“I’m all for social justice but there’s nothing wrong with economic prosperity, nothing wrong at all”
I found this quote strangely fascinating, it seemed to contain just about everything. I reckon the two key terms, ’social justice’ juxtapositioned against ‘economic prosperity’ hold the roots of the hazy labels left and right.
Starting with social justice. The word ’social’ puts us into the collective, public realm. The public realm, as I’ve suggested before, consists of public goods – environment, law and order, schools, hospitals and the like. Justice, in this context, I’d suggest implies an equality of access and treatment within this public realm.
Economic prosperity, when positioned as it is here against social justice has the key difference of belonging to the individual realm. It implies an individual accumulation of economic assets to a level of abundance.
Broadly, and this does involve a bit of a jump, these two terms can be polarised into ‘left’ and ‘right’. The left would stress the importance of social justice as the foundations and primary aim of society, with economic prosperity as a bi-product. Whereas the right would argue the need for individual economic prosperity as the primary motivation for society, which will result in the most socially just outcome.
The two are of course irredeemably linked, and the debate will rest upon where we should lie in between these dichotomies.
I’d suggest that now, perhaps we’ve gone too far: to the point where economic prosperity is inhibiting social justice. These are only a few examples: a key public good, clean environment is being threatened by the pursuit for further economic prosperity of certain businesses and industries. The affordability of houses, in the UK, is being pushed beyond the reach of much of the public because conditions lie in favour of those few emassing great prosperity. Perhaps most alarming, equality under the law is being challenged. A fraud investigation envolving BAE systems arms dealings with Saudi Arabia (a dictatorship with an appalling human rights record) was blocked by the British government, and so to ensure the economic prospetity of a company, the law was not upheld.
Its all a matter of opinion of course, but I think its vital that our political debates remain here rather then getting clouded by issues such as immigration, religion, so-called morality and the celebrity status of politicians.
