Justice versus Social Justice; J. Hospers

to Aristotle, means treating individ uals in accordance with their deserts. If a teacher gives a student a C when the student deserves a B, the low grade is an injustice to the student. It is equally an injustice when the teacher gives her an A which she doesn't deserve. Though the student is not likely to complain of her grade in the second case, it is an injustice all the same, since it is treatment that is not in accord with desert. Moreover, every case of an unde served high grade involves a dimi nution of the value of the grade; the more numerous the B students who get undeserved A's, the less the grade of A comes to mean, and the less it distinguishes the genuine A student from the others. There are some distinctions about justice which should be kept in mind before we apply them to particular cases. 9 10 THE FREEMAN January Distinctions About Justice 1. Justice has to do with the treat ment of persons by other persons.

The lion is not being unjust to the antelope in killing it. The lion is not a moral agent, and no right or wrong, no justice or injustice, is involved. If a child is born crippled or dis eased, this is a misfortune but not an injustice. Injustice requires some person or persons to perpetrate the injustice. (Even those who say that God caused the baby to be born crip pled or diseased are not likely to accuse God of injustice.) Congenital deformity is something that unfor tunately occurs, but it is not some thing that someone has done to someone else; no person has wronged another. 2. Justice depends on desert, and desert is a matter of past perfor mance, not of future possibilities. The grade a student deserves in a course depends upon his past record of achievement in the course. If a man deserves a punishment for a crime, it is because that person com mitted a crime in the past, not be cause (for example) it would be use ful to punish him as a scapegoat; punishing the inn~cent is always un just. Nor is it just to punish him be cause he might commit a crime in the future. Preventive detention of persons believed to be dangerous is sometimes used as a utilitarian measure, to prevent the commission of crimes in the future, but this is done from considerations of utility, not of justice. (Justice is not the whole of morality, and whether preventive detention is ever justified would have to be argued separately.1) 3. Sometimes a law itself is un just; if every driver who parked too long at a parking meter were to be given a prison sentence, such a law, however impartially administered, would be unjust because the sen tence is harsher than the offense de serves. But more often it is the administration of the law that" is un just; one man gets five years for armed robbery and another man guilty of the same offense is given a suspended sentence, or convinces the jury that he is insane, thus receiving an insanity verdict which may let him out in sixty days. Such malad ministration of the law is often called comparative injustice. Many prison ers who accept full responsibility for their actions and do not claim that their sentences are undeserved, still complain of comparative injustice: why were they sentenced when someone equally guilty was let go?

Their sentence may itself not have been unjust, but the injustice lies in the lightness or absence of the other person's sentence compared with theirs. Justice is compatible with forgive ness if the person deserves to be for1985 JUSTICE VS. "SOCIAL JUSTICE" 11 given. But the only person who can forgive the aggressor is the victim. If the offender asked the person he injured "Will you forgive me?" and the victim said "No," and a stranger then entered the room and said "That's all right, I forgive you," the stranger could only utter the words, not actually extend the forgiveness; only the aggrieved party can do that. "I don't want the mother to embrace the oppressor who threw her son to the dogs!" wrote Dostoyevsky. "She dare not forgive him! Let her forgive him for herself, if she will, let her forgive the torturer for the immea surable suffering of her mother's heart. But the sufferings of her tor tured child she has no right to forgive."2 As opposed to forgiving, pardoning is a legal act: a president or a gov ernor may pardon a criminal. Is par doning compatible with justice?

