Political Concept of Social Justice

The term ‘social justice’ is beset by political controversy. For some, it is inextricably linked to egalitarianism and acts as little more than a cipher for equality. As a result, the political right recoils from using the term, except in a negative or derogatory sense. Hayek, for instance, regarded social justice as a ‘weasel word’, a term used intentionally to evade or mislead. In their view, social justice tends to be a cloak for the growth of state control and government interference. Social-democratic and modern liberal thinkers, on the other hand, treat social justice more favourably, believing that it refers to the attempt to reconstruct the social order in accordance with moral principles, the attempt to rectify social injustice. However, there is no necessary link, either political or logical, between social justice and the ideas of equality and state control. As will become apparent later, all theories of social justice can be used to justify inequality, and some are profoundly inegalitarian.

A distinctive concept of ‘social justice’, as opposed to the more ancient ideal of ‘justice’, first emerged in the early nineteenth century. It is ‘social’ in the sense that it is concerned not with legal penalties and punishments so much as with social well-being. Social justice thus stands for a morally defensible distribution of benefits or rewards in society, evaluated in terms of wages, profits, housing, medical care, welfare benefits and so forth. Social justice is therefore about ‘who should get what’. For example, when, if ever, do income differentials become so wide they can be condemned as ‘unjust’? Or, on an international level, are there grounds for arguing that the unequal distribution of wealth between the prosperous and industria-lized North and the developing South is ‘immoral’? In the view of some commentators, however, the very notion of social justice is mistaken. They argue that the distribution of material benefits has nothing whatsoever to do with moral principles like justice, but can only be evaluated in the light of economic criteria such as efficiency and growth. Hayek’s antipathy towards the term can, for example, be explained by his belief that justice can only be evaluated in terms of individual considerations, in which case broader ‘social’ principles are meaningless.

Most people, nevertheless, are unwilling to reduce material distribution to mere economics, and indeed many would argue that this is perhaps the most important area in which justice must be seen to be done. The problem, however, is that political thinkers so seldom agree about what is a just distribution of material rewards. Like justice itself, social justice is an ‘essentially contested’ concept, there being no universally agreed notion of what is socially just. In Social Justice (1976), David Miller accepted that the concept is essentially contested and socially relative, but tried to identify a number of contrasting principles of justice. These are ‘to each according to his needs’, ‘to each according to his rights’ and ‘to each according to his deserts’.

According to Needs

The idea that material benefits should be distributed on the basis of need has most commonly been proposed by socialist thinkers, and is sometimes regarded as the socialist theory of justice. Its most famous expression is found in Critique of the Gotha Programme ([1875] 1968), in which Karl Marx proclaimed that a fully communist society will inscribe on its banners the formula, ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!’ It would be a mistake, however, to reduce socialist conceptions of social justice to a simplistic theory of need-satisfaction. Marx himself, for example, distinguished between the distributive principle that was appropriate to full communism and the one which should be adopted in the transitional ‘socialist’ society. Marx accepted that capitalist practices could not be swept away overnight, and that many of them, such as material incentives, would linger on in a socialist society. He therefore recognised that under socialism labour would be paid according to its individual contribution and that this would vary according to the worker’s physical or mental capacities. In effect, in Marx’s view, the ‘socialist’ principle of justice amounted to ‘to each according to his work’. The criterion of need can be said to be the basis of the ‘communist’ principle of justice, because, according to Marx, it is appropriate only to a future society of such material abundance that questions about the distribution of wealth become almost irrelevant.

Needs differ from both wants and preferences. A ‘need’ is a necessity, it demands satisfaction; it is not simply a frivolous wish or a passing fancy. For this reason, needs are often regarded as ‘basic’ to human beings, their satisfaction is the foundation of any fully human life. While ‘wants’ are a matter of personal judgement, shaped by social and cultural factors, human needs are objective and universal, belonging to all people regardless of gender, nationality, religion, social background and so forth. The attraction of a needs-based theory of social justice is that it addresses the most fundamental requirements of the human condition. Such a theory accepts as a moral imperative that all people are entitled to the satisfaction of basic needs because, quite simply, worthwhile human existence would otherwise be impossible. Attempts to identify human rights are, for instance, often grounded in some notion of basic needs. One of the most influential attempts to identify such needs was undertaken by the psychol-ogist Abraham Maslow (1908–70), who proposed that there is a ‘hierarchy of needs’. The most basic of these needs are physiological considerations like hunger and sleep, which are followed by the need for safety, belonging and love, then there is the need for self-esteem, and finally what Maslow referred to as ‘self-actualization’. In A Theory of Human Need (1991), Len Doyal and Ian Gough identify physical health and autonomy as objective and universal needs, arguing that they are the essential preconditions for participation in social life.

