"Social Justice"

Page last modified March 15, 2018.

This is an optional reading for the students in my CSC 301 Computers and Society class.

Notes on "Social Justice"

by Dr. Marek A. Suchenek

February 12, 2018

This article is posted here for in-class educational use only. No other use or uses is/are allowed.

Social justice assumes that the assets that we all have were given to us, while in most of cases we and our ancestors had to work hard to create and acquire them. It largely ignores who and how much contributed to the creation of these asets.

The above observation has some profound consequences.

Consequence 1. By making a factually false (but politically correct) assumption, the ideology of social justice provides its advocate with a tool with which he can prove virtually anything he wants.

Consequence 2. By ignoring the origin of our assets, it creates a context that is destructive to creation of these assets.

Regarding Consequence 1, it is a well-known fact from logic that one can formally and correctly prove anything from a false assumption. This fact is a consequence of the meaning of implication p => q; if p is false than the entire implication p => q is true regardless of whether q is true or false.

Below is a discussion of Consequence 2.

One may claim that we have what we have, and since there is a plenty of it, we don't have to worry about making more, focusing instead on how to distribute it evenly among all the people.

To its all Utopian appeal, such a claim goes against what most of us are doing from the first grade to retirement.

We learn from the age of seven well into our adulthood how did we manage to be so affluent and prosperous. We study our past ways in order to secure the blessings of well-being to ourselves and our posterity. We acquire knowledge that helps us to sustain the society, our group survival strategy.

Imagine, that we stopped studying Computer Science and related areas of science, mathematics, technology, and engineering, claiming that we already have computer and information technology that are working well enough for us. It seems obvious that such an abandonment would rapidly undo the unprecedented progress that has been brought about by the information revolution. The bugs, flaws, errors, and other imperfections of the existing hardware and software, as well as false or incomplete information stored in data bases and knowledge bases, would keep eroding the computer-based infrastructure to the point that one major cyber-catastrophe could wipe-out the entire civilization.

So we work hard to push the boundary of our knowledge and apply it to solve the never-ending problems that we face in order to survive (and do so in comfort and style). We have to know how did we get here in order to not lose what we and our ancestors have accomplished with enormous effort. Not doing so would be destructive to our well-being and survival.

Social justice, by ignoring the origins of our wealth and prosperity (and also the origins of our freedom), fallaciously concludes that all people are equally entitled to their shares in the said wealth and prosperity. Such an invalid conclusion is destructive to the wealth creation process. In particular, it discourages investment. Therefore, it is not surprising that the nations who made social justice their overriding value (like, for instance, Soviet Union, Socialist Cuba, and my native country, Socialist Poland) had to offer to their peoples low living standards and economic hardships.

Ethical considerations

What appears just and moral for someone who is ignorant of the source of wealth, becomes unjust and immoral once he learns about the unevenly distributed work and productivity that created the said wealth.

That's right. If some people are more productive than others, which usually comes with extraordinary effort on the part of the former, then when or where did the latter acquire their right to the fruits of work of the former? What moral axiom could possibly justify such an appropriation? A claim that some people were born to work so that some other people can eat? (I hope you don't think so.)

Why you, after you worked so hard in order to get your degree in CS or IT, would have a burden to provide for those who didn't feel like graduating from the high school or going to college? Is it because we all have the same stomachs but not the same hands and brains?

Why you, a future computer pro who have realistic expectations about how many kids you can secure good upbringing and comfortable lives for, have to work more in order to subsist children of those who were making kids while you have been studying and working? You most likely are going to do so (work more, that is), but what is a moral excuse for making you a working horse for those who do not care about birth control? Is it because some people were born to study and work while some other people were born to multiply? (I hope you don't think so.)

The above questions cannot be dismissed easily. A refusal to even consider them is going to be as destructive to our general welfare as the ignorance of the origins of wealth by the social justice warriors is going to be.

After a few generations of the mentioned above scenarios, those who have been working and producing means of survival for others will become a minority (since they were not the ones who multiplied the fastest) "democratically" ruled by the emerging majority: those who have enjoyed unfair advantage of hard work and productivity of others. After all, if you subsidize something then you are likely to see more of it.

In other words, to its all good intentions, social justice ideology - by ignoring who and how much contributed to the creation of wealth in hand - will eventually lead to a new paradigm of work exploitation of the most productive members of the society by the less productive majority in charge. And the loss of individual freedom that is a likely consequence of the majority rule will make the said explotation very difficult to abolish. Never mind that the exponential population growth that the above arrangement is doomed to cause must lead to dragging everybody, except, perhaps, for the ruling elite, back to perpetual poverty. We will discuss this phenomenon in detail in Closing Remarks at the end of the semenster.