Social Justice or Subsidiarity?

Just over the transom from James Anderson:

I appreciated your recent posts on "social justice." I agree that the phrase is a mendacious rhetorical device and that conservatives should refuse to use it. But what should we use instead? In one post you asked what's wrong with "plain old 'justice.'"  One problem is that the phrase "social justice" has now become so depressingly commonplace that many folk, unaware of this conceptual revisionism, understand "justice" as shorthand for "social justice". So conservatives need their own distinctive qualifier. Fight fire with fire. What would be your suggestion?

One possibility is "natural justice". Not only does it tip its hat toward the venerable natural law tradition, it also communicates the idea that justice is inextricably tied to the intrinsic nature of things (specifically, the nature of human beings) as opposed to being a mere social construction (as, perhaps, "social justice" suggests). And like "social justice" it has the virtue of being unobjectionable on the face of it. To adapt the opening sentence of one of your posts: "How could any decent person be opposed to natural justice?" What would be the alternative? Unnatural justice?

I'd love to read your own thoughts on this, if you're inclined to share them.

I wish I had a worked-out theory and I wish I had a good answer for Professor Anderson.  But I won't let the absence of both stop me from making a few remarks. Nescio, ergo blogo.

As a sort of joke I might suggest that 'subsidiarity' be used by conservatives instead of 'social justice.'  The trouble with that word, of course, is that it conveys no definite idea to the average person whereas 'social justice' seems to convey a definite idea, one that the average person is inclined to embrace.  It sounds so good!  Who could be opposed to social justice and a just society?   But once one understands what 'social justice' means in the mouth of a leftist, then one has excellent reason to oppose it.  The Left has hijacked the phrase and now they own it; it would be quixotic for a conservative to try to infuse it with a reasonable meaning and win it back.  Let the Left have it!

Anderson and I therefore  agree that we conservatives should never use 'social justice,' or 'economic justice' for that matter.  Beyond that, we might take to using 'socialist justice' as an informative and accurate  way of referring to what leftists call social justice.  But what word or phrase should we use?   How about 'local justice'?  That's not very good, but at least it points in the the subsidiarist direction. Plain old 'justice' is better.  Anderson's 'natural justice' is serviceable.  It has the virtue of combating the notion that justice is a social construct.  But it doesn't combat the top-down control model of socialists and collectivists.  This brings me to subsidiarity.

David A. Bosnich, The Principle of Subsidiarity:

One of the key principles of Catholic social thought is known as the principle of subsidiarity. This tenet holds that nothing should be done by a larger and more complex organization which can be done as well by a smaller and simpler organization. In other words, any activity which can be performed by a more decentralized entity should be. This principle is a bulwark of limited government and personal freedom. It conflicts with the passion for centralization and bureaucracy characteristic of the Welfare State.

The principle of subsidiarity strikes a reasonable balance between statism and collectivism as represented by the Obama administration and the libertarianism of those who would take privatization to an extreme.  By the way, one of the many mistakes Rick Santorum made in his campaign was to attack all government-sponsored education.  He was right to question whether the Federal government has any role to play in education, but to question the role of state and local government in education was a foolish extremism that befits a libertarian, not a conservative.

I take it that subsidiarity is easily detachable from other Catholic doctrines.  Professor Anderson needn't fear that he will be driven in the direction of papal infallibility or Transubstantiation.  In any case, Catholics don't own subsidiarity.  In the ComBox to this excellent post, we find:

"SPHERE SOVEREIGNTY: A principle of Reformed Christian social ethics, usually associated with the thought of Dutch Prime Minister Abraham Kuyper*, that identifies a number of God- ordained creational spheres, which include the family, the state, culture, and the church. These spheres each have their own organizing and ruling ordinances, and each maintains a measure of authority relative to the others. Just social and political structures, therefore, should be ordered so that the authority of each sphere is preserved (see Limited Government and Subsidiarity, The Principle of)."

Subsidiarity also fits well wth federalism, a return to which is a prime desideratum and one more reason not to vote for Obama come November.  By the way, 'federalism' is another one of those words that does not wear its meaning on its sleeve, and is likely to mislead.  Federalism is not the view that all powers should be vested in the Federal or central government; it is the principle enshrined in the 10th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Permit me to coin 'malaptronym.'  If an aptronym is a name that suits its bearer, then 'federalism' is a malaptronym, a name that not only does not suit its bearer, but misleads as to the nature of said bearer.   And the same, of course, is true in spades of 'social justice.'

I say we consign it to the dreaded index verborum prohibitorum!

Comments

[James Anderson]

Thanks, Bill.

I agree wholeheartedly with the Principle of Subsidiarity and Kuyper's political philosophy would be very close to my own.

My reservation about countering "social justice" with "subsidiarity" (other than the unloveliness of the term itself) is that it doesn't capture all that conservatives want to say about political and economic justice. It represents one principle of justice (natural justice, I would say!) rather than justice as such. It's a part rather than the whole.

Does the Principle of Subsidiarity, for example, speak to the proper relationship between justice and inequality? For example, whether it is just for John's wealth to be several hundred times that of Phil's is less a matter of the disparity itself than it is a matter of the means by which they obtained (or failed to obtain) their wealth. It is on points such as this that the notion of "social justice" needs to be countered head-on.

The quest continues!