a quarter of global trade.) In any case, people in many times and places have often enough indicated extreme dissatisfaction with minimally regulated markets that a harsh and detailed system of property law has been erected precisely in order to keep them from “getting on with their lives,” ie, overturning power relations in their societies.

Another line of criticism might interrogate mm’s tacit premise that ‘people usually do X’ is a good reason for promoting X. What other spheres of human life does this apply to, one wonders?

Life isn’t fair and that is just.
Justice isn’t fairness.
Social engineering is enforced fairness.
Justice is asocial. Compassion is on option not a requirement.
Any attempt to mandate compassion is perverse.

The problem with this is the equation of the community with the state. They’re different things, overlapping but distinct.

The libertarian argument is like saying that since all art is abstract the best art is nonfigurative. liberal idealists do make attempts to mandate concern, attemps that can be antisocial in effect, but the problem as with libertarians is the idealism. An architecture that fosters sociability is not one that commands it. But even that is manipulative. There’s no such thing as justice at least in an ideal platonic sense. But communities form themselves in different ways. I wouldn’t want to live in sparta though. Still societies are examples of a sort of representative formalism and when that’s in balance it can be a beautiful thing and a kind of justice. And not all justice in this sense is democratic.

It’s possible, after all, that when “left to get on with their lives,” just as many people would plunder, pillage, and rape as trade goods and services.

See above, re: “rules”. Or, in another shameless self-reference, see this post re: non-market exchange alternatives.

Bianca: I think an application of Occam’s Razor would lead you to the conclusion that John is wrong, and Hayek is not really a pattern designer.

Rawlsian’s suffer from massive overconfidence in what can be achieved distributively through institutional design

Not exactly. They might suffer from a slight confidence that rational politics and a revamped social contract might replace supply-sider/libertarian madness, and/or stalinist central planning (which Cohen at times seemed to support), or something like that.

bianca: Occam’s Razro is usually taken to mean that “the simplest explanation is usually the correct one” — meaning, in this case, that among your own alternative explanations of the passage, the simplest explanation is that John is mistaken about Hayek. Has nothing, as far as I can see, to do with what everybody else has done, and I don’t see why or how it would lead you to conclude that Hayek is not worth studying, etc. Not to say that he is — that’s up to you.

Yarrow: … other than on consequentialist grounds: on moral grounds — that it’s wrong simply to take what each person is able to produce, and also wrong to provide only what people need.

One last time, myself:

a) The rules state some sort of descriptive truth.
No, this is not what any rules do — they are, as you say, pointing out the obvious, “normative principles stating how people ought to behave”, like all rules. Where do I say or imply that they’re some sort of “descriptive truth”?

b) why should we subscribe to your normative principles?
Well, you shouldn’t until you at least know what they are, and as you also point out, obviously, I haven’t said what they are. I.e., I’m not asking anyone, at this point, to subscribe to my normative principles, I’m asking for something much simpler, and what I had thought was much clearer — simply to grasp, in the first place, and then to understand the importance of, in the second place, the distinction between a notion of justice that inheres in rules per se and a notion that inheres in conditions or results per se. Once that’s at least understood, then we can get into long discussions about what the rules themselves are or should be (for those interested).

c) These aren’t questions you can brush aside on the grounds that your rules would be simple descriptive truths, if only everyone would follow them.

But, as I’ve said, I’m not making any such silly claim. As for the flurry of philosophical labels, that too would make for a no doubt interesting, if interminable, discussion in its own right. But that discussion isn’t necessary to understand the relatively simple distinction mentioned above, and so for now, having started with that, I’m content to stop there.

By the way, John — puzzling over how I could have given the impression that I thought “the rules” were some sort of “descriptive truth”, I see that you may have just gotten stuck on the term “observe”. But I wasn’t talking about rules being observed, I was talking about the results of behavior within the rules being observed, and I had talked about it in that way only in order to contrast it with results that were “engineered” or deliberately aimed at. Sorry, but I had thought that was clear.

Metamorf, it’s not entirely clear to me what you mean in this last post about observation. You seem to imply that it is OK to observe the outcome of existing rules and use that outcome as justification for those rules? With the implication that it is not OK to posit a likely outcome of a new rule, and implement the rule based on that?

