" but I disagree that this means that doing things like helping the poor or trying to stop climate change don't constitute a form of justice."
Suppose you believe that climate change, or something else, harms everyone. Is trying to stop it still a form of justice?
Consider the distinction between justice arguments and non-justice arguments from the opposite of your ideological position. A deontological libertarian will object to taxing the rich on the grounds that taking money from someone who has justly earned it is a violation of his rights, hence unjust, however much money he happens to have earned. A consequentialist libertarian will argue that permitting a polity to redistribute income ends up making everyone, on average, worse off, because it gives people an incentive to spend resources trying to be the ones redistributed to not the ones redistributed from and not only does that make the society poorer, there is no good reason to expect the people you want to favor to win the rent seeking struggle. The former argument is about justice, the latter is not.
> Suppose you believe that climate change, or something else, harms everyone. Is trying to stop it still a form of justice?
I think the answer would depend on the manner in which that harm is distributed, and whether the distribution conflicts with the stated norms of our Republic (admittedly, this kicks the can down towards the spooky sign that reads 'meta-ethics').
If the distribution is perfectly uniform across the polity, you could still argue there exists an injustice, in a Rawlsian sense. Behind the veil of ignorance, you may not only lack knowledge on *who* you will be, but also on *when*. Is there not a credible definition of justice which finds it unjust for a generation to secure a more comfortable existence at the expense of a much greater burden on their successors?
If like me you find this worth thinking about, then we might agree that 'environmental justice' or even 'climate justice' are adequate terms to describe the object of our discussion.
"It feels unjust that some people are born in Mail and some are born in California and that determines their life outcomes more than anything they do."
At the same time, you run into the limits of fairness. 'Lottery of birth' isn't synonymous with 'luck', in large part because people make efforts for their descendants to 'rig' the lottery, and negating that effort is itself unfair.
At the large scale, some of that has to be determined by effort to create the society the child is born into. A child born in Botswana or Gabon (to pick two of the more developed sub-Saharan African countries) has a better chance at life than a child born in Mali. This is unfair to the child born in Mali, but part of this unfairness is due to effort by previous generations in Botswana and Gabon to make their societies more functional. A magical fix to this to make things fair for the child in Mali as compared to the other two would be unfair to the previous generations that did the work.
At individual scale, pure genetic chance is more luck (although some of it is in choosing a partner). On the other hand, individual differences are harder to balance; is physical attractiveness a fair trade off for intelligence? Which is worse, an increased chance of cancer, or an increased chance of mental illness?
And, of course, some of those 'birth lottery' effects are still other people's responsibility. It's not the child's fault that they were born to a single parent, but it's not exclusively (or even primarily) societies fault. Any way to fix that unfairness is unfair to someone else. It's tough to admit, but there are somethings that can never be made fair.
I think this was why I offered to explain white fragility. I felt similarly surprised by Scott and commenters saying they had never heard these terms and didn't understand what they might mean
1. I think there is some low likelihood that the history of systemic racism that I have learned about is false, in which case the idea of white fragility doesn't really make sense, although for anyone who encounters that history and believes it, I think they could probably still experience white fragility
2. White fragility could be a lot less common than I think it is; it could be that many people are either totally unconvinced by or totally uniformed about what I think of as the history of systemic racism, and therefore their reaction is simply incredulity rather than defensiveness as I and others might suspect. Or, we might be working from very different moral premises about the duty of human beings toward each other, i.e. they might not have any problem with systemic racism, nor any guilt from the privilege they receive from that system.
3. Do you think that white fragility does not exist? I get that people don't appreciate others assuming that they are experiencing white fragility, and I have conceded above that it may happen less frequently than liberals often assume. You might not like the choice of words and want it to be called something else. But why wouldn't white people have a negative, defensive emotional reaction when faced with the idea that they have caused harm to people of color, given that they think of themselves as good, not-racist people? It's a natural reaction - a lot of people don't like to find themselves in the role of the villain. Like I said in some previous comments, I have experienced it within myself multiple times. It felt horrible to me when I realized that I was the one causing harm, and I got emotional and defensive about it. It has taken practice to be able to respond calmly in situations where someone points out a racist impact that I have had. At the very least, it seems to me like a common experience of white liberals who pride themselves on "valuing diversity."
I think maybe I do take issue with the label. As a comparison, consider acrophobia, the extreme or irrational fear of heights. If someone refuses to climb a 20 foot ladder because they are scared, we might say that they are acrophobic. However, if someone climbs the ladder and we shake it violently, making the person worry that they might fall, we might still expect to get their heart racing and adrenaline pumping, but we wouldn't necessarily take this as evidence that they are acrophobic.
To define defensiveness in response to an accusation (especially an accusation where the stakes could be perceived by the accused as high, and where the accused may not a priori accept the accusation as true) as "fragility" seems incorrect.
If a store clerk sells alcohol to a minor without realizing the customer is a minor, and they are so accused, they might try to defend themselves. To call that "clerk fragility" seems odd. If a driver exceeds the speed limit (say due to a broken or miscalibrated speedometer), and tries to defend themselves, again it seems odd to call this "driver fragility". In both these examples, the facts are against the accused, but it is possible they did not intentionally commit these violations. It seems odd to describe people trying to defend themselves from these accusations as a hallmark of fragility.
The definition of white fragility that I have taken from your comment above would seem to readily extend the "fragility" label to anyone making statements of self defense against any strict liability crime, and that seems overly broad. Even more so if that label were applied to a defence of any crime whatsoever. It seems wrong to apply "fragility" in the general case as it just doesn't seem correct to call a large fraction of statements of self defense "fragility". And then when narrowed to the specific case of accusations of harm to people of color, it doesn't seem like defensiveness in such cases are sufficiently distinct as to deserve a special application of the term.
Switching gears to the self introspective "negative, defensive emotional reaction" that seems to underlie fragility. I participate in a capitalist society: I work at a job in exchange for a salary, I pay money for food and shelter and healthcare, etc. Capitalism clearly has winners and losers; people who get a better deal out of the system, and those who get a worse one.
If someone accused me of harming the poor, I might be defensive: I might say that I give to charity. Someone might come back at me saying even still that by participating in capitalism at all, I'm contributing to the continued and inevitable oppression of the lower classes. Ok, by some definition of terms, sure, I guess someone can claim that. Does my defensiveness constitute "middle-class fragility"? I don't think so.
I'm not sure what we expect of the accused bourgeoisie here. Action at the ballot box? Join a communist revolution? Maybe "middle-class blindness" or "middle-class indifference" might be better labels. As some sort of call to action to engage or change minds, those both seem a little better than "middle-class fragility". Though for someone who acknowledges capitalism's flaws, yet who's not going to abandon capitalism, it seems like any label is probably a tough sell.
Maybe the capitalism example doesn't map well to the white fragility case, but I am inherently suspicious of a label that applies only in special cases and can't be coherently generalized to seemingly symmetric cases. And I have not yet seen evidence that the concept of white fragility is undeserving of that suspicion.
(For a less charitable take, consider "witch fragility": the negative, defensive emotional reaction you get from witches when you accuse them of having harmed other people through the practice of witchcraft. The harms cited may indeed be real, but disagreement with the causal lineage of those harms should not by itself constitute evidence of a unique kind of fragility specific to the demographic of the accused.)
Thanks for replying. This conversation is helping me a lot. It makes sense to me that where we disagree might be over whether white fragility should be its own particular label at all, which is a super contextual question.
The thing that stuck out the most to me about your response was what you said about being "inherently suspicious of a label that applies only in special cases and can't be coherently generalized to seemingly symmetric cases." My guess based on that statement (and this may be assuming a lot, so please correct me where I err) is that we disagree about the status of systemic racism in the current day.
My guess is that you see systemic, impactful racism as largely a thing of the somewhat faraway past - slavery, genocide against indigenous people, Japanese internment camps, Jim Crow, etc. and is not having much of an impact on people of Color today. My guess is that you might also think there is some amount of anti-white racism, which you would estimate at present has about an equal impact as anti-Black or anti-indigenous, etc. racism. If that is the case, it makes a lot of sense to me that you are suspicious of such an asymmetric term as "white fragility" with no counterpart such as "Black fragility" or the like.
I think that systemic racism is still a thing of the present, having impacts such as voter ID laws specifically targeted to prevent a higher ratio of people of Color from voting, vastly higher rates of incarceration for Black and Brown people despite similar crime rates to white people, preferential hiring (and renting to, and anything else you can apply for) of people with white-sounding names continuing to result in a huge wage gap and an even larger wealth gap between people of Color and white people. From my understanding of mainstream biology, basically any disparities we find between racial groups are evidence of differences in how people are impacted by social structures, not biological differences between racial groups, because different racial groups are not biologically relevant groups, only socially relevant groups.
So, from my perspective, it is actually very necessary to have racially asymmetric terms, because we live in a racially asymmetric world.
Did I hit on a difference between our underlying assumptions, or did I totally miss?
Nope. These are “justice” as in distributive justice and corrective justice. Aristotle. If you think “criminal justice” when you hear these phrases, that’s you.
The people using these phrases think, to the extent they think about it, that these forms of justice can be achieved by giving to those who have not, mostly without taking from those who have. If there is a fantasy here, it is utopian plenty, not retributive harshness.
But the term "Nazi" is not nearly as broad as "justice" so it's not really comparable. Personally, ive only really seen these vindictive people on the internet (which i dont think is an accurate representation of the general public). And while the term justice may be more popular now, I think more people are also questioning what exactly justice looks like.
The idea of a world of good people and "saints" lends itself more readily to the concept of villains deserving of retribution. It's more useful to have discussions about the nuances of the concept of justice rather than simply saying "your idea of justice is wrong or incomplete. Stop using that word". It's more useful to strive for a just world rather than a good world of saints.
I'm not a frequent user of the schema "X justice", so I could be wrong. But I think retribution is a big part of it. Reflecting on the ways I've heard the term used, its users don't seem inclined towards incrementalist change or giving to the have-nots. Rather, the notion seems to be that the status quo is intrinsically and intentionally unjust, and that a revolutionary shift is necessary to bring about a new just order.
What you've described is redistribution, not retribution. Left wing people sincerely believe that the world would be improved if the wealth of the rich was distributed to the poor. Calling this "retribution" isn't an argument, it's just an insult.
Redistribution involves two things: taking from the haves, and giving to the have-nots. I fully believe you that you're more motivated by the latter than the former. But I think many on the left are motivated just as powerfully by the confiscatory part.
There's raw indignation at the exorbitant wealth and conspicuous consumption of the hyper-rich, totally independent of how that wealth could be otherwise used. As for this being an "insult" - I don't think people are wrong to be indignant or outraged this way. Billionaire excess is very often genuinely outrageous! Confiscatory and retributive impulses aren't always bad or wrong!
The tendency to distrust and pull down wealthy people can be seen a positive adaptation. Wealth is easily translated into.power, and extreme wealth can be translated into a tyranny.
of course , complaints complaints from the right about *justice are the same thing. Eg
"The problem with this is that social justice advocates are very keen to colonize anything and everything they can under the mantle of justice because it increases the importance of what they are saying. If "climate change justice" is mostly about random small island countries getting inundated or Las Vegas running out of water, it can only go so far. If *every* kind of environmental problem can be tied to "climate justice" and it increasingly is, it magnifies the importance of the topic and the people yelling about it."
Its a complaint that a certain group are power grabbing, getting too big for their boots, etc.
The two prong requirement works for articulating why so many people are against redistribution as we have seen it in practice. We have been efficient in taking from the rich (when considering what we ask of the wealthy in terms of proportion of government revenues), but incredibly inefficient at giving to the poor. The funds are subject to exceptionally higher levels of fraud, waste, and abuse than those and often times benefit people that are as despicable as the most venomous billionaire--but happen to have aligned themselves with whatever political interest brought forth said redistribution efforts (housing authority chiefs, corrupt local politicians, cronies). In my experience many people aren't mad about paying taxes, they don't believe their tax dollars will make any difference worth a damn.
Eh. The SS sincerely believed throwing Jews into the ovens would improve the world, too. Sincere delusional belief while executing deep moral wrong is nothing new among humanity, and its existence in any particular situation is no moral defense whatsoever. Only in Marvel movies do the villians think of themselves as villains and enjoy it.
This person has a sincere belief that behaviour X will help people, but The Nazi's had a sincere belief that behaviour Y would help people! Redistributing wealth taken via coercion from the trillion dollar 1% is a moral wrong because SS! Get rebutted, radical redistributionist :)
Calm down. I'm pointing out that believing you're doing good while doing evil is so commonplace among human beings that it must count for zero when one is assessing right and wrong, and it's just silly to even bring it up as an argument. Sincerity is the least important component of virtue. Vladimir Putin sincerely believes he's helping Ukraine. People who support and oppose abortion both sincerely believe they're helping the would-be mothers. Et cetera. I'm sure you sincerely believe you made a powerful argument, and I'm equally sincere in thinking you didn't.
Of course, the converse is also true. Perhaps many leftists are acting out of intent of retribution against the rich, as the original post tries to darkly hint at. So what? As you've pointed out, intent doesn't matter, only effects. If people reduce climate emissions and give more money to poor countries out of spite, does that not still improve the world?
Suppose person X is proposing action Y. If the question is "is action Y morally good or not?" then, indeed, it doesn't matter why X is proposing it. If the question is "is person X morally good or not?" then it does matter, though it's possible that X sincerely intends something we could all regard as good _but_ that Y is so horrible that we can't see anyone proposing Y as anything but evil.
But here the question isn't either of those, it's "is X after retribution rather than merely redistribution?". And for _that_, X's intent is very relevant indeed.
If some left-winger wants a big transfer of wealth from the very rich to the very poor (or to the fairly poor, or to the merely-not-particularly-rich), then to whatever extent their motivation is to make the poor better off rather than to make the rich worse off as such they're aiming for redistribution but not for retribution.
(Also: 1. I wonder whether you actually have much evidence that the typical SS member was throwing Jews into ovens _because they sincerely thought it would improve the world_. Doubtless some of them were, but I suspect plain ordinary hatred was often at least as important. And: 2. it might be worth distinguishing between "X sincerely thought doing Y would improve the world" and "X sincerely thought doing Y would accomplish Z" where Z is something you/we approve of as much as X does. Perhaps the guys in the SS thought that having fewer Jews in the world was just intrinsically good, and they thought throwing Jews into ovens made the world better for that reason; that feels to me importantly different from the situation where a leftist wants to move money from the rich to the poor because he wants there to be less misery and poverty; you might think what he wants to do is a bad idea for other reasons, but I'm hoping you agree with him that misery and poverty are things we should want there to be less of.)
(Not so) fun fact, the hate for jews in Germany actually (at least partially) originated because they were seen as rich and exploitative :/
On a wider point, I don't think the parent wanted to make a hitler-ate-sugar argument - you're not becoming the SS for wanting to take money from the rich. But it's very easy to be very wrong about being right and the commenter made an extreme argument to showcase that point.
> Only in Marvel movies do the villians think of themselves as villains and enjoy it.
"Hero" and "villain" are not the only possibilities. Some people may reject this frame, and see themselves e.g. as "doing whatever any reasonable person would be doing in their place". It is quite easy when one uses a circular definition, where "reasonable" means "one who would do the same thing".
I suspect that many people who are seen as "villains" by their opponents, simply see themselves as "normal", "reasonable", or "smart".
"The only reason people complain about me is that they wish they were as smart as me, so they could be in my place instead, and then they would do exactly the same thing! You believe they would not? Well, then they are idiots!"
Even people who consider themselves virtuous, may simply care about some virtue other than helping people. "I am doing the right thing; and if some people get hurt in the process, it is a price I am willing to pay!"
That's too extreme. If you'd said "almost nobody sees themselves as a villian" I'd agree, but I believe that some few both do and revel in it. Consider the number of gamers who like to "grief" the obviously weaker.
I concur. It may be that “______ justice” campaigners who are attracted to the punitive element are a minority but they are frequently the noisiest.
Food shortages played a big part in the French Revolution, but when the heads started tumbling into baskets ‘the people’ began enjoying the spectacle for its own sake.
They still had no bread but it was enjoyable to see privileged people humbled, humiliated and killed.
I fear this goes to something deep in the human soul/psyche that when we are suffering, if we can’t get relief, we take some pleasure from seeing someone else suffer.
Mostly it's an opportunity to lay claim of being in charge of the re-distributive efforts - to gain power with other people's money as it's gifted through your channels to the supportive masses. It's called 'justice' because that imparts a patina of official-sounding legitimacy to what is really pure grifting. Justice is available through the rule of law, not the law of mobs.
This is close to the core of why we should use "justice", in fact :)
Consider the example of USA giving foreign aid to the Marshall Islands. This could be a generous gift (to use your language), making the USA a country of saints (to use Scott's language).
However, put yourself in the shoes of someone living in the Marshall Islands. That person knows that their country will disappear by 2050 due to rising oceans, and it's no fault of theirs at all. Rather, it's the fault of everyone, roughly in proportion to how much carbon they have put into the atmosphere. So if the country with the highest carbon footprint in the world pays some money to the Marshall Islands, this is not just feel-good kindness... it's an urgently needed step toward a bit more fairness and justice in this world.
Consider reading the article rather than mounting an ad-hominem attack on its source?
More seriously: even if the *average* altitude is 2m, there are plenty of important populated places near the coast that are at much lower altitude. You seen to imply that the problem only starts once the sea rise reaches 2m...?
And if it leads to still greater urbanization, and distance from traditional ways, thus more ultimate vulnerability to sea level rise - it still was fair and just, full stop?
