Matthew Yglesias has a post here that I agree with, mostly. Here’s the real meat of the post from the very beginning:
Mark Schmitt is bored of all the Jesusland business and wants to ask the right question about religion, namely “why it is that the current flourishing of religious faith has, for the first time ever, virtually no element of social justice?”
I think the answer is that it does have a strong element of social justice. Who’s working to halt the spread of HIV/AIDS in Africa? Who’s trying to help refugees in Darfur? Who’s trying to stop global trafficking in women? Why, that would be socially conservative religious movements.
I’ve always had a bit of a problem with the term social justice at least as the term seems to be used by many people.
Justice is that virtue by which one accords to others that which is theirs by right. It, along with prudence, fortitude, and temperance constitute the cardinal virtues. The term right is, unfortunately, frequently used very loosely. If one says, for example, that the unemployed have a right to work or the needy have a right to assistance, this is not strictly correct. There is neither a legal nor a natural right here so the claim being made is actually a claim in charity rather than a claim in justice. And that’s what a lot of people seem to mean by social justice.
Back in 1931 in his encyclical Quadragesimo Anno Pius XI, building on the prior work of Leo XIII, had this to say about social justice:
But not every distribution among human beings of property and wealth is of a character to attain either completely or to a satisfactory degree of perfection the end which God intends. Therefore, the riches that economic-social developments constantly increase ought to be so distributed among individual persons and classes that the common advantage of all, which Leo XIII had praised, will be safeguarded; in other words, that the common good of all society will be kept inviolate. By this law of social justice, one class is forbidden to exclude the other from sharing in the benefits.
Notice that this does not establish a positive responsibility in justice.
I suspect that the term social justice, in the sense of Christian charity, is frequently used by those who want to harness the power of government which in my view is properly restricted to claims of justice, to claims of charity while separating charity from its real nature as a theological virtue.
UPDATE: MY posts an interesting follow-up here.
