Activists for “social justice” (a.k.a. Social Justice Warriors, or SJW’s) have risen to prominence in our culture in the last few years. I have a number of disagreements with them. But I’m going to tell you my biggest problem with the SJ movement: I don’t think that they value justice. I think that they are activists against justice.
Now, if my complaint were merely an ideological disagreement over the particular requirements of justice regarding certain issues, you might not be too worried. And indeed, some of my problem concerns such ideological disagreement. For example:
- I don’t think that wealth inequality is unjust, and I don’t think redistribution is just. Instead, I think government wealth redistribution violates property rights and is thus unjust.
- I don’t think affirmative action is just. Instead, I think it’s a form of unfair and harmful discrimination.
- Related to the previous two points: I don’t think there are any group rights (e.g., rights of a race or class); there are only individual rights. So there cannot be any injustices to a group as such; there can only be injustices to individuals.
- I don’t think natural events or their consequences can be unjust; only intentional, freely chosen actions and their consequences can be unjust. Thus, e.g., I reject luck egalitarianism.
Still, you can understand the philosophical disagreements about the above points, and so you can understand how people on both sides of the issues can be pursuing justice (de dicto, as philosophers say). If someone is advancing policies that are in fact unjust, they need not be opposed to justice per se; they may just be mistaken about what justice requires. Who knows; perhaps I am mistaken about what justice requires.
But some justice requirements are different. Some things are just core, uncontroversial requirements of justice. If someone rejects these, then you can really conclude that they do not value justice. If someone actively opposes satisfying such requirements, that person is an anti-justice activist. To say a little more about what I mean:
- Uncontroversial requirements: These are things that anyone who understands the concept “justice” will agree to be implied by “justice”. Judgements about it do not vary across political party, for example. The best examples will be accepted throughout history, and across cultures.
- Core requirements: These are things that are central and important to the concept of justice, rather than minor or peripheral implications.
The best example that I can think of:
It is unjust to punish a person for a crime they did not commit.
The principle of course applies not only to actual law-violations, but to any alleged misdeeds. The principle requires those who value justice to also care about truth. In particular, if a person is accused of doing X, then, if the person really did X, this may be cause for punishment. But if the person did not in fact do X, then, uncontroversially, the person should not be punished for X.
This is not some right-wing ideological conception of justice. This is a universal principle. This has always been recognized. Any society that has a notion of justice will agree with this. Nor is it a minor or peripheral aspect of justice. It is the most central, paradigmatic norm of justice that I can think of.
The other points I mentioned above are much less central, much more debatable. Whether inequality of wealth is an injustice, for example, is open to debate. Or whether hiring preferences for racial minorities are an injustice. You can have a conception of justice that takes either position, or no position, on those issues. But you cannot have a recognizable conception of justice that is either in favor of or neutral toward punishing the innocent.
Yet that, it seems, is how the conception of “social justice” is. Those who campaign for social justice are exercised about certain kinds of crimes or alleged crimes. Especially crimes of immoral belief or offensive speech. (Only about certain groups, of course; e.g., if you hold the immoral and offensive belief that terrorism against random American civilians is permissible, that is not something the SJWs will be particularly concerned about.) Of course, they are also concerned about more tangible deeds, such as physical attacks against these certain groups, but that’s common to everyone. The concern about immoral thought and speech is more distinctive of the social justice movement.
I’m not going to talk now about whether those are crimes genuinely worthy of punishment. That could obviously be debated. But if one thinks these alleged crimes are worthy of some kind of punishment (not necessarily legal punishment, but perhaps social sanctions), one must, if one claims to value justice, care about the truth of who did or did not commit them.
There seem to be a number of cases showing that a large portion of social justice activists do not in fact care about that. When someone is accused of a social-justice-related sin, there will be many activists who want that person punished, and they will not expend any effort to determine whether the person in fact committed the sin. If given evidence that the person did not do so, they will not care. They will not, e.g., apologize to the person or rescind their earlier condemnation. It’s not that SJWs specifically prefer to punish the innocent. It is just that punishing the innocent does not especially concern them.
In case anyone has been living in a cave and needs some examples of what I’m talking about, here are a few:
- The Duke lacrosse case: In 2006, the Duke University lacrosse team was basically accused of gang raping a black woman whom they had hired as a stripper for a party. The accused were all white men. The university community was outraged by the horrific crime, especially left-wing social justice people. Some protestors urged the castration of the lacrosse players. A group of 88 faculty members signed a public statement apparently presupposing the guilt of the players and thanking protestors for not waiting for the police investigation to conclude (https://web.archive.org/web/20070720032604/http://listening.nfshost.com/listening.htm). In fact, the case against the players was extremely weak. Eventually, the Attorney General dropped the charges, declaring the players innocent, and the original prosecutor of the case was disbarred for his misconduct in the case (something that virtually never happens, by the way). But in the end, only three members of the group of 88 ever apologized for their rush to judgment. (See KC Johnson’s blog on the case: http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/.)
