How did a set of principles ostensibly devoted to achieving a fair and just society bring about an acrimonious movement dedicated not to justice but to retribution? So far, we’ve examined the people and ideas that are typical of the social justice movement’s excesses. To understand its core beliefs, though, we need to explore social justice’s philosophical roots.
Modern social justice activism owes its origins to ageless philosophical speculation about the nature of justice itself. Some of history’s greatest thinkers devoted their lives to studying justice at a conceptual level. From Aristotle to David Hume, philosophers have tried to pin down mankind’s true nature to determine whether we are even capable of such high-mindedness.
While an embryonic conception of social justice had taken hold in the public imagination by the mid-nineteenth century, it was more or less indistinguishable from charity. In the mid-twentieth century, the idea of social justice as we understand it today became a defined line of philosophical thought, though it was subsequently abused and disfigured by the activists who adopted it as their lodestar.
Perhaps the best description of the Identitarian activist class’s ethos is a collective antipathy to fortune and the fortunate. Not a very lofty ethos, perhaps, but it is not without philosophical and ideological precedents. A variety of philosophers and theoreticians throughout history dedicated their careers to polishing envy and class-consciousness until they shine with a bogus academic luster.
Rewriting History
Sadly, many of today’s students of philosophy have little use for those who laid the foundations of their disciplines simply because of the philosophers’ demographic backgrounds.
In 2018, Arizona State University became the subject of an adversarial New York Times profile as a result of the school’s decision to establish a program for the study of “political economy and moral science.” Designed to focus on under-taught works like Adam Smith’s economic theories and the supremely valuable Federalist Papers—all eighty-five of them—the program came under fire because it was “too heavily focused on white male thinkers from the United States and Europe.”1
This kind of racial reductionism is common in academia. In 2017, for example, students at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, bent on “decolonizing” the syllabus and “address[ing] the structural and epistemological legacy of colonialism,” demanded that thinkers such as Plato, Descartes, and Kant give way, for the most part, to non-Western philosophers. If white European philosophers must be studied, let it be from “a critical standpoint.”2
At first glance, it is not unreasonable for students who want to immerse themselves in non-Western cultures to maximize every opportunity to do precisely that, even if it means relegating the giants of European philosophical thought to the footnotes. But that is not how philosophy works. Its thinkers are interdependent, each relating to the others. There is no comprehensive study of Kant without the study of his contemporary David Hume. Nor can Descartes be comprehended without understanding Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates.
The idea that Western and non-Western philosophy can be entirely compartmentalized is a product of ignorance. Some of the most influential works of medieval Islamic philosophy, for example, were composed in Spain—a nation that engaged in a fair bit of colonizing long after its Islamic influences had been integrated into Iberian society. Those Islamic philosophers, heavily influenced by their classical predecessors, in turn had a profound effect on the philosophical minds that came after them. The Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza set Europe on a course toward the Enlightenment, but he was also a dark-skinned Sephardic Jew from Portugal. Spinoza’s works are, however, unlikely to appear on the preferred reading list of London’s irate anticolonial student activists. Their objections are less a matter of geography or ethnicity than a self-referential preconception about what they believe ought to constitute white European thought.
Minna Salami is among many on the left who insist that a racially correct philosophy curriculum is long overdue. History’s female philosophers, she charges, were persecuted or killed, and the Aztec world was purged of its deep thinkers by murderous colonialists. African philosophy, like that of the seventeenth-century Ethiopian Zera Yacob, whose criticism of organized religion and deism long predates Nietzsche, is not found on many syllabi.3
These are valuable critiques of philosophy’s core curriculum, and Salami is arguing in favor of inclusivity in good faith. But she is not making the same argument as the students for whom she presumes to speak. Salami is not calling for intellectual partitioning in pursuit of historical justice, but her comrades in the grassroots most certainly are. Down that road lies illiteracy, not enlightenment.
