Many people become uncomfortable when conversation turns to social justice. That may reflect their experience of being buttonholed by unrelentingly serious people on the wrongs of the world and the need to change them. But their discomfort may also reflect a long history that goes back as far as the French Revolution with its slogan, 'Liberty, Equality and Fraternity'. Social Justice Week offers an opportunity to tease out the connections implied by this slogan.
Of the three revolutionary aspirations, liberty has come to dominate our contemporary world, particularly in its form of negative liberty – freedom from oppression and from regulations that limit personal choice, especially economic choice. The desire for individual liberty is often opposed to the desire for equality, which usually advocates some constraints on liberty. Social justice has commonly been identified with the desire for equality. So when someone raises issues of social justice their hearers fear that their individual freedom will soon be crimped in the name of state control or of the redistribution of wealth. They naturally become uncomfortable.
Missing in this tension between equality and liberty is any serious consideration of fraternity. It is usually reduced to sentiment, a generous feeling that softens the hard edge of the pursuit of equality or liberty. But fraternity lies at the heart of social justice. It counteracts a one-sided attention to equality or liberty, and is expressed in the ordering of society.
Liberty, equality and fraternity all name values that are must be respected if human beings are to flourish. Liberty protects the human desire to take responsibility for one’s life and to develop personal gifts. Equality recognises that each human being is of unique value and that no one is of more value than others. Both these values should be recognised and promoted in the regulations, practices and symbols that form the ordering of society.
Fraternity names the inescapable interdependence of human beings. No one is self-sufficient. We depend on one another at each point of our lives for shelter, for what we eat, whether we are educated, the peace and security we enjoy, for our mobility and for a market in which we can buy and sell. Fraternity dictates that each person must attend to how their own actions affect the welfare of others, and that society must encourage the development and welfare of each human being in a way that enables the growth of all.
The test of fraternity