By calling your scheme for social improvement a matter of “social justice,” you imply that doing something else, or doing nothing, would be unjust. Hence, if I, on purely prudential grounds, prefer a different solution to the problem (or think you have misidentified the problem in the first place), I am preemptively labeled a proponent of injustice. This is the fallacy of poisoning the well. 

Note: A version of this essay was published in Academic Questions: A Journal from the National Association of Scholars, 37:2 (Summer 2024): 79-80.)

Social justice is a phrase that ought to be banned from our vocabulary and never heard again. There are four reasons why this is so.

First, the phrase has no specific referent in the real world. People with very different, indeed mutually contradictory approaches to solving various social problems will both use it to refer to their schemes. A phrase that can mean anything means nothing.  This phrase, therefore, adds nothing substantive to the discussion it is being used in and should therefore be dropped.  Cut it out!

Second, the phrase is not only meaningless but positively misleading. Many plans put forth to address social problems when analyzed have nothing to do with justice whatsoever. Nobody is to be punished for any illegal act or wrongdoing; no money that was misappropriated or stolen is to be returned to the person who actually earned it. Those would be acts of justice. The scheme in question is accurately not social “justice” at all. It would be much more precisely labeled “social grace” or “social mercy.”  Now, they might be good schemes, but the case for them needs to be made without prejudice on their merits, and when you claim they are about “social justice,” it cannot be. Nobody disputes that showing mercy to, say, the poor or the disadvantaged is a good thing. Some people would dispute that having the government do it with other people’s money, that is, coercing those people by law to do it, is a good or wise thing, and that discussion is one that can be profitably had.

Read More