For instance, an item posted on the website Accredited Times praising the anti-white philosophy campaign asserts that our own age, graced by the philosophy of the great hip-hop artists, is “far superior” to that of the ancient Greeks. “When modern geniuses like Kanye West and Dr. Dre are still very much alive,” writes a self-described “transpecies activist, new age spiritual guru, and chief diversity coordinator,” “it is nothing short of perverse that our youth are forced to study philosophy from over two thousand years ago.”4
These activists don’t know what they don’t know, but they also don’t seem to care that they don’t know it. They are not familiar with the Western philosophy they claim to resent. They don’t appear to know much about philosophy in general—neither the philosophy of others nor even their own. The pursuit of pure justice is rich with history. It’s a satisfying irony that since the philosophical minds who gave birth to the concept of social justice were, by and large, white males, they would be spurned by their disciples.
Justice in Antiquity
Aristotle was among the first Western philosophers to examine the nature of justice—who should enjoy its benefits and how inequality results in or exacerbates injustices. Aristotle believed in objectivity and absolutes, but for the Sophists who preceded him, morality was relative. That’s a pretty cynical way to go through life. A society operating on this principle would quickly descend into sloth, venality, and intemperance. Abandoning this self-obsession masquerading as high-mindedness was a great leap forward.
If justice is viewed as a commodity, Aristotle thought, it should be equitably distributed across a population. Because all commodities are finite, a happy medium lies somewhere between getting more than your fair share and not getting enough.
Aristotle saw justice in terms familiar to future generations of redistributionists, even Karl Marx himself. If a society is possessed of only a handful of unique musical instruments, for example, Aristotle thought that they should be distributed to those who can play them best, giving society the maximum benefit from their use.5 This might seem a reasonable judgment if you don’t consider some of the more intangible virtues we prize today, like dignity, property rights, and enfranchisement.
Aristotle endorsed equality, but not as we understand it today. He took for granted slavery and the inferiority of women. In fact, Aristotle saw the human condition as suited to social stratification. His concept of justice exemplifies a problem with which all of his successors would struggle. If justice is a virtue, it’s a strange one. It is not doled out by the charitable, and its recipients are not obliged to be grateful upon its delivery. If justice is giving each man his “due,” then those who are owed justice may seize it—by force, if necessary. But who determines what is “due” to someone? That’s a moving target.
Enlightened Justice
Fortunately, Aristotle’s descendants were not as comfortable as he was with a stratified society. Subsequent thinkers like Rousseau, Hegel, and eventually Marx all took a stab at understanding and addressing the causes of social inequality. Many philosophers of justice during this period focused on the establishment of just institutions. With the right social mechanisms, they reasoned, inequality will take care of itself.
Luigi Taparelli’s acolytes disagreed. “[L]et it be laid down in the first place that in civil society, the lowest cannot be made equal with the highest,” declared Pope Leo XIII in Rerum novarum.6 This is hardly a theory of retributive justice—indeed, in its contemporary political context, this encyclical “on the condition of the working classes” was distinctly anti-socialist. But it also advocated activist government and articulated a progressive view of how governments might mollify potential revolutionaries before they rose up to demand Marxist reforms.
“Social and public life can only be maintained by means of various kinds of capacity for business and the playing of many parts,” Leo declared. “There are truly very great and very many natural differences among men. Neither the talents, nor the skill, nor the health, nor the capacities of all are the same, and unequal fortune follows of itself upon necessary inequality in respect to these endowments.” In other words, the virtue of an unequal society is that all can find fulfillment simply in the pursuit of their individual interests and abilities.
This is beginning to sound like a pretty conservative, even Lockean, articulation of the theories that resulted in free market economics as we understand it today. And, indeed, Rerum novarum reiterated that the ownership of property is a natural right. But it also contained the seeds of an idea that would blossom into the governing vision of today’s social democrats.
Leo warned that “riches do not bring freedom from sorrow.” Asserting that the Church’s mission is to bring “the rich and the working class together,” he railed against the exploitation of the working class and advocated, albeit in veiled terms, a regulated living wage. “[S]ince wage workers are numbered among the great mass of the needy,” he concluded, “the State must include them under its special care and foresight.” Rerum novarum is therefore considered one of the foundational philosophical arguments for the modern welfare state. Because Leo’s philosophy accepts inequality as the natural state of man, we might not recognize its connection to “social justice” in its present incarnation. The ideological scaffolding that would later be used to construct the modern definition of social justice was nevertheless evident in the encyclical.