- The Noah Carl case: More recently, a group of about 600 academics signed a letter that succeeded in getting Noah Carl fired from a research fellowship position at St. Edmund’s college, for his alleged “racist pseudoscience” (https://medium.com/@racescienceopenletter/open-letter-no-to-racist-pseudoscience-at-cambridge-472e1a7c6dca). The letter accuses Carl’s work of being “ethically suspect and methodologically flawed”, of relying on “discredited ‘race sciences’”, of being “nothing more than an expression of opinion on various social matters”. But it doesn’t cite any evidence of any of this, and the accusations appear to be just factually false. One critic complained about Carl’s use of the term “genetic intelligence”, yet Carl does not in fact use that term. It appears that a major impetus for the attacks was that Carl defended the right of researchers to investigate race and intelligence (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40806-018-0152-x), though he did not himself investigate that topic. The signatories of the letter do not appear to have actually read Carl’s work; see https://quillette.com/2018/12/07/academics-mobbing-of-a-young-scholar-must-be-denounced/.
- The Rebecca Tuvel case: In this case, Tuvel was attacked, again with a large number of signatories to a public statement against her, for publishing a paper comparing “transracialism” (identifying with a different race from one’s race-at-birth, so to speak) to transgenderism. (See the statement.) Some of the attacks were factually false or misleading in a way that is obvious if you read the paper, e.g., the obviously unfair complaint about “deadnaming”. The overall thrust of the complaint seems to be that Tuvel’s article was transphobic. But if you read the article, it’s just obvious that that is not, as a matter of fact, true. She is not against accepting transgender people; rather, she is in favor of accepting transracial people.
There are many cases like this. Now, what is noteworthy is not simply that errors were made. What is noteworthy is the lack of concern about the truth – e.g., the lack of interest in waiting to find out what actually happened, in doing the most basic investigation of the facts of a case before signing a statement about it, and the almost total lack of regret for attacking innocent people.
A person who cares about justice can make mistakes. They can inflict punishment on a person for a thing the person did not in fact do – because, after all, all humans are fallible. What a person who values justice cannot do is to not care about making this kind of mistake. Not punishing people for things they did not do is a non-negotiable commitment of justice. If you do not care about that, then you do not care about justice.
Now, you might say that perhaps the SJWs have identified some other, valid principles of justice that they are really committed to that I have failed to perceive. Maybe they’re right about those controversial justice issues I mentioned at the start, about inequality or affirmative action. But if a person can’t get on the right side of the most basic, uncontroversial aspects of justice, I don’t think you should trust them about much more fraught issues.
Notice also that it is not just a few SJWs who have this problem. In each of these cases, there were public letters signed by a lot of people. And not just by random internet trolls, but by university scholars. That, I think, really reveals something about the social justice movement; it’s not just a fluke or a minor failing.
This is not something that would happen with other movements – you would not get hundreds of people, in a movement nominally dedicated to some value X, to publicly, obviously violate a core principle of X. You could not, e.g., get hundreds of libertarian scholars to directly help the state enslave some people. You could not get hundreds of Christian scholars to pee on a statue of Christ.
So what is it that the SJWs value? I don’t know. Maybe they value equality. Maybe they are just opposed to whatever they see as belonging to the dominant culture. I suspect that the motivation for signing public statements like those mentioned above is essentially tribal: they are publicly signaling their group affiliation. Some people call it “virtue signaling”, but a more accurate term would be “faction signaling”. It’s like waving a big flag for your social faction. And it kind of feels good to be part of a mob. If that’s what you want to do, then indeed it does not matter what the facts of a particular case may be; the case is just an excuse to wave that flag. The facts only matter if you’re actually trying to do justice.
Justice is blind to social factions. Justice, for example, will not automatically support the side of a black woman against a group of wealthy, white, male athletes. It won’t just support the people you find most sympathetic or most aligned with your faction.
That’s why so few people care about justice.
A very thoughtful and compelling read
You Tube: Iowa Corrupt Judges courts police http://www.youtube.com/user/kornko Iowa
Even when the truth is discovered in cases like these, the false accusers rather than the falsely accused, come out on top. For example, Paula McClain at Duke (who led the charge against the laCrosse team), got a series of promotions, and even refused to apologize a decade after the team was found innocent. She’s now a dean at duke, in part because she’s the right color and gender (black woman). “Mattress Girl” at Columbia perpetrated a rape hoax for two years and is now on tour doing “performance art” that re-enacts rape in museums for a fee.
Yeah, you’re probably going to be chased off campus for this essay.
They are in the midst of a blitzkrieg against individual liberty. Once the tanks have rolled over you they never go back unless forced to by a superior force.
They are only concerned with the momentum of the blitzkrieg, not accuracy or actual justice. Some people I never met did something to some other people you never met, long ago, but I have to ‘pay’? Please.
This is an important topic. It’s particularly relevant in the context of the Christian community. Social Justice Christians may think of social justice as a category within justice, one they have been called to address. But when the dictates of social justice stand in opposition to the ethics of justice and mercy, they must choose. In that instant, for the believer facing that choice, social justice becomes the antichrist. One can’t serve two masters.
Professor Huemer, thank you for this interesting post. Your problem is with social justice; my problem is with forced manipulation of our language for purposes of control. [See: Orwell, “Newspeak”]
“If someone is advancing policies that are in fact unjust, they need not be opposed to justice per se….”
