Social Justice definition

Rene Loup said:

Disadvantages bring vulnerabilities and people in general tend to respond very poorly to vulnerability. The concept the Bible teaches is that the strong should help and mentor the weak. In theory this sounds solid but it doesn't usually work out in practice given our sinful nature. We live in a might-makes-right society. Abuse and bullying often stems from power imbalances and movements are reactions to that imbalance.

If I was born in the early 20th century when Christianity was the accepted norm, I would have still been locked away in a mental institution where I would have been electrocuted, lobotomized, and sterilized. I was born with a disadvantage and society would have made my life full of suffering because of it. If society followed Christ's teachings, it would not have been so. Because the world (including Christians) are predisposed to sin and selfishness, there needed to be movements to change how things work in society.

Another example is that for a time slavery was accepted in the USA because it was commonly taught that Africans were biologically inferior to whites. Despite being a Christian nation, Americans still kidnapped, abused, and exploited Africans for personal gain. The abolition movement that took place later would have been a social justice movement for its time and in the end it made life much better for a disadvantaged group of people.

Social justice in itself is not a bad thing and sometimes we need to break the accepted norm to promote Godly values just like how the Early Christians in Rome did. I am fully aware that there will always be an imbalance in power and privilege but people will have to take action to maintain checks and balances. This can be in the form of voting in new laws or something more extreme like creating another French Revolution.

In a perfect world, my autism would not matter and I'd be living a normal life like you are right now. The reality is that the stigma and limitations I face are a daily reality for me and not so much for you. It's because of the grace of God that you live in a country like the USA and not Somalia. It's because of the grace of God that you were born during a time where the economy was good and not in a recession. A lot of your worldly success stem from the grace of God and it's not so much a reward for your faith but more of a responsibility to bring people to Christ and make it on Earth as it is in Heaven.

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Rene Loup said:

The thing that frustrates me the most about old conservatives is that they have a very difficult time understanding that life isn't fair and that success is never guaranteed. This can be attributed to things like the Just World Hypothesis and Survivorship Bias, among other fallacies and cognitive biases.

This isn't aimed specifically at you, Hammster. I had this kind of discussion with many older folk who desperately want to live in a 1950s sitcom instead of facing the reality that people like me do exist and that we do deserve a chance at life like the rest of you.

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Rene Loup said:

Like I said in an earlier post, inequality will always exist as told by Jesus in the book of Matthew. It is impossible to create a utopia on Earth but instead of throwing our hands up in the air and saying, "That's life!" there should be the effort to display empathy and understanding between different groups. How can this be done? My honest answer is, "I don't know". Many have tried and failed to bring a form of utopia on Earth and failed. People are demanding dialogue to get things done but all we have at the moment is tribalism and people trying to shut down free speech. When Jesus said, "My kingdom is not of this world" I take it as we will only know true justice and equality once Christ comes back with a literal Heaven on Earth.

My only advice is to focus on self improvement, love God, and learn to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. With human nature and the decline of Christianity in the West, I am very cynical that this will work out on a societal level before Jesus comes back. If anything, I believe life will always be a constant struggle like this to prove that life apart from God is very Hellish no matter how many superficial pleasures it may have.

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Rene Loup said:

Not always. Heaven has a hierarchy of angels each with specific role to play in the hierarchy. It's not equal but it's not injustice either, even if a third of them disagreed.

However, treating a human like a second class citizen for a superficial reason like skin colour even though the Bible specifically states that he's made in the image of God, however, is an example of injustice.

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Rene Loup said:

I tend to think sin itself would be the biggest social injustice of them all. It's the very thing that creates social injustice. All equality and ease left the world after Adam and Eve ate the fruit and brought sin into the world.

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JCFantasy23 said:

I define it as the public spreading the news, awareness, and sometimes public outcry to bring justice to a situation they think needs more light or focus than it's currently receiving, or that it received in the past. Social Justice in itself isn't a bad thing at all, but like anything it can be taken too far in some cases, while a great solution in the rest of the cases.

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Paidiske said:

I would define social justice as a situation where institutions, laws, social norms, culture, and so on (so not individual actors but systems and groups which operate at a larger-than-individual level) all operate so as to maximise human flourishing.

That's my personal definition, and one informed by a Christian worldview. I recognise that those who pursue social justice are a diverse lot, and are not all going to define what they're aiming for in exactly the same way.



I think that social justice as a concept or a movement has largely developed out of people recognising injustice (in terms of my definition, the inhibiting or preventing of human flourishing), and then seeking to remedy those particular instances that they recognise. I think we have not yet necessarily arrived at a point where we have an agreed, well-defined systematic synthesis of all those experiences and ideas.

That said, I think there are some things which shouldn't be too hard to agree on. Take warfare; which has to be one of the most blatant and obvious examples of social injustice. Even if we don't have a neat systematic definition of social justice, it shouldn't be hard to recognise that a situation where nation-states don't go and kill and maim each other's citizens and destroy their infrastructure (etc) is inherently better than one where they do. Working for peace ought to be something where people of good will can find common cause.

And that basic approach ought to be able to be applied in other cases. We know that access to clean water is a basic requirement for human flourishing; so let's structure our society so as to maximise access to clean water (and so on).

So perhaps there will never be a perfectly just society this side of the eschaton; but by paying attention to what opens up people's potential, gives them safety, and opportunities to flourish - physically, emotionally, socially, financially, spiritually, in whatever other aspect of their being - we can work together to make progress.

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Paidiske said:

It's an injustice not to have access to clean water because without it, you're more susceptible to various preventable diseases, because it often contributes to and entrenches poverty, and so on.

More to the point, it's particularly an injustice because the provision of clean water is perfectly possible. Our (global) society chooses to allow children to die of waterborne diseases rather than invest in the infrastructure which would save their lives.

So here is an evil - an impediment to human flourishing - which is totally within our power to remove, and we (collectively, if passively) choose not to remove it, thereby condemning millions to suffer.

If that's not injustice, I'm not sure what is...

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Paidiske said:

I disagree. Injustice isn't just the result of direct action; it can be a condition which we refuse to address. And poverty - if it's extreme enough to be deleterious - is also unjust.

This is what lies behind the repeated prophetic demand in the Scriptures that we respond to the plight of the poor!

(Eg. Isaiah 58:6-7: Note how injustice, oppression and poverty are addressed as dimensions of the same (sinful) social system.

Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them,
and not to hide yourself from your own kin?)

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Paidiske said:

I don't understand why it's unjust, it's sin, but it's not "social injustice."

If we have social structures which create and maintain poverty, and we don't do anything about them, why is that not social injustice?

Is it something about the term that you object to, rather than the concept that sin can play out at a larger-than-individual level?

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