Upon this foundation, Harvard’s John Rawls built a theory of social justice that animates its activists today, many of whom have probably never read a word he wrote.
The Contemptible Veil
Over the course of several decades, Rawls secured his status as the preeminent philosopher of social justice. More critically, he established a universal definition for the concept in practice that endures today.
A virtuous distribution of justice doesn’t mean perfect equality, Rawls postulates. Inequality among individuals isn’t inherently unjust as long as that inequality makes society, on balance, better off. “The basic structure is perfectly just when the prospects of the least fortunate are as great as they can be,” he wrote in 1969. And unequal outcomes are themselves just, but only as long as they are the result of decisions by just institutions.7 So how do you create a just institution? Rawls prescribes what he calls the “veil of ignorance,” according to which justice is “redistributed” by those who have no idea who the lucky and unlucky recipients will be. The veil ensures that the distributors of justice cannot know the class, abilities, tastes, physical characteristics, or morality of the people who will benefit from their actions. Justice (a Rawlsian definition of which has very little to do with courtroom proceedings) would therefore be dispensed without consideration for any of the individuals involved, so those doing the distributing are more likely to be fair about it.
As much as these distributors of justice might want to bestow advantages upon themselves or their particular tribe, they are blinded by the veil. Their adversaries might end up being the beneficiaries of their unfair distribution of social goods as much as their allies. Therefore, the operator behind the veil will choose the fairest distribution possible.
No one should enjoy an unearned advantage in a just society, Rawls theorizes, and the veil eliminates that temptation. Rawls contends that this is the place from which any just society must begin.
“Activists, social workers, and policymakers may have absorbed only secondhand versions of Rawls,” Carl Bankston writes. “Nevertheless, social justice advocates in general sound quite Rawlsian.”8 He notes, however, that “seeing people as positions rather than as individuals implicitly reduces them to categories.” Bankston observes that Rawlsian thought leads to the division of society based on perceived levels of “victimization or oppression.”
Here is where Rawls’s veil becomes a source of consternation for today’s social justice advocates. Supreme Court decisions like Brown v. Board of Education, which desegregated public schools, and Loving v. Virginia, which struck down bans on interracial marriage, could not ignore the identities of those who suffered discrimination and disenfranchisement. The policymakers who crafted the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts knew full well which groups were being persecuted and who was doing the persecuting. In these cases, applying the veil to the redistribution of justice, both social and economic, would have been both counterproductive and morally obtuse. They have a point.
To achieve real social justice, the activists have determined that Lady Justice needs to lose her blindfold.
The Libertarian Counterattack
There wasn’t much righteousness in Rawls’s conception of the ideal just society, argued his Harvard colleague Robert Nozick in 1974.
Resources are not the product of divine intervention. All goods that exist today were crafted, produced, extracted, or designed by the hands of man. Insofar as someone has secured his resources legitimately, he has every right to them. The Rawlsian idea that resources—both tangible and intangible—should be distributed independently of the personal investment that brought them into existence has been tried in the communist world. Nozick observed that conditions in Marxist societies were not only objectively unjust but also wildly economically inefficient.9
While Nozick criticized Rawlsian philosophy for its impracticality, the economist Friedrich A. Hayek savaged its immorality in The Mirage of Social Justice, the second volume of his three-volume philosophical work, Law, Legislation, and Liberty. As the volume’s title suggests, Hayek had no use for the concept of social justice. A passionate critic of redistributionism, he had no use for “social” anything. Calling it “a weasel word” that “wholly destroys” the meaning of whatever it happens to modify, Hayek deemed social justice among the worst of the lot of 160-odd “social” somethings.10
“Everybody talks about social justice, but if you press people to explain to you what they mean by social justice . . . nobody knows,” Hayek told William F. Buckley on Firing Line in 1977.11 He dismissed the expression as “empty and meaningless,” “a quasi-religious belief with no content whatsoever,” having the potential to lead to “the destruction of the indispensable environment in which the traditional moral values alone can flourish, namely personal freedom.” It is an “intellectually disreputable” idea, which carries with it “the mark of demagoguery and cheap journalism, which responsible thinkers ought to be ashamed to use because, once its vacuity is recognized, its use is dishonest.” He was not a fan.
