F.A. Hayek on Social Justice (Firing Line, 1977)
See everybody talks about social justice but if you press people to explain to you what they mean by social justice, nobody knows. I am telling you because I’ve been trying for the past 20 years, asking people, what really are your principles of social justice?
40 years later, this is still unanswerable
don’t most people refer to “social justice” as being many individual acts of injustice that happen to fit into a common pattern?
I mean like “individual height” vs. “average height”; if the average height of a country declines over time that is a meaningful statistic, even though it is just a way of accumulating lots of individual heights.
I think it’s partly a kind of selective belief in Collective Intergenerational Justice, the instincts of which would normally be to prevent something like an outside country coming in, taking all your land, and then normalizing it on the next generation, with the ethical hit only applying to the invading generation.
The problem is that Collective Intergenerational Justice is the basis of ethnic revenge killings, wars, etc, and is generally just a bad idea. It becomes more obvious how questionable it is once you realize it can’t just be applied to [LOCAL ETHNIC MAJORITY], since many [LOCALLY OPPRESSED ETHNIC MINORITY] had ancestors of the same ethnicity that engaged in widespread slaving, sexual violence, and conquest.