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The Goal of Social Justice. Typically, those who strive for social justice seek the redistribution of power to enhance the well-being of individuals through equal access to healthcare, justice and economic opportunity.
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social justice, in contemporary politics, social science, and political philosophy, the fair treatment and equitable status of all individuals and social groups within a state or society. The term also is used to refer to social, political, and economic institutions, laws, or policies that collectively afford such fairness and equity and is commonly applied to movements that seek fairness, equity, inclusion, self-determination, or other goals for currently or historically oppressed, exploited, or marginalized populations.
In theoretical terms, social justice is often understood to be equivalent to justice itself, however that concept is defined. Many somewhat narrower interpretations conceive of social justice as being equivalent to or partly constitutive of distributive justice—that is, the fair and equitable distribution of social, political, and economic benefits and burdens. According to some interpretations, social justice also encompasses, among other conditions, the equal opportunity to contribute to and to benefit from the common good, including by holding public office (such readings are sometimes referred to as “contributive justice”). Other interpretations promote the stronger goal of equal participation by all individuals and groups in all major social, political, and economic institutions.
Another set of definitions of social justice emphasizes the institutional conditions that encourage individual self-development and self-determination—the former being understood as the opposite of oppression and the latter as the opposite of domination. A related concept of justice, suggested by the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum, is that a just society fosters the capabilities of individuals to engage in activities that are essential to a truly “human” life—including, among others, the capabilities to live a life of normal length, to use one’s mind in ways “protected by guarantees of freedom of expression,” and to meaningfully participate in political decision-making. Still other accounts define social justice, or justice itself, in terms of broad categories of human rights, including the entire range of civil and political rights (such as the rights to personal liberty and to participation in government), economic and social rights (such as the rights to employment and to education), and solidarity or group rights (such as the rights to political independence and to economic development).
Social justice is both a theoretical concept and a practical ideal—an object of social-scientific and philosophical understanding and debate as well as a real-world goal of social and political reform movements. In general, practical ideals of social justice represent an attempt to realize a certain conception of social justice in a particular state or society. Accordingly, such ideals tend to vary with the historical and cultural circumstances in which they are pursued; they may also depend upon current social-scientific understandings of the institutions to be reformed, abolished, or created.
The first philosophical studies of justice and political authority in the West were undertaken in ancient Greece and Rome by thinkers whose works combined theoretical speculation with generally insightful empirical observations. Arguably the most influential of these works was Plato’s Republic, a lengthy examination, in dialogue form, of justice as both an individual virtue and a defining characteristic of the ideal political community. For Plato, justice in the individual soul and in the city-state consists of the harmonious operation of the major elements out of which each is constituted: reason, spirit, and appetite in the soul; and rulers, guardians (or soldiers), and producers (e.g., farmers and craftsmen) in the city-state. Harmonious operation in both cases is realized when each element pursues or performs the object or function appropriate to it and does not intrude upon the proper pursuits or functions of other elements. Although Plato’s vision of the just society is strikingly undemocratic and class-based, his emphasis on service to the common good through the integrated functioning of social classes became a salient feature of many later theories. (Notably, Plato held that women were just as capable as men and therefore just as deserving of opportunities to contribute to the common good. Women as well as men, he insisted, would be among the rulers of a just republic.)
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Like Plato, Aristotle conceived of justice as both an individual virtue and a characteristic of an ideal (or well functioning) city-state. Aristotle’s theory of political justice has been variously interpreted but is generally understood to encompass the rule of law, the pursuit of the common good (the purpose of the state being to realize the communal basis of the good life for all citizens), the equitable distribution of benefits and burdens among equally deserving or meritorious individuals (distributive justice), and fairness in dealings between individuals (corrective, commutative, or reciprocal justice). Political desert and merit, however, are achieved only by those virtuous citizens who contribute significantly to the common good. Thus, the just society, though based on the competent promotion of the common good, involves a hierarchical social order and an equitable distribution of political rights and responsibilities among ranking members of that hierarchy (see also Aristotle: Political theory). Aristotle’s understanding of political justice is to this extent aristocratic.
Aristotle’s view of justice greatly influenced the medieval Christian philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas, who followed Aristotle in holding that the purpose of political authority is to promote the good of the community and that in a just society benefits would be distributed by social rank, with “more prominent” community members receiving correspondingly greater benefits. Aquinas’s philosophy and theology became official doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church in the 16th century, and his vision of justice eventually inspired the measured social reforms advocated by the church in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (see below).