Perhaps I am reading you wrong, but judging the observed results of existing rules seems to require the same sort of standard as judging the likely outcome of new rules, call that standard social justice or not.

The difference would be in the uncertainty of new rules, and it is very Hayekian to say that people overestimate their ability of predicting the outcome of rules. But I don’t think that has much to do with ‘social justice’ as a concept.

See, this is why these threads are so much fun — confusion heaped upon muddle compounded by misreading.

Anyway, having gotten away at last from his theme that everyone is just a “social engineer”, John now seems to feel much more comfortable on the familiar ground of deontology and consequentialism, and now he’s all “Oh, if that’s all it is, why didn’t you just say so?!”. Well, John, back in #61 I asked this question which you ignored: “would it be possible for justice to reside in rules (of fair conduct, say) but not in the results of those rules, and if so would that be different from conceptions which look only at (i.e., aim for) the results (i.e., the pattern or outcome)?” And then, in #82, I talked about “an important—in fact vital—distinction between those who try to design or engineer social outcomes or patterns, and those who are content to accept what ever outcomes or patterns result from people’s behavior within rules”, which I felt you were obscuring. This one you addressed by fixating on the word “observe”, which, as I pointed out just above, you misinterpreted as applying to the rules rather than the results of rules.

Some progress has been made, despite all this. Your notion of “social engineer” has been clarified to mean anyone who thinks broadly about political or social issues. And now that you’ve managed to fit the distinction mentioned in the quotes above into categories you’re comfortable with, I take it you agree with it. So, for the record, I’ll just make explicit again why I’ve had to insist upon the distinction — because it’s important, even if obvious, and because your unique definition of “social engineer” obscures it.

Chris: at this point, as I think I’ve said, I’m not trying to get involved in the various arguments between or among Nozick, Rawls, Hayek, and their numerous followers and opponents. I started out taking issue with a particular point John was making, which, as I say above, I felt obscured rather than clarified an important distinction that pertained to the issues they deal with, and if that distinction is accepted then I’m done, for now at least. Where the rules come from is a matter for another day.

Zamfir: You seem to imply that it is OK to observe the outcome of existing rules and use that outcome as justification for those rules?

(Sigh.) No — have a quick look back and note that observation of outcomes is simply used as a contrast with interfering with, rigging, or “engineering” outcomes. Nothing else is implied, or meant to be implied, by observation.

“would it be possible for justice to reside in rules (of fair conduct, say) but not in the results of those rules, and if so would that be different from conceptions which look only at (i.e., aim for) the results (i.e., the pattern or outcome)?”

Due process vs substantive due process..

So, suppose Hayek is interested in justice as applied to interactions between individuals. Then, either he defines justice as whatever the law actually says, or he provides a description of a just society. I think he does the latter, because if he doesn’t, then his description of how the entrepreneur interacts with underlings is less interesting than I think it is (and is usually taken to be), or at least isn’t really attached to his understanding of justice (as I think it is and is usually taken to be). If he is right, the role of the entrepreneur is an attractive one, but the roles of others are (though vaguely defined) somewhat robotic. I think this can describe only a small proportion of actual economic transactions.

So, fine. Maybe Hayek only described part of the economy. If so, then Hayek provides no grounds for objecting to any arrangements at all in other parts of the economy. And if those other parts of the economy include most industry, then Hayek has no grounds for objecting to industrial unions or for prescribing how industrial corporations should be managed. But it’s pretty rare to read Hayek as “hands off” with regard to industry, especially with regard to unions and any limitation of top-down management.

And, at the same time, it seems pretty rare to read Hayek as having contradicted what is now thought of–by managers, Republicans, etc.–as good management practice–which I myself think is the case. I don’t see a way to make this work without either saying Hayek was, simply, wrong (and he seems too interesting and suggestive and so forth to simply be wrong), or introducing some historical and empirical considerations (which would allow him to be interesting, but would again make him wrong, and which Hayekians have shown no interest in). Or, you can say that Hayek was interested in something like “social justice” even though he usually isn’t read that way, and indeed says the opposite.

