Social Justice

by Gary Craig, Professor of Social Justice, University of Hull,

Social justice is a concept that has been debated – in different guises - for thousands of years although it is only since the 1970s, and particularly in the past fifteen years, that it has re-emerged into political discourse, notably amongst governments which have characterised themselves as social democratic or 'Third Way'. As Miller argues (2001), however, in the context of the development of liberal democratic societies, 'the quest for social justice is a natural consequence of the spread of enlightenment' (p.4).

However, the concept remains a contested one, adopted from a variety of political positions, and linking to wider arguments about the roles of the state, the market and the individual. Although contemporary social democratic governments appear to 'own' the approach of social justice, it has also been espoused from the political right in the UK and in Australia, where, for example, the government argues that social justice is achieved best through an approach which privileges individualism - when individuals are able to compete in the market place, unconstrained by the action of the state. Current arguments about social justice also expose the tensions with other overarching political goals of economic competitiveness and environmental sustainability (JRF 2004).

The concept of social justice received prominence within the United Kingdom with the work of the Commission for Social Justice established by the-then Leader of the Labour Party (CSJ 1994). In a context of deepening inequality and poverty, the Commission suggested that the elements of social justice would include:

This begged important political questions and the policy programme of New Labour governments – and similarly disposed governments elsewhere - continue to beg some of them; for example, the question of what basic needs are. Social democratic governments provide systems of social assistance but have not effectively defined the adequacy of that assistance to meet basic needs as defined by a range of participatory research studies. The UK government's programmes to address social exclusion and reduce poverty are titled Opportunity for All but most such governments do not go beyond goals related to equality of opportunity to promote equality of outcome, which many would argue was a more robust indicator of a socially just society. ''What is not yet acknowledged is that genuine equality of opportunity and recognition of the equal worth of all our citizens is incompatible with the savagely unequal society we now live in. Equality of opportunity in the context of economic and social structures that remain profoundly unequal is likely to remain a mirage' (Lister cited in NICF 2001).

Critics of social democratic governments argue that the state has to intervene more strongly to promote social justice both in terms of the process by which it is achieved and of redistributive policies; the market – covering all the institutions of society which operate to deliver goods and services – distributes those goods and services, as well as opportunities (or life chances) unfairly and the state has a key role in correcting those deficiencies. Governments focusing only on the poor and disadvantaged are also failing one key test of social justice, which is that it is concerned with the fair distribution of the good and bad things across the whole of society and not just amongst the poor. Within the UK, the adoption of the goal of social justice – with a stated commitment to an agenda of equalities - has been used to mark off the policy agenda of the Scottish Executive (Scottish Executive 2003) from that of the UK Parliament. However, the Scottish Executive goes only some way towards a position of fairness to all: its 2003 spending manifesto argued that 'Scotland must be a society of strong inclusive communities where everyone can live with dignity ... every policy we introduce ... will be measured against success in closing the gap between the most disadvantaged and the average.'

A modern protagonist for the concept of social justice was John Rawls (Rawls 1971). Drawing on Aristotle, Hume, Hegel, Kant and other moral philosophers, he argued that (Social) Justice meant 'fairness ... the principle subject of justice is the basic structure of society ... the way in which the major social institutions distribute fundamental rights and duties and determine the division of advantages from social co-operation...' (p.6) (that is, he was not concerned with the benefits to be derived for individuals from private association). A 'well-ordered society' was one in which 'everyone is presumed to act justly ...' (p.8), where vested interests are put to one side. Rawls' rejection of the idea of social justice as compatible with a society oriented towards individual gain is echoed in Donnison (1998) who argues that 'standards and values cannot be developed privately' (p.186) i.e. within one institution or in relation to one practice. What, Donnison suggested, 'we apply to others we must apply to ourselves.' These approaches are grounded in the traditions of a redistributive modern welfare state.

Rawls then derived two basic principles:
1. 'each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive scheme of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for others ... 2. social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) reasonably expected to be to everyone's advantage, and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all'. (p.53) Social justice thus has a strong inter-relationship with the concept of inequality.

These were specific formulations of a more general position, that 'all social values - liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the social bases of self-respect - are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any or all of these values is to everyone's advantage'. (p.59) The obverse concept, injustice, thus becomes in Rawls' view, 'simply inequalities that are not to the benefit of all.' (Ibid.) This approach highlights distinctions between equality of opportunity, or access, equality of outcome, and equality of status. Most contemporary politicians arguing for equality tend to argue for equality of opportunity; however, those on the right emphasise simply equality of rules and processes, the state's role being merely to ensure free market exchanges for all (equally), and those broadly on the left for equality of outcome – or at least sufficient equality of outcome to prevent injustice. Rawls observed that if there were to be inequalities, they could only be justified on the basis that everyone had equality of opportunity to compete for the most desirable positions, regardless of their class or status. Rawls' famous test of social justice was through what he called the 'veil of ignorance', through which 'no-one knows his place in society, class position or social status ... they know that their society is subject to the circumstances of justice and whatever this implies..' (Ibid. pp.118-119). People thus act without any sense of personal advantage.