Again yes, if the person deserves to be pardoned. 4. Justice is a very different thing from mercy, and mercy may be at odds with justice. "But shouldn't jus tice be tempered with mercy?" Let us consider what this would involve. Suppose that five men have com mitted murder, but one of them is let go as an example of mercy. This is surely a comparative injustice to the other four, as well as an injustice to the one who is let go (assuming that he deserves the assigned punishment). If mercy is so wonderful, why shouldn't every criminal be let go? That would really be merciful! Why shouldn't every teacher give every student an A as an act of mercy? Be cause, of course, this would be a great injustice, especially to the students deserving A's. It would also be mercy to give everyone ajob demanding lit erary skill, even to persons who are illiterate-and more merciful still to give them wages for doing nothing at all. Mercy in this sense would mean a total abandonment of jus tice. (Mercy in a much different sense, such as "giving the defendant the benefit of the doubt" in criminal cases [procedural justice ], giving him a chance to improve his conduct, etc., is desirable enough, but these are al ready incorporated in the notion of just treatment; they are included in justice, they do not supersede it.) Justice vs. Collectivism 5. Most important of all, justice is individualistic: since the deserts of individuals differ from one another, so should their rewards and punish ments differ from one another. That is why Aristotle said that justice consists of "treating equals equally, and unequals unequally." If five per sons have committed no crime and five other persons have committed crimes with a one-year sentence at tached, it would be unjust to average out all their records and condemn all ten to six months in jail. The inno12 THE FREEMAN January cent do not deserve the sentence, and the guilty do. Justice is not a matter of averaging; it is a matter of as signing to each individual his or her proper desert.

The example just given illustrates the opposite of justice, namely col lectivism: that is, not considering a person's individual deserts but con sidering his behavior solely as a member of some group. Suppose someone in tribe A has killed a man in tribe B, and in retaliation the members of tribe B conduct a mas sacre of the entire tribe A. Only one of the members of tribe A was guilty of murder, but all his fellow tribes men are killed, not because they were involved in the killing but sim ply because they were members of the same tribe as the killer. Such tribal retaliations, though common in primitive societies, are grOE1S in justices because they involve the punishment of those who do not de serve it. (A variant of this occurs when the members of tribe B select a member of tribe A at random and kill him, even though the person killed was not. the person who was guilty; he was selected not because he was guilty, but simply because he happened to belong to the same tribe as someone who was.) Racism is a particularly perni cious form of collectivism. Persons who cast racial slurs on others are not considering the individual mer its or demerits of the person slurred; they may not know the individual at all, except that he is a member of some racial group (Jews, blacks, Ital ians, etc.). Though the person's in dividual qualities may be quite dif ferent from many other members of the group, all this is ignored: all they know or care is that he is a member of that group. "A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race-and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin. It is hard to say which is the more outrageous injustice: the claim of Southern racists that a N e gro genius should be treated as in ferior because his race has 'pro duced' some brutes, or the claim of a Nazi brute to the status of a su peri or because his race has 'pro duced' Goethe, Schiller, and Brahms."3 Vagueness of "Desert"

All might agree that justice is treatment in accord with desert, and yet they might disagree on particu lar judgments about justice because they do not agree on what particular punishment, grade, compensation, etc. a person deserves. Everyone agrees that a murderer should be punished, but there is much disa greement about what specific pun ishment is deserved: should it be the death penalty? should it be life im prisonment? should it be imprison ment for a stated term with possi1985 JUSTICE VS. "SOCIAL JUSTICE" 13 bility of parole? should it involve incarceration in a prison, or would duty on a work farm suffice? There is general agreement about the severity of various offenses: mur der, which takes away the victim's life, is a worse crime than assault and battery, from which a victim may recover and resume his life thereafter; crimes against the per son are worse than crimes against property, which can usually be re placed; and so on. Yet this is not al ways so: there are forms of mutila tion that are worse than death, and the theft of a valued and irreplace able family heirloom may be a worse loss to the victim than being mugged. Since each case is unique, it is necessary to describe in detail the circumstances of each case in or der to form any estimate of the per son's desert.

Even with such a detailed descrip tion, along with a sincere attempt to empathize with the situation of both parties, there will be disagreement about desert. A woman will ordinar ily recommend a severer punish ment for rape than a man will. A wife will tend to be more sympathetic to the position of a wife in divorce court, and a husband will tend to be more sympathetic with the husband. Those who do not care about animals will tend to be immune to pleas about cruelty to animals. "Put himself in the other person's place" is a piece of advice that most individuals can practice only very incompletely; and even when they try, they will be likely to favor those who have been in situations similar to their own. A criminal will be likely to be more concerned with the treatment of prisoners, but a person who has been stabbed is more likely to identify with the victims of stab bing and less likely to be worried about how the aggressor is treated in prison. This ineradicable "human equation" will probably color all of a person's judgments about deserts even a judge's.