Any needs-based theory of social justice clearly has egalitarian implica-tions. If needs are the same the world over, material resources should be distributed so as to satisfy at least the basic needs of each and every person. This means, surely, that every person is entitled to food and water, a roof over his or her head, adequate health care and some form of personal security. To allow people, wherever in the world they may live, to be hungry, thirsty, homeless, sick or to live in fear, when the resources exist to make them otherwise is therefore immoral. The need criterion thus implies that those in the prosperous West have a moral obligation to relieve suffering and starvation in other parts of the world. Indeed, it suggests a clear case for a global redistribution of wealth. In the same way, it is unjust to afford equally sick people unequal health care. Distribution according to need therefore points towards the public provision of welfare services, free at the point of delivery, rather than towards any system of private provision which would take account of the ability to pay. Nevertheless, a needs-based theory of justice does not in all cases lead to an equal distribution of resources, because needs themselves may sometimes be unequal. For example, if need is the criterion, the only proper basis for distributing health care is ill-health. The sick should receive a greater proportion of the nation’s resources than the healthy, simply because they are sick.

Distribution according to human needs has, however, come in for fierce attack, largely because needs are notoriously difficult to define. Conserva-tive and sometime liberal thinkers have tended to criticize the concept of ‘needs’ on the grounds that it is an abstract and almost metaphysical category, divorced from the desires and behaviour of actual people. They argue that resource allocation should instead correspond to the more concrete ‘preferences’ which individuals express, for instance, through market behaviour. It is also pointed out that if needs exist they are in fact conditioned by the historical, social and cultural context in which they arise. If this is true, the notion of universal ‘human’ needs, as with the idea of universal ‘human’ rights, is simply nonsense. People in different parts of the world, people brought up in different social conditions, may have different needs. Finally, the idea that the needs of one person constitute a moral imperative upon another, encouraging him or her to forego material benefits, is based upon particular moral and philosophical assumptions. The most obvious of these is that human beings have a social responsibility for one another, a belief normally linked to the notion of a common humanity. While such a belief is fundamental to socialism and many of the world’s major religions, it is foreign to many conservatives and classical liberals, who see human beings as essentially self-striving.

Although the ideas of need and equality have often gone hand in hand, modern egalitarian theories have sometimes drawn upon a broader range of arguments. The most influential of these, John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971), has helped to shape both modern liberal and social democratic concepts of social justice. Though not strictly a needs theorist, Rawls nevertheless employs an instrumental notion of needs in his idea of primary goods. These are conceived of as the universal means for the attainment of human ends. The question of social justice therefore concerns how these primary goods, or needs-resources, are to be dis-tributed. Rawls proposed a theory of ‘justice as fairness’. This is based upon the maintenance of two principles:

1. Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others.

2. Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both:

(a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged; and

(b) attached to positions and offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity.

The first principle reflects a traditional liberal commitment to formal equality, the second, the so-called ‘difference principle’, points towards a significant measure of social equality. By no means, however, does this justify absolute social equality. Rawls fully recognized the importance of material inequality as an economic incentive. Nevertheless, he made an important presumption in favour of equality in that he insisted that material inequalities are only justifiable when they work to the advantage of the less well-off. This is a position compatible with a market economy in which wealth is redistributed through the tax and welfare system up to the point that this becomes a disincentive to enterprise and so disadvan-tages even the poor. Rawls’ egalitarianism is, however, based upon a kind of social contract theory rather than any evaluation of objective human needs. He imagined a hypothetical situation in which people, deprived of knowledge about their own talents and abilities, are confronted by a choice between living in an egalitarian society or an inegalitarian one. In Rawls’s view, people are likely to opt to live in an egalitarian society simply because, however enticing the prospect of being rich might be, it would never counterbalance the fear people have of being poor or disadvantaged. Thus Rawls started out by making traditionally liberal assumptions about human nature, believing individuals to be rationally self-interested, but concluded that a broadly egalitarian distribution of wealth is what most people would regard as ‘fair’.

According to Rights

The late twentieth century has witnessed a right-wing backlash against the drift towards egalitarianism, welfarism and state intervention. New Right theories, such as those propounded by Robert Nozick in Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974), have rejected both the needs-based principle of justice and any presumption in favour of equality. Instead, they have championed a principle of justice based upon the idea of ‘rights’, ‘entitlements’ or, in some cases, ‘deserts’. In so doing, the New Right has built upon a tradition of distributive thought dating back to Plato and Aristotle, which suggests that material benefits should in some way correspond to personal ‘worth’. This was also the cornerstone of the classical liberal concept of social justice, advocated by writers such as John Locke and David Hume (1711–76). Just as the concept of ‘needs’ provides the foundation for a socialist principle of justice, so ‘rights’ has usually served as the basis for a rival, liberal principle of justice.

