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With all the Sad Puppies and Gamergate and so forth stuff going around, I've had this post rattling around my head for a while now, and have been intending to write it.
A few weeks ago now, Adam Baldwin tweeted something asking something along the lines of, "What's the difference between 'justice' and 'social justice'?" And he got an answer which was technically correct, but not actually all that helpful. So I decided to write my thoughts on it. If you agree with my definitions, feel free to link to this whenever you need to.
Baldwin made the suggestion, as I understand it, that "social justice" was just, y'know, "justice", and therefore we didn't need the separate term. In my mind, he's half right. Social justice IS a form of justice, but it's different than how we usually use the term.
Let me start with some thoughts on justice itself. Justice is related to fairness, to rewarding the good and punishing the bad. It's a moral concept, and is something that appears to be partially written into into our minds at a basic level: even some animals understand when other animals are being treated better than they are in the same situation. Learning how to expand that personal sense of unfairness to extend to other beings takes some training, however. We're naturally wired to be upset when people are unfair to us, but it takes some training to be upset when people are unfair to somebody else.
"Justice" can be thought of, in part, as the active enforcement of fairness. The metaphor for justice is a set of balance scales -- when things are unfair, the scales are out of balance, and justice is the act of re-balancing them.
It's also important to bring up the concept of "mercy". Justice requires that, when unfair damage has been done, an equal and opposite amount of further damage is done, to balance it out. Taken too far, this will destroy a society, and mercy is the process of tempering justice to destroy less.
However, TOO much mercy destroys justice, and ALSO destroys societies. And much of the work of maintaining a society is the process of finding the best mixture of mercy and justice for every situation. "An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind," but a lack of justice is inherently a lack of society.
There is a parable that says that, when G-d was creating the world, It realized that the universe could not survive under either pure justice or pure mercy. This is like a man who had a pitcher of boiling water, and a pitcher of ice-cold water, and a very delicate, fragile glass. If he poured the boiling water in, the cup would expand and shatter; if he poured the ice-cold water in, the cup would contract and shatter. So he mixed the two pitchers, and poured the middle-temperature water into the cup, and all was well.
This is a digression, but a vitally important one. Pure justice destroys the world through draconian harshness; pure mercy destroys the world through a lack of consequences for selfish actions. So, from this point forward, when I say "justice", imagine that I am saying "justice tempered with mercy", because THAT is the goal that we are working toward.
Indeed, that is one of the primary purposes of society.
Now, there are a lot of mechanisms of enforcing justice. When we think of justice, we most often think of the law, but the law is perhaps the least important method of enforcement we have. The law comes in only after all other methods have failed. Before that point, we have such things as social censure and peer pressure. If you're about to do something wrong, a good friend might pull you aside and say, "Dude -- that REALLY wouldn't be cool. Maybe you shouldn't do it."
Embarrassment can be a method of enforcing justice: if you know that people would think badly about you if they found out that you stiffed a contractor on a payment, you might not do it. And the reaction of others: if it got around that you usually stiffed people, you might never get anybody to work for you anyway. If all those methods fail, THEN the law can step in, but, for the most part, it's fear of what other people might think that keeps people just, more than fear of the law. (But fear of the law is important, too.)
But the MOST important part of enforcing justice is our own consciences. The most important tool that society has to promulgate justice is the way in which parents and other important adults teach our children right and wrong. Everything else we have is based on that.
The way it works is: most of the time, people take just actions because their own training and conscience impels them to. But a person whose conscience fails to draw them to right action may be impelled to because they don't want to be embarrassed in front of their friends, or don't want to get a bad reputation that would make people not want to deal with them. And if THAT fails, a society has laws that can be called into play.
"Justice" is found within the penalties that are paid for doing the wrong thing. Your conscience and internal moral sense makes you feel guilty even before anybody else is involved. If others find out, you can feel embarrassment. If it goes further, you can lose friends, and find people unwilling to deal with you socially and in business. And if things go even further, you can have consequences imposed by laws: loss of material goods through fines, imprisonment, and, in some places, even death.
And that's "justice". The tools, formal and informal, internal and external, which societies have available to enforce fairness and good behavior.
But. Here's the problem.
What happens when the source of the unfairness is the tools themselves? What happens when the formal and informal tools, the internal and external tools, enforce UNFAIRNESS? Enforce BAD action? When the tools themselves are unjust?
How do you deal with THAT problem?
And THAT is where "social justice" comes in. "Justice" is relatively simple. Not EASY, but at least conceptually simpler. Someone does something bad, and the rest of society reacts to it in some way to restore the balance. It's not necessarily easy to tell when someone's done something wrong, or to prove it if it requires the legal system to deal with, or figure out what sort of censure or response is appropriate for a particular action, but, in general, "do something bad, we've got systems that do something bad back" is something that we can understand.
