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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278 279 280 281 282 283 284 285 286 287 288 289 290 291 292 293 294 295 296 297 298 299 300 301 302 303 304 305 306 307 308 309 310 311 312 313 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321 322 323 324

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      ONE PERSON WITHOUT WHOM THIS BOOK WOULD NOT EXIST IS Elizabeth Shaw, who managed the master text of a multitude of drafts and redrafts, as we labored on our separate parts of the book. She also incorporated all the suggestions and corrections offered by other readers over several years and from several locations. In addition, she made countless creative suggestions of her own.

      Two friends with long experience in Rome, Rocco Buttiglione and Andreas Widmer, were especially helpful in offering corrections and suggestions in several key chapters.

      Many other close readers caught errors, raised pointed questions about ambiguities, and caused us to do much rewriting. Among these were Paul’s colleagues Gerald Gillmore of the University of Washington and Gale Burford of the University of Vermont, as well as five especially impressive students at Ave Maria University: Sarah Blanchard, Angela Winkels, Catherine Glaser, Peter Atkinson, and Monica Bushling. Nor can we forget the insights and suggestions of Mitch Boersma of the American Enterprise Institute.

      Finally, our thanks go out to Roger Kimball and his team at Encounter Books, most notably Katherine Wong and Heather Ohle.

      As Tiny Tim said, “God bless you, every one!”

Introduction Introduction

       Paul Adams

      THE DEFINITION OF SOCIAL JUSTICE HAS RECEIVED LITTLE serious attention for two related reasons. From one perspective, developed by Friedrich Hayek in the most compelling critique of the term to date, social justice is a mirage.¹ It is meaningless, ideological, incoherent, vacuous, a cliché.² The term should be avoided, abandoned, and allowed to die a natural death, or else killed off in a few paragraphs, but it does not merit a book-length critique. Hayek himself did not follow this logic; he wrote a sustained critique of the concept rather than dismissing it out of hand, and, we suggest, he was an exemplar of the virtue in his own public life.

From another perspective, the political and ideological force of “social justice” may be seen—by critics as well as some calculating proponents—as useful in its functional vagueness. Sometimes a term is helpful in politics precisely because it is vague. For example, “maximum feasible participation” became an important part of the War on Poverty because it was unclear and no one could agree on what it actually meant.³ Social justice is a term that can be used as an all-purpose justification for any progressive-sounding government program or newly discovered or invented right. The term survives because it benefits its champions. It brands opponents as supporters of social injustice, and so as enemies of humankind, without the trouble of making an argument or considering their views. As an ideological marker, “social justice” works best when it is not too sharply defined.⁴

      So why attempt a level of precision in defining and using the concept when such a project is, according to one view, unachievable and, according to another, politically unhelpful to those who use it most?

      ONE RECENT EXCEPTION to the lack of serious consideration of social justice that is neither partisan nor dismissive is Brandon Vogt’s book, Saints and Social Justice.⁵ Vogt expounds Catholic social teaching by describing the lives of exemplary saints who dedicated themselves to God and to the common good through works of mercy and efforts to improve the lot of the poor and oppressed.

      Michael Novak and I also emphasize social justice as virtue and aim to recover it as a useful and indeed necessary concept in understanding how people ought to live and order their lives together. We seek to clarify the term’s definition and proper use in the context of Catholic social teaching. We discuss its application in the context of democratic capitalism, in which, we argue, social justice takes on a new importance as a distinctively modern virtue required for and developed by participation with others in civil society.

      On this last point we believe Vogt falls short. He sees social justice as a universal category independent of time and place. The popes after Leo XIII treat “social justice” as a new virtue, necessary for dealing with a new era in social history, and for countering the dread threat of secular, atheistic, and collectivist social movements such as “Socialism” as they understood it. In the twentieth century, as Leo XIII feared, those movements overran huge stretches of the world. They rode roughshod over the transcendent dimension of the human person. They also violated many basic human rights, such as the right to personal economic initiative, to property, to association, to personal creativity, and the liberty to speak openly and honestly, to worship publicly, and to maintain the integrity of the family against the state.

This larger social struggle evoked the call for a new social virtue, at first called “social charity” and then, with more permanence, “social justice.” Thus the concept social justice is far larger and more sharply focused than the evangelical Beatitudes and their admirable expression in the lives of the saints. In a sense, the virtues of the saints did take root in individual persons and flower in their beautiful lives; and, indeed, they also contributed to the common good, whether at local or at wider levels. But the depth of the modern social crisis requires a nontraditional—a “new”—response to new and unprecedented ruptures with the agrarian, more personal world of the past. National states became vastly larger, more powerful, and far more intrusive (abetted by new modern technologies) than any traditional authorities of the past. “Citizens” gained greater responsibilities than the “subjects” of the kings and emperors of the past. As Leo XIII and Pius XI grasped—and later popes elaborated, extended, and revised—the new “social justice” required modes of analysis, reflection, and action never possible before.

      I CAME UPON the issue over many years as a social-work educator, helping prepare students to practice in a profession that defined social justice as a core value. Social work’s accrediting body holds all bachelors and masters social-work programs accountable for incorporating social justice into their mission and goals and for assuring that students achieve competency in this area.⁶ So, in this field at least, “social justice” calls out for clarification and cannot be so easily dismissed as it might be by economists.

      My own search for coherence and precision in a “core value” that could also guide practice aimed at the common good led me to the work of Michael Novak. Here was the Catholic philosopher, theologian, and social critic who had given the most serious public attention to the concept of social justice. Throughout his career, Novak had sought to discern how we should order our lives together so that the most poor, oppressed, and vulnerable could thrive. He sought to “promote human and community well-being,” ⁷ in the language of social work’s accreditation standards, though, like me, he had been led by an overwhelming weight of evidence and СКАЧАТЬ