Social Justice in Social Policy
Martin Powell, University of Birmingham
Nick Johns and Alison Green, University of Plymouth
Abstract
It is claimed that social justice is firmly on the political agenda and is a major
concern of numerous policy documents, think tanks and research units.
However, ‗social justice‘ can be seen as a poorly defined ‗motherhood and
apple pie‘ term. Virtually everyone is in favour of ‗social justice‘ but their
interpretations of the term vary widely (there are many different varieties of
apple!). We examine how the social policy literature defines social justice.
First, we develop a template from the social justice literature of concepts (for
example, patterned versus process; equity versus equality; autonomy versus
solidarity; distributional criteria) drawing upon the work of the most influential
authors in this area (eg Rawls, Nozick, Plant, Miller etc). Then, we report
some early findings from a project designed to explore the concept as it is
codified in different aspects of the social policy literature.
Introduction
At a time when public resources have become a battleground and the state is
in the process of withdrawing welfare support in so many different directions
the subject of ‗social justice‘ has become of increasing importance (Policy
Exchange 2010, 2011). However, although its significance is almost
universally accepted, social justice remains a highly contested concept, and
nowhere are these two assertions more evident than in the establishment of
the Commission for Social Justice by the Labour Party in 1992, and the
Conservative‘s Centre for Social Justice in 2004 (see Burchardt and Craig,
2008).
Miller (1999: ix) writes that social justice is an idea that is central to the politics
of contemporary democracies. Spicker (1988: 135) claims that the concept of
social justice has attracted more attention in recent years than any other
question in political theory. However, if social justice is a vital concept for
politics, political theory and society as a whole then we would argue that it sits
at the very heart of what social policy is about. For example, Lavalette and
Pratt maintain that ‗at the heart of social policy debates lies a series of
‗contested concepts such as equality, justice and rights‘ (2006: 105). Similarly,
Daly (2011) argues that welfare is bound up with moral discussions about
precepts such as equality, justice, freedom and rights, and implicit in this is
the recognition that different ideas about social justice are fielded in different
time periods, places and policy contexts (Newman and Yeates, 2008).
The quality of these debates and their relationship to knowledge in allied
areas has been a source of frustration for some commentators, where many
principal works in modern political theory have been divorced from the reality
of social and political issues:
…space travellers in Ackerman‘s (1981) bizarre discussion of social justice.
When well-respected books maunder about the ‗right to walk on my hands‘
(Raz, 1986) or whether we can have a library in our back yard (Nozick, 1974),
I have to curb my exasperation (Spicker, 2006: vi).
In a similar vein Piachaud (2008) could suggest: ‗For practitioners of social
policy, concerned with the practical policies reflecting many motivations,
social justice is often a remote reference point, as abstruse as a lecture on
thermodynamics to someone on the footplate of a steam engine‘. Burchardt
and Craig (2008) aimed to bridge the gap between political philosophy and
social policy by taking into account the practical limitations of the former, and
the unwillingness of the latter to adequately refer to theories of social justice.
The meaning and application of social justice in social policy writing is the
subject of this paper. What we present here is the first part of an extensive
project examining the meaning and applicability of social justice more broadly
as a core social scientific, philosophical and political ideal. The findings are
drawn from a two-stage comparative documentary analysis of two front-line
social policy journals - Social Policy and Administration and Critical Social
Policy – over a ten year period 2000-2010.
Social Justice
There are various definitions of social justice. In the tradition of typical social
policy students we commence with a definition from Wikipedia: ‗Social justice
generally refers to the idea of creating a society or institution that is based on
the principles of equality and solidarity that understands and values human
rights, and that recognises the dignity of every human being‘. The traditional
definition of social justice is in terms of distributive issues, and social justice
and distributive justice are often used interchangeably (eg Miller, 1976, 1999).
Rawls (1971) regards justice as fairness. Harvey (1973: 97) argues that
justice is essentially a principle (or set of principles) for resolving conflicting
claims. Miller (1976) defines social justice by its root meaning ‗suum cuique‘‗to each his own‘. Miller (1999: 1) defines social justice as ‗how the good and
bad things in life should be distributed among the members of a human
society‘. However, there has been a recent trend to define social justice in
terms of recognition as well as redistribution (see below; eg Miller, 1999: 157).
