What are the pro and cons of social justice?

Answer 1

A great book to read that helps explain the divide between liberals/left wingers and conservatives/right wingers over social justice is Thomas Sowell in his book A Conflict of Visions. Basically, he outlines what he terms the constrained and unconstrained visions (the former traditionally conservative, the latter traditionally liberal). The constrained vision is concerned with process, the unconstrained with results.

The pros of social justice by those advocating it (only those with the unconstrained vision) include the attempt to immediately address results, such as in creating welfare programs or redistributing wealth or creating affirmative action programs designed to level the playing field if it is felt that some groups are dominating too much power or wealth at the expense of others. A pro is that social justice is close to what psychologist Jonathan Haidt called the Care/Harm Moral Foundation (however the conservatives who are against social justice are higher in the other 5 moral foundations than are the liberals, and he maintains that we require all 6 to establish a stable society - hence social justice in a way expresses one moral foundation at the expense of the other 5).

However, Hayek has argued brilliantly that actually while compassion may appear to underpin the spirit of social justice, it is actually darker in intention than that, since it is NOT merely urging citizens to use compassion to help those in need. Rather, it usually involves a governmental body coercing citizens to mobilize the wealth produced by society to act to theoretically uplift one sectional group deemed in need of special representation. Hayek has also pointed out that injustice may not be measured as it is entirely subjective and relativistic what some consider unjust in the first place. As all justice is social, the very term is deemed meaningless by its critics.

The cons as articulated by the constrained vision is that the process itself, or social system as it evolved with its existing incentives, becomes thwarted, and that that is dangerous, as to circumvent existing traditions and laws by creating bigger government to act on the behalf of the underprivileged is to dismantle the process by which humans evolved to establishing the greatest freedoms possible, especially over the millenia it took to move beyond slavery and feudalism. To create a powerful government acting on behalf of the less fortunate is to remove the incentives by which the less fortunate may rise by themselves, and the incentives by which the more fortunate obtained their privilege, which it is hypothesized creates many benefits to those they employed or to those consuming their goods or services. Thus, those who oppose social justice may be closer to behavioral principles with which we may be most familiar as parents - we know what happens when we cater to every child's whims (not counting occasional treating and a required generous spirit and love) - we must work as parents to provide the incentives for our children to develop toward their own independence.

A book by McWhorter called Winning The Race is a conservative critique of welfarism, coming from an African-American concerned about how the post-Civil Rights well-intentioned social justice activists combined with the mid 1960s anti-system leftist rhetoric unintentionally led poor African-Americans to develop dependence upon the welfare check, cease looking for work, and become unhealthy models for their children who sought illegal means of making a living, leading eventually to the violent inner-cities we know so well. Those against social justice would say humans are inevitable flawed emotionally, intellectually and morally, a hypothesis psychologists who study cognitive biases and the role of emotion upon thinking would agree with, and so they would argue that social justice is dangerous because it tampers with long-evolved legal, economic, familial and spiritual traditions (the process) to reach certain ends that are actually impossible to reach given the complexity of human nature and human society.

Thus, the pros of social justice include the heartfelt intentions, which everyone can understand, but the unfortunate side effects of parents, lawyers, judges, psychologists, politicians, activists, governments, ceasing to do what they do best, but taking on an elitist "I know best" additional social justice role of speaking on behalf of others is that the structure of a potentially free society is weakened because the incentives, traditions and very often the laws themselves, that underpin the society are tampered with.