John Mcwhorter wrote a good example of justice framing diverting from better solutions in the NYT
Racial justice assumes there is an ongoing institutional and prevalent force acting against the well being of black Americans. Mcwhorter examined things like police interactions among black Americans and others of the same income cohort. Little to no difference. Historically, over half of people in redlined communities were white
If we assume there are specific racially villainous actions that can be stopped we fail to help anyone because it's apparent that the problem is racial only at the very margins
Do we attempt to impose justice or to reform for progress? Mcwhorter proposes: teaching phonics to underprivileged kids, ending the drug war, and expanding access to and respect for trades rather than focusing only on college. Racial justice seems to especially propose white people undergo a spiritual change to stop their mystical inherent oppression and punishing those who do not participate in this
Climate change is probably the highest impact instance of justice solutions vs 'positive' solutions
Justice demands that a great wrong exists and must be categorically remedied. Thus the policy focus is that dramatic and immediate action be taken to achieve a grand goal of essentially preventing any major harmful effects. This isn't the kind of issue where you ask economists for input. But according to economists near term hard caps on emissions are something like half as effective as carbon taxes. And the costs will outweigh the benefits if the tax is clearly above the cost of the warming prevented. Justice demands that no bad thing happen but implementing it with that mindset is more costly and less effective. A straightforward analysis of Paris puts the benefit as low as 10 cents per dollar spent
It's of a piece with the other species of justice framing that Scott is talking about in the article. There's an inherent underlying assumption that we would have equality of outcomes in a just world. There is absolutely no reason to believe this.
It's basically pitting 'justice' in a state of perpetual war against bad luck, uneven genetics, uneven geography, human self-interest, the natural tendency toward centralisation and hierarchy in both the economic and political domain, and basically every other force that creates unequal outcomes in human societies- not least of which is personal choice.
Unfairness is baked into the world at so many levels or emerges so rapidly from organic human processes that expecting a mere absence of malice or even-handedness in dispute-resolution to produce equity is laughable, so in practice this vision of 'justice' has to become totalitarian and all-encompassing. Every variable- including personal choice- has to be coerced into irrelevancy.
Discipline in schools being degraded by complaints over 'disparate impact' is a fair example. It essentially guarantees that the worst-behaving individuals in the worst-behaving group can get away with more the worse they behave. Choice being decoupled from outcome in practice encourages the worst kind of choices.
I don't want to say that unequal outcomes imply you have zero injustice- it could theoretically be the case that black students really are being disciplined more heavily than the case merits- but the patch being applied here is guaranteed to create *drastically more injustice* in addition to basically destroying the ability of other kids to get an education. It's complete madness.
Criminality in any sane society requires mens rea, or at the very least criminal negligence. We do not prosecute for murder those who cause the death of others, accidentally, and notwithstanding exercising due care. That's just bad luck.
Even assuming arguendo your description of the facts (that the Marshall Islands will subside beneath the sea as a direct result of US emissions of CO2), you would need *additionally* to make the case that the US did this deliberately, in order to destroy the Marshall Islands, or with criminal negligence, i.e. knowing full well this would be the result and ignoring any possibility of doing something different. That's the only way this could turn into an issue of justice.
The criminal negligence is a pretty strong argument. Only a very few can be demonstrated to have acted with knowledge of doing harm. OTOH, nobody can be shown to have particularly targeted the Marshall Islands.
It's not really "their money" if its gained through exploitation and wage slavery. It is simply giving people what is theirs. There's an old trade unionist saying that "Profits are wages not yet distributed".
Lol, capitalism isn't just "anything done for profit" - if that's your definition, then we're not talking about the same thing here. Pretty much any conquest, or really any bad action, even by a communist country, could be said to be motivated by "profit" in the general sense, so that argument is basically just "someone doing bad stuff = capitalism".
What most people are talking about when they refer to capitalism is free markets (which necessarily implies private ownership of capital). Free markets and private ownership have brought billions out of poverty, most recently in China and India.
The general criteria for "victims of communism" or "communist death toll" or any similar trite formulation is essentially "Anytime somebody died under a communist government" so the logic that you're applying to communism is being applied to capitalism.
Of course unsurprisingly you now object to such a criteria when its convenient which would illustrate a double standard.
The life expectancy of citizens in the worlds' freest, most market-oriented nations in the world are generally much higher than in the command economies and have historically been much higher than countries that declare themselves socialist. If you really believe in this way of attributing deaths to economic systems, and I don't think you are being sincere, then you ought to incorporate the pseudo-deaths caused by ubiquitous corruption and bureaucratic mismanagement of soviet agriculture/medicine/safety into your toy model. Otherwise you're comparing people lined up and shot vs people dying from all-cause mortality inside a profession they voluntarily selected.
Every step of this analysis is completely deranged, but let's just start with item 1.
In what sense do you believe that capitalist countries financed fascism, and how are you arriving at the conclusion that fascism killed 200 million people?
Is there such thing as exploitation or wage slavery? I'm having trouble with the idea that if I offer to pay someone a wage to do something for me, and they do it, they then rightfully own my profit from that.
I could just as easily say it is the employer who creates the profits by arranging for profitable goods/services to be made and sold. And obviously the workers are not entitled to the profits because that was not part of our agreement. Seems straightforward? If the workers create the profits, why don't they just do that themselves? Why do they need the employer? Could it be that the employer does something valuable?
I'm all in favor of employers being justly compensated for their labor, whereas people such as yourself are only in favor of these select individuals being satisfactorily compensated. It's a certain bourgeois chauvinism based on a mistaken idea of production.
Also, to respond to "workers are not entitled to the profits because that was not part of our agreement". This implies a fair agreement and one properly consented to. If somebody threatens you with poverty (i.e economic blackmail) then that's not meaningfully consented to. Its sort of like saying Tibet is rightfully China's because of the Seventeen Point Agreement, context matters in other words.
This simplified strawman economics model of a business has to stop being used.
The workers that built the capital that the company needed to start, such as the construction workers that built the factory and the manufacturing workers that built the machines the factory runs on need to be paid for their work... and were, with the people that paid them before the first product had rolled out of the factory (the investors) promised a share of the profit. And if the business goes under, as I understand it, it's the investors that lose their money.
The factory janitor doesn't produce a single thing, but their job is just as necessary as every line worker. Same with the truck driver, the HR person, the accountant... and the managers and executives. I don't like that the connections to other business, law makers, and regulators is more important to the success of the business than the quality of its product, but that's not the market's fault, and that's why the people at the top of big business are where they are.
Because labor all by itself doesn't create anything. I can dig holes and refill them all day without creating an iota of economic value. It's labor *plus* capital (machines, technology) *plus* good ideas and leadership that creates economic value. If the workers provided all three, then OK they created the profits, but in that case -- they supply the work, the capital, and the leadership, like a small business might reasonable argue -- then typically these days they *do* receive and enjoy the profits.
But if *all* the workers supply is labor, and the capital and leadership is supplied by someone else, nope. That's like arguing the vast bulk of privates in an army should get all the credit for a military victory, ignoring the role of sophisticated weaponry, intelligence, and good generalship. Basically it confuses a sine qua non with a cause.
Good leaders by themselves without anybody to take orders don't create anything and without worker-created profit you wouldn't be able to afford any machines or technology. Everybody should get the fruits of their labor whether they're leaders or at the very lowest level. The pandemic has illustrated quite clearly which individuals are the "essential workers" and they are paid dirt wages while their boss swims in cash.
Because they made a prior agreement to give those goods to the employer after they were done, in exchange for a fixed wage. If someone just builds something on their own without making such a prior arrangement, then they are indeed entitled to it under capitalism. Most people, even many communists when pressed on the question in isolation, don't find anything intuitively wrong with being able to enter into such contracts. Adding on the concept of ownership of property you create ("entitlement to the fruits of your labor"), and you de facto support free markets.
When this is pointed out the traditional communist fallacy is to then say, well, this isn't fair because the capital that the employer owns that incentivizes such agreements was somehow "stolen". But that line of rhetoric very rarely elaborated upon and obviously not necessarily true; if I write a computer program like Photoshop and someone rents it to do work, it seems really strange to argue that I'm somehow stealing from them.
Who controls what their alternatives are? The justifications behind the abuses of the capitalist system ring quite hollow. This doesn't make the alternatives any better, of course. What is basically boils down to is that any group of people who control power will fight amongst themselves for a larger share, unite against an outsider getting some of their power, and scheme to increase their power. The names used to describe the way in which the power is centralized and controlled don't really matter. (If you're an anti-capitalist, look into the way unions tend to become corrupt. If you're pro-capitalist, look into Upton Sinclair's description of the meat packing industry.)
Yes, but the trade unionists are as biased as the employers. Neither is capable of rendering an objective evaluation of relative value contributed. (And neither am I.)
>If you think “criminal justice” when you hear these phrases, that’s you.
I think Scott's point is that it's not just him, it's the majority of people who hear the word. Most of them have never heard of distributive justice, or even if they have still mostly associate justice with criminal justice.
Fairness is something that even some animals understand. Almost every child needs to be told that the world isn't fair, because they start from an innate assumption that it should be. Perhaps we should just talk about fairness instead of justice and then this complaint goes away?
how many kids do you have? I have 3, and just can't recall experiencing with any of them that innate sense of fairness you are describing, much less any episode where I told them the ugly truth about the world and witnessed their disillusion. The do understand instinctively concepts like retribution, tit for tat, etc., I think.
Those studies seem to reach conclusions more measured than the tweet makes them appear. In particular, they tend to say that there is only 'weak evidence' or that there is only evidence for 'a rudimentary sense of fairness' rather than state baldly that there is a 'replication failure'. The complaint about the logic of the experiment seems rather superficial too - in humans, if someone sets themselves on fire to protest the suffering of their people, they've increased the amount of suffering of their people in the world. The 'illogic' of it might be interesting, but it's hardly a strong argument that it doesn't happen, or that the protester isn't really protesting what they say they are.
And the "cute videos are mind viruses that produce 'zombie ideas'" cute quote is a mind virus too. Describing an idea with bad sounding words makes no difference to its truth value.
My kids get really angry when they feel they are being treated unfairly, it’s true. But when daddy says it’s not fair for him that you won’t let him eat breakfast, they don’t care. “The sense that the world ought to be fair” is, I think, much better described as “high confidence that my concept of fairness matters, but the concepts of fairness of other people are irrelevant, especially when they want things I don’t.”
In the inequity aversion terminology, this means your children are showing "disadvantageous inequity aversion". That's where individuals protest if they lose out unfairly. "Advantageous inequity aversion" is rarer, that's where individuals protest if others lose out unfairly.
I think that a complaint that they have been treated unfairly made as if they believe this is a meaningful reason to be upset indicates that they believe fairness is important. Believing fairness is important enough to make personal sacrifices in order that others are treated fairly is a different thing.
It isn't 'fairness' that they think is important to them. It's _getting what they want_.
There's a pretty huge difference, right? If each one wants to have their book read, they both protest that the outcome isn't fair, even if what i do is choose a book that neither one of them wants.
"Justice as Fairness" is a line associated with Rawls. But most people don't treat them as synonyms, and their first association for the word "justice" will be things like criminal justice. "Fairness" does sound more suitable for Scott's lens, but I don't know if it gives the same scope for saintliness/utopianism. You can imagine a superlatively fair person, but not as naturally as a superlatively benevolent one.
Nonsense. Having reared 5 of them to adulthood (or close enough), I am confident no child is *born* with any sense of "fairness." Generally it has to be beaten into them, in fact. "No, it's not OK to take your brother's toy just because you want it and he's too small to resist."
Fairness is a sophisticated adult social value -- nature has no such concept, and if you could talk to a lion and ask whether it was fair that she preferentially targed young and weak members of the gazelle tribe for eating, she would be very puzzled indeed. It's certainly true that adults sometimes train their kids to expect a little more fairness in the wide world than they can expect within the confines of the family, but this has more to do with inadequate parenting than social failure. Anyone who trains his kids to expect a society of 300 million to function with as much intelligent insight into each of its members as a family of 4 is...kind of dumb, honestly.
You sound like you'd be a good source of data here. Especially since you're an adult who thinks that fairness is a sophisticated adult concept that has no meaning in nature, and presumably have brought up your kids with that opinion.
Have your children at a young age ever complained that they have been treated unfairly as if they think this is a meaningful reason to be upset?
Have they ever been upset that a sibling has appeared to receive higher rewards or attention when they were equally deserving?
To be honest, I'll be quite surprised if you answer no, but I'm interested to find out. If you doubt that other parents experience "It's not fair" as a weirdly common refrain from kids let me point you to this book: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/its-not-fair-amy-krouse-rosenthal
If anything, I would say that the concept of 'life's not fair' is a sophisticated adult concept that kids have to have beaten into them.
My claim that kids have an innate sense of fairness is perhaps stronger than I have concrete evidence for, but it is not such a strong claim that I'm saying kids usually let their sense of fairness rule over their self-interest. These are two different things.
Sorry, but I think you're failing to make a distinction.
1) Yes, kids have desires, and they want those desires satisfied. (Usually *right NOW*.)
2) They also have a sense of fairness. This doesn't change what they want. But it can either reinforce or weaken their demands for it.
3) Unfortunately, their sense of fairness is not symmetrical. They don't necessarily accept that if it's fair that somebody share a cookie with them, that means that it's fair that they share their cookie with someone else. They feel ownership in their cookie, but they don't directly feel the ownership someone else has in the cookie that person is holding.
Reading the replies, enough people agree with him to constitute decent evidence that he's right about how "justice" sounds to the average ear. My point is just that if he's right about that, the use of "X justice" is less a cynical attempt to sneak a free ride on the popular sense of justice as retribution than a sincere misunderstanding of how the language of justice will be received. These phrases are coming out of an academic/activist community where people read and listen each other and debate what is best, and where the sense of justice as retribution is at its weakest. If anything, this is a group with a thin theory of mind about popular understanding, not a thick theory of how to hijack people's natural retributiveness for their own ends.
I disagree, the people in the activist community who use these terms have a pretty thick theory of mind; the phrasing is meticulously tuned to manipulate.
Not many people have read Aristotle. In common parlance, "justice" implies a crime, a victim, and a perpetrator. Justice is achieved through punishment. Yes, making the victim whole is also an objective to be pursued, if possible; but the primary goal is to harm the perpetrator in proportion to the harm he inflicted on the victim (modulo situational circumstances). Thus, while "helping the poor" can be achieved by e.g. giving them money or food, "financial justice" can only be achieved by harming rich people -- ideally, but not necessarily, by taking away their money and giving it to their victims, the poor people.
I think this might be easier for speakers of other languages than English. For example, in German "Gerechtigkeit" means justice in the sense of "fairness" and "treating everyone equally". There would be other words related to courts, such as "Rechtsprechung".
Thus terms like "Klimagerechtigkeit" are clear and don't have the negative connotations that Scott writes about.
Using and abusing the word "justice" is quintessential for mob mobilization. You don't get to fly on the wings of memetic spreading unless you use that particular word. And that has absolutely zero to do with Aristotle, in whose times the Twitter handle @theRealAristotle would not have existed.
As for "gerechtigkeit" - which is rooted in the German word for "right" - it might also be translated as "righteousness". In any case, "selbstgerechtigkeit" pretty much does translate to "self-righteousness".
Googling tells me that the analogue of the American Department of Justice is called Bundesministerium der Justiz in Germany (and similarly in Austria and Switzerland) and that Justiz has mostly legal sense in German. So, yeah, it seems like Klimagerechtigkeit and climate justice have quite different connotations.
In general, I believe it is unproductive to blame miscommunication on the other party. After all, you can't control how they'll hear things, only how you say them.
In light of that, and insofar as Scott is not an isolated example of hearing this way, perhaps this sort of phrasing could be improved.
(Reflexively, you also can't control how other people will say things, only how you hear them. Therefore, that my view also implies that Scott could improve the discourse by hearing these people better. Your comment is not without merit, but "that's you" is an unproductive accusation.)
Aristotle? When did Aristotle talk about distributive or corrective justice? Aristotle's definition of justice was about interpersonal obligation and primarily a personal trait. That is what the term social justice originally meant when it was invented by Catholics. But distributive and corrective justice are 19th century terms meant specifically to criticize that conception of social justice. People like Mills then read that backward into Plato (but not Aristotle, as far as I know).
Though notably Mills ultimately said justice was of secondary interest to utilitarianism which is how he justified things he admitted were unjust. Yes, it's not fair to take a rich man's property simply because he's rich, but it produces utils by giving it to the poor. Justice thus had to give way to higher moral, utilitarian principles, which were unjust in particular but were a form of what he called distributive justice. He specifically admits that this is justice GIVING WAY to higher principles, not just some obvious application of morally intuitive justice.
Check out Nicomachean Ethics, book 5 where Aristotle discusses the different kinds of justice. At 1130b, Aristotle brings in the kind of justice "exercised in the distribution [dianomhs] of honor, wealth, and the other divisible assets of the community, which may be allotted among its members in equal or unequal shares" [taken from the free translation on Perseus]. His major treatment of this subject in his Ethics occurs in the following chapter, NE 5.3. But he discusses this topic all over the Politics, and gives and reasons from principles of distributive justice all over the place there, most famously in his principle that the best flute ought to be given to the best flute player.
It's just not plausible to read distributive justice as something Mill invented in the 19th Century, in the face of this 2400 year old text that is plainly talking about this subject.
Adam Smith also wrote about commutative justice and distributive justice in Theory of Moral Sentiments, at least from the second edition off their of my head, in the mid 1700’s, pointing to Aristotle and Cicero I believe. Might be wrong about Cicero.
I've just searched my version of the text (as in ctrl+f) and can't find the term distributive justice. So I'm not sure what you specifically mean but I can't find it.
My kindle version (can't find the hard copy) puts it in Book 3, Section 2, Chap. 1 "Of those Systems which make Virtue consist in Propriety." That part describes it as "a becoming use of what is one's own," akin to Grotius' (not Cicero) definition of justitia attributrix. Somewhat later Smith compares it to the distributive justice of Aristotle which "consists in the proper distribution of rewards from the public stock of a community" in a footnote.
Edit: if you meant to ask where it was in Nicomachean ethics, Smith notes "See ... 1.5 .c.2." I don't know how that might translate to Aristotle, however, or if it is the editor of TMS making that location reference or something.
I'll take a look. But distribution of rewards doesn't strike you as different from utilitarian or progressive distributive justice? Reward implies desert is earned through action, not through simple necessity, doesn't it?
