Social Justice is the State
In response to: What is Social Justice?
Samuel Gregg’s essay, “What is Social Justice?” is an important reminder that many different moral traditions – including the Catholic natural law tradition – may lay claim to the vocabulary of “social justice” and to an associated notion of the “common good.” As articulated by Gregg, this natural law tradition can employ the language of “social justice” without construing social justice as fundamentally a call for an egalitarian or egalitarian-leaning distribution of material well-being or material resources that are conducive to material well-being. That natural law tradition offers a thick understanding of human well-being and of the sort of social…
More Responses
What is social justice? Sam Gregg’s essay answers this question by reviewing the origins and evolution of the concept. I find little to quibble with in Sam’s remarks and I am certainly in no position to make them a fortiori. My contribution will therefore be to offer an explanation for why social justice theory is both…
John Tomasi’s Free Market Synthesitis
John Tomasi’s Free Market Fairness[1] has the intellectual ambition of formulating a synthesis – at least a tentative synthesis — of key elements of libertarian or classical liberal thought on the one hand and social democrat thought on the other hand. From the former Tomasi purports to take robust economic rights that have a strong claim on being recognized within any acceptable social-political order and an appreciation of the beneficial outcomes of spontaneous orders; and from the latter, he takes a strong commitment to “social justice” that is understood in difference principle fashion as a commitment to making the worst off members of society as well off as possible.