Faiths & Globalisation Initiative

20 February is being celebrated as the UN World Day of Social Justice.

Ian Linden, Director of Policy at the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, asks what’s it all about?

You say “fairness” and she says “social justice”. The shift from “justice”, with its ancient and resonant and threatening echo of what is owed and its absolute objective demands, to today’s “fairness” with its nudging comparative sense, defines two eras in the public discussion of social ethics. A World Day for social justice sounds rather old-fashioned. But I’m not sure how to celebrate a recognisable World Day for fairness.

Nonetheless in the USA not even “fairness” goes uncontested. President Obama has to explain in his State of the Union address that fairness does not actually imply class warfare. Tea party cups are likely to be thrown at any mention of it, let alone full frontal social justice and “redistribution” of wealth from haves to have-nots.

There was for many years an absence of any explicit discussion of ethics in the secular political domain. Wise politicians kept their ethics carefully zipped up. Despite Rawls’ and Dworkin’s contribution to the high culture of liberal democracy, much of its early moral debate has drained away from the public square. Poverty has been at best discussed as a set of discrete pragmatic policy options. In the bygone worlds of Aristotle and Aquinas, John Locke and Adam Smith, (what wasn’t called) economics, and politics, were discussed as part of ethics. Now, confronted by the consequences of a few bankers’ irresponsibility and greed, talk about ethics is creeping back.

Enter Social Justice stage right, and left, to muted applause. Talk of equality, fairness and fat-cats, keeps bubbling up. Our institutions in Britain, such as the National Health Service, remain rich bearers of implicit values despite a gradual reductionism to only one: market-controlled efficiency. The Millennium Development Goals were, and are, an explicit covenanted promise to the poor by world governments, presented in a “to do” list for global social justice against a tight timeframe.

And yet, modern governments “do morality” at their peril. They can be quickly castigated as “sanctimonious”, at worst “hypocritical”. The late Robin Cook’s announcement of an ethical dimension to his foreign policy – even while acknowledging that there would also be a realpolitik dimension - was greeted with derision. But if we can now safely talk about ethical capitalism it may also be possible to talk about social justice again.

One of the characteristics of all the world religions and ethical philosophies is that, in one way or another, they have something to say about social justice. They have elaborated insightful differences between justice and charity, between different kinds of poverty, what is owed to the poor, and the ethics of governance. They are all concerned with what makes for a just or harmonious society and, in particular, a good ruler. If politics was traditionally the better part of ethics, and for Aquinas it was, then statecraft was the better part of politics.

So the mantra “keep religion out of politics” makes religious sense only for the minority who understand religion as something going on primarily inside people’s heads and an essentially private matter. Or for the majority who do not mean shut out religion but wish to indicate that they do not welcome the politics of religious identity, and today see in the democratic secular state the least bad setting for the development of a human rights culture, the flourishing of religious values and virtues in society, and, most importantly religious freedom. The question then becomes how is the matter of social justice raised in the public domain by different religions? And are the different religions agreed on a consensual definition of social justice and what this means in practice.

The temptation for those committed to interfaith action is to assume commonalities that ignore particularity and diversity. The theme of compassion for the poor, for example, can be found in all the world religions. But on closer inspection its weighting in each is different in relation to other core themes, as is its systemic position in each religious culture.

To recognise difference should not be a recipe for entrapment in a form of essentialism; weightings change over time through interaction with other religions and contemporary secular thought. But the place of social justice in faith narratives differs and influences practice, for example: compassion’s scope changing from members of one faith community to all of humankind, the impact of new insights about gender, domestic labour seen as redistribution from women to men, the rights of children.

So a World Day of social justice ought to acknowledge and include in the celebration two things. It’s enormous debt to the world’s religious traditions - without downplaying the failures of people of faith to live up to their ideals and refine their realisation in dialogue with others. And secondly, the diversity of the paths that bring together people of faith to work together for social justice and the global Common Good. For the poor of the world will largely understand the injustice of their situation through the idiom and language of their religious faith, teachings and stories. And these may not even have the words social justice in them.