Is the Punishment Deserved? In all this, however, it must be kept in mind that the only consideration relevant to justice is whether the treatment (the punishment, the re ward, the grade, the compensation for work done) is deserved. Punish ment should be proportional to de sert, whatever that may be; it should not be proportioned to the usefulness of the punishment, as it is in utili tarian theory. The question for jus tice is "What punishment does he deserve?" not "What punishment would be most socially useful?" As a rule the two tend to coincide: the most serious crimes (involving the worst injustices) tend to be those that also require the strongest deterrent measures in order to prevent them from recurring. But it is not always so. It might be socially useful, es pecially during a crime wave, to con14 THE FREEMAN January vict an innocent person and punish him as an example, thus deterring potential lawbreakers and giving the members of the community a re newed sense of "law and order." But of course the conviction of an inno cent person, no matter what its so cial utility, is always an injustice, because the innocent person does not deserve to be punished.

When we turn our attention from the prison to the marketplace, we face equally pressing problems. What should be our criteria for de termining what compensation a worker deserves? Is there such a thing as a "just wage" and how do we determine it? Does justice com mit us to "equal pay for equal work"? Is discrimination in hiring unjust? Does the free market, when it is per mitted to function, result in injustice? "Equal Pay for Equal Work" Does justice require that employ ees receive equal pay for equal work? That depends on what "equal work" means: 1. If it simply means equal time spent, this has very little to do with justice. One employee may work dil igently throughout the workday, and another may spend half her time on the phone with her friends while let ting the customers wait in line (as frequently happens in government offices, such as the Department of Motor Vehicles). To give two such employees equal pay would be un just, though this is typically what occurs.

2. "Equal work" may mean equal effort expended. Two employees may each work to their full capacity dur ing the workday-they both "do their best." Should they receive equal pay? Again,. not necessarily. The one may have more background and ex perience and expertise in the job than the other; and ordinarily more experienced employees do, quite justly, receive more. Also, in any kind of job requiring imagination, one person may exert maximum ef fort and produce little or nothing, while the other may with less than maximum effort achieve brilliant re sults. Doesn't the second deserve a higher return? (If he didn't receive it, another employer who appreci ated ingenuity and initiative would probably hire him at a higher wage.) But if both exert that same effort, and the difference is that the second employee is brilliant and the first is dull and rather stupid, isn't it unfair (unjust) to penalize the dull em ployee for a quality, such as uni maginativeness, which he lacks through no fault of his own? If they're both doing their best, why give less to the dull one? Isn't this an injustice? No: it's true that it's not the dull person's fault that he is not as gifted, but his lack of intelligence 1985 JUSTICE VS. "SOCIAL JUSTICE" 15 is a misfortune (like a disease), not an injustice imposed on him by other persons.

3. But "equal work" can also mean the product of effort, namely achievement. A student who de serves and receives an A in mathe matics may have a great natural ap titude for it, and may work far less hard than a duller student d,idfor his B or C. But the grade is a 'measure of achievement, not of effort or time expended. The employee in a factory whose productivity is high (either in quantity or in quality, or both) de serves higher pay, having contrib uted the most to the organization that employs him. If high achievers receive higher compensation, this is hardly an injustice. Justice and Job-Discrimination But of course not everyone does re ceive higher pay for higher achieve ment. Some employees are compen sated less because of their race or sex; some are turned down as appli cants because of this, before they have a chance to achieve anything in a job at all. Isn't this an injustice?

