Social Justice Isn't What You Think It Is. Paul Adams

[CHAPTER 4] [ CHAPTER 4 ]

       Friedrich Hayek, Practitioner of Social Justice Friedrich Hayek, Practitioner of Social Justice

      GIVEN THE STRENGTH OF HAYEK’S ARGUMENT AGAINST SOCIAL justice, it may seem grotesque even to hint, let alone to assert, that he himself was a practitioner of social justice—even if one adds, as one must, “social justice rightly understood.” Still, in the sentence quoted at the end of the last chapter, Hayek does offer us a clue when he writes, “the greatest service I can still render my fellow men.” This is not the only clue that Hayek saw his vocation as a thinker and writer as a service to his fellow men. He believed, further, that helping others to understand the intellectual keys to a good society, a free and creative society, is to render them a great benefaction. For the free society is an achievement of human wit and enterprise, daring and discovery; its secrets do not lie upon the surface of things, but must be painstakingly searched out through much trial and error, often at the cost of blood. How terrible to ill-treat these precious insights, then, or to lose sight of them, once gained. For this reason, it repulsed Hayek that the term “social justice” was commonly being used as a betrayal of the free society.

Ironically, then, Hayek’s war against the misuse of “social justice” was itself a war fought on behalf of his fellow human beings, a service he wanted to render them, an act of considerable consequence for (if I may put it this way) the entire City of Man. Hayek’s intellectual vocation imposed on him a duty to his fellow humans to defend the free society and to warn them of dangers against it. His intellectual work was, in this sense, a work of justice. It was also a work aimed at the long-run institutional welfare of the human race. Doing it well was not merely a matter of his own self-interest, narrowly considered, but of significance to the Human City as a whole. It was a work of justice in a plainly social dimension.

      Social justice rightly understood, as I have argued above (chapter one), is a specific habit of justice that is “social” in two senses. First, the specific skills which it calls into exercise are those of inspiring, working with, and organizing others to accomplish together a work of justice. These are the elementary skills of civil society, the primary skills of citizens of free societies, through which they exercise self-government by “doing for themselves” (without turning to government) those things that need to be done. The second characteristic of social justice rightly understood is that it aims at the good of the City, not at the good of one agent only. Citizens may band together, as in pioneer days in Iowa, to put up a school or to raise roofs over one another’s homes or to put a bridge over a stream or to build a church or an infirmary. They may get together in the modern city to hold a bake sale for some charitable purpose, to build or to repair a playground, to clean up the environment, or for a million other purposes to which the social imagination of individuals leads them. To recapitulate, social justice rightly understood is that specific habit of justice which entails two or more persons acting (1) in association and (2) for the good of the City.

      Some Precisions

      If I read Hayek correctly, he would make a much firmer practical stand on the libertarian side of welfare issues than I would, putting up strong resistance to the reasoning and practices of the welfare state. He would certainly do so for reasons of principle. But he might also do so for long-range practical reasons, holding that a premature withdrawal on that flank would result in a weakening all along the front and perhaps even a collapse of the center. In such circumstances, it would be more practical for him—a better service to others—to hold firm, even if he were to be accused of rigidity.

For myself, I believe that there is a strong argument for a modified version of the welfare state, certainly in a large, continental, and mobile society such as the United States. It would be wrong to argue that the welfare state is a desideratum of “social justice,” for social justice (rightly understood) is an attribute of citizens, not of states. Social justice is a virtue that can be exercised solely by individuals. Still, one can in a secondary sense speak of a good society—Hayek himself does—and even a just society. By this one means that its laws and institutions respect the moral law governing individuals and do not systematically frustrate that law.

      More than that, Judaism and Christianity have had a profound effect on Western humanists down the centuries, such that even secular, antibiblical thinkers like Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, and Richard Rorty freely admit to borrowing from Moses and from Jesus certain modern liberal principles that they did not learn from Socrates or even the Enlightenment: compassion for the weak and the vulnerable, solidarity, and the like. Most Christians, Jews, and secular humanists would not believe that a society that neglects the suffering of the poor and the vulnerable is a good society. They will no doubt argue long into the night about the means best suited to raising the welfare of the poor. Some libertarians would argue that the best means of raising up the poor—by far—is a strong, free, and growing economy. Others might note that this is not always enough, especially in certain hard circumstances: for instance, when people lack the insight or the habits to take advantage of opportunity.

      For myself, the bright yellow line between a nurturing and a destructive welfare program must be drawn at those points at which welfare creates dependency in otherwise able-bodied and healthy adults, or in other ways corrupts their ability to make practical judgments for themselves and to bear responsibility for them. For instance, the Homestead Act that opened the American West gave hundreds of thousands of citizens a stake in property, on the condition that they would use their own practical intelligence and labor to develop it. This law did not create dependency; on the contrary, it helped families establish their independence.

Similarly, for older and more mature women, Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) did work for a while. Later, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), created by the 1996 welfare reform, corrected for some of its burgeoning abuses. The majority, knocked off stride by a sudden and unforeseen misfortune, such as divorce or widowhood, use this program for one or two years, that is, until they regain their independence and then depart from it. But for younger, inexperienced women, AFDC had on the whole been destructive to a very large proportion of their children, whose prognosis for the future is far bleaker than that of other children.¹

      Among young American blacks, it seems fair to say that this attempt to be of assistance went seriously wrong.² By 1993, out-of-wedlock births among whites and throughout the nation vaulted inexorably upward.³ Even the reforms in TANF did not halt out-of-wedlock births from becoming a way of life for millions nationwide.⁴

      This