And even when someone involved in the system does something wrong, we can deal with that. If a judge is corrupt, we can impeach him or her. If a police officer does unjust things, they can be punished administratively, kicked off the force, or tried as a criminal, depending on what the level of unjust thing is. Those aren't the signs of a broken SYSTEM.
"System" and "systemic" are real important concepts in social justice. "A few bad apples" aren't a problem, so long as they are rooted out and punished. However, showing too MUCH mercy to said bad apples IS a systemic problem.
As I've said, these tools aren't limited to the law. We can have broken SOCIAL tools, too. The way that we interact with each other is itself a social structure which enforces concepts of right and wrong. And we're all part of the system. We're part of society, so we're part of how society works, so we're part of how society doesn't work. It's inevitable.
And so, "if you're not part of the solution, you're part of theprecipitate problem."
That's where the parts which are really hard to deal with come from.
If a racist act happens, and we all make sure that bad things happen to the racist -- not necessarily legal bad things, but bad things like people not wanting to be around the person, so they don't get invited to parties and stuff -- then that's not a systemic problem.
However, if a racist thing happens, and people get away with it without consequences, that's a systemic problem. And, since we are the system, that makes us the problem.
Nobody likes to be the problem. Ever. And it's a lot easier to convince yourself that you're not the problem than it is to stop being the problem, so that's what we do. And it's absolutely true that the person who actually DID the racist act is a BIGGER problem, but nonetheless, if nothing happens in response, then the rest of us have a degree of responsibility.
We don't want to feel that the society is broken, because WE are the society. If there is a "social justice" problem, if there is a "systemic" problem, that's on us.
And that hurts, and that, I think, is why there is a backlash against "social justice warriors".
At some point, I want to talk about the term "SJW", but, for now, let me just say that it is an AWESOME term, and I am completely happy with being called a "social justice warrior", and I'm not sure why the people who are AGAINST us gave it to us, because, well, it's, like, the best thing a person could ever be called. But discussing all of that is probably a post of its own, so I'll deal with that later.
In any case, to summarize:
You need "justice" to right wrongs that happen in a society. "Justice" is the set of tools that are used to re-balance the scales and make things fair again. If you do that 100%, society will break, so you need "mercy", too, and a lot of the time, when people say "justice", they actually mean "a workable balance of justice and mercy".
However, sometimes the tools themselves are unjust. And when the tools are unjust, you need "social justice" to fix those tools. That really hurts, since all of us ARE those tools, so "social justice" is painful, and a lot of people push back on it, because we don't like being hurt. However, it's really, really important to do -- if the tools are unjust, your society is unjust, and an unjust society completely misses the point of having a society in the first place.
A few weeks ago now, Adam Baldwin tweeted something asking something along the lines of, "What's the difference between 'justice' and 'social justice'?" And he got an answer which was technically correct, but not actually all that helpful. So I decided to write my thoughts on it. If you agree with my definitions, feel free to link to this whenever you need to.
Baldwin made the suggestion, as I understand it, that "social justice" was just, y'know, "justice", and therefore we didn't need the separate term. In my mind, he's half right. Social justice IS a form of justice, but it's different than how we usually use the term.
Let me start with some thoughts on justice itself. Justice is related to fairness, to rewarding the good and punishing the bad. It's a moral concept, and is something that appears to be partially written into into our minds at a basic level: even some animals understand when other animals are being treated better than they are in the same situation. Learning how to expand that personal sense of unfairness to extend to other beings takes some training, however. We're naturally wired to be upset when people are unfair to us, but it takes some training to be upset when people are unfair to somebody else.
"Justice" can be thought of, in part, as the active enforcement of fairness. The metaphor for justice is a set of balance scales -- when things are unfair, the scales are out of balance, and justice is the act of re-balancing them.
It's also important to bring up the concept of "mercy". Justice requires that, when unfair damage has been done, an equal and opposite amount of further damage is done, to balance it out. Taken too far, this will destroy a society, and mercy is the process of tempering justice to destroy less.
However, TOO much mercy destroys justice, and ALSO destroys societies. And much of the work of maintaining a society is the process of finding the best mixture of mercy and justice for every situation. "An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind," but a lack of justice is inherently a lack of society.
There is a parable that says that, when G-d was creating the world, It realized that the universe could not survive under either pure justice or pure mercy. This is like a man who had a pitcher of boiling water, and a pitcher of ice-cold water, and a very delicate, fragile glass. If he poured the boiling water in, the cup would expand and shatter; if he poured the ice-cold water in, the cup would contract and shatter. So he mixed the two pitchers, and poured the middle-temperature water into the cup, and all was well.
This is a digression, but a vitally important one. Pure justice destroys the world through draconian harshness; pure mercy destroys the world through a lack of consequences for selfish actions. So, from this point forward, when I say "justice", imagine that I am saying "justice tempered with mercy", because THAT is the goal that we are working toward.
Indeed, that is one of the primary purposes of society.
