Natural vs. Social Justice: A Core Tension

Hello! Welcome to your fourth lesson.

Introduction

In our last lesson, we explored the is-ought problem, the "guillotine" that severs factual statements from moral prescriptions. We concluded that every theory of justice must, at some level, rest on a foundational 'ought' that cannot be derived from facts alone. This forces any theorist to justify their starting principles, be it through reason, intuition, or agreement.

Today, we dive into the heart of the conflict that motivates this course. Our learning outcome is to frame the core tension between 'natural justice' (based on desert, entitlement, or natural law) and 'social justice' (based on fairness, equality, or social goals).

This tension can be understood as a fundamental disagreement about what the foundational 'ought' of justice is.

• Natural justice theories tend to argue that the 'ought' is pre-political and grounded in features of the world or the individual. Principles of desert (what you deserve for your actions) or entitlement (what you have a right to) are seen as primary. Justice means giving each person their due.
• Social justice theories typically argue that the 'ought' is a principle for structuring society itself. The focus shifts from individual deservingness to the fairness of institutions and the distribution of goods, often with a starting assumption of equality. Justice means creating a fair social arrangement.

Understanding this divide is crucial for navigating contemporary debates and for appreciating the diverse traditions in political philosophy. It directly addresses your goal of exploring the landscape of justice beyond the modern social justice paradigm.

The Case for Natural Justice: Giving Each Their Due

The idea that justice consists in giving people what they deserve is ancient, intuitive, and deeply embedded in many cultural and religious traditions. This perspective sees justice as rewarding virtue and effort, and respecting pre-existing rights and claims.

To understand this view and the challenge it faces today, let's turn to a forceful defense of it by the philosopher Louis Pojman.

Pojman captures the essence of the conflict. The natural justice tradition, rooted in thinkers from Aristotle to Locke, asserts that desert and entitlement are pre-institutional. That is, you can deserve something or be entitled to it before any specific laws or social conventions are created.

A crucial distinction within this tradition is between merit and desert.

As Pojman explains:

• Merit is about having a quality that makes you the fitting recipient of something. A tall person merits the prize for being the tallest; a person with certain genetic advantages might merit a position as an elite athlete. You don't necessarily earn your merit.
• Desert is paradigmatically tied to voluntary action, effort, and intention. A student who works diligently deserves a good grade; a person who sacrifices for their community deserves honor.

Theories of natural justice often build upon these concepts. For example, libertarian entitlement theory, most famously articulated by Robert Nozick, is a modern variant. For Nozick, justice is not about achieving a fair pattern of distribution but about respecting people's rights and entitlements. As long as property was acquired justly in the first place (Justice in Acquisition) and transferred justly (Justice in Transfer), the resulting distribution is just, no matter how unequal it is. This is a historical conception of justice: the process matters, not the end-state.

The Case for Social Justice: Correcting for Arbitrary Disadvantage

Social justice theories begin from a different starting point. Instead of focusing on pre-political desert or entitlement, they focus on the fairness of the basic structure of society. The primary question is not "What do individuals deserve?" but "What is a just and fair social system?"

A key tool for thinking about this is the Presumption of Equality.

This presumption flips the natural justice perspective on its head. For a desert theorist, an inequality based on differential effort is presumptively just. For an egalitarian using this principle, even that inequality requires justification.

The most powerful justification for moving away from strict equality, and the core engine of modern social justice theories, is the idea of neutralizing the effects of morally arbitrary factors. John Rawls, as Pojman noted, famously argued that since we don't choose our genetic endowments or the family we're born into, we don't deserve them. And if we don't deserve our talents or starting position, we don't, from a moral point of view, deserve the superior rewards that flow from them.

This leads to a family of theories often called luck egalitarianism.

The core idea you've just read is to distinguish between:

• Brute Luck: Outcomes that are not the result of your choices (e.g., being born with a disability, your genetic makeup, your parents' wealth). Social justice theories aim to compensate for the disadvantages of bad brute luck.
• Option Luck: Outcomes that are the result of your deliberate, voluntary choices (e.g., a calculated business risk that fails, a choice to pursue leisure over income). Luck egalitarians argue that individuals should bear the consequences of their option luck.