There are a number of typologies of social justice. One differentiates
‗patterned‘ from ‗historical‘, ‗processual‘, ‗procedural‘ or ‗entitlement‘ views (eg
Nozick, 1974). A historical view examines the process by which distributions
came into being. According to Nozick (1974: 151), ‗a distribution is just if it
arises from another just distribution by legitimate means‘. In other words, it is
necessary to inquire how a particular distribution came about. Patterned
distributions are broadly based on ‗to each according to their x‘, where x is a
principle such as need, merit or desert. Patterns can be based on arithmetic
equality (cutting a cake into equal slices) or proportional equality (where
unequal slices are justified on some other principle).
Discussions in the social justice/philosophy literature discuss different
elements or bases of social justice. For example, Sen argues that patterned
principles of social justice can be seen in terms of ―to each according to his or
her X‖. There is a range of competing principles: for example, merit, desert,
worth, entitlement, need (Plant et al., 1980) need, worth, work and merit
(Titmuss, 1968); need, contribution to the common good and merit
(Runciman, 1966; Harvey, 1973); and rights, desert and need (Miller, 1976).
There are large debates about the categorisation and content of these
principles. Moreover, few of the above writers have made significant attempts
to apply their criteria to welfare distributions.
According to Harvey (1973: 99-100), several criteria have been suggested:
inherent equality; valuation of services in terms of supply and demand; need;
inherited rights; merit; contribution to common good; actual productive
contribution; efforts and sacrifices. These eight are not mutually exclusive and
they obviously require much more detailed interpretation and analysis. He
follows Runciman (1966) in a weak ordering of need, contribution to common
good, and merit. Harvey (1973: 98) writes that ‗unfortunately there is no one
generally accepted principle of social justice to which we can appeal.‘
Methods
Using Web of Knowledge we searched articles in two social policy journals:
Critical Social Policy (CSP) and Social Policy and Administration (SPA) over a
ten year period (2000-2010) using a set of key search terms. As discussed
earlier we intend to extend this work much further, but facing limited time and
other restrictions, we elected to start with these journals because they
represent the mainstream (SPA) and more critical/radical (CSP) wings of
social policy scholarship.
Table 1 gives the ‗raw‘ numbers and the number of full text articles read after
excluding articles focused on legal/criminal justice; gender equality. We
decided to exclude these articles as studies on (eg) intergenerational fairness,
gender and ‗race‘ equality, equal opportunities tend to draw on their own
conceptual literature rather than the wider and broader social justice literature.
In addition, we ‗hand searched‘ titles and abstracts to capture articles without
the relevant key words but with some discussion of social justice.
Table 1
CSP
JSP
SPA
Total
Justice
3/0
4/3
6/1
13/4
Equal*
3/1
5/4
5/2
13/6
Need*
2/0
4/3
2/0
8/3
Rights
2/2
4/4
7/3
13/9
Desert
0/0
0/0
0/0
0/0
Merit
1/1
0/0
0/0
1/1
There is a small element of ‗double counting‘; for example Smart (CSP)
includes equal and rights, and so is counted under both terms.
Table 1 shows results from three journals, It is clear that there are relatively
few finally included articles. Across the three journals, there are 9 articles on
rights, 6 on equality, 4 on justice, 3 on need, 1 on merit and none on desert.
Citations of included articles seemed fairly low, with the leading articles being
Such and Walker (2005) [15], Dean (2003), Kerr (2003), Osborne (2003) [all
13], Powell and Boyne (2001) [12] and Rummery and Glendinning (2000) [10].
One of the articles that most engaged with social justice (Kangas 2000)
received no citations.
The discussion below reports only on the critical evaluation carried out on the
articles sampled from CSP and SPA. A number of strong inter-related themes
emerged from the initial critical evaluation. Perhaps the strongest of these
was the limited extent to which the authors discussed the overall meaning of
social justice.
Social justice as a general ‘hurrah’ concept
When social justice was mentioned as a general principle efforts to describe
and define it were sometimes surprisingly shallow and patchy. Certainly the
philosophical divisions and models were rarely called upon to orient such
discussions (see below). There were degrees and variations of this. At one
level there were authors who referred to social justice with no attempt to
define it, even where it had a central role to play in their argument.
Noteworthy was Connor‘s (2007) employment of a critical discourse analysis
to evaluate New Labour‘s anti-fraud campaign directed at benefit fraud, and
his conclusion that it signified moral authoritarianism combined with a desire
for social justice; social justice was left to hang as if its meaning were
uncontested.