Hayek’s principal objection to social justice was that it distorts the marketplace, which he viewed as the most powerful engine of human potential and happiness. “[F]ew circumstances will do more to make a person energetic and efficient than the belief that it depends chiefly on him whether he will reach the goals he has set himself,” Hayek contended.12 He reasoned, therefore, that social justice is an illusion.
Rawls’s idea of a just institution is a fallacy, Hayek declared. The minute that an institution starts redistributing society’s goods, it becomes unjust. The more a set of institutions commits itself to addressing inequalities, the more inequalities it causes. “This would go on until government literally controlled every circumstance which could affect any person’s well-being.”13 No one can depend on anyone but himself to secure his maximum economic benefit. To give in to the temptations of distributive justice is to empower the state, invite collectivism, socialism, and ultimately tyranny.
Social justice is “a demand that the state should treat different people differently in order to place them in the same position,” Hayek told Buckley. “Making people equal—a goal of governmental policy—would force government to treat people very unequally, indeed.”
Hayek was no absolutist. He did not see the state as a purely oppressive institution, nor did he resent basic welfare programs like social safety nets or public education. The libertarian dogmatist Ayn Rand described him as “an example of our most pernicious enemy” because of his willingness to compromise with the demands of the modern liberal state and its voters. Hayek did, however, understand that Rawlsian ideals break down when they are applied in the real world. Men are fallible, advantage-seeking political animals, a truth that cannot be theorized away. The veil as Rawls envisioned it is an entirely theoretical construct that denies essential human nature.
The Paradox of Equality
Though they may be loath to admit it, social justice advocates agree with Hayek on one core point: perfect equality isn’t just unattainable, it’s undesirable. This is the contradiction inherent in the modern conception of social justice with which we should most forcefully contend.
Like society’s tangible goods, intangible goods such as justice simply cannot be doled out from behind a veil of ignorance without perpetuating the very injustices we are trying to rectify. True justice, social justice advocates would argue, requires a social reversal. Oppressors must be subjugated and the subjugated must be lifted up. The veil prevents a just society from achieving that objective and is therefore morally reprehensible.
Modern social justice advocates have no interest in a colorblind society. Nor would they accept the notion that just institutions can be trusted to maximize collective benefit. They are suspicious of institutions in general, in fact, since those institutions are invariably the flawed inventions of corruptible men. They are unconvinced that perfect equality is desirable, as we’ve seen, because such a naïve ideal ignores historical injustices. We must all bear burdens that are passed on to us at birth by our parents. These are obligations we cannot shrug off, no matter how hard we try.
In truth, social justice advocates aren’t pure Rawlsian theorists, but they are not doctrinal Marxists either. They’re certainly not libertarians. So what are they? Their theory of justice is rooted in a more subjective notion—a hatred of luck.
Brute Luck
Can institutions be made morally perfect? Can mankind? The answer is, alas, no. So the social justice movement’s intellectual class has largely concluded that the pursuit of pure equality is not just a waste of time, it’s ethically flawed.
These theorists are content to use the noble idea of equality as a starting point, but they veer off the paths forged by Aristotle, Hume, and Rawls when individual actions or circumstances should preclude one person from receiving the same justice as another who is more deserving. How can it be just for people to enjoy the benefits or suffer the burdens associated with the conditions into which they were born? Are the less fortunate and the historically “privileged” truly equivalent? If we treated them equally, is that justice? Or does justice require confiscating benefits, perceived to be unearned, from some to give to others?