If you take "distributive justice" to mean "the concept of whether society is fair" which includes economic aspects then of course that's been discussed forever. Long before the term itself was invented. You could argue it's a theme in the Iliad where the king deprives Achilles of Briseis and disrupts the just distribution of war booty. But that's not usually what distributive justice means. It instead means a specific modern conception of what is economically fair in society.
In that sense, no. You're quoting that out of context to read a 19th century concept back into Aristotle. Remember, like Plato Aristotle was a member of the oligarchal political faction, not a democrat and not a utilitarian.
The Bekker translation on Perseus inserts all kinds of anachronistic terms like political science. The Greek word used in that line is dianomais (διανομαῖς). I think that's what you mean by dianomhs. Dianomais means distribute in the sense of deliver, like distributing mail. Notably, it is what herders do to animals. It specifically does not mean distribute in the sense of justice or desert. A better translation, "one type is that which is created in distributions of honour or money or the other things that fall to be divided among those who have a share in the polity." I expect he's thinking, for example, of one year when Athens ran a budget surplus (due to a particularly good year in the state silver mines) and debated about where that money should go. They ultimately bought ships but they thought about just giving it out as a kind of political dividend.
He is specifically not talking about the redistribution of private property to create social equity. Plato does actually talk about that and he directly condemns it as a tool of wannabe tyrants. But certain people read it back into the text for ideological reasons.
If you define distributive justice to mean "a specific modern conception" then sure you can assert that by definition Aristotle cannot be talking about it. I cannot see exactly how you are distinguishing between "'the concept of whether society is fair' which includes economic aspects" and your apparently very different "specific modern conception of what is economically fair in society." I *think* that you think that the modern term distributive justice always means "redistribution of private property to create social equity," which I do not think that the poster you were responding to above, nor the people who talk about social justice, use it to mean. At most you can say that *your* conception of distributive justice is one you find in Mill and attribute to him since he gives a utilitarian argument for it.
Here's a little more Aristotle from further down the page, since you accuse me of taking him out of context: "This is also clear from the principle of ‘assignment by desert.’ All are agreed that justice in distributions must be based on desert of some sort, although they do not all mean the same sort of desert; democrats make the criterion free birth; those of oligarchical sympathies wealth, or in other cases birth; upholders of aristocracy make it virtue." [From a free translation, but my Irwin translation is not much different] Aristotle's point is that distributive justice means distributing goods such as wealth and honors, to people in society, and that we do so according to some notion of what we think people are worth. But different societies assign worth in different ways. By the by, it is a corollary of this view that if you want to change society fundamentally, you must necessarily want to *re*distribute, i.e., to change the distribution of such goods.
It's true that Aristotle is no lover of democracy. He does argues against Plato in favor of private property (Politics, Book 2), and in so doing is clearly arguing for one form of distributive justice over others.
The poster you were criticizing is completely correct that Aristotle distinguishes distributive justice from justice concerned with punishment, and that is precisely the right response to the original article. (You are correct that the form of the word here is διανομαῖς; the dictionary entry is for διανομή and I was tired.
To your question below, I think it's important to read thinkers carefully and not read things out of them based on my historical preconceptions. But the main reason I wrote here was because I thought you were wrong, thought the person you were responding to was right, and was willing to go down the rabbit hole with you.
> I *think* that you think that the modern term distributive justice always means "redistribution of private property to create social equity," which I do not think that the poster you were responding to above, nor the people who talk about social justice, use it to mean. At most you can say that *your* conception of distributive justice is one you find in Mill and attribute to him since he gives a utilitarian argument for it.
No, at most what I can say is that the person who, as far as I know, invented the term used it in that fashion. And that other people adopted it to mean something else. Neither of which is not what you're talking about. I'm not saying you're wrong to use that definition. But I'd need you to explain it.
Are you going to grasp the nettle and claim, then, that a woman being passed around as property is distributive justice? If it is then how is the term not all encompassing of any kind of economic morality? If not, what is your definition? As I said, if you just mean "people have opinions about what's fair and unfair and that includes matters of wealth" then sure. Hell, the Code of Hammurabi is implicitly distributive justice then. But that seems like such a broad definition as to be useless?
I don't think that it is just to treat women as property. But if someone made a claim that women ought to be treated as property, I would take that as a claim about distributive justice, one that is wrong. Similarly, I think that it is unjust to bury widows with their husbands. If someone made a claim that they ought to be, I would think that person were making a claim about what punishment would be just, one that is wrong.
Also, yes, there probably are things in the Code of Hammurabi that are about distributive justice (although the stuff I remember is about punishment). But Aristotle is getting credit here because he pointed out the distinction between these two kinds of justice, or two uses of the term justice: just distribution and just punishment. And that is the distinction that Scott is ignoring in the OP.
Actually, question for you: It's clearly important to you, in some sense, that the idea is old and longstanding. Why is that? Let's say I'm right and that distributive justice is a creature of the 19th century. Do you feel this weakens it in some way? I ask because I run into A LOT of people dubiously trying to read things back into the Classics. I've never understood the instinct.
I know you are not asking me, but I will take a swing at the question. I think it is valuable to know that a concept is older rather than newer for a few reasons:
1: Knowing how far back the topic goes suggests that it was important for a long time, and might just be a really tough question, instead of one that only smart moderns even thought to ask. Teaching economics, just about every 101 class has one kid who thinks you could solve unemployment by the government just hiring everyone, and likely thinks we are all stupid and/or evil for not just doing that. Pointing out that people have tried that for millennia and it doesn't work well is useful. Likewise questions of "You are not alone in your troubles. Consider all these people just like you in the past..."
2: If you have a perfectly good term for something, and suddenly it goes out of use and another term pops up that seems to be talking about the same thing but with none of the historical arguments being brought to bear, you know something is up. Typically you can root around the history and find "Oh, one side of the debate got entirely wrecked, and the losers went off to lick their wounds, returning with a brand new term to argue about that is said to be completely different but is actually the same and they hope no one will notice." The modern term "mandatory volunteering" for high school students comes to mind... we called that slavery, or at least forced labor, back in the day.
3a: Newer ideas that are popular are likely to be worse than older ideas that are popular. Humans are really bad at consciously picking cultural features and societal designs, but over time things that work get adopted pretty well, so older things that remain salient over time are more probably more workable.
3b: Older ideas that keep cropping up over time are more likely to be based in human nature than human imagination. If some pretty clever modern philosopher says "Boy, people being out of work and stuck home alone during COVID was really rough on them mentally" I think "That might be true." When I see Samuel Johnson also says "If you are idle, be not isolated; if you are isolated, be not idle" that makes me think "Wow, I bet that is much more likely to be true." If I see Grotius or Cicero or Aristotle also saying "Holy crap, people go nuts when they are left alone with nothing to do for a little bit" I assign it a very high likelihood of being true.
Another example is the question of "Why doesn't PTSD ever seem to get mentioned in early writings about war, indeed not much until WWI?" That leads you to wonder if something changed recently, or what.
4: (Related to 3b) Older ideas that have not been struck down as crazy are more likely to be true because they have had lots of time to be repudiated; many old ideas an arguments become so ingrained in the culture because they are accepted as true, that people forget where they came from. If an idea turns out to be really old, I should be able to find dozens of commentaries and arguments against it, many of much higher quality than what you get lately. If those don't work, or didn't work, I can feel more confident that there is really something to the idea.
Likewise, every time someone says "How can you even own something?" I want to point them to Grotius, who pretty exhaustively went through every possible state of ownership with regards to things humans care about. Those became the basis for 20th century international law, but everyone sort of forgets about those arguments because we are so used to ownership everywhere as the default. Even if you don't accept all of e.g. Grotius' arguments, you have the framework to go from, as opposed to starting from scratch.
5: New things might best be thought of as just an experiment that might work. Maybe someday future generations are going to look back and say "Wow, that universal suffrage thing was NOT a good idea." I'd be less likely to expect regret if I could look back from now and see cases where it worked out, and more likely to expect regret if I see lots of cases where it was tried and failed horrible.
6: The later 1800's and early 1900's saw the rise of some really hideous and anti-human ideas. All else equal, if an idea spawned around that time I place a much higher probability of it leading to horrific consequences.
I think that about sums it up for why I look upon older ideas with more sympathy than newer ones.
Lots of good stuff here, although I am not sure I agree with you that older ideas are more likely to be true than newer ones. But I would add that I think lots of people disparage reading old texts as somehow not really engaging with the ideas afresh and being willing to think for yourself. And that surely is a trap you can fall into, of thinking ideas are true just because they are old. But you can fall into such traps as easily reading Quine or contemporary authors. In fact, it might be easier because today's writers use terms and ideas that are already familiar to you, making it harder to break out of your own thinking and learn really new ideas.
Definitely agree on the use of terms etc. and would add that older authors will bring up situations that are totally outside one's experience and help to see things in new ways. Plato's Euthyphro really did that for me; what modern would have to consider "Is it right for me to prosecute my own father for murdering one of our slaves?"
Sure. I guess I'm most frustrated by people retroactively inserting ideas. Like the use of the word distributive justice in the Aristotle translation. That's not a good translation but they obviously want to retroactively insert the actual concept. Now, we can of course agree that he is discussing something and economics and fairness. But the idea that he was advocating for something like a modern welfare state is absurd. To take another example, the idea that international realism was invented by the Greeks is just cope. Yes, the Melian dialogue has some of the concepts, but it's not some thesis of the Athenian worldview.
1: Right, but my point is that the argument goes from "lots of people had lots of thoughts about what was fair economically" to "the idea of distributive justice, a modern term and issue in the next election, was discussed by Aristotle." That's only true in the vaguest, broadest sense. That doesn't mean it's not worth learning! But very rarely do you get such direct lessons. Except maybe in terribly obvious things.
2: I'm not sure about this. Social justice, as originally defined, was a conservative Catholic belief. The Catholics still hold basically similar beliefs but the term was appropriated by the left and then later abandoned by Catholics. Without too much change in underlying ideology. But I do agree there's a lot to be gained by ignoring the specific terms and seeing what the actual object of conversation is. The issue is that you then have to retranslate it back into terms people understand.
3a: I'd agree to this with the modification of "ideas" to "customs." Socrates didn't actually run anything. He was a philosopher and from an out of power faction. Studying how Athens worked is useful in this sense. Studying how Socrates thought Athens ought to work is still useful but less so.
3b: Fair enough.
4: I agree with this. It's even more useful to see the arguments of defeated political factions because it's entirely possible they knew something you didn't. Even if you find them unconvincing you at least understand what your own side overcame. Broad, long lasting political movements usually have at least some sense to them. If you can't think of why that is you don't really understand them. And if you don't understand something you don't understand it's opponents either. This is kind of what I gestured to in my other comment: Aristotle argues against something like the state caring for everyone. This doesn't denigrate the idea and can actually be useful for understanding it.
I agree that Aristotle wasn't talking about a modern welfare state, but I think that confusion is in how "distributive justice" came to be used now, not whether it made sense in Smith's time. He certainly wasn't using it in anyway that would argue for legal redistribution, and pretty much defined the distinction between commutative and distributive as the former being things it is justifiable to punish people over and the latter isn't. The state cannot mandate distributive justice points precisely because they cannot be clearly defined or agreed upon. Modern welfare talk of "distributive justice" would be more closely defined as "a becoming use of what is someone else's" and even that might be being too charitable :D
I can see some sort of parallel if you see the "state" as "the king", and then say ok, a king ought to use his resources to take care of his people. A becoming use of what is his own might be argued to apply to using the royal treasury to buy food for the people in case of famine, for example, but how much and what kind of food etc. still seems to put it in the realm of opinion and out of grammatical, punishable behavior.
Not enough moderns read Smith. Even Rawls had only the Reader's Digest condensed version of Theory of Moral Sentiments to work from, unfortunately. At least he had that, I suppose, but he might have had an easier time with the full work. Alas, it was out of print for most of the 20th century.
Sorry, I feel I wasn't clear. I meant to say that distributive justice in Aristotle and other pre-moderns isn't retroactively putting the words back in his mouth, but rather recently changing the term to mean something other than what it meant back then. Sort of like how "liberal" means something VERY different in the USA post 1870 than it meant in 1775 when Wealth of Nations was written with phrases like "liberal system."
As opposed to how translators always use "pike" instead of "spear", and so change Caesar's legion to having 16-20' weapons they throw around. That shit makes me crazy.
Absolutely. I'm disappointed to say this is probably one of the worst pieces Scott has written in a while. Like, it's just nitpicking about something which is just exposing an absence of familiarity with a really non-obscure, non-ingroup core aspect of political philosophy.
It really reads as a parody:
"I can’t find clear evidence on Google Trends that use of these terms is increasing - I just feel like I’ve been hearing them more and more often."
Does nobody see any issues with starting a *rationalist* piece like this?
Scott then spends a paragraph doing... what exactly?
"What is “climate justice”? Was the Little Ice Age unjust? What if it killed millions? Is it unjust for Mali to have a less pleasant climate than California? What if I said that there’s a really high correlation between temperature and GDP, and Mali’s awful climate is a big part of why it’s so poor? Climate justice couldn’t care less about any of this. Why not? Hard to say. Maybe because there’s no violation and no villain."
This is such a shallow pass at a topic which ought to be a great topic of discussion. Discussing whether justice/fairness are concepts which apply in the absence of human intention is pol phil 101- see here for example https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice/#JustAgen
I think Scott is fully aware of all this and has just gone on a bashing of climate/"woke" justice because it gets used by an out group. Even the wikipedia article he links to explains the concept relatively simply.
By all means, there are really interesting discussions to be had around the scope of justice, the impact of justice as a tool of analysis etc. But the piece as a whole is just shallow and ungenerous, with lots of strawmanning and feigned incredulity. Disappointed.
The general point that Scott seems to have abandoned the premise of steelmanning is pretty sad. I get that he is trying to churn out more and more content, but it really detracts from anything he isn't already pre-disposed to engage with on an equal level with.
I concur, and this is one of the few posts of Scott's that I simply think is flat wrong--or, at least, he should have stopped at noting that the language exists in order to create a moral duty, not to punish. I don't really identify with the XXXXX justice groups, but they are a huge proportion of my wing of the labor movement, and I can say with some confidence that even if they do believe in retribution of the rich, that's simply not how they're understanding "justice" in the phrase "social justice."
I applaud you for referencing Aristotle, but deduct significant points for assuming more people are familiar with the index of justices than have seen >1 ep of 'Law & Order'.
An amazing amount of weight is carried by the "mostly" in "mostly without taking from those who have." I have the uncharitable suspicion that "mostly" doesn't have its usual meaning in this particular sentence.
“the guy who’s more sensitive to violations and more efficient and punishment than anyone else“ —> not sure what was intended but I think the “punishment” line is truncated
Very Online or sufficiently young... I don't know if you've visited a college campus recently, but I can attest that the term "climate justice" is very common there.
Similarly, people on campus may not use the word "woke", but only in the sense that fish don't frequently use the word "water."
I visited my alma mater a bit ago, and every other light pole had an official university banner with the phrase “stay woke” on it. And it’s not even a particularly “woke” campus. So I think it’s safe to say that the younger generations are actually using the term on a regular basis, or at least regularly interact with it.
And an even smaller percentage of the population is at elite schools most in the thrall of this BS rhetoric. Nonetheless, that small group of people tends to end up establishing standards for journalists and other elite tastemakers, so their linguistic and ideological quirks are important to examine.
Both? I think both. The propaganda most influential on our elite is probably important to study. And yes, this is that.
Also, I think the NYT's audience doesn't substantially consist of the Very Online. Even if there's minor overlap, the Very Online probably go to trendier, angrier sites and consume news through podcasts neither of us have ever heard of.
A related TLP-esque theory: the move away from virtue, away from agency, is *precisely the point.* By placing all of these domains outside of individual control, they're removed from your power, and you're absolved of any real responsibility or personal failing.
Currently, many are powerless and frustrated in their individual lives. They start out convinced that nothing they do can help the world because of their own deep-seated insecurities and inadequacies. But recognizing, confronting, and overcoming your insecurity is hard. Reframing everything as "justice" scratches the same itch, allowing people to express their sense of powerlessness, but doesn't make them feel like it's an individual failing of theirs, since "justice" is systemic, broad, administered by the state and beyond any individual's control.
Interesting - I think I've more often seen it used as a call to "caring" or "awareness", which has motivated the wallowing-in-powerlessness theory for me. But that could be motivated reasoning on my part.
Once we move beyond the object, we tend to see what we want to see. Is the word "justice" a call to action or an excuse to not act? Is 50 stars and 13 stripes a symbol of freedom and opportunity, or imperialism and racism, or decadence and degeneracy?
The correct answers are "It's a word" and "it's a flag".
This seems too skeptical. Yes, different words can mean different things to different people, and ultimately they are just words. But if we can't "move beyond the object" and look at its use(s) and meaning(s), we'll hamstring our ability to understand society.
Oh, there is meaning beyond the object, but it's impossible to get to that meaning by talking and talking and talking and talking, which is the only thing that you can actually do in a comments section. You're trying to get water from a well using a colander and then wondering why it keeps coming back empty. Meaning exists beyond language- the only thing words can do is gesture at an illusion of a shadow of the real world. Hieroglyphics and art are better at actually communicating meaning than words.
For what it’s worth this hews very close to what I perceive to be the truth for many young/collegiate/woke-adjacent communities who discuss things in terms of _____ justice. It is almost verboten to have a discussion about climate change, for instance, with those who frame it in terms of climate justice, in which individual choices people make are acknowledged as important. I.e. suggesting to a group of organized college Dems that they might drive less, take shorter showers, or participate less in fast fashion or frequent consumerism is considered hostile and beside the point. They would argue that they couldn’t possibly make a difference through individual choices, only large scale corporate/systemic change, and distractions like the above suggestions would be coded as neoliberal, vaguely un-hip, or insensitive; at least this is true in my experience. Try ruminating about individual changes we can make to flight climate change on a forum such as r/Politics and you might be surprised to find yourself decried.
It is besides the point, though. The "individual choices" narration is a red herring kept in the memesphere by corporate interests. The idea of personal carbon footprint was championed by... BP.
