My ancestors were taught to accept their lot. Their moral duties were fairly simple: PRAY, PAY, and OBEY. What they did and gained was pretty much determined by the Count and by settled customs. But beginning in about 1880, small farms could no longer sustain the growth in population that had begun. Almost 2 million people from the eastern counties of Slovakia began migrating to America (and elsewhere), one by one, along chains of connection established by families or fellow villagers. Usually the men left first and sent back for wives later.
Once in America, my grandparents were no longer subjects. They became citizens, which meant that if social arrangements were not right, they now had the duty (and liberty) to organize to change them. Now they were sovereign. Now they were free, but also saddled with personal responsibility for their own future. They needed to learn new virtues, to form new institutions, and to take responsibility for the institutions left to them by America’s founding generations. All of this was called into being by a new form of political economy, a democratic republic and a capitalist economy, both of which positively cried out for grassroots action by people with initiative and new skills in forming associations of their own.
In this context the new term “social justice” can be defined with rather considerable precision. Social justice names a new virtue in the panoply of historical virtues, a set of new habits and abilities that need to be learned, perfected, and passed on to new generations—new virtues with very powerful social consequences.
This new virtue is called “social” for two reasons. First, its aim or purpose is to improve the common good of society at large, perhaps on a national scale or even an international scale, but certainly on a range of social institutions outside the home. A village or neighborhood may need a new well, or a new school, or even a church. Workers may need to form a union, and to unite with other unions. Since the cause of the wealth of nations is invention and intellect, new colleges and universities need to be founded. All these are social activities—the social activities of a free and responsible people.
In America, the new immigrants formed athletic clubs for the young; for men, social clubs to play checkers, cards, or horseshoes; for women, associations to tend to the needs of neighbors. In Catholic neighborhoods, they began Saturday night bingo games (how my mother enjoyed them!) to raise funds to pay off the church mortgage or to build a school. Immigrants formed insurance societies and other associations of mutual help to care for one another in case of injury or premature death.
But this new virtue is called “social” for a second reason. Not only is its end social, but so also are its constitutive practices. The practice of the virtue of social justice consists in learning three new skills: the art of forming associations, willingness to take leadership of small groups, and the habit and instinct of cooperation with others. All three are needed in order to accomplish ends that no one individual can achieve on his or her own. At one pole this new virtue is a social protection against atomistic individualism, while at the other pole it protects considerable civic space from the direct custodianship of the state.
In the absence of the art of association, the practice of modern citizenship is almost impossible. Without it, there is only the state, the Leviathan. Without it, civil society has no energy, the public square is empty, and citizens huddle in solitary privacy. Tocqueville observed this phenomenon in the prerevolutionary France of the ancien régime in the eighteenth century. Between the naked and solitary individual and l’état there were no mediating institutions. French citizens lacked the social protections and powers that networks of associations would have afforded them. At the time of the French Revolution, he opined, there were not ten men in France capable of starting an association.
Again, it should be noted that this new definition of social justice is practiced by both those on the left and those on the right. There is more than one way to imagine the future good of society. Humans of all persuasions do well to master the new social virtue that assists them in defining, and in working with others toward, their own vision of that good. Competition between left and right, and among factions of each, can be healthy.
Here we are seeking a completely open and nonideological definition of social justice. But not all who claim to be acting for social justice actually further the work of justice. Their motives may be suspect, and so may their grasp of important facts, their moral analysis, or their methods. We would not count “skinheads” or neo-Nazis as those doing the work of social justice. So it is with all claims to be practicing a virtue: Those claims must be examined in greater detail. In order to be just, an act must be correct in every aspect—manner, timing, motive, accuracy of perception, and all the other qualities of good actions. Otherwise, it is defective. Thus, to show someone that what he or she claims to be a virtue actually falls short of some of the demands of true virtue is to affirm the ideal of social justice as a standard of moral judgment.
Conclusion: Social Justice Is a Habit of the Heart
And so we arrive at this conclusion: Social justice is not what most people think it is, a building up of state bureaucracies which are impersonal, inefficient, and expensive far beyond their own original forecasts. True enough, government programs often do real good. But the programs very quickly reach a point of diminishing returns, and begin to suffer multitudes of new and unforeseen problems. If you add up all the money Congress has designated for the relief of the poor since 1965, the total money spent is far more than would be required simply to have given each poor family some $30,000 in cash per year.
But clearly, not every poor family in the United States is receiving that $30,000 per year. For that would put every poor family of four in America comfortably above the 2010 Federal Poverty Level of $22,350 per year, and poverty would have been eradicated, as a statistical matter, years ago.
Government bureaucracies consume most of the money, and relatively little of it passes through to the hands of the poor; in effect, the poor get the droppings.
By contrast, social justice is a virtue whose specific character is social in two ways: the skill in forming associations, and the aim of benefiting the human community, whether local, national, or international. Thus the virtue of forming associations, while turning to government as little as possible, is an immensely powerful way to build a better world. Without the practice of this truly effective social virtue, merely “feeling compassion” is ineffectual.
Dramatically important too: The practice of the virtue of social justice combats the widespread surrender to ever-larger governments. Big governments are too inefficient for their own humane intentions. They are too blind, too out-of-touch with the millions of individual wills at play in society, too domineering, too preachy. They waste too much money, stifle individual initiative, and starve out intermediate associations, hard work, and civic activities.
Of course, a strong government is necessary for a small number of important tasks, such as national defense, protecting the value of the national currency, and providing morally sound, not corrupted, public services such as waterways, airports, harbors, public roads and bridges, maintaining the legal framework required for a free economy, and other projects. Still, it is important to keep a tight grip on the growth of government. For when government grows too large, its people lose their freedoms. Checks and balances and vigilant oversight shrink in power, while coercive regulation knows fewer and fewer bounds. Gradually, too, the creative impulse atrophies.
To protect its own turf, big government tends to place obstacles in the way of individual initiatives; it wants no rivals in the field. By overregulation, insurance requirements, expensive licensing, and many other snares, it cripples free associations. Besides, human beings are always tempted to let others bear their expenses and do the heavy lifting,