(It just occurred to me that Hayek’s ideal economic man might look something like Tony Kushner’s depiction of Roy Cohn in Angels in America, the man with a dozen phone lines all going at one time, with tentacles out into just about everything.)

It’s interesting that ordoliberalism assigns responsibilities at the level of institutions (I assume it is left open whether an “institution” can be comprised of a number of organizations that interact with one another but are all of the same type). Presumably these institutions operate according to rules? This is the kind of thing that I think supports the idea that Hayek thinks an institution (or at least an organization) can be thought of as a machine to express the will of a person. He would seem vulnerable to any idea that complicates a simplistic view of practical reason as rule-following. (And I’d guess that these days more of the theorists who want to complicate practical reason in this way are on the right, and inclined to admire Hayek, than are on the left. So I’d only want to call the view “liberal” with qualifications–or, better, I’d say he has affinities with liberalism or neoliberalism but as far as these details are concerned is at heart antiliberal.)

I don’t think Hayek is against social engineering because he is opposed to one person’s opposing his will and his rules on others (which is what the economic man does when he directs those who don’t know enough to participate in the market themselves). It seems more plausible that he is opposed to restrictions on the freedom of the economic actors. It does sound kind of like the economic actors are permitted to do social engineering, but if they only follow the laws of nature (being the ones who know enough to follow the laws of nature), they wouldn’t have to impose any new rules.

I’m going to try out the position that the most important difference between John’s and Metamorf’s stated positions is a rhetorical one rather than a substantive one. John says that Hayek is doing the same thing that Rawls is doing—propounding a set of rules the satisfaction of which results in justice. I phrase this deliberately vaguely. Is the satisfaction of the rules themselves justice, or is the resulting condition of society what makes up justice? Metamorf thinks that this is an important distinction: since he admits that Hayek’s choice of rules is made (at least in part) on consequentialist grounds, it must mean something for justice to inhere in the following of rules rather than for it to inhere in the outcomes deriving from people following these rules.

I don’t think it means anything substantive. “Justice” is a powerful word—everyone claims that they are on the side of justice. Libertarians or neoliberals prefer to locate justice in the rules because then this allows them to wash their hands of the unequal, non-utility-maximizing (or otherwise problematic) outcomes that emerge from the following of the rules. Progressives prefer to locate justice in the outcomes because this allows them to justify either ex ante rejiggering the rules or ex post redistributing goods to yield more just outcomes.

I think people have a sense of what kind of society they want to live in—this includes rules as well as distributions—and then to support their preference for this kind of society, they use powerful words like “justice” in the ways that best justify their preferred societies. This strikes me as far more plausible than the idea that people make up their minds on the question of where to attach the label of “justice”, and then see what political philosophy flows from that attachment. Thus, it is improper to say, “neoliberalism/progressivism is justified because it best satisfies justice”, rather, we should say, “justice inheres at the level of rule-following/distributions because such an inherence accords with neoliberalism/progressivism”.

(I realized after having submitted my comment the first time that you prefer commenters use real email addresses — thus the double submission.)

I don’t think any of us here would think that going that step further is justified, which is why the step was brought up only as mockery. The step that I did take, however, I believe is justified, and I attempted (briefly) to justify it or at least argue for its reasonability.

I’m not a professional philosopher, but the sense I get in a lot of philosophy (especially analytical or informed by the analytical tradition) that tries to answer questions like “what is knowledge?” or “what is justice?” is an attempt to map intuitive notions that we all think we have in common to something more rigorous. It’s disappointing if my notion of justice really is truly not comparable with yours — we’re then just talking past each other whenever the conversation turns to justice (or, should that be, to “justice”?).

Ultimately, no one arrives at political beliefs based only on unbiased, complete observation and snow-white universal reason. Still, we can improve our beliefs with better and more complete observations of the world and better and broader reasoning. I think that the sticking point between Metamorf and John owes to them talking past each other w/r/t justice, and that this point can become unstuck if they treat justice neither as an independent thing out there in the world whose point of attachment — rules or distributions — needs to be determined by observation and/or reason, nor as a preexisting notion that can be talked about independently of the desirability of various social arrangements (including both rules and distributions).

