Social Justice Isn't What You Think It Is. Paul Adams
John Stuart Mill gave this anthropomorphic approach to social questions almost canonical status for modern thinkers in 1861 in Utilitarianism:
Society should treat all equally well who have deserved equally well of it, that is, who have deserved equally well absolutely. This is the highest abstract standard of social and distributive justice; towards which all institutions, and the efforts of all virtuous citizens, should be made in the utmost degree to converge.10
At the head of his chapter on social justice, Hayek sets quotations from Immanuel Kant and David Hume, who had been much shrewder on the relation between “desert” and reward than Mill. Both saw that “merit” cannot be defined by general rules. Hume’s is particularly sharp: “So great is the uncertainty of merit, both from its natural obscurity, and from the self-conceit of each individual, that no determinate rule of conduct could ever follow from it.”11 In other words, what Mill construes as a heavy moral obligation (“should be made in the utmost degree to converge”), Hume construes as an irrational pretension. Mill makes “merit” and “desert” sound clear and easy; Hume sees them as highly individual, obscure, and subject to self-centered bias. Mill makes “reason” seem luminous, dispassionate, objective; Hume sees reason as distorted and darkened by passion, ignorance, and bias.
Religious thinkers will here be reminded of Reinhold Niebuhr’s sketch of significant differences between the ethics of individuals and the ethics of groups, as in Moral Man and Immoral Society.12 Both Niebuhr and Hume thought certain conceits about reason could be fatal. And so, of course, did Hayek, whose last book was called The Fatal Conceit.13
Hayek argued that justice is the indispensable foundation and limitation of all law. (He had no difficulty speaking of legal discrimination, segregation, or apartheid and the like as “unjust,” and in that sense he might employ the term “an unjust society.”) But he argued, in the same vein, that the reigning conception of social justice—in part codified by Mill—is an abuse of the term justice, and is rooted in a naive anthropomorphic tendency. The abuse consists in taking the term justice out of the realm in which it properly applies to the acts and habits of individuals and using it, illicitly, to name an abstract standard of distribution which authorities ought to enforce—as when Mill speaks of “the highest abstract standards of social and distributive justice, towards which the efforts of all institutions, and the efforts of all virtuous citizens, should be made in the utmost degree to converge.”
Mill here imagines that societies can be virtuous in the same way that individuals can be. Perhaps in highly personalized societies of the ancient type—under kings, tyrants, or tribal chiefs—such a usage might make sense; in such societies, one person made all crucial social decisions. Curiously, however, the demand for the term “social justice” did not arise in earlier societies, in which it might have seemed appropriate, but only in modern times, when more complex societies operate by impersonal rules applied with equal force to all under “the rule of law.”
In ancient societies, however, even kings often made appeal to “reasons of state” to justify behaviors that by the rules of individual ethics would be blameworthy. Still, to the king one could assign personal responsibility. In the sprawling bureaucratic states, however, decisions are beclouded in internal turf wars, intramural tests of will, and decisions made by political horse trading. This is the point Niebuhr had in mind contrasting the possibilities of “moral man” with “amoral society.”
How, then, shall we judge “impersonal mechanisms” and “market forces” that leave some individuals and groups in situations that evoke pity and a sense of moral outrage? We protest against the “injustices” of nature. Do not storms, plagues, wars, and natural calamities of all sorts sometimes punish the just and unjust equally, often unfairly and even unaccountably? From biblical times, such arguments have been advanced against God himself by Job, the Psalmist, and others who saw the just suffer and the unjust prosper. Does God himself lack respect for social justice? Such is our reaction to the ordinary course of nature. It seems only “natural” to extend these feelings to the disappointments and unfair fates we see in the social order. There is a great need in the human breast, Hayek notes, to hold someone accountable, even when in another part of ourselves we recognize that such a protest is absurd:
Yet we do cry out against injustice when a succession of calamities befalls one family while another steadily prospers, when a meritorious effort is frustrated by some unforeseeable accident, and particularly if of many people whose efforts seem equally great, some succeed brilliantly while others utterly fail. It is certainly tragic to see the failure of the most meritorious efforts of parents to bring up their children, of young men to build a career, or of an explorer or scientist pursuing a brilliant idea. And we will protest against such a fate although we do not know anyone who is to blame for it, or any way in which such disappointments can be prevented.14
The birth of the concept of social justice 150 years ago coincided with two other shifts in human consciousness: the “death” of God and the rise of the ideal of the command economy. “Man,” Aristotle wrote, “is political by nature.” When God “died,” men began to trust a conceit of reason and its inflated ambition to do what God had not deigned to do: construct a just social order. This divinization of reason met its mate in the ideal of the command economy; reason (that is, science) would command, and humankind would collectively follow. The death of God, the rise of science, and the command economy yielded “scientific socialism.” Where this sort of reason would rule, the intellectuals would rule (or so some thought). Actually, the lovers of power would rule.
From this line of reasoning it follows that “social justice” is given an adequate meaning only in a directed or so-called command economy (such as in an army) in which the individuals are ordered what to do, so that under “social justice” it will always be possible to identify those in charge and to hold them responsible.15 For the notion presupposes that someone is accountable and that people are guided by specific external directions, not by internalized personal rules of just conduct. The notion further implies that no individual should be held responsible for his relative position. To assert that he is responsible would be blaming the victim and denying the relevance of considerations of “social justice.” For it is precisely the function of “social justice” to blame somebody else, to blame the system, to blame those who (mythically) control it.
Some who think in terms of social justice seem unable to imagine a noncontrolled society, based on spontaneous behaviors, observing universal rules internalized by individuals and flowering in individual self-government. Society as they imagine it is always under command. If it is not under their command, they see it as under the command of powerful others, who by definition are foes of the party of social justice and, hence, oppressors. As Leszek Kołakowski writes in his magisterial history of Communism after many years of faithful service to that Party, the fundamental paradigm of Communist ideology is guaranteed to have wide appeal: You suffer; your suffering is caused by powerful others; these oppressors must be destroyed.16
We are not wrong in perceiving, Hayek concedes, that the effects of the individual choices and open processes of a free society on the fates of individuals are not distributed according to some recognizable principle of justice. The meritorious are sometimes tragically unlucky; the hardworking fail; good ideas don’t pan out, and sometimes those who backed them, however noble their vision and their willingness to take risks, lose their shirts; some evil persons prosper; some of the just languish far below their goals; some receive much greater rewards than others for equal or less effort. The free society isn’t beanbag. It may run on fairer rules and with more equal chances than any other regime known to the human race, but it does not and cannot guarantee equal outcomes.
Further, no one individual (no politburo or congressional committee or political party) has any possibility of designing rules that would or could treat each person according to that person’s merit, desert, or even need. No one has sufficient knowledge of all relevant personal details. As Hume observed, such work is the work of Solomon, and no one is Solomon in his own case. It is work too obscure for humans. As Kant writes, no general rules have a grip fine