To be fair, unless you have a personal jet, individual choice is probably irrelevant. I wouldn't say that about most moral issues--individually helping a poor person is quite relevant. But climate change, in as much as it is a cataclysmic problem, isn't going to care about a single person's impact.
Being a "convenient excuse" doesn't make it wrong. Nothing you individually do will ever effect the climate in a measurable way. Coordinated action is required for that.
However, making personal sacrifices might help demonstrate the sincerity of your belief and be more persuasive.
I think you're right, and that Scott missed an important point there: It's hard to divorce "helping the poor" from actually, you know, helping the poor. Pursuing economic justice, on the other hand, doesn't have to involve helping anyone.
This theory seems very similar to the ideas expressed in this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tooiNm9WmkM. It explains the problem and tries to arrive at a possible solution. I liked it.
henry george wrote very movingly about how this framing contests with hypocrisy around charity, without being so foolish as to say good things aren't good.
Sometimes the zeitgeist swings too far and perhaps it gets annoying when people talk about justice as a buzzword instead of the result of reflection. I think what you identify is use of justice as a buzzword, and yeah the internet rotates through them aggressively. At best it does have the function-in my opinion- of not letting rich liberals off the hook for some of the harms they've driven in this country (particularly around housing), where helping and being nice is contrasted with legitimate support of some of the greatest drivers of huge economic problems.
But then people say "housing justice" and oppose supply increases anyways. So I shrug and stop listening to the word justice until I trust the speaker to actually be able to argue why something is just.
To summarize the strong parts of what Henry George said:
1. We need to think about the systemic root causes of bad outcomes, and reform the system to prevent those systematically. In the same vein as "giving a man a fish feeds him for a day, but teaching a man to fish feeds him for a lifetime".
2. handouts strip away dignity and the poor could provide for themselves a lot more if the system stopped actively screwing them.
There's also a lot of confused stuff about theology and about the rich being thieves and fallacious arguments about how no good will come of constructing public works.
It's less that no good comes of constructing works, but that public works raise land value, which means they won't solve systemic inequalities deriving from land. This is basically the most rudimentary form of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George_theorem Henry George Theorem, which posits that the maximum revenue a government can generate without deadweight loss is, exactly, the land value within its borders.
But I do think he is right to point out that people can tell the difference between 'just redistribution' and 'handouts', and that building a system on the unjust redistribution will lead to frustration from the taxed and the recipients.
"... the Buddha never tried to impose his ideas of justice on the world at large. And this was very wise and perceptive on his part. It’s easy enough to see how imposed standards of justice can be a menace to well-being when those standards are somebody else’s. It’s much harder to see the menace when the standards are your own."
Ring the right bell for the right cause - scratch the right itch with the right term - and the guilt ridden tend to come running, wallets in hand. It's pavlovian. Righteousness is very marketable, especially when people are eager to show off their progressive bona fides and what have you.
Turning everything into "justice" supports moral absolutism and attempts to eliminate the possibility of debate. If you disagree with justice, you're just evil.
Denying anything can be "unjust" supports moral relativism, and eliminates any possibility of debate. If you think something is unjust, you are a a moral absolutist and should be ignored.
I mean I think this is basically all coming out of the SJ community; they have their own idiosyncratic meaning of "justice" and are applying it to lots of things. I don't think it's some distinct phenomenon that's broader than SJ. And indeed many of the things you say here apply to SJ more generally.
Slight disagree. Wikipedia says that eg spatial justice "is promoted by the scholarly tradition of critical geography, which arose in the 1970s." While it's a pretty obscure justice, this suggests they already had a tradition of doing this kind of thing back then. I agree that 1970s critical geography is lefty, but I feel like it's a broader type of lefty than just "the SJ community".
Interesing! Huh. Still, as you say, I think it's basically a feature of that social justice/critical theory/leftism cluster (I realize these are not the same thing but I typically group them together because their ways of thinking seem essentially similar to me).
"Critical X" reads to me as "woke X" (edit: and therefore "SJ X"), at least as far back as the 70s. E.g., "critical legal theory" is the foundational underpinnings of a lot of modern woke stuff, even though it was also that far back.
spatial justice I found kind of interesting. One thought is that it’s just a fancy name for land management. I think of a river that serves thousands of people over thousands of miles and somebody screwing around with the headwaters oblivious to the downstream effects. There’s really no excuse for that happening anymore. (Although I’m sure it does.)
do... you think "justice" is just a word that means "moving things around"? That's not what that word means.
"climate justice" could be rephrased more accurately as "climate change response justice". The world has to choose how to respond to climate change, with mitigation, adaptation, etc. The "climate justice" movement is a movement that attempts to ensure that the response results in outcomes that are "just", according to their definition of "just", which corresponds to left wing values such as fairness. So for example, they would want to ensure that coal workers are compensated and reskilled when their coal plant shuts down, so the poor are not impacted by the energy transition.
> The world has to choose how to respond to climate change, with mitigation, adaptation, etc.
In my view the world doesn’t have to choose anything. A very large cohort of communities geographical locations and nation states will have to decide either alone or amongst themselves how to manage any crisis that occurs such as climate change. India does not have the same problem as northern Canada for instance.
I don’t see how the word justice factors into this.
> So for example, they would want to ensure that coal workers are compensated and reskilled when their coal plant shuts down, so the poor are not impacted by the energy transition.
We might want to start a fund for the benefit of the descendants of the cotton gin debacle While we’re at it;
I know I sound rather Hobbesian, but there is a fundamental truth in that worldview that should not be ignored. When the reach of justice exceeds its grasp it turns pretty quickly into either tyranny or anarchy.
I also think that what justice means is very contigent on context; There are conflicting goals. Is the decision to be made in the context of the greater good? That means that certain marginal influences will not be treated well almost by definition. If marginal interests are what is paramount in any discussion of justice then there is a cost associated with that for others. Pretty quickly boils down to either collective or individual notions of justice . in the collective sense I think the word becomes for too vague to be of any use.
I think that the mentality behind Gall-Peters & similar pretty clearly lines up with SJ types. If anything it's just a very early precursor that ideologically matches the current SJ.
I think the line of causation runs in the other direction. I think social justice largely descends from, or at least draws much of its framework from critical theory. My impression is that this was more visible 10-20 years ago, but that might be more due to a change in my own circles. Critical theory and the social justice movement have for at least a few decades (since before "woke" was a term in popular consciousness, ) essentially existed as a feedback loop with each other.
Thanks for the note, also things to consider: the four dystopias (Darren Allen), X types of leadership, Lewis Model of Culture. The social structure/topology has surely changed.
Seems like a good way of putting it. Justice focuses on outcomes of rule/norm violations, virtue focuses on devising and applying those preventative norms.
This may be a variation of Crotchety Crank's point: acting in the name of 'justice' is acting in the name of a greater good, a higher principle. Whereas 'helping others' can easily be construed as condescending (which it often is) and even self-serving (which it often is). Any whiff of self-serving condescension creates dissonance for those who like to think of themselves and others as being altruistically motivated. They may feel on safer ground as the Keepers of The Obviously Unimpeachable Justice Faith.
It's interesting that Christianity (and any other established tradition that has an element of charity) has some pretty strong memetic defences against this, and many Christians still fail at not being condescending assholes. Now if you introduce a new ideology completely devoid of all these failsafes...
I was thinking this same thing. The New Testament doesn't care that much about "justice" (fairness, maybe?) in the real world. But the Bible (as a whole) VERY MUCH cares about taking care of the poor, the widows, the orphans, the sick. And it very much says that we as individuals should be honest, fair, merciful, etc. Society will do what it does: this is a fallen world. But each one should do what one can for one's neighbors.
And you're right, if you're a proper Christian, you should be aware how bad you suck at being a Christian, and keep on trying in all humility. And I'm worried too about the "successor" religion. Christianity, I think, is probably the least bad religion, so when you toss it out, I wouldn't expect something better, and I don't think "no religion" is an option for most people.
Agree. That is kind of my point - but I think the concept of justice might be considered my many to be a cause beyond reproach. Personally, I think it is a red herring and a pretty suspect concept altogether but in doing so, I feel I am teetering on the edge of a destructive cynicism. Who is bold enough to deny that justice is good?
When you don't know a word, but don't have a dictionary, you can often determine the meaning from how people use the word. The pitfall of this is that it may result in one thinking that "criminal justice" means "making bad people suffer".
Maybe the people you’re thinking of who use “climate justice” and “economic justice” and “X justice” don’t realize how these phrases land with others. But this not a motte and bailey. They are quite sincere in also thinking that “criminal justice” is not justice and is not a model for what they want.
Again, maybe these phrases are poorly chosen give their goals and beliefs. But they very much don’t come out of an attempt to ride the coattails of criminal justice.
It's been interesting to see my friend group evolve on criminal justice tbh. Maybe 2014/2015 they all clearly thought that retribution was a bad criminal justice goal and that it should all be about rehabilitation.
Now they still believe the criminal justice system is broken, but not because retributive justice is bad - it's just that the wrong people are getting punished.
This is just a survey of my Facebook friends, I don't have data about the broader culture. But I worked in criminal defense for a while, have an interest in this, and had noticed this trend before this article.
I don't doubt that the internet is full of hypocrites, but I'll also point out that "the justice system gives nice rehabilitative treatment to some groups and harsh retribution to others, due to factors like racism and classism" can be a systemic criticism, not just a complaint about the wrong people getting punished.
I mean I agree with that and don't even think that this is hypocrisy. It's more like a frame change from "why does a black man caught with cocaine do ten years in prison when tax evaders go free" to "why do tax evaders go free when a black man with cocaine does 10 years in prison."
That's a nitpick but the post *is* about semantics. The former framing emphasizes the injustice of the harsh sentence, the latter the injustice of a lack of sentence for a bad guy. Because of my background I see the harsh sentence as the greater evil and would prefer to address that. I do not believe putting more tax evaders in jail will do that.
My suspicion is that we talk about "helping" when the pie is big enough i.e. the economy is growing, and the average person sees a chance at advancement. When it becomes more of a zero-sum game due to low economic growth or stratified classes, then "justice" comes more into vogue.
Even if inequality is growing, I am also not convinced that the public's perception of that as being a problem, which is informed by the media, will have any meaningful connection to base reality. Public perception of the frequency and magnitude of mass shootings, school shootings, and police violence have all shot up dramatically in recent years despite all of those things becoming less frequent and less severe.
On issues like this, the media mostly operates on Simulacra Level 3.
If anything, it's the other way around - obsession with inequality leads to economic policies that prevent the pie from growing or even cause it to shrink, creating zero-sum conditions.
I think the pie is growing, but at the same time from what I read, the gap between rich and poor is getting larger (at least in the USA). So from the viewpoint of the majority, the pie may not be growing much.
Having said that, you could be right that the pie is actually growing and the idea that it is not is politically slanted, but what I'm getting at is that if people perceive the pie to have stopped growing then they are more likely to demand "justice".
I don't remember encountering the "helping" rhetoric that often, but the difference makes intuitive sense. There also seems to be a directional aspect; "helping" implies voluntary initiative from above, whereas "justice" implies conceding to demands from below, the human motive of economic redistribution shifting from generosity in good times to fears of social unrest and political instability in hard times.
It's simple: it's all "justice" because justice implies the existence of both victims and perpetrators. Unfairness and disparities in outcomes between people, rather than bad things that can be improved in absolute terms. It's a justification for attacking a person, rather than helping a person. It's just more of the same political stuff.
"Justice" also connotes someone somewhere intending to do harm where there isn't always intent. Justice can be demanded, there's moral certainty, whereas anyone can just shrug off platitudes. The term's connotations are satisfying simple and simply satisfying, which is perfect for the social media age.
That's a cool way of looking at it. What I want to know is whether people using [X] justice are actually more concerned with exacting justice against someone instead of helping the original group. I don't think Stalin called it "Economic Justice", but did he call it "helping the poor"?
From the wiki article on economic justice, it doesn't really sound that bad. "Economic justice aims to create opportunities for every person to have a dignified, productive and creative life that extends beyond simple economics." Isn't that a good goal?
I agree that it sounds annoying, but mostly because it sounds like the latest term in a long line of saying things without really helping. I don't really see how [X] justice is any more pernicious than committing yourself to War on [X].
This sounds very motte-and-bailey. "We just want to create opportunities for every person," the motte; "let's punish the 'oppressors' we hate," the bailey.
But it's not a strawman if it's actual behavior. One claims "help the poor" but then defines that as "overthrow the bourgeoisie." The true goal is often the actions taken, not the intentions stated.
The people I know who are interested in economic justice helped get ballot initiatives passed to expand minimum wage, expand medicaid, and overturn right to work in my state. We also respect picket lines and boycotts. Speaking only personally because I don't know for sure about anyone else, my family also almost always tips 20+% and gives a decent (thought sub 10%) amount to charity.
At no point have I guillotined anyone in the bourgeoisie. Hell, I think I might be the bourgeoisie. (I've always been fuzzy on this.) I quite agree that actions matter, but I think if you look at our actions the economic justice crowd comes off pretty well.
Look. Most human attainment is on a bell curve, and half the people are going to be on the left of that curve for whatever metric you care to investigate. For the ones that we look at in the modern world, I'm well placed on the right and it's pretty easy for me to make my way. That's privilege and I'm very glad to have been so blessed. But I can do what my part to make the economy more fair to people who are less fortunate than I am, and I think that's what most people who aren't using economic justice as a sneer mean when we say it.
>> What I want to know is whether people using [X] justice are actually more concerned with exacting justice against someone instead of helping the original group
Giving a buck to someone who gets robbed every night isn't much different than just giving money straight to the criminals.
If the opportunities are expensive to create, and the "we" who want them to be created have a plan that involves them not doing the paying because they've found someone else who can be made to pay, then either A: they're going to *ask* the someone else to pay and be willing to take "no" for an answer, or B: they're going to heap apologies and respect on the someone else whose wealth they are seizing, or C: they're seeing the someone else as a villain due for a dose of good old-fashioned retributive justice.
There's a few other meanings of "justice" which I think are more relevant for some of these justices. There's fairness, which fits best with the "justice" in "economic justice". There's also restitution, which fits with "racial justice".
I've been scrolling down looking to see if anyone else had said this first. Thank you.
I really think a lot of this post is basically Scott strawmanning people he doesn't like. He could have run this idea that woke people like the idea of X justice because it maps to criminal justice and they get to punish people by literally any woke person he knows to find out that they/we don't think of it that way. Instead he constructed a straw woke person and then ruminated about their villainy.
I recall hearing in childhood religious school back in the early 90s that the English word "charity" comes from the Latin "caritas" meaning compassion, and it's about a feeling of caring deep in your heart. But the Hebrew "tzedakah", often translated as "charity" comes from the root "tzedek" meaning justice.
So if they're smelly and obnoxious and ungrateful and no one could blame you for not feeling compassion, you still need to give because justice calls for them to receive. Similarly if they are so numerous that you can only relate to them abstractly.
I never saw this as rejecting utopianism. It's just that in the Jewish vision of an ideal economy, there are still some people who can't take care of themselves and everyone else just steps up and takes care of them.
That's correct. But not only is it not caritas, the CRT-inflected understanding of justice is not tzedakah in support of the inevitably unfortunate (who might be any of us--a Job, for example). Rather, it is retribution on behalf of the "victims" of sin, the sin being advantage itself (styled as "privilege").
" but I disagree that this means that doing things like helping the poor or trying to stop climate change don't constitute a form of justice."
Suppose you believe that climate change, or something else, harms everyone. Is trying to stop it still a form of justice?
Consider the distinction between justice arguments and non-justice arguments from the opposite of your ideological position. A deontological libertarian will object to taxing the rich on the grounds that taking money from someone who has justly earned it is a violation of his rights, hence unjust, however much money he happens to have earned. A consequentialist libertarian will argue that permitting a polity to redistribute income ends up making everyone, on average, worse off, because it gives people an incentive to spend resources trying to be the ones redistributed to not the ones redistributed from and not only does that make the society poorer, there is no good reason to expect the people you want to favor to win the rent seeking struggle. The former argument is about justice, the latter is not.
I can try to answer:
> Suppose you believe that climate change, or something else, harms everyone. Is trying to stop it still a form of justice?
I think the answer would depend on the manner in which that harm is distributed, and whether the distribution conflicts with the stated norms of our Republic (admittedly, this kicks the can down towards the spooky sign that reads 'meta-ethics').
If the distribution is perfectly uniform across the polity, you could still argue there exists an injustice, in a Rawlsian sense. Behind the veil of ignorance, you may not only lack knowledge on *who* you will be, but also on *when*. Is there not a credible definition of justice which finds it unjust for a generation to secure a more comfortable existence at the expense of a much greater burden on their successors?
If like me you find this worth thinking about, then we might agree that 'environmental justice' or even 'climate justice' are adequate terms to describe the object of our discussion.
"It feels unjust that some people are born in Mail and some are born in California and that determines their life outcomes more than anything they do."
At the same time, you run into the limits of fairness. 'Lottery of birth' isn't synonymous with 'luck', in large part because people make efforts for their descendants to 'rig' the lottery, and negating that effort is itself unfair.
At the large scale, some of that has to be determined by effort to create the society the child is born into. A child born in Botswana or Gabon (to pick two of the more developed sub-Saharan African countries) has a better chance at life than a child born in Mali. This is unfair to the child born in Mali, but part of this unfairness is due to effort by previous generations in Botswana and Gabon to make their societies more functional. A magical fix to this to make things fair for the child in Mali as compared to the other two would be unfair to the previous generations that did the work.
At individual scale, pure genetic chance is more luck (although some of it is in choosing a partner). On the other hand, individual differences are harder to balance; is physical attractiveness a fair trade off for intelligence? Which is worse, an increased chance of cancer, or an increased chance of mental illness?
And, of course, some of those 'birth lottery' effects are still other people's responsibility. It's not the child's fault that they were born to a single parent, but it's not exclusively (or even primarily) societies fault. Any way to fix that unfairness is unfair to someone else. It's tough to admit, but there are somethings that can never be made fair.
For what it's worth, I was in the same position as Scott with regard to these words. I doubt it is that rare of a position to be in.
