Justice is not a matter of end-states, but of general rules of conduct that can demand obedience.
Social justice is neither justice nor social.
It is not justice because justice is a virtue. It has to do with how individuals deal with one another and especially in the commutative sense of whether they follow general rules of conduct with one another. Human beings are either just or unjust by how they act in life and what thoughts they harbor in their mind. Society is simply amoral. A “just” or “virtuous” society is at best a use of poetic license to describe the just or virtuous actions of the human individuals that constitute it. After all, something that has no existence outside of the human imagination like society cannot act or strive towards ends or obey laws and as such it cannot take on any moral properties. That John Rawls in his horridly overrated writings on justice tried to define justice by the properties of society is plain proof that he did not understand the basic properties of justice: the human being's obedience to certain rules of conduct. No theory of justice can be grounded in something that does not exist and so no definition of justice can be about society. Since social justice tries to define the concept of justice by institutional arrangements and outcomes, it is simply not a description of justice since justice is a virtue that is always constituted by individual human action.
Nor is social justice even social. To the contrary, it encourages arbitrary thinking that judges situations according to specific instances like wealth and capabilities and by doing so erodes away the general rules of conduct upon which society is made possible. This is unavoidable. When people talk about social justice, they have particular outcomes in mind and they try to design rules in order to attain those particular outcomes. However, these rules are then not designed to be general rules of conduct, to be valid in any situation, but to be rules of conduct designed according to certain ends and this cannot remain for long. Conditions in human society as in the world are always changing; as Heraclitus said: “Πάντα ῥεῖ” - “Everything changes.” Rules cannot be designed for a specific situation in mind because then they stop working when the situation changes, as it always will. So the attempt to design rules in order to attain the socially-just state of the world (and all conceptions of social justice when even not patently false are just conceptions of what the world should be) will result in rules that help create social disorder when the specific conditions those rules were designed for change. Hence by its reliance on designing rules that are meant to achieve specific outcomes achieving particular socially-just conditions, social justice is not social because it is bound to destroy the general rules of conduct that enables social cooperation in whatever condition emergent order leads society.
Ergo, social justice is neither justice nor social. Justice is not about society, but about the actions of individual human beings. The rules that make social cooperation (and hence society) possible are the general rules of conduct that are applicable across specific outcomes like the social rules of conduct found in the Ten Commandments, the Code of Hammurabi and English common law. The rules that social justice designs in order to achieve preconceived outcomes cannot be general rules and are bound to destroy social cooperation when conditions make them obsolete. Social justice is thus not social.
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