In the 17th and 18th centuries the English philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke and the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau developed influential conceptions of justice based on the notion of a social contract. In primeval times, according to social-contract theory, individuals were born into an anarchic “state of nature,” which they eventually sought to escape because of the danger and misery it entailed or because they wished to experience the advantages of social order. To do so, they formed a society by means of a compact or agreement that defined a set of rights and duties of individuals and a set of powers to be exercised by a central government. Social-contract theories thus attempt to legitimate and delimit political authority on the grounds of individual self-interest and rational consent. Conceptions of justice based on social-contract theory were significantly different from earlier understandings, because they viewed justice as a human creation or social construct rather than as an ideal rooted in objective features of human nature and society. Locke’s particular version of the social contract, which recognized a set of natural individual rights that the social contract obliged the ruling authority to protect, became the philosophical basis of political liberalism.
As noted earlier, movements for social justice have been guided and inspired by intellectual understandings of the nature of justice. An early and important example of such influence is the work of the 19th-century Jesuit scholar Luigi Taparelli, who coined the term social justice in the 1840s. Inspired by Aquinas, Taparelli propounded a conservative vision of justice that legitimates aristocratic rule by grounding it in supposedly natural inequalities between individuals. Later in the 19th century, justice became a central theme of Roman Catholic social teaching, which emerged in response to the dire societal consequences of the Industrial Revolution. The church generally accepted economic inequality and social stratification as the products of natural inequalities of ability between individuals but emphasized the ideally harmonious interworking of socioeconomic classes and the moral obligation of civil society and the state to protect the weak and vulnerable and to promote the common good. The church’s approach to social justice thus represented a course midway between laissez-faire capitalism, which would reject any state intervention in the economy on behalf of impoverished and exploited industrial workers, and socialism, which would impose state ownership or control of the economy to meet the basic needs of workers and to ensure their material equality. Taparelli’s contention that the state is obliged to intervene on behalf of distressed individuals only in situations where smaller social units, including the family, are unable to address the relevant social problems was embraced by Pope Leo XIII (a former student of Taparelli) in his 1891 encyclical Rerum novarum (Latin: “Of New Things”; English title On Capital and Labor) and reaffirmed in Pope Pius XI’s 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo anno (Latin: “In the Fortieth Year”; English title Reconstruction of the Social Order).
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, legal reformers in England and the United States, some of whom were inspired by utilitarianism, began to apply the notion of social justice to issues of legal, economic, and political inequality, including women’s rights, the rights of workers, and the exploitation of immigrants and children. In the mid-20th century, racial discrimination and the civil rights of minorities in the United States, particularly African Americans, came to be recognized as a major problem of social justice, as reflected in the nationwide civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s. From the 1960s and ’70s, women’s rights and the rights of sexual minorities were also major focuses of activists who conceived of their goals in terms of social justice. Later social-justice movements in the United States and Europe were concerned with uncovering and dismantling systemic forms of racial discrimination (see critical race theory) and, more broadly, with identifying the various political, economic, and social mechanisms by which members of racial, ethnic, and cultural minorities were—in the estimation of social-justice advocates—oppressed, excluded, and exploited, particularly by white majorities.
Its system of values, with the minimal role assigned to government, has been proven by experience to be disastrously wrong, both in terms of stability and social justice. Even governments and economists openly on the right of the political spectrum have been compelled by history to acknowledge they were at least partially mistaken.
Social justice examines the fairness of a society’s wealth distribution, as well as the distribution of privileges and opportunities. Discrimination based on traits like race or gender goes against the principles of social justice, which include human rights, access, participation, and equity.
Social justice is the belief that everyone in society deserves equal social, economic, and political rights; equal privileges; and equal opportunities. The phrase “social justice” pops up a lot today in discussions around human rights issues.
Jun 5, 2023 · It’s about ensuring equal distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges within a society. Social justice is important because it promotes a fair society where everyone, regardless of their background, has the opportunity to succeed and live with dignity.
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Dec 16, 2013 · Social justice is a normative concept centred on the notion of fairness and the principles of equality, equity, rights and participation. This paper sheds light on some of the underlying theories and fundamental elements of social justice. Specifically, it focuses on the principle of participation given its centrality to a
