Social Justice

History and Development of the Idea of Social Justice

The term social justice was first coined by the Jesuit Luigi Taparelli in 1840 based on the religious teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas. The concept was further elaborated by J. A. Ryan, who was also responsible for advocating the concept of a living wage. John gave a secular dimension to the concept of social justice, and political theorists such as John Stuart Mill, John Locke, David Hume, Kropotkin, Friedrich Hayek, Herbert Spencer and others brought the term into the mainstream discourse.

Two theories explain social justice from two different views: (1) utilitarianism and (2) the contractual theory proposed by Rawls. In its essential form, utilitarianism tells us ‘to perform whichever action among the options available will produce the greatest sum of happiness for all’. Thus, from the utilitarian point of view, certain sets of actions are considered socially just if their application results in greater happiness than any other alternative action. However, utilitarian theory could not account for the distributive character of justice, which emphasizes the fair and equal distribution of certain rights and opportunities among all members of a society.

Taking on this point, Rawls developed his contractual theory of social justice. To his mind, each member of society has an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. Social justice, according to Rawls, is concerned with the fair or equal distribution of social primary goods—rights, liberty and opportunity, income and wealth—among the members ‘unless an unequal distribution of any or all of these goods is to the advantage of the least favored’. He suggested that social justice should be based on two rationales: (1) each person in society should have an equal right to basic liberty and opportunities and (2) social and economic inequalities are not acceptable or justified unless they result in the greatest benefits to the least advantaged. According to Rawls, these rationales are legitimized by following a particular system of collectively enforced social arrangements. In order to ascertain the agreement of the people about an arrangement or a general principle, he advocated a two-step contractual process. According to this process, (1) a majority of the members of a society agree to be represented by a representative for certain actions, and to that extent the representative holds these powers as a trustee of the members' interests, and (2) the members are bound by the decision of the representative as long as the trust is not violated by either of the parties.

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