Moving away from the tendency to merely present social justice as a
generalised phrase was the approach of setting it out with a few component
parts. For example, Hopton (2006) discusses the role of critical psychiatry in
questioning the basis for social justice, fairness and equality, but does not
really attempt to unpick these notions except to specify that equality means
access to treatment and services. This gives the reader more to work with but
still falls short of providing a coherent analytical framework.
Another alternative was to define social justice in the negative, as per the
declaration by Thomas et al. (1998) that social justice cannot simply be
achieved by redistributing resources and removing inequality. Conversely,
Law and Mooney (2006: 537) in reviewing Scottish social policy, suggest that:
‗With
the
Scottish
Executive,
social
inclusion,
antisocial
behaviour,
community, social capital and the pursuit of social justice are understood as
principally economic issues, encapsulated in policy discourses of ‗competition
and cohesion‘. Social justice for them clearly does not reside in policies that
facilitate market-driven inequalities.
Next in this category was the equation of social justice with another loosely
defined concept. A very common feature of the articles sampled was to simply
equate social justice with social democracy and in turn to see social
democracy as the engine of the post-war welfare state (Sales, 2002; Mizen,
2003; Orton, 2004; Beresford, 2005). Bringing this up-to-date in terms of
political commentary, Sevenhuijsen (2000) attempts to enhance the ‗new
social democracy‘ (NSD) of Giddens by adding an ethic of care as a right of
democratic citizenship. In this formulation NSD has four core ingredients:
social justice, emancipation, equality and social cohesion. However, where
social justice was considered as a concept in its own right it was presented as
a simple composite of emancipation and equality. How this then fed back into
the structure of NSD was not entirely clear. At a lower level of conceptual
abstraction, some authors regarded social inclusion as the basis of social
justice (Baker et al., 2006).
A variant of the equation approach involved talking about the means to
achieve social justice without spelling out exactly what it meant. Powell (2000)
refers to the reliance of the Old Left on the welfare system, the New Right on
the market and the Middle Way‘s belief in social investment in human capital.
Although the work of Levitas (1998) on competing discourses is cited, this
does not fully address the deficit. Some articles, then, referred to social justice
while avoiding defining it clearly, resulting in social justice being a rather
vague and broad ‗hurrah‘ concept like ‗motherhood and apple pie‘.
Social justice as a ‘Humpty Dumpty’ concept.
Some other writers tended to use social justice as a ‗Humpty Dumpty‘ concept
(when I use a word, it means just what I want it to mean). For example, most
articles tend to assert bases of social justice without much discussion, and
social justice is often limited explicitly or implicitly to one element such as
‗need‘. Sometimes ‗equality‘ is discussed without reference to different types
of equality (see eg Le Grand, 1982). However, Prabhaker (2009) discusses
White‘s (2003, 2006) Civic republicanism and reciprocity principle. Izuhara
(2003) points out that fairness tends to be associated with procedures rather
than with outcomes. Taylor-Gooby and Martin (2010) distinguish a number of
approaches to do with criteria of equality, need and desert
Perhaps the most detailed discussion of social justice can be found in Kangas
(2000) who explores distributive justice and social justice, using Rawls (and
despite the potential value of this work has never been cited). According to
Kangas, everyone probably agrees that justice should be one of the most
central principles of institutions responsible for distributing societal resources.
Justice in redistribution is a matter of finding the right balance between duties
and entitlements, of having the proper ratio between benefits and burdens.