And doesn't justice demand, as "af firmative action" programs insist, that the injustice be rectified by giv ing the victims of discrimination preference in jobs available now? That depends. (1) Ifit is not you but your ancestors who have been the victims of discrimination, then giving special consideration to you in no way helps them. To hire an under qualified applicant because his great-grandfather was a slave, is no help to the deceased slave; a grave injustice was done, but nothing can be done now to remedy that injustice. To reward someone now because an other member of the same racial group was once penalized is sheet collecti vism. (2) But if the person himself has been discriminated against in the past, measures can usually be taken to correct it: past injustices can often be corrected. (a) You may have been the victim of job-discrimination because the ed ucational facilities in your neigh borhood were poor; you never learned to write or add properly so as to be qualified for any decently paying job. To hire the underquali fied person anyway is no solution: it is not just to students to inflict on them a poor teacher because (for rea sons that are not, or not entirely, her fault) she was discriminated against in the past. And to the extent that such hiring is practiced, the stu dents in a school or fellow employees in a factory come to view the new employee as a case of "sympathy hiring," rather than hiring on the basis of genuine qualifications for the position; which does nothing whatever either to improve the qual ity of the instruction or to promote harmony among races.

16 THE FREEMAN January On-the-job training may help to remedy this defect-a device that many employers use. And in the longer run, changing the educa tional system so that these radical disparities in educational back ground no longer occur, is even more effective. But hiring an incompetent employee is only an attempt to cor rect one past injustice by perpetrat ing another one. Curing Past Discrimination by New Discrimination (b) Suppose, however, that of two applicants for a job, A, who is black, is more qualified than B, who is white, but B gets the job because he is white. This is certainly a case of job-discrimination on account of race. The question is how to remedy it. Suppose the position falls vacant; should A, who was turned down be fore, now be hired in preference to the other new applicant, C? If they are equally qualified, yes: this would help at least to correct a past injus tice. But suppose that C is more qualified than A is. Then hiring A rather than the more qualified C constitutes an injustice to C. (It's not C's fault that she is white, any more than it was A's fault that she is black.) There are many such cases in which acts of past discrimination can be corrected only by committing an other act of unfair discrimination in the present, thus perpetuating discrimination, not eliminating it. If a past act of injustice can be remedied by creating another one in the pres ent, it may be that the cure is worse than the disease; perhaps it would be preferable, rather than to commit a second injustice to correct the first, simply to say no to any such discrim ination in the future. In that case, we hire whomever is most qualified for the job, regardless of the race; and if by this procedure a past act of un fair discrimination remains uncor rected (for this time only), at least no future acts of discrimination need occur as a result. 4 Other Aspects of Job Discrimination 1. It has been assumed thus far that one's race or sex is irrelevant to one's qualifications for a job. But this, of course, is not always the case.

An employer is not necessarily treat ing an applicant unjustly if he hires a man rather than a woman as a bodyguard or as a bouncer in a bar; the woman is turned down not be cause of her sex but because she lacks the physical qualifications for the job. Similarly, a white actor is not being unjustly treated in being passed over for the role of Othello, which requires a black actor to take the part. If justice in hiring is based on one's qualifications for the job, sometimes a person may lack the qualifications precisely because of sex or race.

1985 JUSTICE V8. "SOCIAL JUSTICE" 17 2. It is worth noting that most ern ployers will not turn down a quali fied black applicant in favor of a less qualified white applicant, even if only for reasons of self-interest: his company will prosper only if he takes on the most qualified applicants, re gardless of race or sex. Why is the percentage of unemployed black teenagers almost 50% today, whereas it was less than 10% in the late 1940s? It is not because employ ers have suddenly turned racist; it is because government interferences in the marketplace, which were in tended to help minorities, have ac tually hurt them. For example, min imum-wage laws have prevented many teenagers from being offered summer jobs, and from receiving on the-job training (since before they acquire a skill the employer would lose money by hiring them at the le gal minimum wage). There are countless. examples of this, and a reading of Markets and Minorities by the distinguished black econo mist Thomas Sowell should be suffi cient to convince anyone of it, pop ular propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding. 5 3. One should keep in mind the dif ference between justice and rights.