No, no, no! A singular antecedent takes a singular pronoun. At least, it did in saner days. This should read, “If someone is advancing policies that are in fact unjust, he need not be opposed to justice per se….” Or, if you must, “If someone is advancing policies that are in fact unjust, he or she need not be opposed to justice per se….”
You are a teacher. Stand up for our language, please.
“They” has been a gender neutral singular pronoun since at least Shakespeare. Please don’t be a part of this silly bandwagon, particularly if you mistakenly believe it to be SJW newspeak.
You overstate the case. “They” has sometimes been a singular pronoun, but that use was rare, and it was reserved to generalizations. It was never anyone’s chosen pronoun.
No, it’s actually been quite commonplace. Resistance to its use has predominantly been influenced by mechanistic linguists and grammarians, much like the resistance to split infinitives.
The key thing to remember about the use of the so-called singular they is that it has always been used in a restricted category of speech. Specifically, in instances where the speaker doesn’t know the gender(s) of referent(s), or when linked to an indefinite pronoun, such as anyone or someone.
Can you offer an example in history of a person who spoke English who insisted on “they” as their pronoun? I agree there are examples of the use when making generalizations.
Not so, Pedantically Precise.
What one finds in almost all the examples cited from older literature is cases where the person in question is not known: ‘If anyone… they’ and ‘If someone… they’.
But these formations are used so rarely that it’s difficult to be sure that the authors didn’t just make a mistake.
One thing nobody with any understanding of the language uses, except as an error, is something like ‘This is Chris. They’re in accounting.’ BARF! Anyone saying such a thing should be sent immediately to language jail.
If it was actual justice, it would not require the qualifier “social”.
Tom, This is a perfect, succinct statement about the problem. My only quibble is that it needs the subjunctive–“If it were actual justice…” Nonetheless, Bravo!
Indeed, justice is a platonic ideal. You cannot add a qualifier to justice without it being subsumed by justice and therefore meaningless, or alternatively, for the phrase to mean “something other than–and necessarily in contradiction with–justice.”
The qualifier is useful because it makes it explicit that this is not about economic justice or even legal justice.
Or “social” is prefixed explicitly to denote that it is something quite different from individualized theories of justice. It is a neologism produced to denote that it is a view of “justice” which is not “blind to social factions”.
It might be the wrong view, but just stating that they (the SJWs) disagree with an individualized, libertarian conception of justice, which is what the basic content of Dr. Huemer’s post is. It is rather circular.
This is an excellent analysis of the social justice movement, no question. However my analysis is much more compact: the people who agitate for social justice, whatever they think it is, are unhappy, sad, miserable even, people who do not bother to go through, think through, Professor Huemer’s steps of analysis. They are pathetics who are so disturbed, have been so indoctrinated, as to think they must look for a fight, and happen to have a black friend, who undoubtedly has been discriminated against at some point in his life, in some way or other, and they find it easy to take up this stupid social justice cause. If this nonsense had not been invented by Al $harpton and Je$$e Jack$son, and the rest of the race industry executives, they would have found some other fight over which they could spray their foaming of the mouth. Sickos. Nothing wrong with them that a loving woman could not take care of.
People want to chase people like Mike off campus when they say these things because people like you stand next to him. This is vile.
“This is not something that would happen with other movements – you would not get hundreds of people, in a movement nominally dedicated to some value X, to publicly, obviously violate a core principle of X. You could not, e.g., get hundreds of libertarian scholars to directly help the state enslave some people. You could not get hundreds of Christian scholars to pee on a statue of Christ.”
Libertarian-leaning voters made up a significant contingent of Trump’s support in 2016.
https://www.libertarianism.org/media/free-thoughts/who-elected-donald-trump
Ditto for Christians. Unless you think Trump’s 2016 campaign was congenial to libertarianism or Christianity, this counts as evidence against your claim above.
You have identified a real problem, but it is not unique to “SJWs.”
There is no comparison between voting in presidential elections and condemning the accused in a single incident. If you had to agree with every position a presidential candidate held, the booths would be empty. I don’t vote partly for this very reason, but I understand why some people do vote. Some people even think I’m the bad one for NOT voting. “If you support X, you support Y” is rank dishonesty on the scale of millions of people and thousands of positions when everything is compressed down into whether to check the D box, the R box, or stay home. Trump’s opponent is also guilty of any number of awful things, do you consider yourself a supporter of all those things?
Nobody had a gun to anyone’s head to condemn the Duke lacrosse players or Noah Carl.
“There is no comparison between voting in presidential elections and condemning the accused in a single incident.”
You’re right. Voting for the worse candidate in a presidential election is much *worse* than condemning the accused in a single incident. The people who overzealously went after the Duke lacrosse players acted wrongly against a relatively small group of people, with the result that several students had their lives derailed if not ruined. The people who voted for Trump, on the other hand, were complicit in policies that (1) Trump made clear he would pursue if elected, (2) were based in his racism going back to his housing policies, vendetta against the Central Park Five, and birth certificate conspiracy theory, and (3) ended up derailing or ruining (at least) *thousands* of lives (the Muslim ban, the concentration camps, the sanctions against Iran).