We can quite safely assume that there is general public agreement on this as
well. What soon splits the consensus is putting the principle of just distribution
into practice. What should be distributed? To whom? How much? Even a
quick glance at politics—the motor of distribution of common resources—
shows that all sorts of distributional demands are being backed up by calls for
justice. Justice is in everyone‘s bag of tricks (see also Goodin, 1988, 1993;
Arthur and Shaw, 1991; Campbell, 1990; Le Grand, 1991; Miller, 1976;
Nussbaum and Sen, 1993; Schmidtz and Goodin, 1998) (p. 510). He
continues that he is aware, to be sure, that the Rawlsian approach to justice is
only one among many (see, e.g., Nozick, 1974; Miller, 1976; Macintyre, 1981;
Walzer, 1983; Sen, 1992; Campbell, 1988; Roemer, 1996), and that Rawls
does not reflect in much detail on the central issue of how socio-political
benefits and burdens should be divided in order for justice to be served. The
―justice as fairness‖ principle Rawls advocates does not give much pragmatic
guidance. Neither is the maximin principle unambiguous: how could we, for
example, know when the lot of the most miserable members of society is
maximized? What is the counterfactual situation, which the present situation
should be compared with? What is the time span studied? I am also quite
aware that my comparisons do not represent all countries equally, because
much depends on the indicators chosen and the value systems behind them
(p. 512). He continues that it should be emphasised that inequality per se is
not necessarily unjust or unfair. Much depends on the mechanisms that
produce inequalities. Some people work harder, educate themselves, make
better use of their resources, etc. Therefore, it is justifiable that some people
deserve more than others do. That is why Rawls is nowhere near as
enthusiastic a proponent of greater equality in the distribution of societal
goods as Scandinavian public opinion is. According to Rawls‘s concept of
justice, inequality is acceptable under certain conditions. First, it is acceptable
if based on factors that do not differentiate between people. Even large
income differences are permissible if the institutions producing such
differences are equally accessible to all. If income differences are based, say,
on educational attainment, and education is available to everyone, wage
differences may be seen as justified. Equal opportunity guarantees justice.
Thus, justice is a virtue of an open society. In order to get a clear idea of
poverty, it is therefore not enough to look at cross-sectional data, but
longitudinal data on poor families need to be investigated as well. What
opportunities are there to rise from a disadvantaged position to a better one?
(p. 520). He concludes that rather than sorting out which countries are good,
which are bad, and which are simply ugly, the paper has tried to initiate a
discussion on how to combine philosophical ruminations with comparative
empirical research on social policy.
Generally, philosophical discussions on justice have been dry runs in the
sense that practical issues have been taken into account fairly seldom
(however, there are also interesting exceptions, e.g., Goodin, et al. 1999; Le
Grand, 1991; Rothstein, 1998; and various works by Amartya Sen). Grand
ideas and slogans far divorced from practical issues have been at the
forefront, and when practical questions have been touched upon, it has been
done too easily and without precise information on the functioning of sociopolitical systems, the logic of the operations, and the paradoxes of
redistribution. Correspondingly, among other social sciences, not much
interest has been shown in the philosophical dimensions of socio-political
distribution issues. By combining these two approaches, our love of wisdom
will surely be rewarded (pp. 525-6).
Powell and Boyne (2001) discuss the differences between the ‗default
position‘ of equality and equity, or proportional rather than arithmetic equality.
Sen argues that patterned principles of social justice can be seen in terms of
―to each according to his or her X‖. There is a range of competing principles:
for example, merit, desert, worth, entitlement, need (Plant et al.,1980); need,
worth, work and merit (Titmuss, 1968); need, contribution to the common
good and merit (Runciman, 1966; Harvey, 1973); and rights, desert and need
(Miller, 1976). There are large debates about the categorisation and content
of these principles. Moreover, few of the above writers have made significant
attempts to apply their criteria to welfare distributions. They continue that the
problems of turning concepts into empirical measures were recognised by
Miller: it was ―impossible to dispel a good deal of the vagueness which
surrounds the ordinary concepts of rights, deserts and needs‖. Moreover,
―none of the three criteria . . . was sufficiently precise for its practical
application to be a straightforward matter. Moreover, even when the principle
of distribution (the ―X‖ in Sen‘s formulation) has been chosen, the form of
response to that principle may vary. The general form is: equal Y for equal X.
For example, equal inputs for equal needs and equal outputs for equal needs
are both possible responses.
In other words, there are many possible
equality statements of the form ―equal Y for equal X‖: ―equality‖ becomes
―equalities‖.
It is clear (Table 1) that writers tended to equate social justice with equality,
rights and needs rather than with merit or desert. Weale (1983:158) Since the
break-up of the Poor Law with its notion of ‗less eligibility‘ and the passing of
attitudes like those of the COS with its distinction between the deserving and
the underserving poor, the idea of desert has had little currency in social
policy. Yet it can be argued that the idea of desert has a powerful influence
within the economy and society at large operating to justify economic and
social inequalities. However, popular conceptions of social justice tend to
draw more on these concepts (see below).
