Summary
1 Status questione
2 Scholastic-Thomistic
3 From legal justice to social justice
4 Social Doctrine of the Church
5 New approaches and perspectives
6 Systematization
7 Bibliographical references
1 Status questione
When delving into such a complex topic, we must question the possibility of achieving Social Justice based on the conditions evidenced in reality. Social inequalities are increasing. For proponents of a neoliberal capitalist system, inequality is not only necessary but is at the “essence” of this model of society. The strong rejection of liberal capitalism towards social justice is a relevant fact. Ludwig von Mises, an exponent of the Austrian School of economics, justifies social inequality in the following terms: “Income and wealth inequality is an essential characteristic of the market economy. Its elimination would completely destroy it” (MISES, 2010, p. 347-948).
Friedrich Hayek, one of the main icons of neoliberal thought, expresses all his aversion to the concept of social justice. First, he disqualifies the Church:
It seems to have been embraced by a broad segment of the clergy of all trends in Christianity, which, as they lost faith in a supernatural revelation, seem to have sought refuge and consolation in a new “social” religion that replaces a heavenly promise of justice with another temporal one, and hope to be able to continue their mission of doing good. The Roman Catholic Church, especially, has made the goal of “social justice” part of its official doctrine (HAYEK, 1985, p. 84).
Then, he disqualifies its theorists:
The expression “social justice” is not an innocent expression of goodwill towards the less fortunate, but rather has become a dishonest insinuation. For political debate to be honest, it is necessary for people to recognize that the expression is intellectually dishonorable, a symbol of demagoguery or cheap journalism, which responsible thinkers should be ashamed to use (HAYEK, 1985, p. 118).
The Social Doctrine of the Church (SDC) is recognized even by its greatest adversaries as a defender of social justice. Social inequality is intolerable, and humanity lives in a grave situation of social injustice caused by an economy that kills. Justice is a concept around which Christianity is structured (cf. entry Faith and Justice). It is not just about income distribution.
In addition to the traditional forms of justice inherited from classical thought (legal/general, distributive, corrective), the SDC presents the category of social justice:
The social Magisterium evokes the classic forms of justice: commutative, distributive, legal. Social justice has increasingly gained prominence in the Magisterium, representing a true development of general justice, regulating social relations based on the criterion of law observance. Social justice, a requirement connected with the social question, which today manifests itself on a global scale, concerns social, political, and economic aspects, and, above all, the structural dimension of problems and their respective solutions. (CDSI, 2005, n. 201)
2 Scholastic-Thomistic
The Aristotelian-biblical-patristic concept of justice was reinterpreted in scholasticism. Thomas Aquinas, in the Treatise De Iustitia, introduced the term into theology and framed it within the virtues, thus reformulating Aristotle’s legal justice (ST II-II qq. 58-122). His study is essential to understand the content of social justice. Justice is the character disposition that makes people act justly and desire what is just. It is the virtue that governs human relationships. The just man (dikaios) is one who respects the laws (absolute justice) and equality (particular justice). To be just is to live within legality and respect equality.
In general justice, a just act is one in conformity with the law. The law establishes as due those actions necessary for the community to achieve the common good and eudaimonia. The term “general” refers to its comprehensiveness. Particular justice is guided by the notion of equality and is subdivided into distributive and corrective justice. Distributive justice is exercised in the distribution of honors, wealth, and everything that can be divided. In the distribution, the personal quality of the recipient is considered. In an oligarchy, the criterion of distribution is wealth; in a democracy, the free citizen; in an aristocracy, virtue. Corrective justice aims at restoring balance in private relations, both voluntary (contracts) and involuntary (civil and criminal offenses).
Thomas Aquinas continues the Aristotelian tradition, adding elements of Roman Law, the Patristics, and the Holy Scriptures. To designate general justice, Thomas uses the term legal justice, since the actions due to the community for it to achieve the common good are set forth in law. This justice concerns what is due to another in community. The object of legal justice is the common good. Distributive justice is that which proportionally distributes what is common, whether goods or burdens, and aims to ensure equality in the distribution of duties and rights. Aristotle’s corrective justice is called commutative by Thomas.