Clinton was bad. Trump was obviously worse. And if libertarian voters can really reconcile themselves to Trump, well, so much the worse for libertarianism.
Here’s the Cato Institute’s Jonathan Blanks on the subject in October 2016:
“I’m with Her because I understand that a Trump win isn’t the same to millions of people across this country and this planet not as fortunate as I am. I’m with Her because, in actuality, policies that result in bad outcomes for people of color are far better than no policies, a paranoid delegitimization campaign, and overt racism from the highest office in the land. I’m with Her because my partner gets antisemitic messages because racists have been emboldened by this wretch of a man. I’m with Her because, for all her faults–faults that have and will likely result in more people dying–she’s still a more reliable and less dangerous person in re: foreign policy than he is.”
http://blanksslate.blogspot.com/2016/10/never-means-never.html
True, the libertarians who voted for Trump know that he is not a champion of liberty. However, the claim that they sacrificed their principles rests on the assumption that they believed there was a third possible outcome. They know there wasn’t. You have not refuted Professor Huemer’s claim.
Great article. Justice is imperfect when run by us and our governments. This current trend of justice is disturbing to me, as a follower of Christ, because of permanence of the “stone-throwing” and the lack of forgiveness and restoration. Anyone who has been married for awhile knows neither of these are good, especially for moral failings or simple things like forgetfulness. Lately, I have been toying with the term “political lies” where the SJWs use evidence that only supports their point-of-view ignoring all the other exculpatory evidence. Examples would be “Trump is a racist” or “obstructed justice”. I get both points, but there is exculpatory evidence that is ignored. At some point, we have to get back to fair, forgiving, and just or we begin to lose hope.
The clarity of argument is masterful here. Well done. As a physicist I can fall prey to discounting non STEM scholarship, but philosophy is where it is at!
Can the FBI start flagging these people? This looks like another manifesto in the making.
I am interested in the bright line you try to draw–“It is unjust to punish a person for a crime they did not commit.”–in the following context.
Three students from a class of twenty are known to have committed a serious act of vandalism. Several more were nearby and would clearly have seen who committed the act. So the classroom includes the perpetrators, some who know who the perpetrators were, and some who know nothing.
The teacher says we’re all sitting here until I find out who did this. If that doesn’t work, you’re all going to be punished. The punishment knob can be spun from “you live with this on your conscience” all the way to the guillotine, if its positioning influences the answer to the question I will pose. Though a secondary question is, if the nature or severity of the punishment can impact the primary question, doesn’t that undermine the position that this is a bright line?
The primary question is: is the teacher being unjust?
I ask this because I agree with all your ideological positions about what is just and what is not, but the answer here is not obvious to me. From a game-theoretic standpoint, I think taking group punishment off the table entirely will lead to worse outcomes. The teacher in this example is exploiting the interdependence of the students to find the truth of the matter so as to punish justly, but at some risk of punishing the innocent. On the other hand, rewarding the “code of silence” by punishing nobody strikes me as not only unjust but unwise, for it will bolster the power of the code of silence from that point forward.
Good question; thanks. I don’t think that “you live with this on your conscience” counts as a punishment. However, if you insert a real punishment, then punishing the group is indeed unjust.
In some cases, other values might outweigh the value of justice, so some injustices might be reasonably accepted. There are also situations in which different possible injustices have to be weighed against each other. For instance, in the criminal justice system, some injustices are inevitable. Any justice system will sometimes convict the innocent, and also sometimes acquit the guilty. We have to design the system balancing these different injustices against each other. Depending on how we design it, we will get more of the one injustice and less of the other.
You acknowledge, as with the classroom example, that there are situations where different possible injustices must be weighed against one another. I am not a philosopher, but the academic philosophers I know describe justice (in a way I find frustratingly nebulous, but they’re the experts, not me) as “giving people their due”. Children enter a classroom to learn, for example, and learning typically requires maintaining a certain order which the teacher can’t provide if she devotes too much to ferreting out the best evidence by which to judge individual pupils’ alleged infractions. Sometimes group punishment (knowing it will include the innocent) is the most efficient way to restore order and so do justice to the many children who _are_ there to learn, by giving them _their_ due — an education.
Of course, children are minors, and group punishments meted out in the classroom are also minor. Group punishment for adults, who aren’t as vulnerable to disorderly environments as children are, is harder to stomach, and severe group punishments are harder to stomach than minor group punishments. Nonetheless, administering justice takes resources, resources are scarce, and consuming an inordinate amount of resources attempting to administer the best justice possible in individual cases might do an injustice to a larger population who, through no fault of its own, is then deprived of the resources it would have gotten otherwise, and which it reasonably expected as its due.
Most of the social censure we’re expected to mete out isn’t legal censure, and nobody expects us to expend as much in finding and weighing evidence for our censure as would be expended in a jury trial. Moreover, not everyone (not even academics who are quite competent in their specific area of expertise) feels competent to judge original sources of evidence. Sometimes someone just doesn’t have the time to inspect the original evidence, and so relies on a trusted intermediary’s summary. Sometimes, the original source seems so arcane — or even downright deceptive — that secondary summaries describing “what really happened” strike people as the better guide to making up their minds. (My own words have been thought so cleverly deceptive that a group of people treated another person’s unflattering summary of what my words meant as a better guide to what I said than my actual words themselves, and while I naturally found this absurd and unfair, there is a certain logic to it: this group trusted the summarizer far more than it did me.)