‘Rights’ are moral entitlements to act or be treated in a particular way. In distributive theory, however, rights have usually been regarded as entitlements that have in some way been ‘earned’, usually through hard work and the exercise of skills or talents. This can be seen, for instance, in the classical liberal belief that the right to own property is based upon the expenditure of human labour. Those who work hard are entitled to the wealth they produce. In that sense, rights-based theories are not so much concerned with ‘outcomes’ – who has what – as with how that outcome is arrived at. Rights-based theories are thus based upon a theory of procedural justice. By contrast, needs-based theories are concerned with substantive justice because they focus upon outcomes, not upon how those outcomes are achieved. Rights theories are therefore properly thought of as non-egalitarian rather than inegalitarian: they endorse neither equality nor inequality. According to this view, material inequality is justified only if talents and the willingness to work are unequally distributed among humankind. This contrasts with Rawls’s theory of justice which, though he claims it to be procedural, has broadly egalitarian outcomes built into its major principles.

The most influential modern rights-based theory of justice is that of Robert Nozick, often interpreted as a response to Rawls’s theories. Nozick distinguished between historical principles of justice and end-state princi-ples. Historical principles relate to past circumstances or historical actions that have created differential entitlements. In his view, end-state principles like social equality and human needs are irrelevant to the distribution of rewards. Nozick’s objective was to identify a set of historical principles through which we can determine if a particular distribution of wealth is just. He suggested three ‘justice preserving’ rules. First, wealth has to be justly acquired in the first place, that is, it should not have been stolen and the rights of others should not have been infringed. Second, wealth has to be justly transferred from one responsible person to another. Third, if wealth has been acquired or transferred unjustly this injustice should be rectified. 

These rules can clearly be used to justify gross inequalities in the distribution of wealth and rewards. Nozick rejected absolutely the idea that there is a moral basis for redistributing wealth in the name of equality or ‘social justice’, a term of which he, in common with most libertarian theorists, was deeply suspicious. If wealth is transferred from rich to poor, either within a society or between societies, it is only as an act of private charity, undertaken through personal choice rather than moral obligation. On the other hand, Nozick’s third principle, the so-called ‘rectification principle’, could have dramatically egalitarian implications, especially if the origin of personal wealth lies in acts of duplicity or corruption. It also, for instance, brings the global distribution of wealth into question by casting a shadow over that portion of the wealth of the industrialized West which derives from conquest, plunder and enslavement in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

There have, nevertheless, been a number of major objections to any rights-based theory. Any exclusively procedural theory of justice is, for instance, forced to disregard end-state conditions altogether. This may, in practice, mean that circumstances of undeniable human suffering are regarded as ‘just’. A just society may be one in which the many are unemployed, destitute or even starving, while the few live in luxury – providing, of course, that wealth has been acquired and transferred justly. Furthermore, any historical theory of justice, such as Nozick’s, must explain how rights are acquired in the first place. The crucial first step in Nozick’s account is the assertion that individuals can acquire rights over natural resources, yet he fails to demonstrate how this comes about. An additional objection to rights-based theories of justice is that they are grounded in what C.B. Macpherson called ‘possessive individualism’. Individuals are seen to be the sole possessors of their own talents and capacities, and on this basis they are thought to be morally entitled to own whatever their talents produce. The weakness of such a notion is that it abstracts the individual from his or her social context, and so ignores the contribution which society has made to cultivating indivi-dual skills and talents in the first place. Some would go on to argue further that to treat individuals in this way is, in effect, to reward them for selfishness and actually to promote egoistical behaviour.

According to Deserts

It is common to identify two major traditions of social justice, one based upon needs and inclined towards equality, the other based upon some consideration of merit and more inclined to tolerate inequality. In practice, however, merit-based theories are not all alike. The idea of distributing benefits according to rights, discussed in the last section, relates distribution to entitlements that arise out of historical actions like work, and are in some cases established in law. Deserts-based theories undoubtedly resemble rights-based theories in a number of ways, notably in rejecting any presumption in favour of equality. Nevertheless, the idea of deserts suggests a rather different basis for material distribution. While the notion of ‘needs’ has usually been understood as a socialist principle, and ‘rights’ has often been linked to liberal theories, the idea of ‘deserts’ has commonly been employed by conservative thinkers intent upon justifying not an abstract concept of ‘social justice’ but what they regard as the more concrete idea of ‘natural justice’. However, the ideological leanings of deserts theories are difficult to tie down because of the broad, even slippery, nature of the concept itself.

