Editing Social justice (section)

== Criticism ==
{{Criticism section|date=August 2023}}
[[Michael Novak]] argues that social justice has seldom been adequately defined. He wrote:
{{blockquote|[W]hole books and treatises have been written about social justice without ever defining it. It is allowed to float in the air as if everyone will recognize an instance of it when it appears. This vagueness seems indispensable. The minute one begins to define social justice, one runs into embarrassing intellectual difficulties. It becomes, most often, a term of art whose operational meaning is, "We need a law against that." In other words, it becomes an instrument of ideological intimidation, for the purpose of gaining the power of legal coercion.<ref name="Novak, Michael 2000">Novak, Michael. "Defining social justice." First things (2000): 11-12.</ref>}}

[[Friedrich Hayek]] of the [[Austrian School]] of economics rejected the very idea of social justice as meaningless, self-contradictory, and ideological, believing that to realize any degree of social justice is unfeasible, and that the attempt to do so must destroy all liberty. He wrote:
{{blockquote|There can be no test by which we can discover what is 'socially unjust' because there is no subject by which such an injustice can be committed, and there are no rules of individual conduct the observance of which in the market order would secure to the individuals and groups the position which as such (as distinguished from the procedure by which it is determined) would appear just to us. [Social justice] does not belong to the category of error but to that of nonsense, like the term 'a moral stone'.<ref>Hayek, F.A. (1982). ''Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol. 2''. Routledge. p. 78.</ref>}}

Hayek argued that proponents of social justice often present it as a moral virtue but most of their descriptions pertain to impersonal states of affairs (e.g. income inequality or poverty), which are cited as "social injustice". Hayek argued that social justice is either a virtue or it is not. If it is, it can only be ascribed to the actions of individuals; however, most who use the term ascribe it to social systems, so ''social justice'' in fact describes a regulative principle of order; they are interested not in virtue but power.<ref name="Novak, Michael 2000"/> For Hayek, this notion of social justices presupposes that people are guided by specific external directions rather than internal, personal rules of just conduct. It further presupposes that one can never be held accountable for ones own behaviour, as this would be "blaming the victim". According to Hayek, the function of social justice is to blame someone else, often attributed to "the system" or those who are supposed, mythically, to control it. Thus, it is based on the appealing idea of "you suffer; your suffering is caused by powerful others; these oppressors must be destroyed."<ref name="Novak, Michael 2000"/> Ben O'Neill of the [[University of New South Wales]] and the [[Mises Institute]] argues:
{{blockquote|[For advocates of social justice] the notion of "rights" is a mere term of entitlement, indicative of a claim for any possible desirable good, no matter how important or trivial, abstract or tangible, recent or ancient. It is merely an assertion of desire, and a declaration of intention to use the language of rights to acquire said desire.

In fact, since the program of social justice inevitably involves claims for government provision of goods, paid for through the efforts of others, the term actually refers to an intention to use ''force'' to acquire one's desires. Not to earn desirable goods by rational thought and action, production and voluntary exchange, but to go in there and forcibly take goods from those who can supply them!<ref>O'Neill, Ben (16 March 2011) [https://mises.org/daily/5099/The-Injustice-of-Social-Justice The Injustice of Social Justice] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20141028092912/http://mises.org/daily/5099/The-Injustice-of-Social-Justice |date=28 October 2014 }}, ''[[Mises Institute]]''</ref>}}

Psychologist [[Steven Pinker]] argues that social justice "sees society as a struggle for power, also zero-sum, among different sexes, sexual orientations, and races [and] also has a contempt for science".<ref name="Robinson 2018">{{Cite journal |last=Robinson |first=Nathan J. |date=May 28, 2018 |title=In Defense Of Social Justice |url=https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2018/05/in-defense-of-social-justice |access-date=2023-08-14 |journal=Current Affairs}}</ref> Media commentator [[Jordan Peterson]] argues that social justice promotes collectivism and sees individuals as "essentially a member of a group" and "not essentially an individual". He also argues that social justice "view[s] the world" as "a battleground between groups of different power".<ref name="Robinson 2018" />