Many would contend, as I would, that no one has a right to a job:. for example, no employer should be forced by law to hire an employee he doesn't need, or even to hire an employee he doesn't want on his pay roll; if it's his own money he's dis pensing (and risking), he is within his rights to hire whom he pleases. If he is a racist who refuses to hire blacks or Mexicans, he may well suf fer economically for his prejudices: if he fails to avail himself of many of his best qualified applicants, he will himself be the loser, especially when his non-racist competitor employs them; but that is a punishment he takes on himself by being a racist. Many employers may have racist feelings, but if they want to stay in business they do not let these feel ings get in the way of their pocketbooks. His failure to hire certain persons is, then, not a violation of the rights of those whom he fails to employ; no one has a right to a job that another person has to pay for. But in refusing to hire those applicants who are most qualified, he is committing an injus tice, because he is not treating oth ers in accordance with their deserts.

The right to so treat them is not in compatible with his being unjust in so treating them. Whether the law should prohibit so treating them de pends on one's view of the law: whether one believes, as the Found ing Fathers (on the whole) did, that the law should prohibit only viola tions of rights, or whether (as on more recent views) the law should intervene also whenever there are cases of injustice.

18 THE FREEMAN January Justice and the Market It has often been alleged that the free-market system is unjust. Criti cisms of the free market constitute a very high percentage of the content of most college courses in ethics and social philosophy. It may be granted at once that no system is entirely just in every detail; there will always be cases of injustice. But the market system is by far the least unjust of all economic systems. The Soviet Union does not have a market economy. A worker's pay de pends not on his actual merit or pro ductivity, but on what the bureau crats in charge decide to pay each worker in a given category. The gov ernment decides that teachers shall receive a higher wage than physi cians, and that factory workers shall receive a higher wage than filing clerks. Theoretically at least, each worker in a given category is sup posed to earn the same-the as sumption being that each one is maximally dedicated to the ideals of communism and therefore will exert maximum effort and achieve maxi mum productivity during his hou~s at work. How does this system work out in practice? A description by someone who defected from it pro vides a dramatic illustration: Nobody in the bus factory was in a hurry to work; the workers preferred to sit in the smoking room until the fore man appeared, when they all dashed to their places. "Why should we hurry for the money they pay us?" said the work men. "Work's not a wolf, it won't run into the forest!" In the mornings they were almost all drunk or hung over, and throughout the working day people would be regularly detailed to slip over the fence for some vodka. Only one man put in a full day's work. The rest hated him, and when pointing him out would rotate one finger meaningfully by the temple. They were always looking for chances to do him dirt, either by surreptitiously damaging his machine or by stealing his tools.

"Want to be a champion and raise the targets?" they said spitefully. It turned out that if one man exceeded the target, the target would be raised for·all of them the following month, and they would have to work twice as hard for exactly the same money. 6 The injustice of a system that pe nalizes the dedicated worker is too obvious to require comment-not to mention the effects on the worker himself: nothing ruins the morale of a human being more than being pe nalized for doing a good job. Market Rewards A market economy, by contrast, re wards initiative and enterprise. Not every employer recognizes talent immediately: there may be a period in which he pays a certain employee less than he would if he knew the employee's true worth. Yet the ten dency in a market economy is for each person to rise to the limit of his ability. Since there are competing employers, if one employer doesn't 1985 JUSTICE VS. "SOCIAL JUSTICE" 19 recognize his worth, another one is likely to do so.

Don't those who work in SOIne kinds of jobs deserve more pay than others? Yes, and the market sorts this out also. A person who does dan gerous work, such as walking along the catwalk of a high bridge for safety inspection, is not likely to take such a job unless in doing so he earns more than he would as a janitor. Nor is a person likely to spend years of his youth going through medical school if at the end of the road he earned no more than he would have as a dishwasher. And a physician with a good record of curing diseases is likely to have more patients than one with a bad record; and doesn't the first physician deserve his greater reward? There is no one wage which one can describe as ajust wage (surely this depends on the health of the economy, and what em ployers can afford to pay): if one wants a definition of ajust wage, one could simply say that it is the wage that one's services can command on a free market. The fact that some persons' labor is worth more than others' is largely taken account of by the market itself.