He’s discussing the labels on the map, not the topography of the territory.
I think this was why I offered to explain white fragility. I felt similarly surprised by Scott and commenters saying they had never heard these terms and didn't understand what they might mean
I have a serious question. Do you think it is possible that white fragility does not exist? How certain are you of its existence?
Thanks for your question. 3 thoughts:
1. I think there is some low likelihood that the history of systemic racism that I have learned about is false, in which case the idea of white fragility doesn't really make sense, although for anyone who encounters that history and believes it, I think they could probably still experience white fragility
2. White fragility could be a lot less common than I think it is; it could be that many people are either totally unconvinced by or totally uniformed about what I think of as the history of systemic racism, and therefore their reaction is simply incredulity rather than defensiveness as I and others might suspect. Or, we might be working from very different moral premises about the duty of human beings toward each other, i.e. they might not have any problem with systemic racism, nor any guilt from the privilege they receive from that system.
3. Do you think that white fragility does not exist? I get that people don't appreciate others assuming that they are experiencing white fragility, and I have conceded above that it may happen less frequently than liberals often assume. You might not like the choice of words and want it to be called something else. But why wouldn't white people have a negative, defensive emotional reaction when faced with the idea that they have caused harm to people of color, given that they think of themselves as good, not-racist people? It's a natural reaction - a lot of people don't like to find themselves in the role of the villain. Like I said in some previous comments, I have experienced it within myself multiple times. It felt horrible to me when I realized that I was the one causing harm, and I got emotional and defensive about it. It has taken practice to be able to respond calmly in situations where someone points out a racist impact that I have had. At the very least, it seems to me like a common experience of white liberals who pride themselves on "valuing diversity."
I think maybe I do take issue with the label. As a comparison, consider acrophobia, the extreme or irrational fear of heights. If someone refuses to climb a 20 foot ladder because they are scared, we might say that they are acrophobic. However, if someone climbs the ladder and we shake it violently, making the person worry that they might fall, we might still expect to get their heart racing and adrenaline pumping, but we wouldn't necessarily take this as evidence that they are acrophobic.
To define defensiveness in response to an accusation (especially an accusation where the stakes could be perceived by the accused as high, and where the accused may not a priori accept the accusation as true) as "fragility" seems incorrect.
If a store clerk sells alcohol to a minor without realizing the customer is a minor, and they are so accused, they might try to defend themselves. To call that "clerk fragility" seems odd. If a driver exceeds the speed limit (say due to a broken or miscalibrated speedometer), and tries to defend themselves, again it seems odd to call this "driver fragility". In both these examples, the facts are against the accused, but it is possible they did not intentionally commit these violations. It seems odd to describe people trying to defend themselves from these accusations as a hallmark of fragility.
The definition of white fragility that I have taken from your comment above would seem to readily extend the "fragility" label to anyone making statements of self defense against any strict liability crime, and that seems overly broad. Even more so if that label were applied to a defence of any crime whatsoever. It seems wrong to apply "fragility" in the general case as it just doesn't seem correct to call a large fraction of statements of self defense "fragility". And then when narrowed to the specific case of accusations of harm to people of color, it doesn't seem like defensiveness in such cases are sufficiently distinct as to deserve a special application of the term.
Switching gears to the self introspective "negative, defensive emotional reaction" that seems to underlie fragility. I participate in a capitalist society: I work at a job in exchange for a salary, I pay money for food and shelter and healthcare, etc. Capitalism clearly has winners and losers; people who get a better deal out of the system, and those who get a worse one.
If someone accused me of harming the poor, I might be defensive: I might say that I give to charity. Someone might come back at me saying even still that by participating in capitalism at all, I'm contributing to the continued and inevitable oppression of the lower classes. Ok, by some definition of terms, sure, I guess someone can claim that. Does my defensiveness constitute "middle-class fragility"? I don't think so.
I'm not sure what we expect of the accused bourgeoisie here. Action at the ballot box? Join a communist revolution? Maybe "middle-class blindness" or "middle-class indifference" might be better labels. As some sort of call to action to engage or change minds, those both seem a little better than "middle-class fragility". Though for someone who acknowledges capitalism's flaws, yet who's not going to abandon capitalism, it seems like any label is probably a tough sell.
Maybe the capitalism example doesn't map well to the white fragility case, but I am inherently suspicious of a label that applies only in special cases and can't be coherently generalized to seemingly symmetric cases. And I have not yet seen evidence that the concept of white fragility is undeserving of that suspicion.
(For a less charitable take, consider "witch fragility": the negative, defensive emotional reaction you get from witches when you accuse them of having harmed other people through the practice of witchcraft. The harms cited may indeed be real, but disagreement with the causal lineage of those harms should not by itself constitute evidence of a unique kind of fragility specific to the demographic of the accused.)
Thanks for replying. This conversation is helping me a lot. It makes sense to me that where we disagree might be over whether white fragility should be its own particular label at all, which is a super contextual question.
The thing that stuck out the most to me about your response was what you said about being "inherently suspicious of a label that applies only in special cases and can't be coherently generalized to seemingly symmetric cases." My guess based on that statement (and this may be assuming a lot, so please correct me where I err) is that we disagree about the status of systemic racism in the current day.
My guess is that you see systemic, impactful racism as largely a thing of the somewhat faraway past - slavery, genocide against indigenous people, Japanese internment camps, Jim Crow, etc. and is not having much of an impact on people of Color today. My guess is that you might also think there is some amount of anti-white racism, which you would estimate at present has about an equal impact as anti-Black or anti-indigenous, etc. racism. If that is the case, it makes a lot of sense to me that you are suspicious of such an asymmetric term as "white fragility" with no counterpart such as "Black fragility" or the like.
I think that systemic racism is still a thing of the present, having impacts such as voter ID laws specifically targeted to prevent a higher ratio of people of Color from voting, vastly higher rates of incarceration for Black and Brown people despite similar crime rates to white people, preferential hiring (and renting to, and anything else you can apply for) of people with white-sounding names continuing to result in a huge wage gap and an even larger wealth gap between people of Color and white people. From my understanding of mainstream biology, basically any disparities we find between racial groups are evidence of differences in how people are impacted by social structures, not biological differences between racial groups, because different racial groups are not biologically relevant groups, only socially relevant groups.
So, from my perspective, it is actually very necessary to have racially asymmetric terms, because we live in a racially asymmetric world.
Did I hit on a difference between our underlying assumptions, or did I totally miss?
Justice justice, for all the missing justices.
Justice justice is for Justice (the band/musical-group) not being more popular!
If you are fighting for justice justice, then you are a proponent of justice justice justice.
you know, people who don't live near a good spot that serves avocado toast
Nope. These are “justice” as in distributive justice and corrective justice. Aristotle. If you think “criminal justice” when you hear these phrases, that’s you.
The people using these phrases think, to the extent they think about it, that these forms of justice can be achieved by giving to those who have not, mostly without taking from those who have. If there is a fantasy here, it is utopian plenty, not retributive harshness.
But the term "Nazi" is not nearly as broad as "justice" so it's not really comparable. Personally, ive only really seen these vindictive people on the internet (which i dont think is an accurate representation of the general public). And while the term justice may be more popular now, I think more people are also questioning what exactly justice looks like.
The idea of a world of good people and "saints" lends itself more readily to the concept of villains deserving of retribution. It's more useful to have discussions about the nuances of the concept of justice rather than simply saying "your idea of justice is wrong or incomplete. Stop using that word". It's more useful to strive for a just world rather than a good world of saints.
That's my opinion anyway.
I'm not a frequent user of the schema "X justice", so I could be wrong. But I think retribution is a big part of it. Reflecting on the ways I've heard the term used, its users don't seem inclined towards incrementalist change or giving to the have-nots. Rather, the notion seems to be that the status quo is intrinsically and intentionally unjust, and that a revolutionary shift is necessary to bring about a new just order.
What you've described is redistribution, not retribution. Left wing people sincerely believe that the world would be improved if the wealth of the rich was distributed to the poor. Calling this "retribution" isn't an argument, it's just an insult.
Redistribution involves two things: taking from the haves, and giving to the have-nots. I fully believe you that you're more motivated by the latter than the former. But I think many on the left are motivated just as powerfully by the confiscatory part.
There's raw indignation at the exorbitant wealth and conspicuous consumption of the hyper-rich, totally independent of how that wealth could be otherwise used. As for this being an "insult" - I don't think people are wrong to be indignant or outraged this way. Billionaire excess is very often genuinely outrageous! Confiscatory and retributive impulses aren't always bad or wrong!
The tendency to distrust and pull down wealthy people can be seen a positive adaptation. Wealth is easily translated into.power, and extreme wealth can be translated into a tyranny.
of course , complaints complaints from the right about *justice are the same thing. Eg
"The problem with this is that social justice advocates are very keen to colonize anything and everything they can under the mantle of justice because it increases the importance of what they are saying. If "climate change justice" is mostly about random small island countries getting inundated or Las Vegas running out of water, it can only go so far. If *every* kind of environmental problem can be tied to "climate justice" and it increasingly is, it magnifies the importance of the topic and the people yelling about it."
Its a complaint that a certain group are power grabbing, getting too big for their boots, etc.
The two prong requirement works for articulating why so many people are against redistribution as we have seen it in practice. We have been efficient in taking from the rich (when considering what we ask of the wealthy in terms of proportion of government revenues), but incredibly inefficient at giving to the poor. The funds are subject to exceptionally higher levels of fraud, waste, and abuse than those and often times benefit people that are as despicable as the most venomous billionaire--but happen to have aligned themselves with whatever political interest brought forth said redistribution efforts (housing authority chiefs, corrupt local politicians, cronies). In my experience many people aren't mad about paying taxes, they don't believe their tax dollars will make any difference worth a damn.
Eh. The SS sincerely believed throwing Jews into the ovens would improve the world, too. Sincere delusional belief while executing deep moral wrong is nothing new among humanity, and its existence in any particular situation is no moral defense whatsoever. Only in Marvel movies do the villians think of themselves as villains and enjoy it.
This person has a sincere belief that behaviour X will help people, but The Nazi's had a sincere belief that behaviour Y would help people! Redistributing wealth taken via coercion from the trillion dollar 1% is a moral wrong because SS! Get rebutted, radical redistributionist :)
Calm down. I'm pointing out that believing you're doing good while doing evil is so commonplace among human beings that it must count for zero when one is assessing right and wrong, and it's just silly to even bring it up as an argument. Sincerity is the least important component of virtue. Vladimir Putin sincerely believes he's helping Ukraine. People who support and oppose abortion both sincerely believe they're helping the would-be mothers. Et cetera. I'm sure you sincerely believe you made a powerful argument, and I'm equally sincere in thinking you didn't.
Of course, the converse is also true. Perhaps many leftists are acting out of intent of retribution against the rich, as the original post tries to darkly hint at. So what? As you've pointed out, intent doesn't matter, only effects. If people reduce climate emissions and give more money to poor countries out of spite, does that not still improve the world?
Suppose person X is proposing action Y. If the question is "is action Y morally good or not?" then, indeed, it doesn't matter why X is proposing it. If the question is "is person X morally good or not?" then it does matter, though it's possible that X sincerely intends something we could all regard as good _but_ that Y is so horrible that we can't see anyone proposing Y as anything but evil.
But here the question isn't either of those, it's "is X after retribution rather than merely redistribution?". And for _that_, X's intent is very relevant indeed.
If some left-winger wants a big transfer of wealth from the very rich to the very poor (or to the fairly poor, or to the merely-not-particularly-rich), then to whatever extent their motivation is to make the poor better off rather than to make the rich worse off as such they're aiming for redistribution but not for retribution.
(Also: 1. I wonder whether you actually have much evidence that the typical SS member was throwing Jews into ovens _because they sincerely thought it would improve the world_. Doubtless some of them were, but I suspect plain ordinary hatred was often at least as important. And: 2. it might be worth distinguishing between "X sincerely thought doing Y would improve the world" and "X sincerely thought doing Y would accomplish Z" where Z is something you/we approve of as much as X does. Perhaps the guys in the SS thought that having fewer Jews in the world was just intrinsically good, and they thought throwing Jews into ovens made the world better for that reason; that feels to me importantly different from the situation where a leftist wants to move money from the rich to the poor because he wants there to be less misery and poverty; you might think what he wants to do is a bad idea for other reasons, but I'm hoping you agree with him that misery and poverty are things we should want there to be less of.)
(Not so) fun fact, the hate for jews in Germany actually (at least partially) originated because they were seen as rich and exploitative :/
On a wider point, I don't think the parent wanted to make a hitler-ate-sugar argument - you're not becoming the SS for wanting to take money from the rich. But it's very easy to be very wrong about being right and the commenter made an extreme argument to showcase that point.
> Only in Marvel movies do the villians think of themselves as villains and enjoy it.
"Hero" and "villain" are not the only possibilities. Some people may reject this frame, and see themselves e.g. as "doing whatever any reasonable person would be doing in their place". It is quite easy when one uses a circular definition, where "reasonable" means "one who would do the same thing".
I suspect that many people who are seen as "villains" by their opponents, simply see themselves as "normal", "reasonable", or "smart".
"The only reason people complain about me is that they wish they were as smart as me, so they could be in my place instead, and then they would do exactly the same thing! You believe they would not? Well, then they are idiots!"
Even people who consider themselves virtuous, may simply care about some virtue other than helping people. "I am doing the right thing; and if some people get hurt in the process, it is a price I am willing to pay!"
That's too extreme. If you'd said "almost nobody sees themselves as a villian" I'd agree, but I believe that some few both do and revel in it. Consider the number of gamers who like to "grief" the obviously weaker.
I concur. It may be that “______ justice” campaigners who are attracted to the punitive element are a minority but they are frequently the noisiest.
Food shortages played a big part in the French Revolution, but when the heads started tumbling into baskets ‘the people’ began enjoying the spectacle for its own sake.
They still had no bread but it was enjoyable to see privileged people humbled, humiliated and killed.
I fear this goes to something deep in the human soul/psyche that when we are suffering, if we can’t get relief, we take some pleasure from seeing someone else suffer.
Mostly it's an opportunity to lay claim of being in charge of the re-distributive efforts - to gain power with other people's money as it's gifted through your channels to the supportive masses. It's called 'justice' because that imparts a patina of official-sounding legitimacy to what is really pure grifting. Justice is available through the rule of law, not the law of mobs.
Bingo
This is close to the core of why we should use "justice", in fact :)
Consider the example of USA giving foreign aid to the Marshall Islands. This could be a generous gift (to use your language), making the USA a country of saints (to use Scott's language).
However, put yourself in the shoes of someone living in the Marshall Islands. That person knows that their country will disappear by 2050 due to rising oceans, and it's no fault of theirs at all. Rather, it's the fault of everyone, roughly in proportion to how much carbon they have put into the atmosphere. So if the country with the highest carbon footprint in the world pays some money to the Marshall Islands, this is not just feel-good kindness... it's an urgently needed step toward a bit more fairness and justice in this world.
I looked up the geography of the Marshall Islands and find that (from wiki).
“The average altitude above sea level for the entire country is 7 feet (2.1 m).”
It would take a very large acceleration from the present 3.4mm (+-4mm) for the Marshall island to sink by 2050.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/12/02/world/The-Marshall-Islands-Are-Disappearing.html has a lot of detailed information on this question.
The NYT is basically a tabloid these days. I’m quoting the stats from NASA’s sea level rise portal, https://sealevel.nasa.gov/
Consider reading the article rather than mounting an ad-hominem attack on its source?
More seriously: even if the *average* altitude is 2m, there are plenty of important populated places near the coast that are at much lower altitude. You seen to imply that the problem only starts once the sea rise reaches 2m...?
And if it leads to still greater urbanization, and distance from traditional ways, thus more ultimate vulnerability to sea level rise - it still was fair and just, full stop?
John Mcwhorter wrote a good example of justice framing diverting from better solutions in the NYT
Racial justice assumes there is an ongoing institutional and prevalent force acting against the well being of black Americans. Mcwhorter examined things like police interactions among black Americans and others of the same income cohort. Little to no difference. Historically, over half of people in redlined communities were white
If we assume there are specific racially villainous actions that can be stopped we fail to help anyone because it's apparent that the problem is racial only at the very margins
Do we attempt to impose justice or to reform for progress? Mcwhorter proposes: teaching phonics to underprivileged kids, ending the drug war, and expanding access to and respect for trades rather than focusing only on college. Racial justice seems to especially propose white people undergo a spiritual change to stop their mystical inherent oppression and punishing those who do not participate in this
Climate change is probably the highest impact instance of justice solutions vs 'positive' solutions
Justice demands that a great wrong exists and must be categorically remedied. Thus the policy focus is that dramatic and immediate action be taken to achieve a grand goal of essentially preventing any major harmful effects. This isn't the kind of issue where you ask economists for input. But according to economists near term hard caps on emissions are something like half as effective as carbon taxes. And the costs will outweigh the benefits if the tax is clearly above the cost of the warming prevented. Justice demands that no bad thing happen but implementing it with that mindset is more costly and less effective. A straightforward analysis of Paris puts the benefit as low as 10 cents per dollar spent
It's of a piece with the other species of justice framing that Scott is talking about in the article. There's an inherent underlying assumption that we would have equality of outcomes in a just world. There is absolutely no reason to believe this.
It's basically pitting 'justice' in a state of perpetual war against bad luck, uneven genetics, uneven geography, human self-interest, the natural tendency toward centralisation and hierarchy in both the economic and political domain, and basically every other force that creates unequal outcomes in human societies- not least of which is personal choice.
Unfairness is baked into the world at so many levels or emerges so rapidly from organic human processes that expecting a mere absence of malice or even-handedness in dispute-resolution to produce equity is laughable, so in practice this vision of 'justice' has to become totalitarian and all-encompassing. Every variable- including personal choice- has to be coerced into irrelevancy.