Social Justice as a ‘Simples’ (Meerkat) Concept
Walzer (1983) argues for a pluralist and complex notion of social justice. In
other words, different criteria of social justice should apply in different cases.
As most writers in our sample focused on one service (eg NHS), it was
difficult to tell if they considered if different criteria ought to operate in other
services. However, Powell and Boyne (2001) suggest that it may be
necessary to differentiate between different principles for national from local
services. The welfare state is usually considered in terms of the nation state.
However, the national welfare state and national citizenship of Titmuss,
Marshall and Beveridge neglects both the local welfare state and local
citizenship of localists such as W. A. Robson, and the importance of the local
welfare state historically in Britain and in other countries. National services
such as income maintenance and the NHS aim to deliver uniform standards
throughout the nation. It follows that deviations from centrally decided norms
are illegitimate inequalities. On the other hand, the role of local government is
to respond to the wishes of the local population. As John Stewart puts it, local
government is the government of difference, unlike national services, for
which territorial justice is an appropriate analytical tool, local services face a
trade-off between territorial justice and local autonomy, O‘Higgins (1987) has
compared this problem to that identified by Nozick (1974) of patterned
distribution. ―In a polity in which local authorities are free to make their own
decisions about service priorities and resource allocation, equality of outcome
across services as between different local authorities cannot be guaranteed.
Territorial justice can only be ensured by continually intervening to restrict or
direct the choices which local authorities make‖. Thus, it can be shown that
regarding geographical inequality as a defect to be eradicated makes an
important implicit assumption. While inequality may be seen as a problem of a
national service, for local services the yardstick of equality is not the only
appropriate measuring rod. Rather than merely pointing out the existence of
geographical variation, it is important to examine the underlying reasons for it.
Far from being seen as evidence of failure, geographical variations may be
regarded as evidence of the success of responsiveness to the local
population. In particular, it is important to examine whether variations result
from local political choice or constraints. For localists, national uniformity
might be seen as a failure. ―Local autonomy‖ and ―equality‖ are both seen as
―good things‖. However, these concepts are in tension. Generally, more local
autonomy
leads
to
greater
geographical
differentiation
and
greater
centralization leads to greater uniformity. However, many commentators seem
to want to have their analytical cake and eat it. They complain about greater
geographical inequality and greater central control during the Conservative
period of office in the 1980s and 1990s. There is a danger of a ―Catch 22‖
situation where a centralist government is criticised for greater central control,
while a localist government is criticised for greater geographical inequality. In
order to avoid this it is important to bear in mind the distinction between
national and local welfare services, and the trade-off between territorial justice
and local autonomy. A more recent example concerns the policy
differentiation associated with political devolution. From the point of view of
uniformity across the UK, this led to an increase in inequality, but from a
Scottish point of view, it illustrated the success of devolution. Social policy
analysis needs to be more sophisticated than an ―inequality-finder general‖,
condemning all inequalities, regardless of type, context, or cause. From a
localist perspective, some inequalities may be ―acceptable‖. If the ―default
value‖ is that all detected geographical variations are automatically assumed
to be a defect, then the arguments for localism are doomed to failure.
Similarly, Trydegard and Thorsland (2010) explore the dilemma or tension
between the national welfare state principles of universalism, generosity and
equality on the one side, and the varying local implementation of the policy on
the other, has been stressed by numerous researchers, and many studies
have demonstrated large local variation in different forms of social services.
Social policy writers as ‘philosopher-kings’?
Miller (1999: 59) writes that some recent social philosophers such as Walzer
are more interested in what ordinary people think about distributive justice,
while others such as Nozick appear happy to ride roughshod over many
everyday beliefs in the name of a single principle claimed to rest on a
fundamental moral insight. Rawls occupies the middle ground, arguing what a
conception of justice a person might hold under his ‗veil of ignorance‘.