3 From legal justice to social justice
In the 19th century, Neo-Thomists revived the concept of legal justice from a new perspective. The Enlightenment, the rule of law, and liberalism demanded rethinking the concept of just distribution. Following Charles Taylor (TAYLOR, 2000, p. 242), the basis of social identification in hierarchical societies is the notion of honor. Honor is a pre-conception of each person in their condition that defines privileges and distinctions by occupying a certain position (status). In hierarchical societies, distributive justice will be the organizing principle of social life. The rule of distribution will be: to each according to their social position. In democratic society, where everyone has the same “relevance,” the notion of honor is replaced by the “notion of dignity used in a universalist and egalitarian sense that allows us to speak of the inherent dignity of human beings (…). The premise is that everyone shares this dignity” (TAYLOR, 2000, p. 242). Therefore, if fundamental equality is not proportional but absolute, distributive justice cannot be the organizing principle of society, but legal justice, founded on the fundamental equality of all human beings. As all members of society are equal before the law, legal justice becomes social justice, where everyone has the same value, and every act in accordance with the law benefits everyone. The means used to achieve the common good is the subject of the common good – society in its members – justifying the change of name from legal justice to social justice.
In this context of transition, Louis Taparelli d’Azeglio (1793-1862), a Neo-Thomist theologian from the Gregorian University, was the first to use the expression “social justice” in the work Saggio teoretico di diritto naturale. Concerned with the consequences of liberalism and the rapid expansion of capitalism through the Industrial Revolution, this author sought a theological basis that would support the Church’s moral doctrine. And he succeeded, as his thought influenced the elaboration of the Rerum Novarum. However, the expression social justice caused controversies between conservative sectors of the hierarchy and “European social Catholicism,” as it was suspected of a certain socialist influence. This seems to be the reason why it was not adopted by Leo XIII.
Taparelli starts from the assumption of the existence of two rights. Individual right refers to God and oneself. Social right specifies human relations and must underpin social justice. “Social justice is justice between man and man.” Among men considered only in their humanity, rationality, and freedom, there are “relations of perfect equality, because man and man here means nothing but humanity reproduced twice” (TAPARELLI d’AZEGLIO, 1840-1843). Social justice, therefore, in a society where the positions occupied by each one are considered secondary in matters of justice, has as its object what is due to the individual solely by their human condition.
The social Catholics of late 19th-century France, primarily responsible for spreading the term “social justice” in Europe, also linked it to legal
justice. Antoine, in Cours d’économie sociale (1899), develops a theory of justice, reiterating the meanings of legal justice, distributive justice, and commutative justice. Legal justice is the constant will of citizens to give society what is due to it, the habitual disposition to contribute, under the direction of the supreme authority, to the common good, this is what we call legal justice. Therefore, it identifies with social justice, as there is identity of object, the common good. Social justice consists in observing all rights, has the common good as its object, and civil society as its subject. Civil society only exists in the totality of its members, and all of them must collaborate in achieving the common good (subject of social justice) and all must participate in the common good (term of social justice).
In the German sphere, where there is also a return to Neo-Thomism, the editors of the important magazine Stimmen aus Maria-Laach, Pesch, Gundlach, Messner, Nell-Breuning, and Tischleder adopted the expression social justice. This fact was decisive for the term to be accepted by the Magisterium, as these authors decisively contributed to the elaboration of the encyclical Quadragesimo anno (1931) by Pius XI. Before that, only Pius X, in the encyclical Iucunda sane (1904), which commemorated St. Gregory the Great, used the term by qualifying the saint as a defender of social justice. The concept appears in the encyclical Studiorum Ducem (June 29, 1923), on the occasion of the sixth centenary of Thomas Aquinas’ canonization. In it, Pius XI states that in the writings of Aquinas are found the refutations of liberal theories of morality, law, and sociology.