Discipline in schools being degraded by complaints over 'disparate impact' is a fair example. It essentially guarantees that the worst-behaving individuals in the worst-behaving group can get away with more the worse they behave. Choice being decoupled from outcome in practice encourages the worst kind of choices.
https://mynorthwest.com/3399911/rantz-wa-schools-adopt-race-based-discipline-white-students-get-harsher-punishment/
I don't want to say that unequal outcomes imply you have zero injustice- it could theoretically be the case that black students really are being disciplined more heavily than the case merits- but the patch being applied here is guaranteed to create *drastically more injustice* in addition to basically destroying the ability of other kids to get an education. It's complete madness.
Criminality in any sane society requires mens rea, or at the very least criminal negligence. We do not prosecute for murder those who cause the death of others, accidentally, and notwithstanding exercising due care. That's just bad luck.
Even assuming arguendo your description of the facts (that the Marshall Islands will subside beneath the sea as a direct result of US emissions of CO2), you would need *additionally* to make the case that the US did this deliberately, in order to destroy the Marshall Islands, or with criminal negligence, i.e. knowing full well this would be the result and ignoring any possibility of doing something different. That's the only way this could turn into an issue of justice.
The criminal negligence is a pretty strong argument. Only a very few can be demonstrated to have acted with knowledge of doing harm. OTOH, nobody can be shown to have particularly targeted the Marshall Islands.
It's not really "their money" if its gained through exploitation and wage slavery. It is simply giving people what is theirs. There's an old trade unionist saying that "Profits are wages not yet distributed".
The death toll of capitalism is unparalleled to any modern system.
Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/CapitalismVSocialism/comments/o6ot72/the_death_toll_of_capitalism_read_it_before_you/
Lol, capitalism isn't just "anything done for profit" - if that's your definition, then we're not talking about the same thing here. Pretty much any conquest, or really any bad action, even by a communist country, could be said to be motivated by "profit" in the general sense, so that argument is basically just "someone doing bad stuff = capitalism".
What most people are talking about when they refer to capitalism is free markets (which necessarily implies private ownership of capital). Free markets and private ownership have brought billions out of poverty, most recently in China and India.
The general criteria for "victims of communism" or "communist death toll" or any similar trite formulation is essentially "Anytime somebody died under a communist government" so the logic that you're applying to communism is being applied to capitalism.
Of course unsurprisingly you now object to such a criteria when its convenient which would illustrate a double standard.
The life expectancy of citizens in the worlds' freest, most market-oriented nations in the world are generally much higher than in the command economies and have historically been much higher than countries that declare themselves socialist. If you really believe in this way of attributing deaths to economic systems, and I don't think you are being sincere, then you ought to incorporate the pseudo-deaths caused by ubiquitous corruption and bureaucratic mismanagement of soviet agriculture/medicine/safety into your toy model. Otherwise you're comparing people lined up and shot vs people dying from all-cause mortality inside a profession they voluntarily selected.
Ahahahahhahha, a reddit Socialist post ahahahahahhh get real. Comical. Try Buzzfeed next time.
Its the content that matters isn't it?
Every step of this analysis is completely deranged, but let's just start with item 1.
In what sense do you believe that capitalist countries financed fascism, and how are you arriving at the conclusion that fascism killed 200 million people?
Is there such thing as exploitation or wage slavery? I'm having trouble with the idea that if I offer to pay someone a wage to do something for me, and they do it, they then rightfully own my profit from that.
Its the workers who create the goods/services which create profits. Why wouldn't they be entitled to the fruits of their labor?
I could just as easily say it is the employer who creates the profits by arranging for profitable goods/services to be made and sold. And obviously the workers are not entitled to the profits because that was not part of our agreement. Seems straightforward? If the workers create the profits, why don't they just do that themselves? Why do they need the employer? Could it be that the employer does something valuable?
I'm all in favor of employers being justly compensated for their labor, whereas people such as yourself are only in favor of these select individuals being satisfactorily compensated. It's a certain bourgeois chauvinism based on a mistaken idea of production.
Also, to respond to "workers are not entitled to the profits because that was not part of our agreement". This implies a fair agreement and one properly consented to. If somebody threatens you with poverty (i.e economic blackmail) then that's not meaningfully consented to. Its sort of like saying Tibet is rightfully China's because of the Seventeen Point Agreement, context matters in other words.
This simplified strawman economics model of a business has to stop being used.
The workers that built the capital that the company needed to start, such as the construction workers that built the factory and the manufacturing workers that built the machines the factory runs on need to be paid for their work... and were, with the people that paid them before the first product had rolled out of the factory (the investors) promised a share of the profit. And if the business goes under, as I understand it, it's the investors that lose their money.
The factory janitor doesn't produce a single thing, but their job is just as necessary as every line worker. Same with the truck driver, the HR person, the accountant... and the managers and executives. I don't like that the connections to other business, law makers, and regulators is more important to the success of the business than the quality of its product, but that's not the market's fault, and that's why the people at the top of big business are where they are.
Because labor all by itself doesn't create anything. I can dig holes and refill them all day without creating an iota of economic value. It's labor *plus* capital (machines, technology) *plus* good ideas and leadership that creates economic value. If the workers provided all three, then OK they created the profits, but in that case -- they supply the work, the capital, and the leadership, like a small business might reasonable argue -- then typically these days they *do* receive and enjoy the profits.
But if *all* the workers supply is labor, and the capital and leadership is supplied by someone else, nope. That's like arguing the vast bulk of privates in an army should get all the credit for a military victory, ignoring the role of sophisticated weaponry, intelligence, and good generalship. Basically it confuses a sine qua non with a cause.
Good leaders by themselves without anybody to take orders don't create anything and without worker-created profit you wouldn't be able to afford any machines or technology. Everybody should get the fruits of their labor whether they're leaders or at the very lowest level. The pandemic has illustrated quite clearly which individuals are the "essential workers" and they are paid dirt wages while their boss swims in cash.
Because they made a prior agreement to give those goods to the employer after they were done, in exchange for a fixed wage. If someone just builds something on their own without making such a prior arrangement, then they are indeed entitled to it under capitalism. Most people, even many communists when pressed on the question in isolation, don't find anything intuitively wrong with being able to enter into such contracts. Adding on the concept of ownership of property you create ("entitlement to the fruits of your labor"), and you de facto support free markets.
When this is pointed out the traditional communist fallacy is to then say, well, this isn't fair because the capital that the employer owns that incentivizes such agreements was somehow "stolen". But that line of rhetoric very rarely elaborated upon and obviously not necessarily true; if I write a computer program like Photoshop and someone rents it to do work, it seems really strange to argue that I'm somehow stealing from them.
Who controls what their alternatives are? The justifications behind the abuses of the capitalist system ring quite hollow. This doesn't make the alternatives any better, of course. What is basically boils down to is that any group of people who control power will fight amongst themselves for a larger share, unite against an outsider getting some of their power, and scheme to increase their power. The names used to describe the way in which the power is centralized and controlled don't really matter. (If you're an anti-capitalist, look into the way unions tend to become corrupt. If you're pro-capitalist, look into Upton Sinclair's description of the meat packing industry.)
Yes, but the trade unionists are as biased as the employers. Neither is capable of rendering an objective evaluation of relative value contributed. (And neither am I.)
>If you think “criminal justice” when you hear these phrases, that’s you.
I think Scott's point is that it's not just him, it's the majority of people who hear the word. Most of them have never heard of distributive justice, or even if they have still mostly associate justice with criminal justice.
Fairness is something that even some animals understand. Almost every child needs to be told that the world isn't fair, because they start from an innate assumption that it should be. Perhaps we should just talk about fairness instead of justice and then this complaint goes away?
how many kids do you have? I have 3, and just can't recall experiencing with any of them that innate sense of fairness you are describing, much less any episode where I told them the ugly truth about the world and witnessed their disillusion. The do understand instinctively concepts like retribution, tit for tat, etc., I think.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inequity_aversion_in_animals
Problems with the logic of this paradigm and non-replications:
https://twitter.com/nicholaraihani/status/1197809126417616897
As Claudia Tennie says "cute videos are mind viruses that produce 'zombie ideas'"
Wikipedia plays this down, but afaict inequity aversion in capuchins etc is considered oversold is the majority of primate researchers.
Those studies seem to reach conclusions more measured than the tweet makes them appear. In particular, they tend to say that there is only 'weak evidence' or that there is only evidence for 'a rudimentary sense of fairness' rather than state baldly that there is a 'replication failure'. The complaint about the logic of the experiment seems rather superficial too - in humans, if someone sets themselves on fire to protest the suffering of their people, they've increased the amount of suffering of their people in the world. The 'illogic' of it might be interesting, but it's hardly a strong argument that it doesn't happen, or that the protester isn't really protesting what they say they are.
And the "cute videos are mind viruses that produce 'zombie ideas'" cute quote is a mind virus too. Describing an idea with bad sounding words makes no difference to its truth value.
My kids get really angry when they feel they are being treated unfairly, it’s true. But when daddy says it’s not fair for him that you won’t let him eat breakfast, they don’t care. “The sense that the world ought to be fair” is, I think, much better described as “high confidence that my concept of fairness matters, but the concepts of fairness of other people are irrelevant, especially when they want things I don’t.”
In the inequity aversion terminology, this means your children are showing "disadvantageous inequity aversion". That's where individuals protest if they lose out unfairly. "Advantageous inequity aversion" is rarer, that's where individuals protest if others lose out unfairly.
I think that a complaint that they have been treated unfairly made as if they believe this is a meaningful reason to be upset indicates that they believe fairness is important. Believing fairness is important enough to make personal sacrifices in order that others are treated fairly is a different thing.
It isn't 'fairness' that they think is important to them. It's _getting what they want_.
There's a pretty huge difference, right? If each one wants to have their book read, they both protest that the outcome isn't fair, even if what i do is choose a book that neither one of them wants.
Here's my thoughts on fairness: https://fracturedrelationships.substack.com/p/its-not-fair?s=w
"Justice as Fairness" is a line associated with Rawls. But most people don't treat them as synonyms, and their first association for the word "justice" will be things like criminal justice. "Fairness" does sound more suitable for Scott's lens, but I don't know if it gives the same scope for saintliness/utopianism. You can imagine a superlatively fair person, but not as naturally as a superlatively benevolent one.
Nonsense. Having reared 5 of them to adulthood (or close enough), I am confident no child is *born* with any sense of "fairness." Generally it has to be beaten into them, in fact. "No, it's not OK to take your brother's toy just because you want it and he's too small to resist."
Fairness is a sophisticated adult social value -- nature has no such concept, and if you could talk to a lion and ask whether it was fair that she preferentially targed young and weak members of the gazelle tribe for eating, she would be very puzzled indeed. It's certainly true that adults sometimes train their kids to expect a little more fairness in the wide world than they can expect within the confines of the family, but this has more to do with inadequate parenting than social failure. Anyone who trains his kids to expect a society of 300 million to function with as much intelligent insight into each of its members as a family of 4 is...kind of dumb, honestly.
You sound like you'd be a good source of data here. Especially since you're an adult who thinks that fairness is a sophisticated adult concept that has no meaning in nature, and presumably have brought up your kids with that opinion.
Have your children at a young age ever complained that they have been treated unfairly as if they think this is a meaningful reason to be upset?
Have they ever been upset that a sibling has appeared to receive higher rewards or attention when they were equally deserving?
To be honest, I'll be quite surprised if you answer no, but I'm interested to find out. If you doubt that other parents experience "It's not fair" as a weirdly common refrain from kids let me point you to this book: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/its-not-fair-amy-krouse-rosenthal
If anything, I would say that the concept of 'life's not fair' is a sophisticated adult concept that kids have to have beaten into them.
My claim that kids have an innate sense of fairness is perhaps stronger than I have concrete evidence for, but it is not such a strong claim that I'm saying kids usually let their sense of fairness rule over their self-interest. These are two different things.
Sorry, but I think you're failing to make a distinction.
1) Yes, kids have desires, and they want those desires satisfied. (Usually *right NOW*.)
2) They also have a sense of fairness. This doesn't change what they want. But it can either reinforce or weaken their demands for it.
3) Unfortunately, their sense of fairness is not symmetrical. They don't necessarily accept that if it's fair that somebody share a cookie with them, that means that it's fair that they share their cookie with someone else. They feel ownership in their cookie, but they don't directly feel the ownership someone else has in the cookie that person is holding.
Reading the replies, enough people agree with him to constitute decent evidence that he's right about how "justice" sounds to the average ear. My point is just that if he's right about that, the use of "X justice" is less a cynical attempt to sneak a free ride on the popular sense of justice as retribution than a sincere misunderstanding of how the language of justice will be received. These phrases are coming out of an academic/activist community where people read and listen each other and debate what is best, and where the sense of justice as retribution is at its weakest. If anything, this is a group with a thin theory of mind about popular understanding, not a thick theory of how to hijack people's natural retributiveness for their own ends.
Also, RIP "with liberty and justice for all."
I disagree, the people in the activist community who use these terms have a pretty thick theory of mind; the phrasing is meticulously tuned to manipulate.
It's boilerplate modern political rhetoric about unfairness, victims and oppressors.
I think Scott has a better take on what people are mostly thinking. However, I don't know a good way to adjudicate who has the correct take.
Not many people have read Aristotle. In common parlance, "justice" implies a crime, a victim, and a perpetrator. Justice is achieved through punishment. Yes, making the victim whole is also an objective to be pursued, if possible; but the primary goal is to harm the perpetrator in proportion to the harm he inflicted on the victim (modulo situational circumstances). Thus, while "helping the poor" can be achieved by e.g. giving them money or food, "financial justice" can only be achieved by harming rich people -- ideally, but not necessarily, by taking away their money and giving it to their victims, the poor people.
I think this might be easier for speakers of other languages than English. For example, in German "Gerechtigkeit" means justice in the sense of "fairness" and "treating everyone equally". There would be other words related to courts, such as "Rechtsprechung".
Thus terms like "Klimagerechtigkeit" are clear and don't have the negative connotations that Scott writes about.
Using and abusing the word "justice" is quintessential for mob mobilization. You don't get to fly on the wings of memetic spreading unless you use that particular word. And that has absolutely zero to do with Aristotle, in whose times the Twitter handle @theRealAristotle would not have existed.
As for "gerechtigkeit" - which is rooted in the German word for "right" - it might also be translated as "righteousness". In any case, "selbstgerechtigkeit" pretty much does translate to "self-righteousness".
Googling tells me that the analogue of the American Department of Justice is called Bundesministerium der Justiz in Germany (and similarly in Austria and Switzerland) and that Justiz has mostly legal sense in German. So, yeah, it seems like Klimagerechtigkeit and climate justice have quite different connotations.
In general, I believe it is unproductive to blame miscommunication on the other party. After all, you can't control how they'll hear things, only how you say them.
In light of that, and insofar as Scott is not an isolated example of hearing this way, perhaps this sort of phrasing could be improved.
(Reflexively, you also can't control how other people will say things, only how you hear them. Therefore, that my view also implies that Scott could improve the discourse by hearing these people better. Your comment is not without merit, but "that's you" is an unproductive accusation.)
Aristotle? When did Aristotle talk about distributive or corrective justice? Aristotle's definition of justice was about interpersonal obligation and primarily a personal trait. That is what the term social justice originally meant when it was invented by Catholics. But distributive and corrective justice are 19th century terms meant specifically to criticize that conception of social justice. People like Mills then read that backward into Plato (but not Aristotle, as far as I know).
Though notably Mills ultimately said justice was of secondary interest to utilitarianism which is how he justified things he admitted were unjust. Yes, it's not fair to take a rich man's property simply because he's rich, but it produces utils by giving it to the poor. Justice thus had to give way to higher moral, utilitarian principles, which were unjust in particular but were a form of what he called distributive justice. He specifically admits that this is justice GIVING WAY to higher principles, not just some obvious application of morally intuitive justice.
Check out Nicomachean Ethics, book 5 where Aristotle discusses the different kinds of justice. At 1130b, Aristotle brings in the kind of justice "exercised in the distribution [dianomhs] of honor, wealth, and the other divisible assets of the community, which may be allotted among its members in equal or unequal shares" [taken from the free translation on Perseus]. His major treatment of this subject in his Ethics occurs in the following chapter, NE 5.3. But he discusses this topic all over the Politics, and gives and reasons from principles of distributive justice all over the place there, most famously in his principle that the best flute ought to be given to the best flute player.
It's just not plausible to read distributive justice as something Mill invented in the 19th Century, in the face of this 2400 year old text that is plainly talking about this subject.
Adam Smith also wrote about commutative justice and distributive justice in Theory of Moral Sentiments, at least from the second edition off their of my head, in the mid 1700’s, pointing to Aristotle and Cicero I believe. Might be wrong about Cicero.
I've just searched my version of the text (as in ctrl+f) and can't find the term distributive justice. So I'm not sure what you specifically mean but I can't find it.
My kindle version (can't find the hard copy) puts it in Book 3, Section 2, Chap. 1 "Of those Systems which make Virtue consist in Propriety." That part describes it as "a becoming use of what is one's own," akin to Grotius' (not Cicero) definition of justitia attributrix. Somewhat later Smith compares it to the distributive justice of Aristotle which "consists in the proper distribution of rewards from the public stock of a community" in a footnote.
Edit: if you meant to ask where it was in Nicomachean ethics, Smith notes "See ... 1.5 .c.2." I don't know how that might translate to Aristotle, however, or if it is the editor of TMS making that location reference or something.
I'll take a look. But distribution of rewards doesn't strike you as different from utilitarian or progressive distributive justice? Reward implies desert is earned through action, not through simple necessity, doesn't it?
It isn't plainly in the text.
If you take "distributive justice" to mean "the concept of whether society is fair" which includes economic aspects then of course that's been discussed forever. Long before the term itself was invented. You could argue it's a theme in the Iliad where the king deprives Achilles of Briseis and disrupts the just distribution of war booty. But that's not usually what distributive justice means. It instead means a specific modern conception of what is economically fair in society.
In that sense, no. You're quoting that out of context to read a 19th century concept back into Aristotle. Remember, like Plato Aristotle was a member of the oligarchal political faction, not a democrat and not a utilitarian.