A final theme that emerged strongly from our analysis was the lack of
engagement with the attitudes or views of citizens. A few articles specifically
explored user views about the intersection between welfare and justice
(Dwyer, 2002). Moffatt and Higgs (2007) point out that the term ‗entitlement‘
was used often by participants in their survey. This was generally linked to the
idea of ―earning‖ entitlement as a result of contributions made throughout their
working lives: This more articulate view of the principles behind the system
invoked both the importance of contributions as well as the notion of
entitlement as desert rather than the often-mentioned perception that such
help constitutes charity. Pinker (2006) cites his earlier famous view that: ‗As
we grow up ‗the most authentic rights we acquire and exercise are those we
use in the roles of buyers and sellers in the market-place. We do not have to
be persuaded that we have rights to what we buy.‘ By contrast, ‗the idea of
paying through taxes or holding authentic claims by virtue of citizenship
remains largely an intellectual conceit of the social scientist and the socialist;
consequently most applicants for [statutory] social services remain paupers at
heart‘ (Pinker, 1971: 141-2).
Pinker (2006) makes a broader point, citing Titmuss‘ (1968: 14) opening
essay on ‗The Subject of Social Administration‘ was based on the lecture he
had given at the first meeting of the Social Administration Association in the
previous year. On the purposes of the new Association, he suggested that ‗we
are not here to found a branch of the Conservative, Labour or Liberal Parties‘
or to advance ‗any particular political ideology. Our first duty and our last duty
is to the truth . . . and to expose more clearly the value choices that confront
societies in the arena of social welfare‘. However, Pinker adds that, having
distanced both the Association and the discipline from any ideology, and
having committed both of them to the pursuit of truth and to the ‗exposure of
value choices‘, Titmuss then proceeded to define the study of social needs as
an intellectual enterprise that was normatively autonomous and institutionally
divorced from the values and activities of competitive markets. It would seem,
therefore, that in the making of value choices between public sector and
private sector policy options in the meeting of needs, further debate was
unnecessary. He cites Arthur Seldon of the IEA that ‗the difficulty of
conducting a debate with Professor Titmuss is that he makes his adversary
feel not only wrong but also wicked. His Achilles heel is that he knows (or,
more accurately, feels) he is right‘ (Seldon, 1968).
Taylor-Gooby and Martin (2010) distinguish a number of approaches to do
with criteria of equality, need and desert (Miller, 1999: ch. 2). Desert is
complex and may be based on notions of moral worth or social or economic
contribution. The core themes are reflected in comparative analysis in EspingAndersen‘s initial threefold categorisation of regime types: the Nordic social
democratic focuses on equality; the corporatist-conservative places more
emphasis on desert and links this to contribution through social insurance and
to status; while the liberal market-oriented approach restricts the state to
meeting need (Mau and Veghte, 2007: 6–8). (pp. 86-7). They discuss popular
discourses about desert (for example, van Oorschott, 2006) to emphasise the
degree of effort involved in realising opportunities (Roemer, 1996: 5–8). The
key point is that fairness involves an allocation which would give people the
same outcomes, provided they contribute the same degree of effort, taking
into account differences in their social circumstances, which affect not only
the amount of effort needed, but the capacity of different groups to exert effort
effectively (Roemer, 2005). The distinction between the two approaches
introduces the issue of responsibility into the debate, whether lying primarily
with the distributor (the state) as in the first approach, or with the individual as
in the second (pp. 87-8). There is considerable evidence of similarity in
hierarchies of deservingness in European countries. In general, elderly people
are seen as most deserving, closely followed by sick and disabled people,
then unemployed people and immigrants (van Oorschott, 2006: 23).
There are significant debates about whether to ‗bring the public back in‘
(Burnstein, 1998). Miller (1976: 341-2) takes issue with Rawl‘s approach to
social justice from behind a ‗veil of ignorance‘: the whole enterprise of
constructing a theory of justice on the basis of choices hypothetically made by
individuals abstracted from society is mistaken‘. (But see Plant et al., 1980:
14-17 for a critique of Miller‘s approach). Miller (1999: ix-x) advocates
discovering the underlying principles that people use when they judge some
aspects of their society to be just or unjust. In order to achieve this, he looks
fairly closely at empirical research on popular conceptions of justice. ‗If we
want to describe what social justice means in contemporary political debate,
than sooner rather than later we must look at what the people themselves
think. However, he adds that this does not mean that ‗our theory of justice
should be nothing more than an aggregate opinion poll‘. Plant (1991: 327-8)
points out that Ackerman‘s spacecraft (cf Rawls original position) is rejected
by Walzer, and goes on to argue that another way of doing philosophy is to
interpret to one‘s fellow citizens the world of meanings that we share. Justice
and equality can conceivably be worked out as philosophical artifacts, but a
just or egalitarian society cannot be. Instead of asking Rawlsian questions
behind the veil of ignorance, we should rather concentrate on the more
specific question ‗what would individuals like us choose, who are situated as
we are, who share a culture and are determined to go on sharing it? What
choices have we already made in the course of our common life? What
understandings do we already share? Questions of political philosophy are
questions about specific societies with particular values. Justification,
argumentation has to take place within such contexts and not external to them
(pp. 343-4). As Plant et al. (1980: 151) ask, who needs citizens, when the
social planner can construct the just world by thought-experiment, without
bothering to consult their views?