I do agree that for discussion to be fruitful, (some level of) agreement on the terms used in the discussion is needed. I’m not sure, however, that asking “what is justice?” or “is justice the fulfillment of rules or the fulfillment of distributions?” should be a first step.

I think nearly everyone starts out with observing that there are conditions, norms, rules, outcomes, policies, etc. out there that sit well with an intuitive sense of what is right and there are other such things that are at odds with our intuitive sense. Or, on an emotivist account, we get happy or satisfied or angry or sad about things. Usually we receive from our environment broader schemes to organize our sense, and on the grandest scale we have religious or philosophical systems that guide us on how we ought to behave and on what we ought to praise and what we ought to condemn, at the social or individual levels or both.

It seems that what Hayek and Rawls and other grand-system political philosophers are trying to do is answer the question, “how ought society to be?” They all think that various things are important in answering the question, such as which and how much of various rights and freedoms people enjoy, while other things, such as which God(s) people worship, are unimportant. I’m pretty sure I’ve studied Hayek far less than either you or John, but he seems to place a great deal of importance on a certain set of rules people follow and the absence of constraint on free actors within the context of those rules. An archetypical utilitarian would contrariwise place the importance on the quantity of utility in society, which flows from things like freedom and prosperity and health and security, and isn’t particularly concerned about rules of interaction between actors or rules for mapping people’s choices to people’s outcomes beyond the extent to which these rules promote utility-maximizing behavior.

I don’t see how bringing in the notion of justice adds much. Hayek says that justice is a function of the fulfillment of the stuff that he cares about, and the utilitarian says that justice is a function of the fulfillment of the stuff that they care about. Or maybe the utilitarian would say that their system is indeed not as just as it could be, but maximizing justice does not maximize utility, so they’re not especially worried that their system could be more just.

I’m finding myself rambling because I guess my thesis is a negative one: the question of “what is justice?” is not very important when discussing how ought society to be. I guess I have to play a reactive role, then, and try to convince people I find arguing about “what is justice?” that they’re better off arguing about something else. In this particular case, I think the interesting question is why Hayek thinks his rules are better than other rules, and why either an emphasis on rules rather than outcomes generally or an emphasis on his rules rather than outcomes is more warranted.

Considering only your last paragraph, I wonder what work justice does in it. Why does Hayek or anyone else care that whatever the best we can do gets called “justice”?

I suppose if we have at least a mote of modesty, we would doubt that the best we can come up with right now is the best that anyone anywhere in the future will ever come up with, and so it’s better to consider the best we can come up with now as provisional, and acknowledge that it falls short of what we’d like to be able to come up with. In this sense, I can see the value of an idealized “justice” that we are striving to better approximate, but I don’t see why “justice” rather than simply “things being better” is a superior choice of ideals to strive for, aside from the rhetorical value of “justice”.

That’s exactly my point. I would prefer that people argue for what it is that they value. What makes one society better than another? As I said above, since my thesis is that “justice” is not terribly useful or interesting, or, at least (at worst? at best?), overrated, I have to sit back until someone argues that justice is a useful concept for talking about what sorts of societies are better than other societies.

I must say, though, that your comment seems to focus on the distribution of the good as something that “resemble[s] justice”.

With all due respect, John, I don’t think you’d make a good waiter. Most waiters would understand the difference between a pizza and a hamburger, and wouldn’t try to insist they’re the same.

Some remarks relating to the tail-end of this thread:

1. The distinction between ‘is just’ and ‘is best’ (or ‘is good enough’) may be that ‘is just’ applies only to (say) political institutions (or to societies viewed from the point of view of an assessment only of political institutions), while ‘is best’ can apply to just about anything. [Aside: I tend to take this kind of deflationary view about things like natural rights: a natural right is one which, assuming some set of basic, invariant (‘natural’) facts, would be embodied as positive rights in the ideal society, or in any acceptable society. Or (I think) in other words, ‘x has a natural right that y’ can be understood as ‘x should have the artificial right that y’.]

