Social justice
[1][2] In Western and Asian cultures, the concept of social justice has often referred to the process of ensuring that individuals fulfill their societal roles and receive their due from society.
[6][7][8][9][10][excessive citations] Social justice assigns rights and duties in the institutions of society, which enables people to receive the basic benefits and burdens of cooperation.
[22][23] In the late industrial revolution, Progressive Era American legal scholars began to use the term more, particularly Louis Brandeis and Roscoe Pound.
After the Renaissance and Reformation, the modern concept of social justice, as developing human potential, began to emerge through the work of a series of authors.
Baruch Spinoza in On the Improvement of the Understanding (1677) contended that the one true aim of life should be to acquire "a human character much more stable than [one's] own", and to achieve this "pitch of perfection...
[33] Some references to the use of the expression are in articles of journals aligned with the spirit of the Enlightenment, in which social justice is described as an obligation of the monarch;[34][35] also the term is present in books written by Catholic Italian theologians, notably members of the Society of Jesus.
[33] The usage of the term started to become more frequent by Catholic thinkers from the 1840s, beginning with the Jesuit Luigi Taparelli in Civiltà Cattolica, and based on the work of St. Thomas Aquinas.
Taparelli argued that rival capitalist and socialist theories, based on subjective Cartesian thinking, undermined the unity of society present in Thomistic metaphysics as neither were sufficiently concerned with ethics.
This is the highest abstract standard of social and distributive justice; towards which all institutions, and the efforts of all virtuous citizens, should be made in the utmost degree to converge.
"[37] In the later 19th and early 20th century, social justice became an important theme in American political and legal philosophy, particularly in the work of John Dewey, Roscoe Pound and Louis Brandeis.
After the First World War, the founding document of the International Labour Organization took up the same terminology in its preamble, stating that "peace can be established only if it is based on social justice".
In 1931, the Pope Pius XI explicitly referred to the expression, along with the concept of subsidiarity, for the first time in Catholic social teaching in the encyclical Quadragesimo anno.
Quoting classical Greek thinkers like Epicurus on the good of pursuing happiness, Hunter also cites ornithologist, naturalist, and philosopher Alexander Skutch in his book Moral Foundations: The common feature which unites the activities most consistently forbidden by the moral codes of civilized peoples is that by their very nature they cannot be both habitual and enduring, because they tend to destroy the conditions which make them possible.
[42]Pope Benedict XVI cites Teilhard de Chardin in a vision of the cosmos as a 'living host'[43] embracing an understanding of ecology that includes humanity's relationship to others, that pollution affects not just the natural world but interpersonal relations as well.
[44]In The Quest for Cosmic Justice, Thomas Sowell writes that seeking utopia, while admirable, may have disastrous effects if done without strong consideration of the economic underpinnings that support contemporary society.
To determine whether any particular system of collectively enforced social arrangements is legitimate, he argued that one must look for agreement by the people who are subject to it, but not necessarily to an objective notion of justice based on coherent ideological grounding.
According to Rawls, the basic liberties that every good society should guarantee are: Thomas Pogge's arguments pertain to a standard of social justice that creates human rights deficits.
He assigns responsibility to those who actively cooperate in designing or imposing the social institution, that the order is foreseeable as harming the global poor and is reasonably avoidable.
The current institutional design, he says, systematically harms developing economies by enabling corporate tax evasion,[52] illicit financial flows, corruption, trafficking of people and weapons.
"[56]: 52 The same document reports, "From the comprehensive global perspective shaped by the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, neglect of the pursuit of social justice in all its dimensions translates into de facto acceptance of a future marred by violence, repression and chaos.
Under John Wesley's direction, Methodists became leaders in many social justice issues of the day, including the prison reform and abolition movements.
One of Judaism's most distinctive and challenging ideas is its ethics of responsibility reflected in the concepts of simcha ("gladness" or "joy"), tzedakah ("the religious obligation to perform charity and philanthropic acts"), chesed ("deeds of kindness"), and tikkun olam ("repairing the world").
The disparity and wide inequalities in social behaviour of the jātis – exclusive, endogamous communities centred on traditional occupations – has led to various reform movements in Hinduism.
Despite this, in terms of their understanding of the necessity of a just and righteous world, and the nearly inevitable obstructions along such a path, the two have much in common; and, particularly in the first edition of [A Theology of Liberation], the use of Marxian theory is quite evident.
"[83] Other noted exponents are Leonardo Boff of Brazil, Carlos Mugica of Argentina, Jon Sobrino of El Salvador, and Juan Luis Segundo of Uruguay.
Ruth Faden of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and Madison Powers of Georgetown University focus their analysis of social justice on which inequalities matter the most.
The third principle of the Earth Charter is social and economic justice, which is described as seeking to eradicate poverty as an ethical, social, and environmental imperative, ensure that economic activities and institutions at all levels promote human development in an equitable and sustainable manner, affirm gender equality and equity as prerequisites to sustainable development and ensure universal access to education, health care, and economic opportunity, and uphold the right of all, without discrimination, to a natural and social environment supportive of human dignity, bodily health, and spiritual well-being, with special attention to the rights of indigenous peoples and minorities.
"[94] Ben O'Neill of the University of New South Wales and the Mises Institute argues: [For advocates of social justice] the notion of "rights" is a mere term of entitlement, indicative of a claim for any possible desirable good, no matter how important or trivial, abstract or tangible, recent or ancient.
In fact, since the program of social justice inevitably involves claims for government provision of goods, paid for through the efforts of others, the term actually refers to an intention to use force to acquire one's desires.
[96]Psychologist Steven Pinker argues that social justice "sees society as a struggle for power, also zero-sum, among different sexes, sexual orientations, and races [and] also has a contempt for science".