There have been some cases of seeking popular views about social justice
and redistribution (eg Applebaum, 2002; Arts and Gelissen 2002; Jaeger
2006; Kangas 2002; Kluegel and Smith 1986; Kluegel et al., 1995; Mau and
Veghte, 2007; Svallfors, 1997, 2003; van Oorschot, 2000). Runciman‘s (1966)
work has been termed by Plant et al. (1980) ‗the most profound study of
values and inequality in the postwar period‘. Saunders (1996: 88-90) claims
that the ‗deserving‘ versus ‗underserving‘ distinction is
important; many
people angry that their hard work is being taxed in order to support those who
will not work. Popular support for egalitarianism is always qualified by the
question of just desert. He cites a survey where 90% agreed that ‗people‘s
incomes should depend on hard work and ability‘. He interprets this as ‗strong
support for meritocracy‘ and that views depend on ‗whether inequality is
justifiable‘ (for contemporary parallels see O‘Brien, 2010). He discusses
Marx‘s ‗communist principle‘ - from each according to their ability; to each
according to their need- which recognised that such a system could only work
in a society which had overcome scarcity – a society where resources are
‗lying around‘ in bountiful supply waiting to be allocated Marx‘s ‗socialist
principle‘ was very different: ‗to each according to his work‘ recognised that
the right of the producers is proportional to the labour they supply; the equality
consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labour.
But one man is superior to another physically and mentally and so supplies
more labour in the same time … This equal right … tacitly recognises unequal
individual endowment and thus productive capacity as natural privileges. It is,
therefore, a right of inequality‘. Marx‘s principle of socialist distribution was
essentially a meritocratic principle (p. 86).
Citation Analysis
In addition to exploring what our included journal articles said about social
justice, we also examined what social justice writers they drew upon. We
examined the bibliographies of our articles in order to determine which social
justice writers were referred to. It is clear that relatively few social justice
writers are cited. Many social justice works and writers are cited in few
articles. The most utilised authors were:

Edwards (5)

Hayek (5)

Rawls (5)

Nussbaum (4)

Sen (4)

Turner (4)
Some leading writers such as Ackerman, Rae and Walzer were cited only
once, with no citations of leading writers like Anthony Flew at all.
Table 2.
CSP
SP&A
Total
Count
Ackerman
Prabhakar
(1980)
(2009)
1
Kangas (2000)
1
Kangas (2000)
1
Yanay (2006)
1
Arthur
and
Shaw (1991)
Campbell
(1988)
Dworkin (1977)
Dworkin (1978) Johns (2005)
Dworkin (2002)
Edwards
Johns (2005)
1
Haagh (2006)
1
Yanay (2006)
2
(1988, JSP)
Edwards
Johns (2005)
1
Johns (2005)
1
and Johns (2005)
1
(1994)
Edwards
(1995)
Edwards
Batley (1978)
Edwards et al Seven
(1999)
1
huijsen
(2000)
Fraser
and Lister (2006)
1
Honneth (eds)
(2003)
Goodin (1985)
Yanay (2006)
1
Goodin (1988)
Kangas (2000)
1
Goodin (1993)
Kangas (2000)
1
Hardin (1988)
Kangas (2000)
1
Harvey (1973), Fitzpatrick
Powell
(1996)
(2000)
Boyne (2001)
2
Hayek (1960)
Smith (2005)
Haagh (2006)
3
Izuhara (2003)
2
Dean (2003)
1
and
Mooney and
Williams
(2006)
Hayek (1976), Beresford
(1982)
(2005)
Honneth
(1995)
Honneth
Martin (2001)
1
(1996)
Le
Grand,
Kangas (2000)
1
(1991)
Le
Grand Beresford
1
(1982)
Le
(2005)
Grand Greener
(1997)
1
(2002)
Macintyre
Kangas (2000)
1
Kangas
2
(1981)
Miller (1976)
(2000);
Powell
and
Boyne (2001)
Miller (1999)
Taylor-Gooby
and
1
Martin
(2010)
Nozick (1974)
Smith (2005
Kangas
3
(2000);
Powell
and
Boyne (2001)
Nussbaum and Sevenhuijsen Kangas (2000)
Sen (ed, 1993)
(2000)
Nussbaum
Sevenhuijsen
(1993)
(2000)
1
Nussbaum and Seven
Glover (1999)
