On social [in]justice
On social [in]justice
A term, which can be found in many circles, in some more often than others. First of which I have mentioned above is politics and other social "doers", who's provenance might seem a bit suspicious in one way or another. Why ? That is what I'm about to explain later. Let's get back to circles where this term is used less often. It can be Holy Bible for instance, but when it comes to Holy Bible, inappropriate translation is much more probable. There might be lack of proper knowledge of where this term came from. The best starting point will be explanation, where this "social justice" came from.
So, one of the first mention of this term, or saying, was use by classics of...communism. In this subject, there can be no doubt that Karl Marx is taking his prime. As one of materialism historical representative, he exclude any idea that can spread over the time or history, no matter whether it is ethic idea or anything else. There is no such thing as general idea, like "good", "truth" or anything like it. "Social justice" according to Marx meant redistribution of goods, of course only in one direction; take from the wealthy and give it to the poor. In this sense, it starts socialism as it was - "the set of beliefs that states that all people are equal and should share equally in a country's money, or the political systems based on these beliefs". The false in the sentence above, is that, there cannot be a country where everyone is equal, or share same in country money. At best, there can be a country where citizens are equally subjected to law, but still it is impossible for men, since we are far from perfect. Even in democratic and free country as Switzerland, there are representatives of nation, or part of such. Even if this idea would be realistic, in achievable sense, is there a chance for a nation to exist where there are no classes of professions or single one of those ? Peasants for instance ? No, there is no way to realize this idea. Seems pretty archaic. And even so, in primitive tribe there are warriors, parents, shaman, leader. So classes in society are inevitable, whether it is western world, primitive tribes or anything else. Thing, that Marx failed to understand, was way of existing of those classes. His main point was liquidation of capitalistic class, but here he apparently didn't understand what Adam Smith had to say [On Adam Smith in another occasion]. As everyone can see, "social justice" of Marx failed in many ways. One of the examples was communism in Soviet Russia. This so called "social justice" led to terror never seen before, and as a result it was just a tool to reign and keep the power, but when it comes to results, it was highly ineffective.
Another place, where we can find "social justice" is Holy Bible. In comment's to Ap.6,6 we can find some pointers to "social justice". In some comments we can find "[...] this horseman is associated with social injustice[...]. As we can see, the commentator does not understand issue - what justice is, and "social justice" itself cannot be achieved. How could a man judge a man's worth ? By special committee ? The question at hand is, where the hunger comes from [see Ap.6,6] ? Sometimes it comes from choices we made, and cannot be fix by any idea, not to mention "social justice" one. Of course, there are places in the world where hunger takes its harvest, but mostly its because of extreme natural conditions or natural disasters, like flood or drought. In this place it is worth mentioning, that some people suffer hunger because of the addiction, like alcohol or drugs. Because of this, "social justice" is only idea which cannot be realized, since state does not know state of one person, nor the reason why he/she is in that particular state.
As You can see, trouble with "social justice" comes from misunderstanding or wrong interpretation, or both. Misunderstanding of term genesis, and naiveness ["everyone should have equal share...or almost equal"]. Unfortunately, these two concepts are widely used by modern politicians who wants to realize this idea, or at least they say about making it real. Trouble with politicians though is that they forgot they suppose to guard justice itself in the first place, without any "social" addition. And justice alone is fairly simple to understand - give a man what he/she deserves. That's about it.