Now add in that it’s pretty normal for people to treat factional cohesion as a necessary ingredient in producing the social changes which will ultimately result in a more just society:
Just as an orderly classroom is commonly thought to do more justice overall to its pupils than a disorderly one, some people sincerely believe some social pecking-orders are more likely than others to result in doing more justice to people overall, and if factional signaling seems helpful in establishing such a pecking-order, people _will_ signal factionally, believing not unreasonably (though often mistakenly) that in doing so, they _are_ pursuing justice.
What’s the worst that can happen, then?
People whose interest in justice isn’t feigned (just misguided) piling on and seriously harming an individual based on weak, secondhand evidence, rather than adequate consideration of stronger, but costlier to process, evidence.
Thus, for example, massive petitions against scholars based not on the scholars’ actual work, but on what seemingly-trustworthy intermediary sources (that is, trustworthy to those signing the petition) _said_ the scholars’ work said. Such seemingly-trustworthy intermediaries needn’t be deliberately malicious, either, just mistaken enough to mislead others who aren’t going to “waste resources” second-guessing intermediaries they’ve already deemed trustworthy. Of course this is awful, and absurd, and it sure would be better if people were more careful. But, based on how scarce people’s resources for doing justice actually are, it wouldn’t be surprising for this particular kind of injustice to occasionally occur even among people whose overall interest in pursuing justice was fairly sincere.
If injustices can be traded-off and balanced, can’t justices?
I think on the face of it you reject the bare premise of “social justice” with this statement:
“I don’t think there are any group rights (e.g., rights of a race or class); there are only individual rights. So there cannot be any injustices to a group as such; there can only be injustices to individuals.”
In 2X’s example, the class (perhaps as individuals) suffers the injustice because they are members of the class (e.g. some no nothing and are nevertheless punished). And there are many such cases in history where classes are the object of punishment.
I suppose you could put your foot down and say “No, only the individuals who compose the class suffer injustice” but it seems like it would be rather impossible to discuss coherently say the injustice of Jim Crow laws without reference to the wronged class (blacks in the South). Or e.g. the case of a nation that is invaded in an unjust war. This makes me skeptical to claims such as “there cannot be any injustices to a group as such”.
But if you accept that there can be injustices to a group as such, then it simply becomes a matter of trade-offs of injustices as in the case of the criminal court system.
For the record, I think that the injustices you noted are certainly not worth their (at best negligible or more likely negative) impact on preventing other injustices on balance. And much of what goes on today you accurately assess as “factional signaling”. But there are/were movements for genuine social justice in history which that would be counted as the same or otherwise misjudged by the excluding entirely the notion of group rights or injustices.
I also hesitated over group justice. But the problem with the concept is that if it is valid, it is appropriate to punish groups rather than individuals.
The injustice of racism and sexism is that they punish individuals because of their group rather than their deeds. We should not use the same logic when we try to fix that.
Is the injustice of racism and sexism simply that they punish individuals because of their group? I think it is more complex than that.
Consider the case of a war — if groups cannot be the subject of justice or injustices, then the inevitable harms that will occur are merely a matter summing up and adjudicating soldier-to-soldier or soldier-to-civilian (or civilian-to-soldier) grievances, and the individuals involved must bear full responsibility for the extent of their involvement and whatever happens. I have a hard time agreeing with that. As another case, I think it’s fair to say Poland suffered an injustice 70 years ago, and also many Polish people suffered injustice as a result, but the former isn’t merely a metaphorical elaboration of the latter.
Can’t we punish a country (a group) for committing an unjust war, by say, levying taxes as reparations or restricting its sovereignty? Individuals will inevitably be punished in varying (perhaps unfair) degrees as a consequence, does that make such actions unjust?
I think the issue with racism and sexism, as opposed to say nationality in the context of war, is that race and sex are in most cases not accurately considered to be morally “causal” qualities. I think that group membership can be a morally causal quality in contexts– say being an active member of a political party or religious sect that is committing injustices, even if one isn’t committing the injustices directly oneself. But we have correctly come to realize that say merely being black (or, contra some “SJWs”, white), or being a woman (or, again contra some “SJWs”, a man) doesn’t enter into the correct causal moral calculus (which is certainly still being developed).
Jon, I don’t see a reply button on your later comment, so I’m replying to this one.
Yes, in wars, nations are punished. That’s because wars are unjust. They punish the innocent and the guilty alike. They punish women and children and noncombatants and people who were forced to fight. Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s Secretary of State, famously said it was okay to kill half a million Iraqi children with sanctions. That is a form of justice that I would hope everyone would reject.
I’ll also note that the Bible rejects the idea that children should be punished for their parents’ sins.
Will,
My purpose was not to justify the injustices of war, but to point out that in fact groups or classes that are the subject of justice and injustices in these cases (in addition to individuals as well).