Andrew Lister, a lecturer at Oxford University’s Centre for the Study of Social Justice, expands on the notion that true distributive justice may have to account for the luck of the draw:
The rationale for focusing on social positions is that people will be born into different starting points in life, which make it more or less likely that they will be able to succeed. People are born with different levels of innate talent. And assuming that liberty must permit private childrearing in some form, we will never have perfect equality of opportunity. Moreover, even if there were perfectly fair equality of opportunity and no differences in levels of innate talent, any economic system involving the market will involve a substantial element of luck. People who are willing to play by the rules will suffer unmerited failure; others less meritorious will win success. . . . Since everyone depends on the cooperation of others, we ought to take advantage of this morally arbitrary luck to claim a greater share of what we produce together—not unless this inequality will make everyone better off.14
This is an opinion that can be arrived at only by those with a powerful aversion to internalizing the lessons of history. Eliminating hereditary claims to title and nobility is one thing; neutralizing less tangible benefits based upon a subjective assessment of “privilege” is something else. Social leveling is predicated on the sacrifice of individual liberty and potential, which is why Hayek was so suspicious of the practice. Indeed, as Lister concedes, “Maximizing expected opportunity means being willing to accept that some may have very small chances in life in order that others who have already greater chances can have greater chances still.”15
For the social justice left, that is an unacceptable concession. Theirs is a crusade against “brute luck.” Those who believe in this philosophy and are familiar with the literature on the matter call themselves “luck egalitarians.” Natural talent, opportunity, or even personal tastes—these are disparate circumstances that must be corrected through social leveling. This is the dismal future Kurt Vonnegut envisioned.
“The aim of justice as equality is to eliminate so far as it is possible the impact on people’s lives of bad luck that falls on them through no fault or choice of their own,” writes Richard Arneson.16 As he and other critics of luck egalitarianism point out, this kind of forced leveling only makes people bitter, ungovernable, and unproductive. These circumspect critics of luck egalitarianism call themselves “rational egalitarians.”
Anca Gheaus tries to smooth over these divisions by identifying how social goods can be distributed in a way that doesn’t make the public want to rise up in violent revolution: “To promote equality of status, we could eliminate (especially early) school selection based on merit and de-emphasize quantitative evaluation of pupils and exams. To promote equality of power and inclusion we can, for instance, plan towns having in mind the goal of racial integration or introduce workplace democracy.”17 This is the fatal conceit of the haughty technocrat.
Gheaus has inadvertently allowed the social justice advocates’ mask to fall. Believers in her particular form of social justice see society not as an infinitely complex set of interactions and traditions shaped by trial and error over generations but as one big problem to fix. What’s more, they think they are sharp enough to fix it. If only they had the power to remake the world in their own image, this would be a just society at long last. This kind of hubris inevitably gives way to power hunger.
It is often overlooked that racial and sexual segregation on the scale America witnessed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was a result of social engineering that had to be enforced from the top down. The fad of “urban planning,” typified by a mid-twentieth-century love affair with the idea of the “radiant city” promoted by, among others, architectural theorist Le Corbusier, did not result in radiant cities. It yielded stark, soulless towers punctuated by what Jane Jacobs famously dubbed “promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders.”18
In the process of deconstructing centuries of organic, incremental social evolution, the central planners empower government to engage in what government does best: boondoggles. Even the history of the practically sanctified national highway system has been whitewashed. “Haste, waste, mismanagement, and outright graft are making a multibillion-dollar rat-hole out of the Federal Highway Program,” wrote Karl Detzer in 1960.19 At least that project had a necessary military dimension. The people who were displaced, the lives that were ruined, the inefficiently allocated labor, and the millions of wasted dollars are the forgotten costs of indulging those prideful enough to consider themselves the enlightened distributors of society’s goods.
Taking Social Justice Back
Some conservatives have tried to appropriate both the term “social justice” and its equalitarian message by advocating positive social leveling based on a more circumspect understanding of what the public sector can achieve.
Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute asserted in 2014 that conservatives should seek social justice not by instituting top-down solutions that tell the disadvantaged what they should want but by asking them what they would prefer. He defined “marginalized communities” in a much more expansive way than the Identitarian left does by describing one of its members—a man, “single with no kids and no religion,” who is “professionally and socially disengaged.”20 Perhaps this man is white, perhaps not; Brooks doesn’t say. But by expanding the definition of marginalization to include not only race and sex but also lower-income persons with no attachment to local mediating institutions and a lack of opportunities for economic advancement, Brooks was ahead of the curve. The persons and communities he described would become a preoccupation of political analysts when they united to form the backbone of Donald Trump’s winning coalition of voters.
Brooks and other reformers argue that the conservative fear of public sector intervention into private affairs turns off voters who would otherwise find conservative policy prescriptions attractive. “As even the libertarian economist Friedrich Hayek argued, guaranteeing ‘some minimum food, shelter, and clothing’ is an appropriate task for government.” Brooks advocates the reformation of the public education system, a program for economic growth that focuses on the lowest rungs of the social ladder, and a renewed emphasis on free enterprise. “Drop the materialistic fight against spending and take up a moral fight for people,” he later argued. “Empathy doesn’t contradict fiscal conservatism; it actually requires it.”
This is social justice divorced from Identitarianism. For Identitarians, there is no true justice without tribal consciousness and a full understanding of who the presumably marginalized and disadvantaged really are. Unreservedly embracing Rawls’s veil, Brooks insists that any virtuous program of social justice must be blind to the identity of its beneficiaries. That’s why his prescription was doomed to be ignored and eventually abandoned.
By describing “marginalized communities” as those who are estranged from society whatever their sex or race, Brooks has attacked a sclerotic liberal paradigm that needs to be challenged. But because he refuses to endorse racial and demographic hierarchies, no social justice activist will take his prescriptions seriously. He is more likely to be shunned as a beneficiary of “white privilege,” unaware of his true station in life or the unfair advantages he has enjoyed.
In 2015, the Supreme Court was asked to rule on the University of Texas’s use of racial preferences in admissions. In a four-to-three decision the following year,21 the Court upheld the constitutionality of a university’s use of race as a criterion for admissions. The oral arguments in the case revealed how hotly the issue was debated. “There are those who contend that it does not benefit African-Americans to get them into the University of Texas, where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a less—a slower-track school where they do well,” remarked Justice Antonin Scalia, who would die before the case was decided.22 “One of the briefs pointed out that most of the black scientists in this country don’t come from schools like the University of Texas. They come from lesser schools, where they do not feel that they’re being pushed ahead in classes that are too fast for them. I’m just not impressed by the fact that the University of Texas may have fewer. Maybe it ought to have fewer.”
The usual suspects howled in outrage, proclaiming Scalia’s comments racist, but his statement was simply a sympathetic reference to an amicus brief. It was an argument for racially blind justice and maximum equality of opportunity, albeit one that is not easy to state inoffensively for those who consider meritocracy to be inherently discriminatory.
Social justice in today’s America is bound up with race. Perhaps a capable reformer will one day decouple Identitarianism from social justice, but that task has so far confounded all who have tried.
The Veil Falls
The pursuit of a purely just, rational, and equal society has preoccupied philosophical minds for millennia despite the impossibility of ever achieving such a thing. By defining justice as a tangible and therefore finite good, social justice advocates are trapping themselves in a constricting paradigm that is intrinsically flawed.
The veil of ignorance is supposed to blind society’s enlightened distributors to the identities of those who would receive their judgments—a utopian goal that modern-day social justice advocates resent. So they’ve simply let the veil drop.
Neither the alt-right nor the social justice left believes that blindness to traits acquired at birth can produce optimal justice. The alt-right is wholly suspicious of any distribution of social goods that does not account for America’s uniquely deserving white majority. The social justice left is generally hostile toward any distribution of social goods that does not disadvantage that majority, if only to make up for the centuries of unfair advantages from which its members benefit even today, whether they know it or not. The fractiousness of Identitarianism ensures that pure equality, even if it were attainable, will never be seen by all as justice.
In the end, conservatives who are attracted to the idea of appropriating social justice for the cause of individual liberty and equality of opportunity will find themselves frustrated by Identitarians both to their left and right.