A foreman complains that the manager who sits behind a desk all day receives more pay than he does. But the manager has the responsi bility of coordinating workers' ef forts and turning out a quality prod uct. And the president of the firm, who earns more than the manager, has the awesome responsibility of trying to anticipate next year's mar ket, and thus deciding how much of what to produce, what materials to order and from whom; on such de cisions depends the continued exis tence of the firm. Doesn't the successful discharge of such respon sibilities merit a higher income? Workmen and foremen who later be come managers and members of the board seldom complain any longer about the disparity in income. There are those who say that no one deserves the high pay received by some executives and corporation heads-that such high incomes somehow constitute an injustice. But what if the executive who receives $500,000 a year is talented and in genious enough to save the company two million dollars a year without sacrificing quality of product? He has certainly been worth more than his pay to the company. The stockhold ers are anxious enough to pay him this, and even more rather than see him captured by another company.

Should they be prohibited from pay ing him what they believe he deserves? Misfortune vs. Injustice If someone is unemployed because there is no longer any demand for his skill, he will have to set about ac quiring another. But where is the in justice in this? Who is the perpetra20 THE FREEMAN January tor of the alleged injustice? The buggy-maker who no longer has any demand for buggies? Wouldn't it be unjust to the buggy-maker to force him to retain a worker he doesn't need, when most customers are buy ing cars instead of buggies? Or suppose a man does have a mar ketable skill but at the moment there are no openings in his area. Is this unjust? It is unfortunate for him that he must either be unemployed or change jobs or move to another area, but there is no one who can be accused of treating him unjustly. The more a free market is permitted to operate, the more likely it is that he will soon find an outlet for his skills.

Again, his unemployment may be a temporary misfortune, but not an injustice. Suppose a farmer decides to grow soybeans this year, endeavoring to enrich the soil and to increase the output of the same product that made him considerable money last year. But suppose that many other farmers have the same idea, and as a result there is an overproduction of soybeans and the price of soybeans this year suffers a sharp decline. This is simply a reality of the mar ket: "Given constant demand, if there's more of a product the value of each unit declines." Is this an in justice to the farmer? If the farmer's crops are lost through drought or flood, this is a misfortune, not an injustice; but the fact that other farmers also planted soybeans is a deliberately under taken human action, not a condition of nature. Still, where is the injus tice? If the farmer had been wise, perhaps he should have planted something else this year; but how is the fact that other farmers also wanted to make money by planting soybeans an injustice to him? If he can plant soybeans, why can't they?

It may be a misfortune that too many are grown this year and a surplus re sults; but where is the injustice? Who has been unjust to whom? If he had a reason to anticipate what other farmers would do, he is stuck with the results of bad planning on his part; but if he had no way of know ing, the financial loss can be de scribed only as a misfortune, not as an injustice. Justice vs. "Social Justice" Those who are engaged in "social engineering" often characterize the concept of individual justice, de scribed above, as outdated. What we need, they say, is social justice. 7 But what exactly does this term mean? If justice is treatment in ac cord with desert, and deserts are un equal, then justice demands that treatments also be unequal. If every one were given the same wage re gardless of effort or achievement, we would have a society in which hardly anyone would choose to work at all; in the end there would be nothing 1985 JUSTICE VS. "SOCIAL JUSTICE" 21 left to distribute, and starvation would stalk the land. The ideal of justice as complete egalitarianism everyone receives the same regard less of who does what or how much, or even if they do nothing at all-is contradicted by the most elementary facts of reality. It is not the idea of forcible redistribution that deters egalitarians-they have no objec tions at all to that-but only the fact that once the goose has been killed it can lay no more eggs.

