Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten has an essay on Justice Creep that bears some similarity to my recent thoughts in Is Solving This Problem Wise?
Helping the poor becomes economic justice. If they’re minorities, then it’s racial justice, itself a subspecies of social justice. Saving the environment becomes environmental justice, except when it’s about climate change in which case it’s climate justice. Caring about young people is actually about fighting for intergenerational justice. The very laws of space and time are subject to spatial justice and temporal justice.
He doesn't like the downstream implications of this semantic change - nor do I.
There’s one last disadvantage I’m having trouble putting into words, but which I think is the most important. A narrative of helpers and saviors allows saints. It allows people who are genuinely good, above and beyond expectations, who rightly serve as ideals and role models for others. A narrative of justice allows, at best, non-criminals - people who haven’t broken any of the rules yet, who don’t suck quite as much as everyone else. You either stand condemned, or you’re okay so far.
I thought that captured an idea very well that I was on the edges of but had eluded me.
It was also interesting to learn about Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota dystopian Sci-Fi novels. Not that I'm likely to pick up any new fiction these days, but just to see an interesting idea out there. If anyone has read it, give us your impressions.
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There is a related post at Isegoria:
https://www.isegoria.net/2022/03/between-them-they-control-the-commanding-heights-of-politics-and-culture/
Scott Alexander: Helping the poor becomes economic justice. If they’re minorities, then it’s racial justice, itself a subspecies of social justice.
"The problems of racial injustice and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power." — Martin Luther King, Jr., 1967
While you may not agree with King, his meaning from more than half a century ago is quite clear. Now, imagine Alexander's essay published in the Meridian (Mississippi) Star in 1967.
Scott Alexander: Saving the environment becomes environmental justice, except when it’s about climate change in which case it’s climate justice.
Except his own links contradict his minimization of the terms. "Environmental justice is the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people . . . ", while "Climate justice is a concept that addresses the just division, fair sharing, and equitable distribution of the benefits and burdens of climate change . . ." When rich people profit by dumping their pollution into poor communities, that's environmental injustice.
Scott Alexander: The very laws of space and time are subject to spatial justice and temporal justice.
Again, Alexander's own links show he has constructed a straw man. It has nothing to do with "the very laws of space and time," but with the relationship of people and oppressed groups to the allocation of space and time, especially in urban environments.
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While we're at it, here is King on systemic racism, 1967: “White Americans must recognize that justice for black people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our society.”
David - I was fascinated by your comment there about Wilson. I have much the same condition myself, though I don't think to the same extent.
Our comment didn't appear on Isegoria, so we are cross-posting it here:
Hence the obsession with nomenclature — with the magical force of words.
So, people should be able to call someone the {n-word} without being criticized.
Older institutional types, on the other hand, have seen their influence and authority plummet over the past decade. Of this vertiginous fall from grace, Trump was merely a symptom, not the cause. The digital age will not tolerate the steep hierarchies of the twentieth century: these will either be reconfigured or smashed.
Whites, especially White men, who hold the vast majority of political and economic power, are reacting negatively as society becomes more egalitarian. Demagogues use populist resentment to egalitarian social change to acquire increasing power.
For all the differences in age and status, the two groups come from the same stock: upwardly mobile, hyper-educated, and largely white.
You can hardly tell them apart from the Republicans in Congress.
Aristotle describes two different virtues -- justice and magnanimity -- as being in a way complete virtues. There is nevertheless a significant difference between them. Justice is a complete virtue because it compels you to act as if you were completely virtuous: for example, because a courageous man would defend the city at war, just laws compel every man to go forth and risk death in battle as if they were courageous.
Magnanimity, by contrast, is the capstone virtue of one who really does possess all the virtues. That man does what is right because doing the best thing is most worthy.
Alexander senses the peril of shifting to 'justice' instead of praising the worthy. It invites the state to decide what morality requires, and thereby to interfere in and attempt to govern every aspect of human life. That was in fact what Aristotle thought proper, as Plato before him; but it is, at least in the modern era, the path to totalitarianism.
The social justice warriors see themselves as helpers and saviors. That's the problem. If you see yourself as a saint, then everything you do must be an expression of your essential holiness, and everyone who opposes you must be a sinner. Humility and caution are the missing virtues in today's public discourse. We need to think some more about the lesson of the Parable of the Pharisee and the Publican.
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