In its broadest implications, I see social justice as a standard for the rationality and humanity of the community and state system. Among its contents are equality among people in all rights and political participation, and the provision of the bounties of nature, the economic system, and the fruits of civilization to all. One of the manifestations of the concept of social justice is guaranteeing a sufficient standard of living as a non-disputable right for every citizen, in harmony with the moral value system commonly respected.
However, in right-wing liberalism, it is not believed that the wealth of the rich entails a right for the weak, but rather a moral preference left to individuals themselves. According to this view, the state is not permitted to forcibly transfer wealth from the rich to the poor. They consider the protection of property rights a duty of the state, because the owner has a right to what he owns. This paper attempts to approach a discussion of these propositions, usually addressed by political philosophy starting from moral philosophy. I also point out here that social justice does not become a system unless individuals and groups in society cross the threshold of moral commitment towards each other, the state, and the world. Neglecting this condition has rendered sacrifices in vain and hopes disappointed.
Introduction: The Increasing Presence of Social Justice in Awareness and Politics
The concept emerged in political language with the industrial revolution, in parallel with the socialist tendency, as a protest against exploitation. It became a revolutionary slogan for progress and brotherhood and a focal point for developing measures to improve the human condition, especially for workers. After the mid-nineteenth-century revolutions in Europe, social justice became a focus of interest for progressive thinkers and political activists. Proudhon united justice and social justice, seeing them as synonymous with human dignity. By the mid-twentieth century, the concept became central to leftist and centrist parties, represented by social democratic parties. In common practice, at national and international levels, social justice is synonymous with distributive justice, both in academia and theory. There is general agreement not to separate the economic and social components of justice, although human rights are often treated separately. It is preferable to integrate them with the economic, social, and cultural aspects in a broader concept of social justice.
It is commonly said that the poor care about their livelihood and lack the surplus energy to concern themselves with demands for civil and political rights. However, if we observe what has happened in recent decades and continues to this day, most wars occur among the poor and between the poor and the rich over political rights, religious, nationalistic, and other disputes. Rarely do protests for bread escalate to armed confrontations, and if they do, they remain limited. Therefore, it is in everyone's interest to broaden the definition of social justice to include not only the basic necessities of individual life but also everything beyond conflict due to differing definitions of rights and duties, feelings of injustice, or rejection of contemporary values of the state and civil society—not always due to marginalization and oppression.
Over the centuries, religions and philosophies have formed agreements to distinguish right from wrong, good from corrupt values and behaviors. There is a convergence or consensus across societies on sufficient principles for social justice, especially the trust in humanity’s ability to harmonize with moral rules derived from religious, customary, or other sources to organize life and strive for perfection. Social justice is concerned with equality in rights, as expressed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is not new but rather a coordination of values commonly accepted and internationally recognized; equal opportunities; and equal right to a dignified life within a limited range of inequality.
Social justice focuses on reducing disparities in income, job opportunities, information, participation in civic and political life, health, and access to infrastructure and other facilities.
Widely Accepted Principles of Social Justice
The mutual obligations between the individual and society are the subject that the concept of social justice addresses, which is a philosophical construct. In most practically oriented studies, it is reduced to distributive justice in the economic context, which is not incorrect because the basic requirements of life take priority in the struggle for comprehensive justice. The broader content of the concept includes all human rights and the state’s guarantee of those rights. Reciprocal justice pertains to individuals in their relationships, but adding the adjective "just" to exchange calls for the state's role in enforcing the law, not merely individuals’ voluntary compliance. Reciprocal justice refers to corrective or punitive justice, as deterrence is necessary to maintain reciprocal justice. The rule of law and equality of individuals under it are essential for any form of justice.
Thus, the concept is open to the comprehensive system of the state, law, and society, making it a window to view the indivisible whole—as social justice is. Let us agree that the concept of social justice encompasses everything that people agree is good for society as a whole and for individuals. Practically, its scope may narrow or expand depending on the recognized human rights in the prevailing culture, the moral system in people's consciences and behavioral practices, and the power structure of social groups in the political system.
Social justice has been a subject of philosophy and religion since their inception. Many writings of the ancients still gain the admiration of modern readers when read apart from their historical context full of events that contemporary societies find unacceptable. Until the early twentieth century, many societal circles did not understand that exclusive authority violates justice because sovereignty belongs to the entire people, or that democracy excludes non-property holders or certain groups in ways that contradict ethics. Slavery was common in Eastern and Western societies, and while texts say people are born free, many were in fact born slaves in Rome, Greece, the East, and even in modern states until recently. It was common to enslave war captives—including children and women—and sell them in markets like goods. This reminds us that the values of justice are not independent of time, and we should not forget to be grateful for the major achievements in moral progress amid our frustration with current systems, policies, and abuses.