The Bekker translation on Perseus inserts all kinds of anachronistic terms like political science. The Greek word used in that line is dianomais (διανομαῖς). I think that's what you mean by dianomhs. Dianomais means distribute in the sense of deliver, like distributing mail. Notably, it is what herders do to animals. It specifically does not mean distribute in the sense of justice or desert. A better translation, "one type is that which is created in distributions of honour or money or the other things that fall to be divided among those who have a share in the polity." I expect he's thinking, for example, of one year when Athens ran a budget surplus (due to a particularly good year in the state silver mines) and debated about where that money should go. They ultimately bought ships but they thought about just giving it out as a kind of political dividend.
He is specifically not talking about the redistribution of private property to create social equity. Plato does actually talk about that and he directly condemns it as a tool of wannabe tyrants. But certain people read it back into the text for ideological reasons.
If you define distributive justice to mean "a specific modern conception" then sure you can assert that by definition Aristotle cannot be talking about it. I cannot see exactly how you are distinguishing between "'the concept of whether society is fair' which includes economic aspects" and your apparently very different "specific modern conception of what is economically fair in society." I *think* that you think that the modern term distributive justice always means "redistribution of private property to create social equity," which I do not think that the poster you were responding to above, nor the people who talk about social justice, use it to mean. At most you can say that *your* conception of distributive justice is one you find in Mill and attribute to him since he gives a utilitarian argument for it.
Here's a little more Aristotle from further down the page, since you accuse me of taking him out of context: "This is also clear from the principle of ‘assignment by desert.’ All are agreed that justice in distributions must be based on desert of some sort, although they do not all mean the same sort of desert; democrats make the criterion free birth; those of oligarchical sympathies wealth, or in other cases birth; upholders of aristocracy make it virtue." [From a free translation, but my Irwin translation is not much different] Aristotle's point is that distributive justice means distributing goods such as wealth and honors, to people in society, and that we do so according to some notion of what we think people are worth. But different societies assign worth in different ways. By the by, it is a corollary of this view that if you want to change society fundamentally, you must necessarily want to *re*distribute, i.e., to change the distribution of such goods.
It's true that Aristotle is no lover of democracy. He does argues against Plato in favor of private property (Politics, Book 2), and in so doing is clearly arguing for one form of distributive justice over others.
The poster you were criticizing is completely correct that Aristotle distinguishes distributive justice from justice concerned with punishment, and that is precisely the right response to the original article. (You are correct that the form of the word here is διανομαῖς; the dictionary entry is for διανομή and I was tired.
To your question below, I think it's important to read thinkers carefully and not read things out of them based on my historical preconceptions. But the main reason I wrote here was because I thought you were wrong, thought the person you were responding to was right, and was willing to go down the rabbit hole with you.
> I *think* that you think that the modern term distributive justice always means "redistribution of private property to create social equity," which I do not think that the poster you were responding to above, nor the people who talk about social justice, use it to mean. At most you can say that *your* conception of distributive justice is one you find in Mill and attribute to him since he gives a utilitarian argument for it.
No, at most what I can say is that the person who, as far as I know, invented the term used it in that fashion. And that other people adopted it to mean something else. Neither of which is not what you're talking about. I'm not saying you're wrong to use that definition. But I'd need you to explain it.
Are you going to grasp the nettle and claim, then, that a woman being passed around as property is distributive justice? If it is then how is the term not all encompassing of any kind of economic morality? If not, what is your definition? As I said, if you just mean "people have opinions about what's fair and unfair and that includes matters of wealth" then sure. Hell, the Code of Hammurabi is implicitly distributive justice then. But that seems like such a broad definition as to be useless?
I don't think that it is just to treat women as property. But if someone made a claim that women ought to be treated as property, I would take that as a claim about distributive justice, one that is wrong. Similarly, I think that it is unjust to bury widows with their husbands. If someone made a claim that they ought to be, I would think that person were making a claim about what punishment would be just, one that is wrong.
Also, yes, there probably are things in the Code of Hammurabi that are about distributive justice (although the stuff I remember is about punishment). But Aristotle is getting credit here because he pointed out the distinction between these two kinds of justice, or two uses of the term justice: just distribution and just punishment. And that is the distinction that Scott is ignoring in the OP.
Actually, question for you: It's clearly important to you, in some sense, that the idea is old and longstanding. Why is that? Let's say I'm right and that distributive justice is a creature of the 19th century. Do you feel this weakens it in some way? I ask because I run into A LOT of people dubiously trying to read things back into the Classics. I've never understood the instinct.
I know you are not asking me, but I will take a swing at the question. I think it is valuable to know that a concept is older rather than newer for a few reasons:
1: Knowing how far back the topic goes suggests that it was important for a long time, and might just be a really tough question, instead of one that only smart moderns even thought to ask. Teaching economics, just about every 101 class has one kid who thinks you could solve unemployment by the government just hiring everyone, and likely thinks we are all stupid and/or evil for not just doing that. Pointing out that people have tried that for millennia and it doesn't work well is useful. Likewise questions of "You are not alone in your troubles. Consider all these people just like you in the past..."
2: If you have a perfectly good term for something, and suddenly it goes out of use and another term pops up that seems to be talking about the same thing but with none of the historical arguments being brought to bear, you know something is up. Typically you can root around the history and find "Oh, one side of the debate got entirely wrecked, and the losers went off to lick their wounds, returning with a brand new term to argue about that is said to be completely different but is actually the same and they hope no one will notice." The modern term "mandatory volunteering" for high school students comes to mind... we called that slavery, or at least forced labor, back in the day.
3a: Newer ideas that are popular are likely to be worse than older ideas that are popular. Humans are really bad at consciously picking cultural features and societal designs, but over time things that work get adopted pretty well, so older things that remain salient over time are more probably more workable.
3b: Older ideas that keep cropping up over time are more likely to be based in human nature than human imagination. If some pretty clever modern philosopher says "Boy, people being out of work and stuck home alone during COVID was really rough on them mentally" I think "That might be true." When I see Samuel Johnson also says "If you are idle, be not isolated; if you are isolated, be not idle" that makes me think "Wow, I bet that is much more likely to be true." If I see Grotius or Cicero or Aristotle also saying "Holy crap, people go nuts when they are left alone with nothing to do for a little bit" I assign it a very high likelihood of being true.
Another example is the question of "Why doesn't PTSD ever seem to get mentioned in early writings about war, indeed not much until WWI?" That leads you to wonder if something changed recently, or what.
4: (Related to 3b) Older ideas that have not been struck down as crazy are more likely to be true because they have had lots of time to be repudiated; many old ideas an arguments become so ingrained in the culture because they are accepted as true, that people forget where they came from. If an idea turns out to be really old, I should be able to find dozens of commentaries and arguments against it, many of much higher quality than what you get lately. If those don't work, or didn't work, I can feel more confident that there is really something to the idea.
Likewise, every time someone says "How can you even own something?" I want to point them to Grotius, who pretty exhaustively went through every possible state of ownership with regards to things humans care about. Those became the basis for 20th century international law, but everyone sort of forgets about those arguments because we are so used to ownership everywhere as the default. Even if you don't accept all of e.g. Grotius' arguments, you have the framework to go from, as opposed to starting from scratch.
5: New things might best be thought of as just an experiment that might work. Maybe someday future generations are going to look back and say "Wow, that universal suffrage thing was NOT a good idea." I'd be less likely to expect regret if I could look back from now and see cases where it worked out, and more likely to expect regret if I see lots of cases where it was tried and failed horrible.
6: The later 1800's and early 1900's saw the rise of some really hideous and anti-human ideas. All else equal, if an idea spawned around that time I place a much higher probability of it leading to horrific consequences.
I think that about sums it up for why I look upon older ideas with more sympathy than newer ones.
Lots of good stuff here, although I am not sure I agree with you that older ideas are more likely to be true than newer ones. But I would add that I think lots of people disparage reading old texts as somehow not really engaging with the ideas afresh and being willing to think for yourself. And that surely is a trap you can fall into, of thinking ideas are true just because they are old. But you can fall into such traps as easily reading Quine or contemporary authors. In fact, it might be easier because today's writers use terms and ideas that are already familiar to you, making it harder to break out of your own thinking and learn really new ideas.
Definitely agree on the use of terms etc. and would add that older authors will bring up situations that are totally outside one's experience and help to see things in new ways. Plato's Euthyphro really did that for me; what modern would have to consider "Is it right for me to prosecute my own father for murdering one of our slaves?"
Sure. I guess I'm most frustrated by people retroactively inserting ideas. Like the use of the word distributive justice in the Aristotle translation. That's not a good translation but they obviously want to retroactively insert the actual concept. Now, we can of course agree that he is discussing something and economics and fairness. But the idea that he was advocating for something like a modern welfare state is absurd. To take another example, the idea that international realism was invented by the Greeks is just cope. Yes, the Melian dialogue has some of the concepts, but it's not some thesis of the Athenian worldview.
1: Right, but my point is that the argument goes from "lots of people had lots of thoughts about what was fair economically" to "the idea of distributive justice, a modern term and issue in the next election, was discussed by Aristotle." That's only true in the vaguest, broadest sense. That doesn't mean it's not worth learning! But very rarely do you get such direct lessons. Except maybe in terribly obvious things.
2: I'm not sure about this. Social justice, as originally defined, was a conservative Catholic belief. The Catholics still hold basically similar beliefs but the term was appropriated by the left and then later abandoned by Catholics. Without too much change in underlying ideology. But I do agree there's a lot to be gained by ignoring the specific terms and seeing what the actual object of conversation is. The issue is that you then have to retranslate it back into terms people understand.
3a: I'd agree to this with the modification of "ideas" to "customs." Socrates didn't actually run anything. He was a philosopher and from an out of power faction. Studying how Athens worked is useful in this sense. Studying how Socrates thought Athens ought to work is still useful but less so.
3b: Fair enough.
4: I agree with this. It's even more useful to see the arguments of defeated political factions because it's entirely possible they knew something you didn't. Even if you find them unconvincing you at least understand what your own side overcame. Broad, long lasting political movements usually have at least some sense to them. If you can't think of why that is you don't really understand them. And if you don't understand something you don't understand it's opponents either. This is kind of what I gestured to in my other comment: Aristotle argues against something like the state caring for everyone. This doesn't denigrate the idea and can actually be useful for understanding it.
5: Fair enough.
6: Ibid.
I agree that Aristotle wasn't talking about a modern welfare state, but I think that confusion is in how "distributive justice" came to be used now, not whether it made sense in Smith's time. He certainly wasn't using it in anyway that would argue for legal redistribution, and pretty much defined the distinction between commutative and distributive as the former being things it is justifiable to punish people over and the latter isn't. The state cannot mandate distributive justice points precisely because they cannot be clearly defined or agreed upon. Modern welfare talk of "distributive justice" would be more closely defined as "a becoming use of what is someone else's" and even that might be being too charitable :D
I can see some sort of parallel if you see the "state" as "the king", and then say ok, a king ought to use his resources to take care of his people. A becoming use of what is his own might be argued to apply to using the royal treasury to buy food for the people in case of famine, for example, but how much and what kind of food etc. still seems to put it in the realm of opinion and out of grammatical, punishable behavior.
Not enough moderns read Smith. Even Rawls had only the Reader's Digest condensed version of Theory of Moral Sentiments to work from, unfortunately. At least he had that, I suppose, but he might have had an easier time with the full work. Alas, it was out of print for most of the 20th century.
Sorry, I feel I wasn't clear. I meant to say that distributive justice in Aristotle and other pre-moderns isn't retroactively putting the words back in his mouth, but rather recently changing the term to mean something other than what it meant back then. Sort of like how "liberal" means something VERY different in the USA post 1870 than it meant in 1775 when Wealth of Nations was written with phrases like "liberal system."
As opposed to how translators always use "pike" instead of "spear", and so change Caesar's legion to having 16-20' weapons they throw around. That shit makes me crazy.
Absolutely. I'm disappointed to say this is probably one of the worst pieces Scott has written in a while. Like, it's just nitpicking about something which is just exposing an absence of familiarity with a really non-obscure, non-ingroup core aspect of political philosophy.
It really reads as a parody:
"I can’t find clear evidence on Google Trends that use of these terms is increasing - I just feel like I’ve been hearing them more and more often."
Does nobody see any issues with starting a *rationalist* piece like this?
Scott then spends a paragraph doing... what exactly?
"What is “climate justice”? Was the Little Ice Age unjust? What if it killed millions? Is it unjust for Mali to have a less pleasant climate than California? What if I said that there’s a really high correlation between temperature and GDP, and Mali’s awful climate is a big part of why it’s so poor? Climate justice couldn’t care less about any of this. Why not? Hard to say. Maybe because there’s no violation and no villain."
This is such a shallow pass at a topic which ought to be a great topic of discussion. Discussing whether justice/fairness are concepts which apply in the absence of human intention is pol phil 101- see here for example https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice/#JustAgen
I think Scott is fully aware of all this and has just gone on a bashing of climate/"woke" justice because it gets used by an out group. Even the wikipedia article he links to explains the concept relatively simply.
By all means, there are really interesting discussions to be had around the scope of justice, the impact of justice as a tool of analysis etc. But the piece as a whole is just shallow and ungenerous, with lots of strawmanning and feigned incredulity. Disappointed.
The general point that Scott seems to have abandoned the premise of steelmanning is pretty sad. I get that he is trying to churn out more and more content, but it really detracts from anything he isn't already pre-disposed to engage with on an equal level with.
I concur, and this is one of the few posts of Scott's that I simply think is flat wrong--or, at least, he should have stopped at noting that the language exists in order to create a moral duty, not to punish. I don't really identify with the XXXXX justice groups, but they are a huge proportion of my wing of the labor movement, and I can say with some confidence that even if they do believe in retribution of the rich, that's simply not how they're understanding "justice" in the phrase "social justice."
I applaud you for referencing Aristotle, but deduct significant points for assuming more people are familiar with the index of justices than have seen >1 ep of 'Law & Order'.
An amazing amount of weight is carried by the "mostly" in "mostly without taking from those who have." I have the uncharitable suspicion that "mostly" doesn't have its usual meaning in this particular sentence.
It is "on us" and our "fantasy" that "soak the rich" rhetoric really sounds like prioritization of retribution over relief?
Here, here.
(Possible?) copyedit thread:
“the guy who’s more sensitive to violations and more efficient and punishment than anyone else“ —> not sure what was intended but I think the “punishment” line is truncated
I can’t recall hearing or reading anyone use the term climate justice. Google says people do…so it’s a thing.
Then again, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone in real life use the term woke. It’s wildly popular among Very Online People.
Very Online or sufficiently young... I don't know if you've visited a college campus recently, but I can attest that the term "climate justice" is very common there.
Similarly, people on campus may not use the word "woke", but only in the sense that fish don't frequently use the word "water."
I visited my alma mater a bit ago, and every other light pole had an official university banner with the phrase “stay woke” on it. And it’s not even a particularly “woke” campus. So I think it’s safe to say that the younger generations are actually using the term on a regular basis, or at least regularly interact with it.
It looks like a little over 1% of the population consists of full time traditional college students.
And an even smaller percentage of the population is at elite schools most in the thrall of this BS rhetoric. Nonetheless, that small group of people tends to end up establishing standards for journalists and other elite tastemakers, so their linguistic and ideological quirks are important to examine.
Melvin cited an Australian example, and the American "paper of record" has plenty of examples too: https://www.google.com/search?q=inurl%3Anytimes.com+"climate+justice"
Is it important to examine - or is it just clickbait targeted at Very Online People?
Both? I think both. The propaganda most influential on our elite is probably important to study. And yes, this is that.
Also, I think the NYT's audience doesn't substantially consist of the Very Online. Even if there's minor overlap, the Very Online probably go to trendier, angrier sites and consume news through podcasts neither of us have ever heard of.
“ The propaganda most influential on our elite”
Is it? You assume the elite give it anymore thought than anyone else. I see no reason to think that they do.
"elite schools most in the thrall of this BS rhetoric"
What is your basis for this? That doesn't match my experience (having attended both elite and significantly less elite schools).
I graduated over a decade ago, and I took classes on subjects like environmental justice, although that was at least broadly related to my major.
For what it's worth, I've come across climate justice online and IRL a fair amount
I've encountered both "woke" and "climate justice" a fair bit IRL
I saw this article just the other day in a mainstream newspaper: "International Women's Day Highlights Climate Justice As A Feminist Issue"
https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/international-women-s-day-highlights-climate-justice-as-a-feminist-issue-20220303-p5a1ba.html
There have literally been "March[es] for climate justice" is numerous major cities across the country/western world.
NPR talks about it.
A related TLP-esque theory: the move away from virtue, away from agency, is *precisely the point.* By placing all of these domains outside of individual control, they're removed from your power, and you're absolved of any real responsibility or personal failing.
Currently, many are powerless and frustrated in their individual lives. They start out convinced that nothing they do can help the world because of their own deep-seated insecurities and inadequacies. But recognizing, confronting, and overcoming your insecurity is hard. Reframing everything as "justice" scratches the same itch, allowing people to express their sense of powerlessness, but doesn't make them feel like it's an individual failing of theirs, since "justice" is systemic, broad, administered by the state and beyond any individual's control.
Hrm, that doesn't feel right to me. Mostly I see X Justice used as a call to action. A call to be a superhero and do battle with the unjust.
Interesting - I think I've more often seen it used as a call to "caring" or "awareness", which has motivated the wallowing-in-powerlessness theory for me. But that could be motivated reasoning on my part.
Once we move beyond the object, we tend to see what we want to see. Is the word "justice" a call to action or an excuse to not act? Is 50 stars and 13 stripes a symbol of freedom and opportunity, or imperialism and racism, or decadence and degeneracy?
The correct answers are "It's a word" and "it's a flag".
This seems too skeptical. Yes, different words can mean different things to different people, and ultimately they are just words. But if we can't "move beyond the object" and look at its use(s) and meaning(s), we'll hamstring our ability to understand society.
Oh, there is meaning beyond the object, but it's impossible to get to that meaning by talking and talking and talking and talking, which is the only thing that you can actually do in a comments section. You're trying to get water from a well using a colander and then wondering why it keeps coming back empty. Meaning exists beyond language- the only thing words can do is gesture at an illusion of a shadow of the real world. Hieroglyphics and art are better at actually communicating meaning than words.