Proponents of "social justice" do not, then, usually demand that every person (or every family) receive the same income. For reasons of sheer survival, this is not done even in the Soviet Union. What the proponents of "social justice" do demand, how ever, is that everyone, regardless of effort, ability, or achievement, re ceive a "decent standard ofliving" which in urban America may in clude not only food, clothing, and shelter, but a telephone, a television set, and convenient means of trans portation as "necessities of life." And who shall be required to pay for these things? Those whose income is higher; "justice demands" that those who are "more fortunate" be re quired to contribute to those who are "less fortunate." These are the pop ular name tags, and the underlying assumption is that if one person has more and another less, this is solely a matter of "luck" or "fortune," as if somehow individual ability and initiative had nothing to do with im proving one's lot.

It is far from clear, however, how A being forced to give part of his pay check to B is an example of justice: it would seem to be a case of injustice to A, and a windfall for B. And even if such transfer payments should be made, should they be done in the name of justice? The basis of justice is desert; the basis of charity is need: in charity, we give to others because they need it; in justice, we receive compensation (or punishment) be cause we deserve it. The difference between justice and charity should not be obscured. The "Underprivileged" and Why They Are Poor The poor are usually classified as "unfortunate" or "underprivi leged," as if those who earned more had purposely deprived them. But this label, which social planners au tomatically attach to everyone who is below a certain level of income, ap plies only to some of them, certainly not to all. We must first investigate, which social planners almost never do, why they are poor.

1. Suppose a neighbor of yours is about to make an investment which you know to be fraudulent: he will lose everything if he makes the in vestment. Undeterred by your pleas, he does it anyway, and the result is that he loses everything. Would most 22 THE FREEMAN January people, including champions of "so cial justice," be willing to hand over part of their paychecks in perpetuity to a person who has merely been foolish? 2. Suppose a lady has been thrifty all her life, saved for her old age, and has a small house and yard; a second lady, with considerably more in come, spent it all on riotous living and is now destitute. Should the first lady be required to give over part of her limited income each month to the second? (That is the way things work out under the current welfare sys tem; but is this justice?) 3. Assume that a worker has been able to pay into old-age insurance but simply failed to do so, spending everything she earned. Now she is destitute. Should others, who have provided in advance for their old age, be forced to hand over a portion of their savings to the person who has not so provided? To do so may be charitable, but is it just?

4. Now let us take a different kind of case. A person is ill or has a phys ical handicap which does not enable her to work; she would like to, but she can't and her family has no re sources. Shouldn't "society" take care of her? Coercive or Voluntary This is certainly the best case for welfare; but the question remains whether it should be government welfare (compulsorily paid by all wage earners) or privately financed welfare (voluntarily contributed by those who are able). Though the matter would require a lengthy dis cussion that is not possible here, I suggest that the persons who answer to this description are a compara tively small minority of the popu lation, and that, once the enormous ball-and-chain of high taxation (in cl uding social security payments) was removed from every wage earner, and would-be entrepreneurs could start small businesses and take on employees without the present high probability that their enter prises will be bankrupted by taxes and regulation, there would be such a resurgence of prosperity that gov ernment welfare would be quite un necessary: private funding would be quite adequate to the task, as it was during the first century of American history when the standards of living were much lower than they are now.8 Herbert Spencer was much wiser than today's planners when in 1884 he criticized "the tacit assumption that Government should step in whenever anything is not going right. 'Surely you would not have this misery continue!' exclaims someone, if you hint at demurrer to much that is now being said and done. Observe what is implied by this exclamation. It takes for granted, first, that all suffering ought to be prevented, which is not true; much of the suffering is cura1985 JUSTICE VS. "SOCIAL JUSTICE" 23 Supporters of Schemes THE hardworked and over-burdened who form the great majority, and still more the incapables perpetually helped who are ever led to look for more help, are ready supporters of schemes which promise them this or the other benefit by State-agency, and ready believers of those who tell them that such benefits can be given, and ought to be given....