Principles and Conditions of Social Justice
Complete equality in the constitution, laws, and procedures among all citizens in political rights, social duties, and legal obligations. They have the same status in the state, which treats them without discrimination. Equality stems from the inherent dignity of the human person and natural brotherhood. This principle determines the nature of the political system suitable for social justice. Clearly, democracy is a condition, as is the guarantee of personal freedom, religion, belief, thought, expression, and political organization without discrimination.
Reducing income inequality through taxes, subsidies, and other means; equality in public economic benefits; and care for people with special needs, the weak, and the disadvantaged. More precisely, distributive justice requires the elimination of poverty.
Social Justice Policy is based on eliminating discrimination by birth, empowering individuals through inclusive education, and ensuring access to healthcare and essential information so that everyone can equally benefit from available opportunities. It also involves compensating those who are disadvantaged or harmed without fault of their own and promoting values and standards that embody virtue and integrity in behavior, as well as in people’s relationship with the state and common goods.
Social justice presupposes a just society governed by values that dominate individuals and groups in most behavioral contexts voluntarily. Electoral democracy expresses this society within a state of social justice, where the values and behavior of the majority become the rule, and deviations are penalized. In contrast, a society accustomed to tolerating violations of justice in interpersonal and institutional relations produces, under democracy, nothing but a fragile state incapable of either injustice or justice. In such situations, people long for a “just tyrant” who, though he curtails freedom—the necessary condition for human dignity and moral responsibility—restores order. However, such tyranny deprives society of the opportunity to learn through trial and error, and once the tyrant’s era ends, things return to their pre-tyranny state.
Social justice is linked with religious and cultural tolerance, social harmony within the state, and liberation from illusions of religious and ethnic hostility that have historically caused widespread suffering. It calls for the well-being of all humanity, positive engagement with global societies, and support for peace.
Democracy assumes that civil society is founded on a social contract that outlines the mutual benefits, rights, and obligations of societal membership. For example, individuals enjoy collective security in return for paying taxes and, when necessary, serving in the military. Social justice requires appropriate mechanisms to organize institutions in a way that ensures individuals, groups, and organizations act according to comprehensive and universally valid rules of social justice.
Pluralist democracy allows for diverse views regarding mutual obligations and the rules governing them, including how to allocate limited resources among competing needs. With cultural diversity, the challenge becomes finding a broadly accepted concept of social justice as a legitimate foundation for defining obligations and distributing resources. This task falls on society itself and cannot be accomplished if its constituents persist in discord without a sense of responsibility for the unity essential to a functioning state. This includes agreement on how to organize social institutions in accordance with the shared concept of social justice.
The Libertarian Perspective
The libertarian view aligns with liberalism in its foundation on individualism. However, libertarianism insists on a narrow definition of state functions and hence favors a minimal government. Liberalism, on the other hand, has evolved to encompass a wide range of ideas and varying positions on the role and size of government. Pure libertarianism has not materialized in any of the advanced modern states, all of which adhere—albeit to varying degrees—to social justice. Nevertheless, it remains a theoretical reference point for limiting government expansion, which has increased significantly since the early 20th century.
In libertarian theory, the state governs only to the extent necessary to protect human rights. Thus, the state is limited to internal and external security, the right to life, protection of property rights, and ensuring individual autonomy. Taxes are levied solely to fund these functions. The state enacts laws against theft, fraud, and breach of contract and restricts behaviors that prevent others from exercising their civil rights. This approach is grounded in the belief that individuals’ free will and personal responsibility, within a free-market economy, best achieve the public good. The system operates with the free flow of capital and labor, low tax burdens, and encourages technological innovation, job creation, and the efficient production and distribution of goods and services.
Thomas Malthus’s views on the poor exemplify this trend, as do positions of prominent thinkers in neoliberalism. In this framework, the state withdraws from social justice responsibilities, leaving them to the private sphere—charity, religious giving, and familial support. Risks like unemployment, illness, and old age are managed through self-organized insurance schemes, also referred to as market-based solutions. However, experience has shown these are insufficient, and the need for state involvement remains.
Libertarianism is based on the principle that individuals have complete ownership over themselves, and each person has the right to give or withhold their legally acquired assets according to personal preferences and ethical philosophy. Individuals are fully protected from losing any rights unless their actions violate others' rights. Generally, no person may be coerced to benefit themselves or others. In this view, individual obligations toward society are minimal—taxes, for instance—and the main duty is not to infringe on others’ rights.
Libertarianism does not deny personal moral responsibility, which may lead to voluntary acts of generosity or prioritizing others’ needs over self-interest. But it holds individuals accountable for their own actions. The self is the source of authority, and each person freely chooses their ethical philosophy.