Miller argues that social justice – which he regards as interchangeable with the concept of distributive justice - provides the political and philosophical basis for deciding 'how the good and bad things in life should be distributed among the members of a human society' (Miller 1999:1). These things incorporate, in his view, familiar material dimensions of a 'good life' – income, wealth, education, housing, health and so on. Miller identifies three key principles which connect strongly to the concept of social justice: desert, need and equality.

In relation to desert, a just society is one 'whose institutions are arranged so that people get the benefits they deserve' (Ibid.:155). This principle must not however become a rigid formulation contingent simply on institutional arrangements within a society, but allow concepts of need to come into play i.e. resources cannot be committed solely on the basis of desert but also of need. The concept of need is 'not merely idiosyncratic or confined to those who hold a particular view of the good life ... it must be capable of being validated on terms that all relevant parties can agree to.' (Ibid.: 205). This validation is a political process but one from which many parties have hitherto been excluded because of their lack of power, both in a formal and informal sense. Miller agues that the notion of equality relevant to social justice is distributive in its nature: 'it specifies that benefits of a certain kind – rights, for instance – should be distributed equally because justice requires this' (Ibid.: 232). To achieve social justice, we must have 'a political community in which citizens are treated in an equal across-the-board way, in which public policy is geared toward meeting the intrinsic needs of every member, and in which the economy is framed and constrained in such a way that the income and other work-related benefits people receive correspond to their respective deserts.' (Ibid.: 250).

The concept of social justice is thus linked closely to other key concepts such as need, to citizenship and rights. Marshall's 1950 exposition of Citizenship and social class advanced a taxonomy of rights by which one could identify the characteristics of citizenship. These incorporated:

Many contemporary commentators on citizenship, such as Lister (1997) and Dean and Melrose (1999) do not regard these rights as of equal weight. Dean and Melrose for example argue that 'Civil rights underwrite the operation of the market economy and are entirely consistent with class inequality' whereas 'political rights and social rights tend to challenge such inequality' (p. 180). Thus citizenship and class to a large extent can embody opposing principles. From this perspective, there remains a major political question about the degree to which social justice is compatible at all with the operation of a market economy. Doyal and Gough (1991) argue that social justice 'stands against fanatics of the free market economy ... but also demands and promotes economic success' or, conversely, that 'social justice is an ideal in its own right but economic success also demands a greater measure of social justice'. (p.130) Plant (2000), however, argues that social justice requires governments to work with the grain of the market. For many commentators, the market is the fundamental cause of much injustice, both social and economic, and the goal of social justice as fairness requires governments to confront the inequities of market systems.

Most contemporary conceptions of social justice generally place social and political rights far ahead of civil rights in the sense in which Marshall used them. Confusingly, civil rights have come in the past forty years, most of all through the political activism of Blacks in the Southern United States of America, more to mean social and political rights - such as freedom to attend mixed schools than the more narrow meaning ascribed them by Marshall. Earlier analyses of social justice are also limited in their understanding of the way in which the dimensions of gender and culture need to be built into a framework of values; to Marshall's typology we would need to add, following Castles (2000), Lister (2003) and others, the categories of cultural rights and gender rights. For minority ethnic groups, this means the right to be culturally different within a society which provides the same social, civil and political rights to all.

This raises a further important theoretical and political agenda, that of exploring the nature of social justice within multicultural societies and particularly those characterised by institutional and individual racism. Multicultural societies have increasingly been struggling with the difficulties of incorporating respect and recognition for cultural diversity and difference within a framework of universal rights: to date, within the UK, these arguments have been couched in terms of debates about social integration, assimilation and cohesion rather than about social justice. Social injustice might however be said to emerge not just from the unconstrained workings of institutions, groups and organisations through the mechanisms of the market, leading to significant differences in income, wealth and the opportunities and outcomes that these bring, but also because of cultural and socially-constructed differences based on, for example, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and disability (Fraser 2001).