Consider the case that you are walking home and are assaulted by a thief with a knife, you manage to disarm and incapacitate the thief, but are injured in the process. In addition to the jail sentence, you sue the thief for a reasonable amount to compensate you for you necessary medical treatment.
I don’t think anyone would say you have acted unjustly in this situation.
Now consider the case of country A invading country B in an act of pure aggression akin to the thief above. Country B manages to defeat country A, incapacitate it’s army, and installs a provisional government and imposes reasonable reparations on country A.
I believe these cases are analogous. Country B does no injustice to country A in this case.
However, if groups or classes cannot be the subject of justice or injustices, many of the citizens of country B have committed many injustices against citizens and residents of country A (they have had “taxation without representation” in the form of imposed reparations, deprived of democratic sovereignty for the duration of the provisional governments, etc.) , and we cannot justify their actions by pointing to the group level. This seems absurd to me. So I believe groups or classes can be the subjects of justice or in justice.
Once you accept that, then it is a question of properly balancing group justice and individual justice, not merely dismissing the former in favor of the latter. I agree that individual justice can’t be simply dismissed in the name of social justice, as in many of the cases the OP mentions, but it is a matter of determining acceptable trade-offs, as in the criminal justice system, no a lack of justice applying to groups or classes altogether.
[As a side: the Bible, whatever your stance on its moral and theological authority, doesn’t speak with a unified voice on the issue of war (e.g. 1 Samuel 15)]
“Social” does not add anything to the word Justice. Justice is just Justice. Adding “social” to it changes its meaning.
You acknowledge that there is often a need to balance different concerns for justice. I’m curious what you think about the following account of social justice efforts (in large part because I’m not sure what to think of them).
SJWs tend to believe that there are widespread but largely ignored social injustices. They believe that, whatever the intent, they follow a tendency of society to divide people along certain lines of group identity, and to think about them in ways that lead to frequent injustice carried out against people who are in these groups. I think the evidence for this is reasonably good, but far from conclusive.
One thing that results from this is a tendency to dismiss or at least underestimate the legitimacy of accusations by individuals who are in these groups. For example, rape victims are frequently dis-believed despite the fact that rape victims are less likely to lie about what was done to them than, say, mugging victims, who are almost always believed. This analogy is humorously drawn here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51-hepLP8J4 The general unwillingness to believe rape victims also seems to be a part of the explanation of under-reporting, under-trying, and under-punishing rapists. This is a serious injustice. If society had a policy of defaulting (outside the jury box) to believing sexual assault victims, these regular injustices would be less likely to occur. Therefore, although it will result in an occasional Duke situation, the general policy of vocally supporting those who make accusations is better for justice, all things considered, than the “wait and see” attitude that allows various biases to play a role in producing widespread injustice. On such a view, SJWs are fighting for justice by trying to limit widespread types of injustice, even if this means allowing for a certain type of injustice that one normally should be unwilling to accept. On this view, they could genuinely be fighting for justice in many cases despite not showing an appropriate respect for truth in other cases.
Thx, Matt. I understand your point. But I don’t see how these SJW’s could explain cases like Noah Carl, where they successfully demand that someone be fired because of his work, without apparently reading the work.
I think if you are individually interacting with a person who reports a crime, you should treat that person sympathetically and, by default, interact with them as though they are telling the truth. It’s when you start causing harm, or trying to cause harm, to the alleged perpetrator that you need to have satisfied some burden of proof.
“It is unjust to punish a person for a crime they did not commit.”
I don’t know if that’s quite so universal a standard. Collective punishment has been a normative practice in a number of contexts. Families/clans are often held responsible for the sins of some of their members.
War is collective. Yet Aquinas holds [I think] that soem wars are justified. Also was the Atom Bomb on Japan justfied? To me it seems clear that that ended the war and avoided aprolonged land invasion. But it was collective.
I think letting them know we have bombs that could blow up entire cities might have done that as well without killing people. Maybe some footage from the Manhattan project and a description of the effects of radiation.
“It is unjust to punish a person for a crime they did not commit.”
Agree with the ethic but I’d be interested to see how you’d respond to some potential limits.
Example 1: Nation X unjustifiably invades nation Y. And let’s assume the only way for nation Y to adequately defend itself is to carry out civilian bombings in nation X. Also assume that the decision to invade was an entirely top-down process, and the citizenry were uninvolved. Is bombing the civilians punishing them for something they did not do? And if so, does this mean nation Y should not bomb the citizenry?
Example 2: Foot’s moral dilemma – rioters demanding the judge to convict someone for a crime committed, and if their demands are not met they’ll kill 5 people. I think the majority of people would not consider capitulating to the judge’s demands, but if you ramp up the number of people the rioters would kill I think people’s intuitions might change. For example, if the rioters hid a bomb somewhere in a big city, so the potential deaths reached the high thousands. What’re your thoughts here?
I suppose in the strict sense neither of these cases are exactly punishments, since they might not match up with the definition entirely. However, I feel as though this could be an arbitrary distinction.
Capitulating to the rioters demands* sorry
I think the problems with “social justice warriors” noted above are symptoms of a larger problem: the lack of trust in institutions of justice, a distrust which I think is appropriate. I think many SJWs don’t *trust* the legal/judicial/social systems when they vindicate the targets of their (SJWs) rage. I think SJWs feel like these exculpated targets somehow “gamed” the system which is why they don’t apologize or retract.