This framework attempts to create a version of fairness that is "endowment-insensitive" and "ambition-sensitive." Justice requires us to correct for inequalities in starting points and natural abilities, but allows for inequalities that emerge from people's different goals and efforts.

The Core Tension Framed

We can now map the fundamental conflict between these two conceptions of justice.

Dimension	Natural Justice (Desert/Entitlement)	Social Justice (Fairness/Equality)
Source of Justice	Pre-social and universal. Grounded in nature, reason, or individual action.	Socially constructed. Grounded in principles for a fair cooperative scheme.
Primary Unit	The individual and their actions/claims.	The "basic structure" of society and its institutions.
Relevant Information	Historical: How did a distribution come about? Was it through just acts? (Nozick)	Patterned: Does the current distribution meet a principle of fairness? (Rawls, Dworkin)
View on Natural Talents	A basis for merited, and often deserved, rewards.	A "morally arbitrary" factor whose unequal effects should be mitigated. A collective asset.
Default Position	Distributions arising from free exchange and desert are presumptively just.	Equal distribution is the presumptive baseline. Inequality requires robust justification.
Core Principle	"To each according to what they deserve or are entitled to."	"Eliminate inequalities arising from unchosen circumstances."
Is-Ought Connection	Often attempts to ground "ought" in facts about human nature, effort, or ownership.	Often accepts the is-ought gap and grounds "ought" in a hypothetical agreement or a fundamental ideal of fairness.

Test your understanding!

Imagine a society must decide how to allocate funds for university education. There are two candidates for the last available spot.

• Candidate A: Comes from a wealthy, well-educated family. She is exceptionally brilliant, scoring in the 99.9th percentile on standardized tests with seemingly little effort. She is a "natural."
• Candidate B: Comes from an impoverished background with few resources. She is also very bright, but has had to work relentlessly to achieve scores in the 95th percentile, overcoming significant obstacles.

What different questions would a natural justice theorist and a social justice theorist ask to determine who should get the spot?

Show answer

A natural justice theorist might focus on merit and desert:

• Merit: "Who is the most qualified candidate right now? Who will make the best use of the education?" This likely favors Candidate A, who has demonstrated higher ability.
• Desert: "Who has worked harder?" This might favor Candidate B, as her achievement is a product of immense effort. A natural justice theorist might be torn between rewarding pure merit (A) versus rewarding deserving effort (B).

A social justice theorist (specifically a luck egalitarian) would focus on fairness and arbitrary factors:

• "To what extent are each candidate's test scores a product of brute luck vs. option luck?"
• Candidate A's high score is partly due to brute luck (genetics, fortunate upbringing). Candidate B's score is despite her bad brute luck.
• The goal would be to create a "level playing field." They would ask: "If Candidate B had been given the same advantages as Candidate A, how would she have performed?" From this perspective, Candidate B's achievement is arguably more impressive, and giving her the spot would help to correct for an unjust distribution of unearned social and natural assets.

Conclusion

Today we have framed the central conflict that runs through much of political philosophy. This is not just an academic debate; it reflects a deep divide in how people intuitively think about justice.

Key Takeaways:

• Natural Justice prioritizes principles like desert and entitlement, which are seen as pre-political. It focuses on individual actions and historical chains of events, asking if people have received what they are due.
• Social Justice prioritizes principles like fairness and equality, which are seen as criteria for designing a just society. It focuses on the basic structure of institutions and mitigating the effects of morally arbitrary luck.
• The core tension revolves around the moral status of natural talents and social starting points: are they a just basis for vastly different life outcomes, or are they arbitrary factors whose influence a just society must correct?

This framework gives us the tools to dissect and categorize the theories we will encounter. We can ask of any theory: where does it stand on this fundamental divide? Does it see justice as ratifying a natural order of deservingness, or as constructing a fair order of equality?

Preview of the next lesson:
This lesson presented the conflict as a duel between two powerful principles: desert vs. fairness. But must a theory of justice be based on only one supreme value? The next and final lesson in this introductory module, "Identify monist versus pluralist approaches to value," explores this very question. We will examine whether justice is about finding the one true principle (monism) or about navigating the trade-offs between multiple, equally valid but conflicting values (pluralism). This will directly engage your interest in finding the "least bad points" in complex systems.