Social justice is also about the non-material aspects of life: these incorporate critically the dimensions of respect and recognition between different groups and individuals (and not just the poor). For Miller, the distributive notion of social justice is not to be confused with 'the ideal of a society in which people regard and treat one another as equals ... [which]... is not a distributive ideal in itself but does have distributive implications' (Op. cit.: 232,241), for example by influencing our attempts at distributive justice. This latter concept he terms social equality, which 'is a matter of how people regard one another and how they conduct their social relations' (Op. cit. 239). This complementary 'recognition' or 'relations of respect' aspect of social justice has been strongly argued in recent years by e.g. Young (1990). For her, social justice as a distributive issue needs to be set within a relational context, in particular 'the elimination of institutionalized domination and oppression'. Individuals, as well as the state and the market, have a key role to play in supporting the goals of social justice and answering the sorts of deceptively simple question posed by Miller in relation to social justice between the genders: 'is it fair that women should perform more domestic labour than men?' (2001: 5).

Miller argues that the major challenge posed by multiculturalism is that it widens the notion of the closed political community within which concepts such as need, rights and desert are contested. However, this is not an argument for 'the elimination of cultural differences but the opening up of national identities so that they become accessible to the members of many (ideally all) cultural groups within existing democratic states.' (2001: 263) The political task is to ensure that all cultural groups are, first, recognised and secondly, engaged in the process of determining the principles of social justice and acting on those principles. Miller argues there is little empirical evidence supporting the view that cultural differences translate into differing conceptions of social justice.

Most major conceptions of social justice also fail to consider the role of those most disadvantaged by social injustice, as actors - rather than simply victims - in the search for social justice. The United Nations (see e.g. UNDP 1993) points to the many ways, including organizational, informational, developmental, constitutional and legal, political and economic ways, in which participation by the disadvantaged themselves may promote social justice. Many governments have now also acknowledged the importance of processes which empower the disadvantaged to act and speak on their own behalves. An additional dimension might thus be on the role of community development as the means by which the excluded and the marginalised can act in the search for social justice. To put it another way, social justice is not simply about achieving forms of human welfare – of whatever kind – but the means by which that welfare is obtained.

It has also been argued (see e.g. JRF 2004) that geography has an important influence on the achievement of social justice. Differential equality of opportunity, poverty, access to rights and so on, may be accentuated for those in rural areas as compared with their urban counterparts, (e.g. the costs of accessing goods and services and their frequently poorer quality), or those living in deteriorating neighbourhoods compared with those in well-resourced communities.

Drawing on these analyses, one wide-ranging definition of social justice might be:
a framework of political objectives, pursued through social, economic, environmental and political policies, based on an acceptance of difference and diversity, and informed by values concerned with;

It is, however, increasingly necessary to consider how the process of globalisation - that is, the impact of economic groupings which have no allegiance to particular political entities - affects this approach. In Miller's and earlier writers' analyses, it is possible to define social justice within the context of a closed political community in which all relevant actors could be identified and encouraged to engage with the debates about social justice. Globalisation, according to many commentators, has generated increasing divisions, in terms of income and wealth, both between and within all nation states. Two limited scenarios might be advanced to protect the claims of social justice: one is that each nation state can continue to argue the merits of social justice, the other that a transnational community and its institutions emerges (which the European Union could represent within the context of Europe) which can constitute the new closed political community. Alternatively, those concerned with issues of social justice between states and regions would not retreat within such a closed community but use it as a base for advancing political, economic, social and environmental arguments for global (social) justice.

References

Castles, S. (2000) Ethnicity and globalisation, London: Sage.
CSJ (Commission for Social Justice) (1994) Social Justice:Strategies for national renewal, London: Verso.
Dean, H. and Melrose, M. (1999) Poverty, riches and social citizenship, Routledge, London.
Donnison, D. (1998) Policies for a just society, Macmillan, Basingstoke.
Doyal, L. and Gough, I. (1991) A theory of human need, Macmillan, Basingstoke.
Fraser, N. (2001) 'Recognition without ethics?', Theory, culture and society, 18(2-3): 21-42.
JRF (2004) Overcoming disadvantage: an agenda for the next 20 years, York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
Lister, R. (2003) Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives (2nd edition), Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Marshall, T.H. (1950) 'Citizenship and social class', in T.H. Marshall and T. Bottomore, (1992) Citizenship and social class, London: Pluto Press.
NICF (2001) Annual report, Belfast: Community Foundation for Northern Ireland.
Plant, R. (2000) 'Social justice' in R. Walker (ed.) Ending child poverty, Bristol: Policy Press.
Rawls, J. (1971) A theory of justice, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Scottish Executive (2003) Social Justice: a Scotland where everyone matters, Edinburgh: Scottish Executive.
UNDP (1997) Human Development Report, 1993, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Young, I.M. (1990) Justice and the politics of difference, Princeton: Princeton University Press.