2
1
huijsen
(2000)
Plant
et
al
Powell
(1980)
and
1
Boyne (2001)
Plant (1999)
Sevenhuijsen
1
(2000)
Rae
et
al
Powell
and
(1981)
Boyne (2001)
Rawls (1971/2)
Dean (2003);
Haagh (2006)
Kangas
(2000);
1
4
Taylor-Gooby
and
Martin
(2010)
Rawls (1995)
Raz (1986)
Smith (2005)
Roemer (1996)
Kangas (2000)
1
Yanay (2006)
2
Kangas
2
(2000);
Taylor-Gooby
and
Martin
(2010)
Rothstein
Kangas (2000)
1
Runciman
Powell
1
(1966)
Boyne (2001)
(1998)
Sen
Lecture/
(1979)
Kangas
Sen
(2000);
(1992)
Powell
and
3
and
Boyne (2001);
Taylor-Gooby
and
Martin
(2010)
Schmidz
and
Kangas (2000)
1
Izahara (2003)
1
Martin (2001) Izahara (2003)
3
Goodin (1998)
Sugden
Turner (1986)
Hopton
(2006)
Turner (1993)
Fitzpatrick
1
(2000)
Walzer (1993)
Weale (1983)
Johns (2005)
Kangas (2000)
1
Powell
2
and
Boyne (2001)
White (1998)
Powell
1
(2000)
White (2003)
Haagh (2006);
2
Prabhakar
(2009)
Alongside the general trends outlined above, there were some quite
significant variances between the journals that are worth highlighting, some
would seem to make ‗face‘ sense. For example, as might be expected Nancy
Fraser appeared in CSP but not in SPA, presumably because she talks about
recognition as an important dimension of social justice, and this would also,
though more implicitly, explain the imbalance in the citations of John Edwards.
Ultimately the pattern would reflect the editorial philosophy of CSP. Others are
equally noteworthy but would not at first sight be as readily explicable. Rawls,
while a prominent presence in the SPA, does not appear at all in the CSP,
and the same pattern with Miller, Walzer and Rae. These are patterns that we
aim to explore more fully in the larger work.
Conclusions
Our findings from this preliminary exploration of social justice are rather
tentative as they are based on exploring two journals over the last decade.
They are also expressed to be deliberately provocative. However, we have
found that the strength and depth of social justice discussions in much of the
social policy literature remains shallow and patchy. Moreover, social policy
views appear to be somewhat out of tune with public attitudes.
This may be due to the themes of the importance of the normative, and a
single value orientation of Titmussian social administration (Mishra, 1989).
This affirmed the role of values in social science. Choice of ends and means
involved particular forms of social and distributive relations (such as
egalitarian or inegalitarian). It was the task of social policy studies to spell out
the options available and their implications. Titmussian social administration
was firmly anchored in the values of Fabian collectivism. There was little by
way of a normative debate. This resulted in the field of social policy coming to
be defined ‗in terms of a struggle between the forces of good and evil‘ with a
refusal to examine social welfare as a problematic or contested notion. This
gave rise to the paradoxical situation in which social administration stressed
the importance of values and choices, but paid scant attention to its own
value-orientation, giving social administration an ideological character which
was scarcely recognised (pp. 77-8). Similarly, Flew (1983: 159-60) cites David
Donnison: the case for egalitarianism is ‗muddled because its academic
spokesmen were never challenged by sufficiently tough opposition to compel
them to clarify their views‘. Finally, Spicker (2008: vi) points to the ‗problem of
ideologies‘- students lack the material to examine the precepts critically, and
all too often they lead to a view of the world divided between Angels and
Devils, where nothing the Devils say makes any sense at all. We are
uncomfortable with the implicit casting of ‗ordinary citizens‘ as Devils.
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