4 Social Doctrine of the Church
The development of the concept of social justice from the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition receives impetus in the Social Encyclicals. The concept was introduced by Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno (1931). The term is cited seven times and always accompanied by the adjectives commutative, legal/general. It is a concept that brings precise demands, with human dignity as its criterion, as defined by Taparelli.
The economy is its most immediate field of application. For Pius XI, there is a law of social justice that should govern any economic model:
It is necessary that wealth, continually increasing with the progress of the social economy, be distributed among individuals or particular classes in such a way that the common utility, spoken of by Leo XIII, is always preserved, or, in other words, that the general welfare of the entire society is not harmed. This law of social justice prohibits one class from being excluded by another from sharing in the profits. (Q A 57)
It applies to the economic sphere with the same universality as legal justice. Therefore, “everyone must have their share in material goods; and their distribution must be governed by the norms of the common good and social justice” (Q A 58). Also in Thomas Aquinas, legal justice orders man immediately to the common good.
Social justice considers the human being in their condition as a human person, their rights and duties as a member of society. Just as everyone has obligations, everyone has benefits since the common good is realized only “when all and each have all the goods that natural riches, technical art, and good economic administration can provide.” (Q A 75). In the economic order, the formula of social justice would be: all the necessary goods for everyone.
Still in the economic sphere, the world of work is the main field of application of the law of social justice. The wage is one of its main instruments. To value work justly, its personal and social dimensions must be considered (QA 69). The common good requires the promotion of jobs as a condition of security and well-being. Unemployment reflects an unjust economy. Social justice must regulate and determine the worker’s and their family’s wages, avoiding the exploitation of child labor and women (Q A 71).
Social justice does not apply only to the economic field. Public institutions must also adapt the entire society to the demands of the common good, that is, to the rules of social justice (Q A 110). Human beings, considered as persons, are equal and, therefore, all inequality in aspects constitutive of the person, such as their basic material needs, must be eliminated. It is not enough to appeal to morality in the relationships between employers and workers, as the production system develops within a social structure. Social justice inspires the reform of institutions. The State has an irreplaceable role in applying this law (Q A 79), always in collaboration between State, business, and society: “This justice must penetrate completely into the institutions of peoples and all aspects of social life. Public authority must insist on defending and effectively claiming this legal and social order” (Q A 88).
The Vatican Council, in Gaudium et spes, provides two decisive theological foundations. The first is the dignity of the human person created in the image and likeness of God:
The fundamental equality between all men must be increasingly recognized, since, endowed with a rational soul and created in the image of God, all have the same nature and origin; and, redeemed by Christ, all have the same divine vocation and destiny. But any social or cultural form of discrimination regarding the fundamental rights of the person, based on sex, race, color, social condition, language, or religion, must be overcome and eliminated as contrary to God’s will (…) Indeed, excessive economic and social inequalities between the members and peoples of the single human family cause scandal and are an obstacle to social justice, equity, human dignity, and, ultimately, social and international peace (GS 29).
The second foundation is the reference to “the creation of some organism of the Church tasked with stimulating the Catholic community in promoting the progress of needy regions and social justice among nations” (GS 90). Social justice as a requirement of human dignity has global reach and finds its theological foundation in the principle of the universal destination of goods: “God destined the earth and all it contains for the use of all men and peoples; so that created goods should reach the hands of all equitably, according to justice, seconded by charity” (GS 69). Following this orientation of the Council, Paul VI created the Commission of Justice and Peace (Motu proprio Catholicam Christi Ecclesiam, January 6, 1967).