Friedrich Hayek, a leading libertarian thinker and a favorite of UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, heavily influenced the formation of the New Right in the 1970s–1980s. He outright rejected the concept of social justice, calling it a logical fallacy. Justice, in his view, applies to individual actors—a person is just when they act justly. The aggregate distribution of resources in the market results from individual interactions and is not intended by any single actor, so it cannot be called just or unjust. Hayek believed that redistribution by governments—beyond providing basic public needs aligned with minimal government—violated individual freedom. Governments, in their zeal for "social justice," summon central authority that imposes unwanted choices on individuals under a misunderstood concept. Hayek feared that economic and social roles of the state pave the way for dictatorship or fascism. These ideas weakened welfare states and fueled neoliberalism.
While society is a non-personal entity (and attributing will to it is metaphorical), the economic processes and laws do affect individual lives. People, as co-inhabitants of this world, experience unequal benefits from the system—so correction is necessary, and the principle of solidarity within the extended family of humanity must be accepted. This is consistent with human conscience, and it is unreasonable to defend public policy that disregards the moral obligations people feel toward one another.
The Utilitarian Perspective
Utilitarianism, within liberalism, assumes civil society is based on a voluntary contract for mutual benefits. Distributive justice is utilitarianism’s primary concern. Aristotle was the first to distinguish distributive, commutative, and retributive justice, laying an early foundation for utilitarian thought. He saw fair distribution of goods as a legitimate role of the state, though his standard was based on individual merit rather than utility. Philosophical utilitarianism is credited to Jeremy Bentham and later John Stuart Mill (1883), who asserted that the distribution of all valuable things should be governed by the principle of maximizing the good for the greatest number.
According to Mill, utility is the standard, and maximizing total societal benefit is the criterion for optimal resource allocation.
Utilitarianism remains popular in ethics and political philosophy because it offers clear governmental guidance on practical matters—like selecting infrastructure and public service projects. Governments compare various program configurations and choose the one that maximizes total societal benefit, a process based on optimization principles. However, maximizing the happiness of the majority may conflict with egalitarianism, a core of liberal democracy and modern constitutions, since some individuals or needs may be excluded for the sake of greater total benefit.
If we hypothetically assume that individuals are identical in preferences, then diminishing marginal utility would require equal income or service distribution to maximize welfare. But real-life individuals are not identical. The very concern with social justice arises from unequal abilities to secure life essentials—health, income, services—due to individual, familial, or group circumstances across geographic regions.
Formal utilitarianism measures results—policies are compared based on outcomes. But what outcome should policy aim to maximize? That’s a value-based question. It also must align with ethical principles. In a democracy, value standards for evaluating outcomes often differ. Preferences may be non-aggregable—group A prefers option X over Y, while group B prefers the opposite. This is a well-known problem in welfare economics. There’s no theoretical solution when projects are indivisible—but practically, solutions are found. Societies accustomed to compassion and empathy tend to live more happily. What person A gives up may not reduce their family’s welfare by even 1%, while greatly improving the well-being of person B.
The Principle of Equality in Basic Liberties
The principle of equality in basic liberties takes precedence over what is known as the difference principle related to the rule of inequality in favor of the least advantaged. In commenting on this conception of justice, some argue that it implicitly reflects the inclination of individuals in the original position, behind the veil of ignorance, to avoid risk. They choose, among the various possible forms of inequality, the pattern that offers the most to the least advantaged—that is, the individual in that experiment acts with caution assuming they may find themselves in that disadvantaged position. There is an objection to Rawls that states the probability of any individual occupying a given position is equal to the probability of occupying any other position. Thus, based on the rule of maximizing expected gain, the middle would be the most suitable and should therefore be maximized. However, I note that modern decision theory assumes harm, not benefit, from the absolute value of the negative position more than from its positive counterpart, even if both are equidistant from the middle. If Rawls were to accept this objection, he would end up embracing the utilitarian perspective.
Nozick’s Objection and the Libertarian Right
Nozick and the libertarian right object to Rawls on the basis that his theory applies to an imagined situation where people wake up one morning and find various goods already available in the world, and all they need to do is agree on how to distribute them. In their view, however, there is always ownership acquired through legitimate means and income earned through labor. The government has no right to redistribute what individuals own or have earned but rather to protect those rights from infringement. I believe this thesis contradicts many facts and the social conventions that people have agreed upon, which cannot be ignored, as social justice is a normative philosophy, not a set of physical facts existing independently of conscious subjects.
The Origin of Land Ownership
Historically, we know how power played a fundamental role in acquiring land ownership—not, as Nozick claims, that the land was owned by no one and someone simply came and took possession. When land belonged to no one, all people were morally equal in their access to it, and it was under collective sovereignty. I see private land ownership, even if it becomes legitimate, as not eliminating that sovereignty, which is the primary right of ownership. It is also an exaggeration to assume that income is acquired through a system that is flawless and without any faults.