Now, there are a lot of mechanisms of enforcing justice. When we think of justice, we most often think of the law, but the law is perhaps the least important method of enforcement we have. The law comes in only after all other methods have failed. Before that point, we have such things as social censure and peer pressure. If you're about to do something wrong, a good friend might pull you aside and say, "Dude -- that REALLY wouldn't be cool. Maybe you shouldn't do it."
Embarrassment can be a method of enforcing justice: if you know that people would think badly about you if they found out that you stiffed a contractor on a payment, you might not do it. And the reaction of others: if it got around that you usually stiffed people, you might never get anybody to work for you anyway. If all those methods fail, THEN the law can step in, but, for the most part, it's fear of what other people might think that keeps people just, more than fear of the law. (But fear of the law is important, too.)
But the MOST important part of enforcing justice is our own consciences. The most important tool that society has to promulgate justice is the way in which parents and other important adults teach our children right and wrong. Everything else we have is based on that.
The way it works is: most of the time, people take just actions because their own training and conscience impels them to. But a person whose conscience fails to draw them to right action may be impelled to because they don't want to be embarrassed in front of their friends, or don't want to get a bad reputation that would make people not want to deal with them. And if THAT fails, a society has laws that can be called into play.
"Justice" is found within the penalties that are paid for doing the wrong thing. Your conscience and internal moral sense makes you feel guilty even before anybody else is involved. If others find out, you can feel embarrassment. If it goes further, you can lose friends, and find people unwilling to deal with you socially and in business. And if things go even further, you can have consequences imposed by laws: loss of material goods through fines, imprisonment, and, in some places, even death.
And that's "justice". The tools, formal and informal, internal and external, which societies have available to enforce fairness and good behavior.
But. Here's the problem.
What happens when the source of the unfairness is the tools themselves? What happens when the formal and informal tools, the internal and external tools, enforce UNFAIRNESS? Enforce BAD action? When the tools themselves are unjust?
How do you deal with THAT problem?
And THAT is where "social justice" comes in. "Justice" is relatively simple. Not EASY, but at least conceptually simpler. Someone does something bad, and the rest of society reacts to it in some way to restore the balance. It's not necessarily easy to tell when someone's done something wrong, or to prove it if it requires the legal system to deal with, or figure out what sort of censure or response is appropriate for a particular action, but, in general, "do something bad, we've got systems that do something bad back" is something that we can understand.
And even when someone involved in the system does something wrong, we can deal with that. If a judge is corrupt, we can impeach him or her. If a police officer does unjust things, they can be punished administratively, kicked off the force, or tried as a criminal, depending on what the level of unjust thing is. Those aren't the signs of a broken SYSTEM.
"System" and "systemic" are real important concepts in social justice. "A few bad apples" aren't a problem, so long as they are rooted out and punished. However, showing too MUCH mercy to said bad apples IS a systemic problem.
As I've said, these tools aren't limited to the law. We can have broken SOCIAL tools, too. The way that we interact with each other is itself a social structure which enforces concepts of right and wrong. And we're all part of the system. We're part of society, so we're part of how society works, so we're part of how society doesn't work. It's inevitable.
And so, "if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the
That's where the parts which are really hard to deal with come from.
If a racist act happens, and we all make sure that bad things happen to the racist -- not necessarily legal bad things, but bad things like people not wanting to be around the person, so they don't get invited to parties and stuff -- then that's not a systemic problem.
However, if a racist thing happens, and people get away with it without consequences, that's a systemic problem. And, since we are the system, that makes us the problem.
Nobody likes to be the problem. Ever. And it's a lot easier to convince yourself that you're not the problem than it is to stop being the problem, so that's what we do. And it's absolutely true that the person who actually DID the racist act is a BIGGER problem, but nonetheless, if nothing happens in response, then the rest of us have a degree of responsibility.
We don't want to feel that the society is broken, because WE are the society. If there is a "social justice" problem, if there is a "systemic" problem, that's on us.
And that hurts, and that, I think, is why there is a backlash against "social justice warriors".
At some point, I want to talk about the term "SJW", but, for now, let me just say that it is an AWESOME term, and I am completely happy with being called a "social justice warrior", and I'm not sure why the people who are AGAINST us gave it to us, because, well, it's, like, the best thing a person could ever be called. But discussing all of that is probably a post of its own, so I'll deal with that later.
In any case, to summarize:
You need "justice" to right wrongs that happen in a society. "Justice" is the set of tools that are used to re-balance the scales and make things fair again. If you do that 100%, society will break, so you need "mercy", too, and a lot of the time, when people say "justice", they actually mean "a workable balance of justice and mercy".
However, sometimes the tools themselves are unjust. And when the tools are unjust, you need "social justice" to fix those tools. That really hurts, since all of us ARE those tools, so "social justice" is painful, and a lot of people push back on it, because we don't like being hurt. However, it's really, really important to do -- if the tools are unjust, your society is unjust, and an unjust society completely misses the point of having a society in the first place.