John Paul II maintains social justice as a core axis of the Church’s social doctrine. For him, the “social question” is identified as a matter of social justice at whose origin are found structures of sin and perverse mechanisms (Sollicitudo rei socialis). By situating human work as the key to the social question, the commitment to justice is concretized, firstly, in the struggle for labor rights (Laborem exercens). The priority of labor over capital is one of the demands of social justice, and trade unions are the exponents of this struggle (LE 8). Benedict XVI, in Caritas in veritate, recalls that social doctrine has never failed to highlight the importance of distributive justice and social justice for the market economy itself, not only because it is integrated into the meshes of a broader social and political context, but also because of the web of relationships in which it operates (CiV 35).
Pope Francis will expand the concept of social justice (TORNIELLI and GALEAZZI, 2016; FRANCIS, 2016). In Evangelii Gaudium, the pontiff recalls that “no one should say that they remain distant from the poor because no one can feel exempt from concern for the poor and social justice” (EG 201). And he emphasizes that social justice should be on the agenda of interfaith dialogue: interfaith dialogue, founded on an attitude of openness in truth and love, should seek peace and social justice, it is an ethical commitment that creates new social conditions (cf. EG 250).
In Laudato sí, the pontiff inserts social justice into the paradigm of caring for the common home:
often there is a lack of clear awareness of the problems that
particularly affect the excluded. These are the majority of the planet, billions of people (…) A true ecological approach always becomes a social approach, which must integrate justice into debates about the environment, to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor (LS 49).
Caring for the common home points to intergenerational justice:
If the earth is given to us, we cannot think only from a utilitarian criterion of efficiency and productivity for individual profit. We are not talking about an optional attitude, but an essential question of justice, because the land we received also belongs to those who will come (LS 159).
5 New approaches and perspectives
At the Medellín Conference (1968), CELAM dedicated an entire document to the theme of justice. It denounces that “misery marginalizes large human groups in our peoples. This misery, as a collective fact, is qualified as an injustice that cries out to heaven.” And it proclaimed the liberating force of Christianity: “We believe that love for Christ and our brothers will not only be the great liberating force from injustice and oppression, but also and mainly the inspirer of social justice” (DM, Justice, 1).
In Puebla (1979), the bishops viewed social justice as a social right that integrates the evangelization process. “The peoples of this continent have the right to education, association, work, housing, health, leisure, development, good governance, freedom and social justice, and participation in decisions that concern the people and nations” (DP 1272).
In Aparecida, the concept was significantly expanded. “Kingdom of God, social justice, and Christian charity” is the title of the first item in chapter 8. Social justice is placed in the broad context of announcing the Kingdom of God and promoting human dignity. First, it recalls that works of mercy should be accompanied by the pursuit of true social justice (DAp 385).
Then it highlights that the new poor emerging today transcend the socio-economic dimension of social justice:
migrants, victims of violence, the displaced and refugees, victims of human trafficking and kidnappings, the disappeared, HIV patients and those with endemic diseases, drug addicts, the elderly, boys and girls who are victims of prostitution, pornography and violence or child labor, abused women, victims of violence, exclusion, and trafficking for sexual exploitation, people with disabilities, large groups of unemployed, those excluded by technological illiteracy, people living on the streets of large cities, indigenous and Afro-descendants, landless farmers, and miners (DAp 402).
Social justice is not limited to policies of more equitable distribution of income and wealth. A new type of demand articulates economic equity with the recognition of discriminated groups. The Church recognizes from faith the seeds of the Word present in the traditions and cultures of indigenous and original peoples in strengthening their identities and organizations (cf. DAp 529-530). It also supports “the dialogue between black culture and Christian faith and their struggles for social justice” (DAp 533).
Entities and movements organized around ethnicity, people, gender, and sexuality, profession fight for their identities to be recognized. The demand is to be “recognized” as a human being in its full constitution” (HONNETH, 2003). Social injustice also manifests in forms of cultural discrimination. Injustices of a symbolic nature arising from social models of representation exclude the “other” through their interpretation codes and moral values. In many cases, economic injustice is amplified by this type of injustice. The two forms reinforce each other. The poor are not just economically poor but also black, indigenous, women, gay, transgender, etc. Overcoming cultural injustice lies in recognizing the diversity of identities and their social representation models. Recognition politics and redistribution politics integrate the concept of social justice. Combating socioeconomic inequality is joined by struggles to end discriminations. Broad social justice aims to respond to both demands. The field of social justice is simultaneously redistribution and recognition (FRASER, 2001).
