The Quest for Social Justice

The quest for social justice is a society's demand upon its government to live up to the terms of the social contract, i.e., do its duty in the performance of the contract.

As I am interpreting John Locke, government is to protect the individual as expressed in his right of freedom. In the American experience this right is stated as the right of the individual to pursue personal happiness. A right is like a natural propensity towards self-preservation, even as conscience is a natural "reminder" to do the morally right thing. In Abraham Maslow's terms, the right of freedom is a bodily striving toward self-actualization, which is to maintain a developed self in harmony with itself and others.

Indeed, it is natural for the citizen to appeal to his government whenever he thinks he is being harmed, or whenever he believes his lot would be improved if some obstacle impeding him in his pursuit of well-being could be overcome through governmental action on his behalf.

Government will not always respond favorably to society's demand for action, however. But it sometimes does, especially if there are many, many in the society who want the same thing. When government does act upon a societal insistence, it does so by instituting some governmental program aimed at meeting the demand to the extent it enhances the individual's well-being.

Mark Latour in his book American Government and the Vision of the Democrats, 2007, sees the social contract as the basis for appealing to government in the social quest for improving the the citizen's quality of life. I think his point of view is the essence of Lockean theory. And we know that throughout history the individual has bettered himself, his living conditions, and his health by reaching out to government, whether tribal or more organized.

Latour discerns that with the thrust to improve comes a societal counter-reaction to hold on to what is and not to rock the boat, so to speak. There certainly is something in everyman to stay the course, and keep doing what has been successful in the past. I think this is also part of the self-preservation "instinct"--not to move too fast so as to sow the seeds of self-destruction. Government doesn't want to go bankrupt through some project it couldn't really afford, either.

Nor does government want to engage in some project of social change without sufficient reason for justifying the program. Justification is in terms of improving the quality of life of the citizenry, as Latour makes explicit. I think Latour's application of the concept of the social contract is profound, but let's see what happens when we apply it to the current political affairs in the US.

The government programs of social security, unemployment insurance, medicare, fair labor laws and OSHA working condition rules are instances of social programs intended to improve the working man's life--signifcantly.

Nonetheless, there exists in the citizenry an adamantly resistant number who protest these programs. For social justice is always a quest from what has been the policies in the past to what are the policies that improve the quality of life henceforth.

Government is also called upon to defend the individual against those powerful groups who would cause him harm or jeopardize his freedom toward self-actualization (to use Maslow's term). To take just one case among a host of instances, the governmental agency PDA stands today as a bulwark against the pressures of the pharmaceutical industry. But to get an agency or department to stand up for the individual, there must a vocerfous outcry!

I close with a personal story. I grew up in an era when many white people believed that blacks were inferior people. Some didn't even want to touch a black, expressing the same fear that today some youth have in touching old people. These whites didn't want their children associating with black kids either.

I think it was not until the IQ testing results conducted by psychologists in the thirties and forties reported in scientific journals demonstrating that white kids and black kids had equal intelligence levels that the Supreme Court could rule with sufficient reason in favor of desegregating the schools. That ruling coupled with the distinguished record blacks achieved in WWII, I believe, led to the Civil Rights "revolution" of the 1960's, embodied in the legislation passed under President Johnson. This achievement is a clear instance of the quest for social justice, as an application of the concept of the social contract: the demands by blacks exercising their civil rights and the response of government in providing remedy to the injustices committed against them for lo these many centuries.

(Interestingly, the government that institutes the social program accrues the benefit of devotion from those who insisted upon it, such that power would greatly be increased to the ruling group.)