I am greatly puzzled as to how the author of Huemer (2016) could write something like this:
“These are things that anyone who understands the concept “justice” will agree to be implied by “justice”. Judgements about it do not vary across political party, for example. The best examples will be accepted throughout history, and across cultures…. [i.e.] It is unjust to punish a person for a crime they did not commit… This is not some right-wing ideological conception of justice. This is a universal principle. This has always been recognized. Any society that has a notion of justice will agree with this. ”
Your own (2016) surveys the historical progression from non-liberal to liberal morality. Central to that progression is, as you surely know, the individualization of responsibility and the rejection of blood guilt and group responsibility. These “SJWs” you are so concerned with can probably be read as re-introducing a modest form of group responsibility: (roughly) if your speech predictably furthers the cause of violence or bigotry, you are morally responsible for incidents of violence or bigotry, even if you do not commit them. So you can be punished for them. Group responsibility was in fact a dominant conception of justice until at least 1700 in virtually all cultures around the world, and as such it’s more than a little bizarre to try to adjudicate this individualist/collectivist debate by asserting that SJWs are literally the first collectivists to walk the earth!
“This is not something that would happen with other movements – you would not get hundreds of people, in a movement nominally dedicated to some value X, to publicly, obviously violate a core principle of X.” I am not trying to be snarky or troll-y, but you don’t think Trump voters, and Republicans in general, do this all the time for at least the last 40 years? If that’s too broad for you, what about just evangelical Christian Republicans? Isn’t there political activism pretty much based on that?
Timothy Sommers:
” [Huemer:] “This is not something that would happen with other movements – you would not get hundreds of people, in a movement nominally dedicated to some value X, to publicly, obviously violate a core principle of X.” I am not trying to be snarky or troll-y, but you don’t think Trump voters, and Republicans in general, do this all the time for at least the last 40 years? If that’s too broad for you, what about just evangelical Christian Republicans? Isn’t there political activism pretty much based on that?”
Trump voters, Republicans and evangelicals are a different population set than academics and scholars. Given the very nature of their profession, the academics and scholars are supposed to know better.
Huemer has these people dead to rights.
Your argument:
1. These people care about justice only if they care about avoiding punishing x for doing y when x didn’t do y.
2. They don’t care about avoiding punishing x for doing y when x didn’t do y.
3. So, these people don’t care about justice.
Your support for the second premise is roughly that they don’t care about whether it is true that x did y: they didn’t wait until all the facts were in; that they didn’t apologize after being given evidence that x didn’t do y; and so on. But this support is weak. These people can and likely did believe that there was enough evidence or reason to believe that x did y. Additionally, they might believe that pursuing punishment was justified at the time (given their evidence), and so not apologize for doing the right thing–pursuing punishment–afterward. This is compatible with caring about whether it was true that x did y. So, despite the fact that they can’t care about justice without caring about truth, the conclusion that they don’t care about justice is not warranted because you haven’t sufficiently supported the claim that they don’t care about truth.
If you want to write about Noah Carl, you might want to know who he hangs out with.
“What is called for here is not genocide, the killing off of the population of incompetent cultures. But we do need to think realistically in terms of the ‘phasing out’ of such peoples…. Evolutionary progress means the extinction of the less competent. To think otherwise is mere sentimentality.”
https://shameproject.com/profile/charles-murray/
And yes, some people do not get jobs because they’re arguments are socially unacceptable. The academy changes as society changes.
The point of tenure is that once past the post, you can be almost as outrageous as you want. Before then, you jump through hoops.
The point of tenure is to force people to tow the line?
It seems reminiscent of the choice Joyce had to make between being a Jesuit and having to tow the line, but being given the ability to have intellectual freedom, or just having intellectual freedom.
So the academy is heading back to its religious/scholastic roots?
From all that I hear about left-movements going off the deep end in such ‘extreme’ cases as Maoism in China, my impression is that there is some dynamic within leftist strains of thought toward authoritarianism, groupthink and other associated vices. Left unchecked, we see how they operate in action here in the USA. They behave as cultists, True Believers who simply will not submit themselves to a fair-rules dialogue with their opponents/critics. The more moderate “liberals” I don’t see this; it’s with the more extreme strains of leftist thought, the ones that manage to find such a dubious ideal as socialism so attractive.
You note that the injustices perpetrated by these academics/scholars(/activists) in the name of justice is done basically with impunity and with the silent complicity of their colleagues. Red flag right there.
So unless they establish otherwise, I suggest that we drop any assumptions that these folks are engaged in the pursuit of truth; rather, they have priorities that outweigh this. By this point, they have squandered the benefit of the doubt.
Some consequentialists would say that sometimes punishing the innocent and lying about it is the right thing to do, all things considered. Maybe they would stop short of using the word ‘justice’, but still. In other words, and crudely, this strikes me the typical Kantian move whereby only deontologists get to talk of justice and rights.
Not that it matters, but I say this as no fan of virtue signalling (or faction signalling — I like that).
