Aristotle identified two types of justice:
(1) Commutative justice.
(2) Distributive justice.
Commutative justice is about justice between individuals. How do you fix a harm to one person done by another person.
Distributive justice is about the proper apportionment of social benefits between individuals. It differs between different communities. In Athens, it meant that all citizens were entitled to vote and serve on juries and were obligated to render services to the state. In Sparta, it meant that there were two kings who got personal bodyguards and everyone had their own helot to hunt. It’s how a particular society divies up society’s pie. For Aristotle, there’s no right way to do this — it is just a descriptive term, and a given society can violate that society’s rules for pie cutting (for example, in Athens someone could try to deny citizens the right to be on a jury. That would violate Athens’s sense of distributive justice, but not Sparta’s since Sparta didn’t do juries).
Leftists try to confuse “social justice” with commutative justice. They also try to pretend that there is only one type of social justice. Their vision of social justice, however, is just a proposal for changing the rules of distributive justice within our community. They want to create a world in which certain groups “justly” deserve to have a bigger piece of the pie under new rules that they create.
“They want to create a world in which certain groups “justly” deserve to have a bigger piece of the pie under new rules that they create.”
That captures it. As the the term “social justice” is used by modern lefties, it generally means that the “good people” (i.e. the lefties) will give designated groups in society more money and assets, which have been taken away from other designated groups under force of law. The word “justice” is used in an attempt to characterize this transfer of wealth as morally mandated.
This is to be contrasted with “hamburger justice”, which occurs when someone is giving away free hamburgers. This is universally good. So is “hot dog justice” , and occasionally “beer justice.”
Good stuff! Thanks.
I got tired of driving to work and seeing guys younger than me playing roundball and fishing: made me feel like one of Athen’s silver mine slaves.
So I went mini-Galt. Somebody else can feed and service the gibsmedats.