For what it’s worth this hews very close to what I perceive to be the truth for many young/collegiate/woke-adjacent communities who discuss things in terms of _____ justice. It is almost verboten to have a discussion about climate change, for instance, with those who frame it in terms of climate justice, in which individual choices people make are acknowledged as important. I.e. suggesting to a group of organized college Dems that they might drive less, take shorter showers, or participate less in fast fashion or frequent consumerism is considered hostile and beside the point. They would argue that they couldn’t possibly make a difference through individual choices, only large scale corporate/systemic change, and distractions like the above suggestions would be coded as neoliberal, vaguely un-hip, or insensitive; at least this is true in my experience. Try ruminating about individual changes we can make to flight climate change on a forum such as r/Politics and you might be surprised to find yourself decried.
It is besides the point, though. The "individual choices" narration is a red herring kept in the memesphere by corporate interests. The idea of personal carbon footprint was championed by... BP.
https://mashable.com/feature/carbon-footprint-pr-campaign-sham
To be fair, unless you have a personal jet, individual choice is probably irrelevant. I wouldn't say that about most moral issues--individually helping a poor person is quite relevant. But climate change, in as much as it is a cataclysmic problem, isn't going to care about a single person's impact.
Being a "convenient excuse" doesn't make it wrong. Nothing you individually do will ever effect the climate in a measurable way. Coordinated action is required for that.
However, making personal sacrifices might help demonstrate the sincerity of your belief and be more persuasive.
I think you're right, and that Scott missed an important point there: It's hard to divorce "helping the poor" from actually, you know, helping the poor. Pursuing economic justice, on the other hand, doesn't have to involve helping anyone.
This theory seems very similar to the ideas expressed in this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tooiNm9WmkM. It explains the problem and tries to arrive at a possible solution. I liked it.
Climate “justice”—“just ice.”
More broadly, justice is for putting things on ice. Good for hotheads, bad for warm feelings.
henry george wrote very movingly about how this framing contests with hypocrisy around charity, without being so foolish as to say good things aren't good.
https://cooperative-individualism.org/george-henry_justice-not-charity-1891.htm
Sometimes the zeitgeist swings too far and perhaps it gets annoying when people talk about justice as a buzzword instead of the result of reflection. I think what you identify is use of justice as a buzzword, and yeah the internet rotates through them aggressively. At best it does have the function-in my opinion- of not letting rich liberals off the hook for some of the harms they've driven in this country (particularly around housing), where helping and being nice is contrasted with legitimate support of some of the greatest drivers of huge economic problems.
But then people say "housing justice" and oppose supply increases anyways. So I shrug and stop listening to the word justice until I trust the speaker to actually be able to argue why something is just.
To summarize the strong parts of what Henry George said:
1. We need to think about the systemic root causes of bad outcomes, and reform the system to prevent those systematically. In the same vein as "giving a man a fish feeds him for a day, but teaching a man to fish feeds him for a lifetime".
2. handouts strip away dignity and the poor could provide for themselves a lot more if the system stopped actively screwing them.
There's also a lot of confused stuff about theology and about the rich being thieves and fallacious arguments about how no good will come of constructing public works.
It's less that no good comes of constructing works, but that public works raise land value, which means they won't solve systemic inequalities deriving from land. This is basically the most rudimentary form of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George_theorem Henry George Theorem, which posits that the maximum revenue a government can generate without deadweight loss is, exactly, the land value within its borders.
But I do think he is right to point out that people can tell the difference between 'just redistribution' and 'handouts', and that building a system on the unjust redistribution will lead to frustration from the taxed and the recipients.
An essay which reframes the question of "justice" from a Buddhist perspective titled "Wisdom over Justice" https://www.dhammatalks.org/books/uncollected/Justice.html
an excerpt
"... the Buddha never tried to impose his ideas of justice on the world at large. And this was very wise and perceptive on his part. It’s easy enough to see how imposed standards of justice can be a menace to well-being when those standards are somebody else’s. It’s much harder to see the menace when the standards are your own."
Ring the right bell for the right cause - scratch the right itch with the right term - and the guilt ridden tend to come running, wallets in hand. It's pavlovian. Righteousness is very marketable, especially when people are eager to show off their progressive bona fides and what have you.
Turning everything into "justice" supports moral absolutism and attempts to eliminate the possibility of debate. If you disagree with justice, you're just evil.
It's like "equity". Instead of arguing about what's fair, some people want to change the definition of fairness so it aligns with their cause.
Great Craigs think alike.
Spin that shit!
Denying anything can be "unjust" supports moral relativism, and eliminates any possibility of debate. If you think something is unjust, you are a a moral absolutist and should be ignored.
I mean I think this is basically all coming out of the SJ community; they have their own idiosyncratic meaning of "justice" and are applying it to lots of things. I don't think it's some distinct phenomenon that's broader than SJ. And indeed many of the things you say here apply to SJ more generally.
Slight disagree. Wikipedia says that eg spatial justice "is promoted by the scholarly tradition of critical geography, which arose in the 1970s." While it's a pretty obscure justice, this suggests they already had a tradition of doing this kind of thing back then. I agree that 1970s critical geography is lefty, but I feel like it's a broader type of lefty than just "the SJ community".
Interesing! Huh. Still, as you say, I think it's basically a feature of that social justice/critical theory/leftism cluster (I realize these are not the same thing but I typically group them together because their ways of thinking seem essentially similar to me).
It is essentially similar. People were "discovering" things on tumblr that I "discovered" in crudely published magazines in the GHWB administration.
"Critical X" reads to me as "woke X" (edit: and therefore "SJ X"), at least as far back as the 70s. E.g., "critical legal theory" is the foundational underpinnings of a lot of modern woke stuff, even though it was also that far back.
I thought this was common knowledge.
Like many things, it is a superposition of common knowledge and conspiracy theory, depending on which side you are on.
spatial justice I found kind of interesting. One thought is that it’s just a fancy name for land management. I think of a river that serves thousands of people over thousands of miles and somebody screwing around with the headwaters oblivious to the downstream effects. There’s really no excuse for that happening anymore. (Although I’m sure it does.)
Working that out is a form of spatial justice.
The term climate justice I find absurd.
Until we can move “climate” around.
do... you think "justice" is just a word that means "moving things around"? That's not what that word means.
"climate justice" could be rephrased more accurately as "climate change response justice". The world has to choose how to respond to climate change, with mitigation, adaptation, etc. The "climate justice" movement is a movement that attempts to ensure that the response results in outcomes that are "just", according to their definition of "just", which corresponds to left wing values such as fairness. So for example, they would want to ensure that coal workers are compensated and reskilled when their coal plant shuts down, so the poor are not impacted by the energy transition.
> The world has to choose how to respond to climate change, with mitigation, adaptation, etc.
In my view the world doesn’t have to choose anything. A very large cohort of communities geographical locations and nation states will have to decide either alone or amongst themselves how to manage any crisis that occurs such as climate change. India does not have the same problem as northern Canada for instance.
I don’t see how the word justice factors into this.
> So for example, they would want to ensure that coal workers are compensated and reskilled when their coal plant shuts down, so the poor are not impacted by the energy transition.
We might want to start a fund for the benefit of the descendants of the cotton gin debacle While we’re at it;
I know I sound rather Hobbesian, but there is a fundamental truth in that worldview that should not be ignored. When the reach of justice exceeds its grasp it turns pretty quickly into either tyranny or anarchy.
I also think that what justice means is very contigent on context; There are conflicting goals. Is the decision to be made in the context of the greater good? That means that certain marginal influences will not be treated well almost by definition. If marginal interests are what is paramount in any discussion of justice then there is a cost associated with that for others. Pretty quickly boils down to either collective or individual notions of justice . in the collective sense I think the word becomes for too vague to be of any use.
I think that the mentality behind Gall-Peters & similar pretty clearly lines up with SJ types. If anything it's just a very early precursor that ideologically matches the current SJ.
I think the line of causation runs in the other direction. I think social justice largely descends from, or at least draws much of its framework from critical theory. My impression is that this was more visible 10-20 years ago, but that might be more due to a change in my own circles. Critical theory and the social justice movement have for at least a few decades (since before "woke" was a term in popular consciousness, ) essentially existed as a feedback loop with each other.
Beyond a feedback loop, I have trouble differentiating the two entirely as there appears to be significant membership overlap
Reminds me of this comment : Process vs outcome based orientation
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SWxnP5LZeJzuT3ccd/?commentId=TfJAnL84ZiaqBngvy
Thanks for the note, also things to consider: the four dystopias (Darren Allen), X types of leadership, Lewis Model of Culture. The social structure/topology has surely changed.
Seems like a good way of putting it. Justice focuses on outcomes of rule/norm violations, virtue focuses on devising and applying those preventative norms.
This may be a variation of Crotchety Crank's point: acting in the name of 'justice' is acting in the name of a greater good, a higher principle. Whereas 'helping others' can easily be construed as condescending (which it often is) and even self-serving (which it often is). Any whiff of self-serving condescension creates dissonance for those who like to think of themselves and others as being altruistically motivated. They may feel on safer ground as the Keepers of The Obviously Unimpeachable Justice Faith.
It's interesting that Christianity (and any other established tradition that has an element of charity) has some pretty strong memetic defences against this, and many Christians still fail at not being condescending assholes. Now if you introduce a new ideology completely devoid of all these failsafes...
I was thinking this same thing. The New Testament doesn't care that much about "justice" (fairness, maybe?) in the real world. But the Bible (as a whole) VERY MUCH cares about taking care of the poor, the widows, the orphans, the sick. And it very much says that we as individuals should be honest, fair, merciful, etc. Society will do what it does: this is a fallen world. But each one should do what one can for one's neighbors.
And you're right, if you're a proper Christian, you should be aware how bad you suck at being a Christian, and keep on trying in all humility. And I'm worried too about the "successor" religion. Christianity, I think, is probably the least bad religion, so when you toss it out, I wouldn't expect something better, and I don't think "no religion" is an option for most people.
> helping others' can easily be construed as condescending (which it often is) and even self-serving (which it often is)
I have a hard time understanding how substituting the word justice protects one from those downsides.
Agree. That is kind of my point - but I think the concept of justice might be considered my many to be a cause beyond reproach. Personally, I think it is a red herring and a pretty suspect concept altogether but in doing so, I feel I am teetering on the edge of a destructive cynicism. Who is bold enough to deny that justice is good?
When you don't know a word, but don't have a dictionary, you can often determine the meaning from how people use the word. The pitfall of this is that it may result in one thinking that "criminal justice" means "making bad people suffer".
Maybe the people you’re thinking of who use “climate justice” and “economic justice” and “X justice” don’t realize how these phrases land with others. But this not a motte and bailey. They are quite sincere in also thinking that “criminal justice” is not justice and is not a model for what they want.
Again, maybe these phrases are poorly chosen give their goals and beliefs. But they very much don’t come out of an attempt to ride the coattails of criminal justice.
It's been interesting to see my friend group evolve on criminal justice tbh. Maybe 2014/2015 they all clearly thought that retribution was a bad criminal justice goal and that it should all be about rehabilitation.
Now they still believe the criminal justice system is broken, but not because retributive justice is bad - it's just that the wrong people are getting punished.
This is just a survey of my Facebook friends, I don't have data about the broader culture. But I worked in criminal defense for a while, have an interest in this, and had noticed this trend before this article.
I don't doubt that the internet is full of hypocrites, but I'll also point out that "the justice system gives nice rehabilitative treatment to some groups and harsh retribution to others, due to factors like racism and classism" can be a systemic criticism, not just a complaint about the wrong people getting punished.
I mean I agree with that and don't even think that this is hypocrisy. It's more like a frame change from "why does a black man caught with cocaine do ten years in prison when tax evaders go free" to "why do tax evaders go free when a black man with cocaine does 10 years in prison."
That's a nitpick but the post *is* about semantics. The former framing emphasizes the injustice of the harsh sentence, the latter the injustice of a lack of sentence for a bad guy. Because of my background I see the harsh sentence as the greater evil and would prefer to address that. I do not believe putting more tax evaders in jail will do that.
>They are quite sincere in also thinking that “criminal justice” is not justice and is not a model for what they want.
Is that because they disagree with its approaches or simply aren't in control of it?
My suspicion is that we talk about "helping" when the pie is big enough i.e. the economy is growing, and the average person sees a chance at advancement. When it becomes more of a zero-sum game due to low economic growth or stratified classes, then "justice" comes more into vogue.
Even if inequality is growing, I am also not convinced that the public's perception of that as being a problem, which is informed by the media, will have any meaningful connection to base reality. Public perception of the frequency and magnitude of mass shootings, school shootings, and police violence have all shot up dramatically in recent years despite all of those things becoming less frequent and less severe.
On issues like this, the media mostly operates on Simulacra Level 3.
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/unifying-the-simulacra-definitions
If anything, it's the other way around - obsession with inequality leads to economic policies that prevent the pie from growing or even cause it to shrink, creating zero-sum conditions.
I think the pie is growing, but at the same time from what I read, the gap between rich and poor is getting larger (at least in the USA). So from the viewpoint of the majority, the pie may not be growing much.
Having said that, you could be right that the pie is actually growing and the idea that it is not is politically slanted, but what I'm getting at is that if people perceive the pie to have stopped growing then they are more likely to demand "justice".
I don't remember encountering the "helping" rhetoric that often, but the difference makes intuitive sense. There also seems to be a directional aspect; "helping" implies voluntary initiative from above, whereas "justice" implies conceding to demands from below, the human motive of economic redistribution shifting from generosity in good times to fears of social unrest and political instability in hard times.
It's simple: it's all "justice" because justice implies the existence of both victims and perpetrators. Unfairness and disparities in outcomes between people, rather than bad things that can be improved in absolute terms. It's a justification for attacking a person, rather than helping a person. It's just more of the same political stuff.
"Justice" also connotes someone somewhere intending to do harm where there isn't always intent. Justice can be demanded, there's moral certainty, whereas anyone can just shrug off platitudes. The term's connotations are satisfying simple and simply satisfying, which is perfect for the social media age.
That's a cool way of looking at it. What I want to know is whether people using [X] justice are actually more concerned with exacting justice against someone instead of helping the original group. I don't think Stalin called it "Economic Justice", but did he call it "helping the poor"?
From the wiki article on economic justice, it doesn't really sound that bad. "Economic justice aims to create opportunities for every person to have a dignified, productive and creative life that extends beyond simple economics." Isn't that a good goal?
I agree that it sounds annoying, but mostly because it sounds like the latest term in a long line of saying things without really helping. I don't really see how [X] justice is any more pernicious than committing yourself to War on [X].
This sounds very motte-and-bailey. "We just want to create opportunities for every person," the motte; "let's punish the 'oppressors' we hate," the bailey.
I think "let's punish the oppressors we hate" is a strawman.
I got tired of hearing "guillotine Bezos" from my kids.
But it's not a strawman if it's actual behavior. One claims "help the poor" but then defines that as "overthrow the bourgeoisie." The true goal is often the actions taken, not the intentions stated.
The people I know who are interested in economic justice helped get ballot initiatives passed to expand minimum wage, expand medicaid, and overturn right to work in my state. We also respect picket lines and boycotts. Speaking only personally because I don't know for sure about anyone else, my family also almost always tips 20+% and gives a decent (thought sub 10%) amount to charity.
At no point have I guillotined anyone in the bourgeoisie. Hell, I think I might be the bourgeoisie. (I've always been fuzzy on this.) I quite agree that actions matter, but I think if you look at our actions the economic justice crowd comes off pretty well.
Look. Most human attainment is on a bell curve, and half the people are going to be on the left of that curve for whatever metric you care to investigate. For the ones that we look at in the modern world, I'm well placed on the right and it's pretty easy for me to make my way. That's privilege and I'm very glad to have been so blessed. But I can do what my part to make the economy more fair to people who are less fortunate than I am, and I think that's what most people who aren't using economic justice as a sneer mean when we say it.
>> What I want to know is whether people using [X] justice are actually more concerned with exacting justice against someone instead of helping the original group
Giving a buck to someone who gets robbed every night isn't much different than just giving money straight to the criminals.
If the opportunities are expensive to create, and the "we" who want them to be created have a plan that involves them not doing the paying because they've found someone else who can be made to pay, then either A: they're going to *ask* the someone else to pay and be willing to take "no" for an answer, or B: they're going to heap apologies and respect on the someone else whose wealth they are seizing, or C: they're seeing the someone else as a villain due for a dose of good old-fashioned retributive justice.
And I almost never see A or B.
There's a few other meanings of "justice" which I think are more relevant for some of these justices. There's fairness, which fits best with the "justice" in "economic justice". There's also restitution, which fits with "racial justice".
I've been scrolling down looking to see if anyone else had said this first. Thank you.
I really think a lot of this post is basically Scott strawmanning people he doesn't like. He could have run this idea that woke people like the idea of X justice because it maps to criminal justice and they get to punish people by literally any woke person he knows to find out that they/we don't think of it that way. Instead he constructed a straw woke person and then ruminated about their villainy.
I recall hearing in childhood religious school back in the early 90s that the English word "charity" comes from the Latin "caritas" meaning compassion, and it's about a feeling of caring deep in your heart. But the Hebrew "tzedakah", often translated as "charity" comes from the root "tzedek" meaning justice.
So if they're smelly and obnoxious and ungrateful and no one could blame you for not feeling compassion, you still need to give because justice calls for them to receive. Similarly if they are so numerous that you can only relate to them abstractly.
I never saw this as rejecting utopianism. It's just that in the Jewish vision of an ideal economy, there are still some people who can't take care of themselves and everyone else just steps up and takes care of them.
That's correct. But not only is it not caritas, the CRT-inflected understanding of justice is not tzedakah in support of the inevitably unfortunate (who might be any of us--a Job, for example). Rather, it is retribution on behalf of the "victims" of sin, the sin being advantage itself (styled as "privilege").
Tzedek is closer to righteousness than justice in my understanding.