6 Socio-environmental justice
The distribution of goods, taxes, and responsibility for care are the focus of environmental justice. Issues involving ecology and social inequality are intertwined in the concept of socio-environmental justice. The classic definition of justice: “giving each one what is due” also applies to natural resources, not just economic and social rights. Nature is a public good that all human beings should enjoy. Social justice is one of the four topics of the Earth Charter: respect and care for the community of life; ecological integrity; social and economic justice; democracy, violence, and peace. Economic activities and institutions at all levels should promote, without discrimination, the rights of all people to a natural and social environment capable of ensuring human dignity, physical health, and spiritual well-being. Eliminate discrimination in all its forms, such as those based on race, color, gender, sexual orientation, religion, language, and national, ethnic, or social origin.
To whom do the oil reserves, rivers, forests, and the atmosphere belong? Broadly speaking, the following approaches exist (IBANEZ, 2012): in climate justice, the poor are seen as the main victims of the environmental crisis caused by the rich. Therefore, the main culprits for the crisis must pay for it; environmental justice understands that toxic waste and scrap are deposited in the poorest territories and peripheries, affecting specific groups: Afro-descendants (environmental racism), the poor (environmental classism), women (environmental sexism). This view proposes a fairer distribution of natural resources so that no social group can be harmed; defenders of ecological justice include non-human animals in the distribution; intergenerational socio-environmental justice contemplates future generations as recipients of justice.
7 Systematization
The common good is the content of social justice. Social justice regulates the relations of the individual with the community in their condition as community members. In social justice, the direct aim is the common good, and indirectly, the good of this or that particular individual. The human being is considered in community.
Recognition is the proper activity of social justice. It aims to regulate the social practice of considering the other as a subject of rights (or person), as a being that is “an end in itself and possesses a dignity” (Kant). A subject of rights can only constitute itself as such if it is recognized by another subject of rights. Social justice concerns this practice of mutual recognition within a community. It eliminates all sorts of privileges, in the sense of inequality of rights. Each one only possesses the rights they accept for others. To the extent that the other members do not recognize someone’s rights, that person is freed from recognizing the rights of others. The subject of social justice is otherness.
The human person is an existing concrete being. It has a human nature, a whole in itself, and cannot be reduced to a part of a larger whole. It is owed all the goods necessary for its realization in the concrete, individual, rational, and cultural dimensions. The basic equality of each person is equality in this dignity as the founding concept of contemporary juridical-political experience.
Even if distributive justice, applying pertinent criteria, such as “to each according to their contribution” and “to each according to their need,” is present in the sharing of produced goods, the economic system can still be unjust from the perspective of social justice if it violates human dignity (Mater et magistra 82).
To determine what is due in a concrete case, in terms of social justice, it is not enough to follow the canons of proportional equality of distributive justice, but it is necessary to consider the goods that the human being is deserving of by virtue of their human condition. Social justice contemplates the following dimensions: socioeconomic, legal-political-institutional, sociocultural, moral/subjective.
Social justice is the systematization, in terms of the theory of justice, of the value of human dignity present in the development of civilization: act in such a way that you use humanity, both in your person and in the person of any other, always and simultaneously as an end and never simply as a means (Kant). “Do to others as you would have them do to you” (Luke 6:31).
Élio Gasda, SJ. Faculdade Jesuíta de Filosofia e Teologia (Belo Horizonte). Original Portuguese text.
8 Bibliographical references
BENEDICT XVI. Caritas in Veritate (CV). On Integral Human Development in Charity and Truth,
2009.
SECOND VATICAN ECUMENICAL COUNCIL. Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes (GS). On the Church in the Modern World, 1965.