I don’t think that wealth inequality is unjust, and I don’t think redistribution is just. Instead, I think government wealth redistribution violates property rights and is thus unjust.
Doesn’t it depend upon how the unequal distribution was obtained? Union organization is criminalized, inequality results.
I don’t think affirmative action is just. Instead, I think it’s a form of unfair and harmful discrimination.
Doesn’t it depend upon what created the conditions causing some to think that affirmative action [however you define it] was needed to address the unequal conditions?
Related to the previous two points: I don’t think there are any group rights (e.g., rights of a race or class); there are only individual rights. So there cannot be any injustices to a group as such; there can only be injustices to individuals.
This seems a false choice. If blacks are discriminated against and I am black then the individual discrimination is against me due to my being placed in a group by others. The creation of the group by others groups me call it an individual right or group right whatever the enforcement is mine.
I don’t think natural events or their consequences can be unjust; only intentional, freely chosen actions and their consequences can be unjust. Thus, e.g., I reject luck egalitarianism.
Doesn’t it depend? City government doesn’t treat areas equally in terms of flood control due to race. A “natural event’ results in flooding, white populated area [as planned] unharmed; black populate are [as planned] harmed. Nothing ‘natural’ about it. Nothing “luck” about it.
Is it just for one child to inherit wealth and another child to inherit none?
Jon, the problem comes when you compare individuals to groups. Do the children of abolitionists deserve to be treated differently than the children of slaveowners? Does it matter that a few of the richest slaveowners were black, and if so, do their children deserve compensation for the “original sin” of slavery?
I agree that Bible, being an anthology, often contradicts itself. I still agree with this: “The child will not share the guilt of the parent, nor will the parent share the guilt of the child. The righteousness of the righteous will be credited to them, and the wickedness of the wicked will be charged against them.”
“Jon, the problem comes when you compare individuals to groups.”
Absolutely, but this is the exactly the problem–how do we balance group and individual justices and injustices?
We shouldn’t merely reject conceptions of group/class level “social” justice all together out of hand and only treat individual level justice as real, such a description of our moral situation simply isn’t accurate–class/groups can be the subject of justice and injustice. We are in agreement that “inheritable guilt” such as is implied in certain arguments for reparations for US slavery is an unjust notion. But the exact relationship between group and individual level justice is a very complex matter.
Jon, we can agree on this: “the exact relationship between group and individual level justice is a very complex matter.” I think the solution is to blame group decisions on the individuals who were responsible for the group’s decision, which almost always means the rich and powerful.
Not sure that this stands up to scrutiny, depending on the definition of ‘punish’.
Let’s say that someone is a beneficiary of a crime, but did not commit it.
Consider 3 cases.
Case I
A steals a car from B, and sells the stolen car to an unrelated third party C, who has no idea of the provenance of the car.
A tracks the car down, and takes it back.
Has C been ‘punished’?
C has been deprived of value, despite the fact that they did no harm to A.
The vehicle is unambiguously still A‘s property, because A has done nothing to alienate the vehicle. So A is within his rights to take it back.
Obviously this shifts the cost of the crime from A to C (additionally, A has lost their search costs).
If C paid less than the replacement cost of the vehicle, then there’s some overall reduction in dollar-valued losses, but it’s not clear what it means for overall welfare (since people have different marginal utilities of money).
Case II
A steals a high-valued gemstone from B, sells it to an anonymous third party, and uses the funds to buy their kid a house (the kid is named D, because of family tradition).
D has unambiguously benefited from the theft. The house is – again, unambiguously – the proceeds of the crime, at one remove.
Can B take D‘s house?
If not, why not?
If D knew that his father was a criminal, and knew that the funds used for D‘s house were illegally obtained, would that change the calculus? If so, why so?
Case III
Now generalise Case II: make it intergenerational and international.
Some French people F benefited greatly from their forebears’ (F’) shonky deals for control over resources in former colonies.
The deals were sufficiently egregious that they are not distinguishable from outright theft; the deals were struck ass the colonial period was ending, and took advantage of the corruption of the hand-picked indigenous successors to French rule.
Can F‘s Paris apartments be rightfully seized as compensation? (My view is ‘Yes’.)
(Francophiles and Western-apologists can substitute the behaviour of Russian oligarchs as the USSR was disintegrating, and the oligarchs’ properties in London. if that’s not redolent enough, imagine it’s the grandchildren of Josef Mengele, and the apartments were bought with the proceeds of stuff stolen from camp inmates in the 1940s).
Beneficiaries of crimes – even unwitting beneficiaries – ought to be valid targets for victims’ redress.
(I plan to appeal to this when it’s time to expropriate all bureaucrats and their descendants, once government eventually becomes a subscription service and the illegitimacy of coercive government is finally recognised. It should already have happened to churches.)
Oops… in Case I the car I kept using A instead of B (the real victim). They all look alike to me.
So t orecap: B tracks the car down, and takes it back.
C has been deprived of value, despite the fact that they did no harm to B.
The vehicle is unambiguously still B‘s property, because B has done nothing to alienate the vehicle. So B is within his rights to take it back.
Obviously this shifts the cost of the crime from B to C (additionally, B has lost their search costs).