A Provisional Definition of Social Justice

I was asked a very simple question by Nigel Ashford during my IHS seminar.  One I was not very prepared to answer.  What is my definition of social justice?  I made the same arguments that I have made before, namely that social workers use the word all the time without ever really defining it and that its scope has grown to encompass all injustice.

In thinking about it enough, I have found a definition with which I am pretty comfortable.  Social justice is the betterment of opportunities and outcomes for marginalized people.  Let's define some terms.  By betterment I mean both in the sense of in-time and across a longer time period.  This is definitely not an egalitarian argument wherein a person is only made better off if they have equal stuff to everyone else at a particular time.  My definition of social justice includes a longer timeline and finds inequalities to be justified so long as the system under which they arise benefits marginalized people.

By opportunities I mean the ability of a person to be, in a Ralwsian way, a responsible self-author.  Or, even in a libertarian sense, to have liberty and freedom to actualize their inner potential.  There is a salient argument that people cannot be considered free if they do not have the material ability to express their innate liberty.  A child dying of starvation in Darfur is not free.  It is not merely the absence of official coercion that is important, as some libertarians may argue.  So, social justice seeks to increase the opportunity for individuals to play out their capacities.

Outcomes is probably the fuzziest concept in that definition.  I mean it to instill as sense of consequentialism into the definition.  I would find both subjective and objective measures to be compelling in this sense.  Whether people found a particular intervention or set of social welfare policies to help them person is a valuable contributor.  In addition, the positive rights that liberals are very eager to instantiate actually make serviceable metric for social progress.  These are often imposed from without and with a naivete that sees conditions unequal to our own to be unjust.  However, the approximation of outcomes to what we currently experience could be seen as a measuring tool of social justice, but not proof that a condition is itself unjust.  This is an ordinal scale, not nominal.

Two takeaways from this:  Nowhere in this definition does it mandate that income or other goods or abilities must be forcibly redistributed.  Indeed, there would be no just authority that could allocate resources in a just way, in my opinion.  All decisions in that system would be unjust.  Justice requires that the decision-making be on the individual level.

In addition, this does not provide for a sense of group rights. Group analysis can take place in assigning the label "marginalized" to a particular person, but those groups are more widely understood.  In addition to ethnic groups or social classes, it includes criminal defendatns, for example.

I need to think this through a lot more, but this is at least a start.  So there, Nigel.