Innate Capacities and the Role of Luck
The formative capacities people are born with are not earned but rather a matter of luck, and thus do not fall under entitlement. Those born deprived of property and capacities did not cause this condition and do not deserve the misery they suffer; therefore, a corrective approach is necessary. Perhaps compassion and the various forms of empathy among people stem from a deep, spontaneous awareness of this great truth, to which the values of social justice gave expression.
On the Least Advantaged in Rawls' Theory
Rawls identifies the least advantaged as unskilled workers and the like, based on their average earned income. Others, with whom I agree, argue that this neglects people with disabilities and those unable to earn an income altogether. In his view, individuals who choose not to engage in the labor market are excluded from the least advantaged group, and he does not support including them—this exclusion is practical, not philosophical. The difference principle justifies widening inequality as long as the income of the least advantaged grows. This is evident from U.S. data, where the average real wage of workers increases slightly, while the income of other groups grows at much higher rates. According to the difference principle, justice remains intact.
The Impact of Rawls’ Theory
Despite criticism and reservations, Rawls’ theory added new tools to political philosophy and provided a progressive stance within liberal circles. It supports a governmental role in distributive justice at a time when the influence of the right, which rejects any state responsibility for social justice, is growing.
The Capability Approach
Proposed by Amartya Sen, who is well-known for proposing the Human Development Index and contributing to economic evaluation of public investment projects. Sen’s approach starts from the idea that the understanding and realization of social justice have progressed under comparative epistemology, without the transcendental abstraction of justice theory. He argues that theories based on an ideal notion of social contract overlook issues of marginalization and exclusion, as well as the impact of globalization on local social conditions and human rights. I do not agree with Sen’s claim that the social contract idea—as adopted by Rawls and others—leads to what he criticizes. Rather, the hypothetical contract format outlines a theory of social justice.
I believe it is possible to begin from a moral framework that enjoys recognition, regardless of people’s willingness to abide by it, as a form of implicit contract based on acknowledgment of its validity or legitimacy. Contemporary welfare state measures can be seen as rooted in the idea that people have contracted for a poverty and risk insurance system, represented by governments through taxes, benefits, and similar mechanisms. Sen goes further by opposing social justice approaches that focus on means, resources, and institutional arrangements, as opposed to outcomes or ends.
Freedom as Capabilities
The capabilities approach is based on the human right to the freedom to pursue a good life; but that freedom should be understood in terms of the capabilities people find themselves with. This approach does not use fairness or equality in income and consumption distribution as a general measure, yet reducing inequality remains central to any theory of social justice under this framework.
The ten individual capabilities in this approach represent a translation of human rights:
Living a normal lifespan with dignity and peace of mind;
Good health;
Bodily autonomy and control;
The senses, imagination, and thought;
Emotions;
Social affiliation and the right to recognition and respectful treatment;
Practical reason;
Living in harmony with other living beings;
Concern for the environment.
We notice a strong presence of the language of Sustainable Development Goals in the capabilities approach. As I see it, it is closer to agreed-upon policies than it might first appear. Thus, it is a consensual program for human care more than a social justice philosophy.
Outcomes of the Capability Approach
Among the outcomes of this approach are: good nutrition, education, good health, housing, and being loved and respected. These are positive achievements as opposed to the removal of negative counterparts: malnutrition, illiteracy, poor health and illness, lack of housing, contempt, marginalization, and stigma associated with religious and ethnic hatred or social background.
The capability approach, adopted by the United Nations since the early 1990s, has not produced clear results. The progress shown by data is better explained by the normal course of development than by actual responses to international development goals. This is because capabilities, as defined by the approach, relate to the overall economic potential of countries. It is nearly impossible to develop capabilities in isolation from economic development—which has been weakened in the minds of people and governments in developing countries by the approach’s focus on the concerns of developed countries regarding the environment, pollution, natural resources, and the missionary promotion of liberal democracy.
Related Sources
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Rawls , John, A Theory of Justice: Revised edition, The Belknap Press of Harvard Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1999.
A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, 2nd Edition Volume I , Edited by Robert E. Goodin, Philip Pettit and Thomas Pogge, Blackweel publishing, 2007.
Knowles, Dudley, Political Philosophy, Routledge, 2001.
Swift , Adam, Political Philosophy A Beginners’ Guide for Students and Politicians Third dition, Polity Press, 2014.
Kraynak, Robert P. ,The Origins of “Social Justice” in the Natural Law Philosophy of Antonio Rosmini, The Review of Politics 80 (2018), 3–29, University of Notre Dam.
Justice, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Social Justice in an Open World: The Role of the United Nations
Berlin, Isaiah, “TWO CONCEPTS OF LIBERTY,” Four Essays On Liberty, (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 118-172.
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