Social Justice Isn't What You Think It Is. Paul Adams
of eternal things to consider what was happening in the social economy of Europe. He did so because, as people began living longer, subsistence farms could no longer sustain growing families, and people were being driven from the countryside. When a father died, the eldest son inherited the farm; younger sons had to leave and find work elsewhere. They emigrated to North and South America and to the newly industrializing cities of Europe. These vast migrations to urban environments had devastating effects on traditional family life and, therefore, on the Christian faith. So, in the name of the family, Leo XIII decided to address the social crisis of the late nineteenth century.
In particular, Leo came to the defense of industrial workers. At any earlier time, he would have had to address an encyclical primarily to farmers because, for centuries, farming had been the occupation of 90 percent of the people on earth. In 1891, many of the world’s leading philosophers and greatest minds thought that socialism would be the system of the future. To the contrary, Pope Leo listed a dozen reasons why socialism would prove to be not only evil, but also futile.
Flash forward to 1931 and Quadragesimo Anno. In this encyclical Pius XI pointed out the many successful reforms undertaken in capitalist economies since 1891. Still aware of the gathering storm, he urged the nations to address more seriously the social crisis still wracking Europe. On nine different occasions in the encyclical, he used the relatively new term “social justice” to designate his ideal. In other words, a sense of crisis and change was built into the term, or at least surrounded it.
The basic idea behind social justice has its roots in Aristotle and in medieval thought. The core of the ancient idea—then called “general justice”—may be adumbrated by the following: In times of war, occupation, and exile, it was hard for individuals to live sound moral lives. Order broke down; the rule of homo homini lupus (“man is a wolf to man”) prevailed. The ethics of individuals, wise men observed, are much affected by the ethos of the city in which they live. Thus, the readiness to make sacrifices, to maintain the health and strength of the city, seemed to be good and virtuous, and needed a special name, beyond the simple “justice” that consists of giving each individual his due. This concept of general justice was not sharply developed until the twentieth century, but its roots were ancient. It pointed to a form of justice whose object was not just other individuals, but the community.
Nowadays, many people speak fervently of “social justice.” Progressives everywhere speak of it; the Communists loved the term. Everybody has heard of it, but very few have defined it. Even in 1931, important commentators on Pius XI displayed considerable confusion. Allow me to quote the Jesuit priest who probably drafted the encyclical, a brilliant thinker who died at the age of 104, Oswald von Nell-Breuning. Nell-Breuning wrote:
The encyclical Quadragesimo Anno has finally and definitively established, theologically canonized, so to speak, social justice. Now, it is our duty to study it, according to this strict requirement of scientific theology. And to give it its proper place in the structure of the Christian doctrine of virtue on the one hand and the doctrine of rights and justice on the other.4
Note the fateful ambiguity. We are left to wonder: Is social justice an abstract, regulative ideal? Some people who note a growing disparity of income in the United States say that such inequality is a sin against social justice. Is that the true meaning of the term? Or is social justice a virtue that individuals practice? Does the term refer to something inherent in society or to something inherent in individuals?
Here we must take an abbreviated tour through the terrain of virtue. In the ancient city of Athens in the time of Aristotle, there were roughly 300,000 inhabitants, most of them slaves. The consequence was that every Greek male citizen who was free and able to vote (about 30,000 men) needed to learn the arts of war. He needed to know how to handle a sword, a spear, and a horse and chariot. Such skills were crucial to defending the city, which was constantly in danger of being overrun by enemies far and near. In addition, the young men needed to learn the arts of peace. They needed to know how to persuade, how to make laws, and how to run an estate. By the time he was eighteen, a young Greek male was expected to be well-versed in these and other habits and skills.
That is what they meant by virtue: the kind of habit (or skill) you are not born with and do not always use, but which you develop and, when called upon, deploy. Virtue means those habits in particular that help a man to govern his passions and emotions so that he can act through reflection and choice. Virtues (and vices) are the habits that make you the distinctive kind of person you are. They define your character. A man who has prudence, for example, deliberates well and is reliable in action.
Until the 1930s, most education in America, especially in Sunday school, at the YMCA, and through the McGuffey Readers in the schools, concentrated on training in character, on bringing up Americans of sound habits. Why? Because if people do not know how to manage their passions and emotions when they make decisions, they cannot govern themselves. “Confirm thy soul in self-control,” runs the old hymn; “Thy liberty in law.” Citizens who cannot practice self-control cannot succeed at republican self-government. Without self-controlled citizens, the American experiment must fail.
To return to the main theme: Virtue is something you have to learn and master through practice. True, some people seem to be “naturals” at certain things and hardly have to learn them; virtues sometimes seem to be gifts some people are born with. For others, this or that virtue is a hard-earned self-modification. Once attained, however, it is an enduring and stable part of one’s character. George Washington had a combustible temper when he was young, but by middle age he had disciplined it to achieve his legendary calm.
Now, is social justice such a virtue? As Friedrich Hayek points out, most of those who use the term today do not talk about what individuals can do. They talk about what government can do.5 They talk about social justice as a characteristic of political states. Often they mean, in particular, situations of inequality, to be remedied by state-enforced redistribution. In most modern progressive usage, the cry for social justice is not a cry for greater virtue on the part of the citizenry. Indeed, the citizenry is deemed to lack sufficient virtue to such an extent that the state must intervene and effect by coercion the redistribution that individuals lack the virtue to effect on their own.
In brief, Hayek’s challenge is the following: Either the modern term “social justice” refers to a virtue to be practiced by individuals, in which case it retains its claim to the traditional language of virtue, or else it refers to a state of affairs in society, in which case it is not about individuals or their habits at all. The problem, then, boils down to this: if social justice is not a virtue, its claim to moral standing falls flat.
Alas, I have not encountered a satisfying answer to Hayek’s critique. We shall have to face this question more fully in chapter four.
The New Virtue of Association
So far ours has been a fairly broad search into what people today mean by social justice. Almost all current usages fall prey to ideology. A nonideological definition such as we are seeking is seldom encountered. But, in the words of Pope Leo XIII, new times demand a new response. So let us see if we can construct an approach to social justice for today’s world that recovers its original understanding and does not fall prey to the current traps.
It is highly instructive to reread Rerum Novarum in the light of the events of 1989. Certainly, these events were fresh in the mind of John Paul II in 1991 as he repeated the century-old warnings against a growing socialist state:
According to Rerum novarum and the whole social doctrine of the Church, the social nature of man is not completely fulfilled in the State, but is realized in various intermediary groups, beginning with the family and including economic, social, political and cultural groups which stem from human nature itself and have their own autonomy, always with a view to the common good. This is what I have called the “subjectivity” of society which, together with the subjectivity of the individual, was cancelled out by “Real Socialism.”6
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