A ‘desert’ is a just reward or punishment, reflecting what a person is ‘due’ or ‘deserves’. In this wide sense, all principles of justice can be said to be based upon deserts, justice itself being nothing more than giving each person what he or she is ‘due’. It is possible, therefore, to encompass both needs-based and rights-based theories within the broader notion of just deserts. For example, it can be said that the hungry ‘deserve’ food, and that the worker is ‘due’ a wage. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify a narrower concept of deserts. This is related to the idea of innate or moral worth, that people should be treated in accordance with their ‘inner’ qualities. For example, the theory that punishment is a form of retribution is based upon the idea of deserts because the wrong-doer is thought to ‘deserve’ punishment not simply as a result of his actions but in view of the quality of evil lying within him or her. Conservatives have been attracted to the notion of deserts precisely because it appears to ground justice in the ‘natural order of things’ rather than in principles dreamt up by philoso-phers or social theorists. To hold that justice is somehow rooted in nature, or has been ordained by God, is to believe that its principles are unalterable and inevitable.

The concept of natural justice has been prominent in conservative attempts to defend free-market capitalism. Theorists who write within the liberal tradition, such as Locke or Nozick, have usually enlisted principled arguments about property rights to justify the distribution of wealth found in such economies. By contrast, conservative thinkers have often followed Edmund Burke in regarding the market order as little more than the ‘laws of nature’ or the ‘laws of God’. Although Burke accepted the classical economics of Adam Smith which suggested that intervention in the market would result in inefficiency, he also believed that government regulation of working conditions or assistance for the poor amounts to interference with Divine Providence. If the prevailing distribution of wealth, however unequal, can be regarded as ‘the natural course of things’, it is also, in Burke’s view, ‘just’. Herbert Spencer (1820–1904), the British social philosopher, also developed a theory of distributive justice that relies heavily upon ‘natural’ factors. Spencer was concerned to develop a new social philosophy by relying on ideas developed in the natural sciences by Charles Darwin (1809–82). In Spencer’s view, people, like animals, were biologically programmed with a range of capacities and skills which determined what they were able to make of their lives. In The Principle of Ethics ([1892–3] 1982) he therefore argued that ‘each individual ought to receive the benefits and the evils of his own nature and consequent conduct’, a formula that underpinned his belief in the ‘survival of the fittest’. In other words, there is little point in defining justice in terms of abstract concepts such as ‘needs’ or ‘rights’ when material benefits simply reflected the ‘natural’ endowments of each individual.

When material distribution reflects ‘the workings of nature’ there is little purpose in, or justification for, human beings interfering with it, even if this means tolerating starvation, destitution and other forms of human suffering. Some have employed precisely this argument in criticism of attempts to mount famine or disaster relief. Although the more fortunate may like to feel they can relieve the suffering of others, if in doing so they are working against nature itself their efforts will ultimately be to no avail and may even be counter-productive. An early exponent of such a view was the British economist Thomas Malthus (1766–1834), who warned that all attempts to relieve poverty were pointless. In An Essay on the Principles of Population ([1798] 1971), he argued that all improvements in living conditions tend to promote increases in population size which then quickly outstrip the resources available to sustain them. War, famine and disease are therefore necessary checks upon population size; any attempt by government, however well-intentioned, to relieve poverty will simply court disaster.

The idea that justice boils down to natural deserts has, however, been subject to severe criticism. At best, this can be regarded as a harsh and unforgiving principle of justice, what is sometimes referred to as ‘rough justice’. Material circumstances are put down to the roll of nature’s dice: the fact that some countries possess more natural resources and a more hospitable climate than others is nobody’s fault, and nothing can be done about it. The simple fact is that some are lucky, and others are not. Many would argue, however, that this is not a moral theory at all, but rather a way of avoiding moral judgements. There is no room for justice in nature, and to base moral principles upon the workings of nature is simply absurd. Indeed, to do so is to distort our understanding of both ‘justice’ and ‘nature’. To portray something as ‘natural’ is to suggest that it has been fashioned by forces beyond human control, and possibly beyond human understanding. In other words, to suggest that a particular distribution of benefits is ‘natural’ is to imply that it is inevitable and unchallengeable, not that it is morally ‘right’. Moreover, what in the past may have appeared to be unalterable may no longer be so. Modern, technologically advanced societies undoubtedly possess a greater capacity to tackle problems such as poverty, unemployment and famine, which Burke and Malthus had regarded as ‘natural’. To portray the prevailing distribution of material resources in terms of ‘natural deserts’ may therefore be no more than an attempt to find justification for ignoring the suffering of fellow human beings.