2. The distinction between deontology and consequentialism makes sense only when we are talking about the form or content of rules, for example of laws (broadly construed). It breaks down when we are talking about justification, since justification is always a matter of consequences in one way or another. This is related to John’s point about the difference in levels of abstraction between Rawls’s principles of justice, and Hayek’s proposed ideal legal (actually constitutional) structure. Actually, H provides various ‘justice’ like principles to support (consequentialistically) his recommended regime, and R goes on to sketch a set of laws that are to rule without too much in the way of legislative fiddling about (and surprise! – basically IIRC this happens to be something very like a 70s Democrat platform of markets + some modest ‘redistribution’ relative to the market dist.)

(4. A quibble: John, ‘cannot therefore ought not’ should probably be ‘cannot therefore may not’ (or ‘not-can therefore not-ought’) – at least if you mean to counterpose the more familiar maxim. Maybe not though – ‘cannot therefore ought not’ should be otiose, but someone might well argue it and hope that when they (non-trivially) invoke the ‘ought-not’ provision, no-one will notice that the fact that there is anything to actually prohibit impies that the ‘cannot’ justification must in fact be false. Or perhaps more plausibly, ‘cannot, therefore ought not to try’ could be both defensible and operative.)

Well, I of course maintain that by ‘always peeping around the corners and through the holes’, you mean ‘in one way or another’…

It is an interesting one – perhaps there’s a danger of legislating the meaning of ‘justification’ so as to make all just’n consequentialist. There’s also the matter of what kind of a thing a consequence is anyway in this context (is it a causal effect, etc; does it count if it affects only the doer of the action, possibly in some rather arcane way, etc).

Still, do you happen to have a prima facie counterexample to hand?

Social is probably better than “distributive”.

There is a legitimate distinction between just action in personal encounters and just action at the collective level. “Social” marks that distinction and it does so better than “collective” or “distributive” would.

Tim @154, (1): The distinction between ‘is just’ and ‘is best’ (or ‘is good enough’) may be that ‘is just’ applies only to (say) political institutions (or to societies viewed from the point of view of an assessment only of political institutions), while ‘is best’ can apply to just about anything.

Intuitively, there can be unjust interactions among individual actors that, unless “political” is expanded to include anything interpersonal, are not at all political. If I hack into your bank account and steal a hundred pounds or dollars or Euros without you ever discovering the theft, then an injustice has still been perpetrated, no?

In this instance, we would normally oppose such an action and would want better banking security to prevent such actions from happening, as well as an ethic of property rights so that I wouldn’t even try to steal the money from you. We could imagine situations, though, where we would approve of the undetected theft — some people at least would applaud a Robin Hood-like thief who hacks into the CEO of Goldman Sachs’s bank account and gives the money to Oxfam or Habitat for Humanity or, hell, a lobbying group for tighter regulation of the finance sector. If we think that this non-consensual but undetected (and thus having no bearing on property norms or security) redistribution makes the world a better place despite it being unjust, then why do we care about justice rather than what’s best? Unless we, perversely to my mind, would prefer a world that’s worse for persons but better for the insensate principal of justice. And if we disapprove of the theft because we think that it actually makes the state of the world worse, then we don’t need to rely on justice to disapprove of it.

John @151: I guess it’s possible that talking about what sorts of societies are better is just inherently useless activity. But on the assumption that it makes any damn sense whatsoever, I guess I’m not concerned that justice will be unimportant.

Why? Give me a case where justice does work that cannot be done by an appeal to (Rawlsian) primary goods themselves.

Yarrow, why is the act just? I infer from your post that you would (at least privately) applaud the act. Is there something good about the act beyond that it alleviates suffering, expands opportunity, freedom, and capabilities, redistributes wealth to where it will have a greater effect on economic growth, increases overall utility, etc.?

If plutocrats in country A enrich themselves at the expense of the rest of their country, and plutocrats in country B enrich themselves at the expense of the rest of *their* country, why is it better that our secret hacker transfer funds from country A’s plutocrats to the poor of country A and funds from country B’s plutocrats to the poor of country B, rather than “crossing the streams”, so to speak? It seems to me that the first instance feels closer to justice, even though the effects on the world are indistinguishable. What does satisfying justice offer, then, other than a sense of satisfaction?