Indeed the more numerous public instrumentalities become, the more is there generated in citizens the notion that everything is to be done for them, and nothing by them. Each generation is made less familiar with the attainment of desired ends by individual actions or private com binations, and more familiar with the attainment of them by govern mental agencies; until, eventually, governmental agencies come to be thought of as the only available agencies. HERBERT SPENCER, The Man VB. the State tive, and the prevention of it is pre vention of a remedy. In the second place, it takes for granted that every evil can be removed: the truth being that, with the existing defects of hu man nature, many evils can only be thrust out of one place or form into another place or form-often being increased by the change. "Theexc1amation also implies the unhesitating belief ... that evils of all kinds should be dealt with by the State. There does not occur the in quiry whether there are at work other agencies capable of dealing with evils, and whether the evils in question may not be among those which are best dealt with by these other agencies. And obviously, the more numerous governmental interventions become, the more con firmed does this habit of thought grow, and the more loud and perpet ual the demands for intervention."gTry Freedom With an unfettered economy, and a minimum of charity (and most Americans have more than a mini mum), the problem of poverty would become almost obsolete. Economist Thomas Sowell may have overstated the case, but he had a valid point when, in answering the question "How to get rid of poverty?" he an swered, "Hold a meeting of all the leading experts on poverty some where in the middle of the Pacific and not let them go home for ten years. When they came back, they 24 THE FREEMAN would discover there was no more poverty."10 It will be apparent by now that the demands of "social justice" are in compatible with those of individual justice; to the extent that the first demand is met, the second must be sacrificed. If the government takes money out of Peter's wallet to put it in Paul's, it may have achieved greater equality, but not greater jus tice. It is impossible for individuals to receive a just wage on a free mar ket and then be forced to part with a portion of it, for then they receive less than a just wage.

The final irony is that the ideals of the champions of "social justice" are not even achieved when they are put fully into practice. Because people will not-and cannot-produce in definitely without compensation, the final result of massive transfer pay ments is equality of zero-universal destitution. That, after all, is how the excesses of the late Roman wel fare state gave way to the desti tution of the Dark Ages. ll It has happened many times in history, and it could happen again if the proponents of "social justice" -that is, enforced collectivism-push their demands so far as to cancel out the requirements of individual justice. ® -FOOTNOTESlSee, for example, Frederick Schoeman, "On Incapacitating the Dangerous," in John Ar thur and William Shaw, eds., Readings in the Philosophy ofLaw (Prentice-Hall, 1984), and in Joel Feinberg and Hyman Gross, eds., Philos ophy of Law (Wadsworth, 1981).

2Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Kara mazov, Modern Library edition, p. 254. (First published 1882.) 3Ayn Rand, "Racism," in The Virtue of Sel fishness (Signet Books, 1964). 4See Louis Katzner, "Is the Favoring of Women and Blacks in Employment and Edu cational Opportunities Justified?" in Feinberg and Gross, Philosophy of Law. - 5See also Walter Williams, The State Versus Blacks (McGraw-Hill, 1982); Warren Brookes, The Economy in Mind (Universe Books, 1982). 6Vladimir Bukofsky, To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter (Viking Press, 1977), p. 123. 7See , for example, Richard Brandt, ed., Social Justice (Prentice-Hall, 1962); Nicholas Rescher, Welfare (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972); Norman E. Bowie, Distributive Justice (Uni versity of Massachusetts Press, 1971); Robin Barrow, Injustice, Inequality, and Ethics (Barnes & Noble, 1982); Michael Bayles, Prin ciples of Legislation (Wayne State University Press, 1978).

8See , for example, Henry Hazlitt, The Con quest of Poverty (Arlington House, 1978). 9Herbert Spencer, The Man 'versus the State (Caxton Press, 1940), pp. 34-35. Originally published 1884. See also John Hospers, Liber tarianism (Laissez Faire Books, 1971), Chap ter 7. lOThomas Sowell, in Reason, December 1980 issue, p. 5. USee Ludwig von Mises, Human Action (Reg nery, 1945), esp. pp. 767-769; also Isabel Pa terson, The God of the Machine (Caxton Press, 1943), pp. 38-40.