LATIN AMERICAN EPISCOPAL COUNCIL. Conclusions of the II General Conference of the Latin American Episcopate. Medellín Document (DM), 1968.
_______. Conclusions of the III General Conference of the Latin American Episcopate. Puebla Document (DP), 1979.
_______. Conclusions of the V General Conference of the Latin American Episcopate. Evangelization in the present and future of Latin America. Aparecida Document (DAp), 2007.
FRANCIS. Evangelii Gaudium (EG). The Joy of the Gospel. On the Proclamation of the Gospel in Today’s World, 2013.
_______. Laudato Si’ (LS). On Care for Our Common Home, 2015.
FRASER, N. From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a Post-Socialist Age. In: SOUZA, J. (ed.). Democracy Today: New Challenges for Contemporary Democratic Theory. Brasília: UnB, 2001, p. 245-282.
HAYEK, F. A. von. Law, Legislation, and Liberty: Volume II. The Mirage of Social Justice: A New Formulation of the Liberal Principles of Justice and Political Economy. São Paulo: Visão, 1985.
HONNETH, A. Struggle for Recognition. The Social Grammar of Social Conflicts. São Paulo: Editora 34, 2003.
JOHN XXIII. Mater et Magistra (MM). On the Recent Evolution of Social Life in the Light of Christian Principles, 1961.
_____. Laborem Exercens (LE). On Human Work, 1981.
MISES, L. von. Human Action. A Treatise on Economics (1949). São Paulo: Instituto Ludwig von Mises Brasil, 2010.
PIO XI. Quadragesimo Anno (QA). On the Restoration and Improvement of the Social Order in Accordance with the Gospel Law, 1931.
PONTIFICAL COUNCIL FOR JUSTICE AND PEACE. Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (CDSI). São Paulo: Paulinas, 2005.
TAPARELLI D’AZEGLIO, L. Saggio Teorico di Diritto Naturale Appoggiato sul Fatto. 5v. Rome: 1840-1843.
TAYLOR, C. Philosophical Arguments. São Paulo: Loyola, 2000.
TORNIELLI, A.; GALEAZZI, G. Pope Francis – This Economy Kills: Pope Francis’s Vision on Capitalism and Social Justice. Lisbon: Bertrand, 2016.
To learn more
CAMACHO, I; RINCÓN, R; HIQUERA, G. Praxis cristã III: option for justice and freedom. São Paulo: Paulinas, 1988.
DÍAZ, José A. Biblical terms of “social justice” and translation of “dynamic equivalence”. Ecclesiastical Studies, n.51, 1976. p.95-128.
FLEISCHACKER, S. A Brief History of Distributive Justice. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2006.
IBANEZ, F. Rethinking justice from ecology. Miscelánea Comillas, v.70, n.137, 2012. p. 357-372.
FRANCIS. Love is contagious: the Gospel of justice. Braga: Nascente, 2016.
HAYEK, F. H. von. The Constitution of Liberty (1972). São Paulo, Visão, 1983.
MAFFETONE, S.; VECA, S. (eds.). The Idea of Justice from Plato to Rawls. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2005.
MANZONE, Gianni. The dignity of the human person in the social doctrine of the Church. Teocomunicação, v.40, n.3, Sep/Dec 2010. p. 289-306.
MARIAS, J. Social Justice and Other Justices. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1979.
PIKETTY, T. The Economics of Inequality. São Paulo: Intrínseca, 2014.
SANDEL, M. J. Justice – what is the right thing to do. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2012.
SYNOD OF BISHOPS. Justice in the World (1971).
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ROUANET, L. P. Rawls and the issue of social justice. Phrónesis, Campinas, v.5, n.1, , Jan/Jun 2003. p.1124.
SEN, A. Development as Freedom. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2007.
LEAL, C. The notion of social justice in Gaudium et spes. Theology and Life, v.54, n.2, 2013. p.181-204.
WALZER, M. Spheres of Justice: a defense of pluralism and equality. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2003.