Social Justice

For the last 50 years, debates about justice in political philosophy have focused on distributive justice – the distribution of resources between citizens – or, in John Rawls's famous terminology, the distribution of “the benefits and burdens of social cooperation” (Rawls, 1971: 4). But this way of thinking about justice has its limitations. In particular, it fails to identify the many kinds of social injustice that afflict contemporary advanced capitalist societies, including (amongst other things) sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism. Looking at the social movements that have emerged over the last 50 years reveals claims about injustice relating to identity, difference, status, and unequal power relations. Take any “new left” social movement of the 1960s–1980s (the Women's Liberation Movement, the LGBTQI+ movement, the disability rights movement, Indigenous Rights movements, etc.), or some of the most prominent movements today, such as Black Lives Matter, movements for decolonization, or trans rights, and you will see that these groups have broader demands that are not captured by the idea of distributive justice.