Justice and Democracy
Robert S. Holzman in Anesthesia and the Classics, 2022
The basis of justice, for many people, refers to fairness, but there are a number of recognized contexts. Social justice is the notion that everyone deserves equal economic, political, and social opportunities regardless of race, gender, or religion. Distributive justice refers to the equitable allocation of assets in society. Environmental justice is the fair treatment of all people with regard to environmental burdens and benefits. Restorative or corrective justice seeks to make whole those who have suffered unfairly. Retributive justice seeks to punish wrongdoers objectively and proportionately. And procedural justice refers to implementing legal decisions in accordance with fair and unbiased processes. Legal and political systems that maintain law and order are desirable, but they cannot sustain either unless they also achieve justice.
Mental health promotion
Chambers Mary in Psychiatric and mental health nursing, 2017
Health is a fundamental right and has been enshrined in international and regional human rights treaties.30 For example, Article 12:1 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights31 states that: ‘The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health.’ There is a strong case to argue that mental health is a matter of social justice. Social justice refers to opportunity within society, support of human rights and enabling society to function better. The right to good mental health and well-being can be considered a matter of justice, insofar as it is necessary for optimum living and therefore an entitlement. However, that is not to say that people have the right not to be unhealthy. Everyone deserves a good state of mental health.
Health and Fairness
Michael Fine, James W. Peters, Robert S. Lawrence in The Nature of Health, 2018
Social justice means many things to many people. To some, it means only the effort to improve the lot of the poor. To others, social justice speaks to the perceived need to redistribute resources, so everyone owns common resources, eliminating any inequalities in income and wealth. To still others, social justice means an attempt to equilibrate life chances, so everyone has an equal ability to makes something of their lives, and then we leave the “something” up to the individual, letting people knit what they choose from the raw material of life chances. To still others, life is intrinsically unfair, with genetics and social position always causing/resulting in the unfair distribution of opportunities. According to this philosophy, social injustice is inevitable, a meaningless illusion, and the suffering and early death of the poor is nature or God’s way of improving the human race, and is not to be or cannot be tampered with.
There’s No Harm in Talking: Re-Establishing the Relationship Between Theological and Secular Bioethics
Published in The American Journal of Bioethics, 2020
Michael McCarthy, Mary Homan, Michael Rozier
Social justice is broadly understood as fair relationships between individuals and populations, measured by distribution of resources, fair opportunity, and a social contract that serves everyone equally. The secular notion of social justice and its Christian equivalent may not seem all that different in practice. At the same time, public health ethics can often treat justice as an objective to be met—an ethical principle that is violated or not, just as in clinical and research ethics. A Christian understanding of social justice, however, claims that we cannot truly know who we are as a human person without knowing how we relate to others. We are not atomized individuals, but intimately connected beings who will never know who we are without considering what it means to be in right relationship. Social justice is both an end to be worked toward and a process to revealing who we are as people. A Christian understanding of social justice therefore suggests that failing to organize society in a fair manner is not only bad for the community, but negatively affects every individual in that community, whether they suffer from or benefit from the injustice.
Reimagining positive youth development and life skills in sport through a social justice lens
Published in Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 2022
Martin Camiré, Tarkington J. Newman, Corliss Bean, Leisha Strachan
Social justice is often described as too nebulous and too versatile to be constricted to a single concept, instead consisting of a multitude of “discursive and pedagogical practices” (Bialystok, 2014, p. 148). As an ideological perspective, social justice is the belief that everyone deserves equal social, economic, and political rights, as well as equitable opportunities and protections (National Association of Social Workers, 2015). It consists of embracing “the idea that social identities such as race, class, and gender exist in intersectionality, that is, in the belief that social identities do not act independently, instead interact in an intersection of systematic oppression” (Warren et al., 2014, p. 91). Social justice is thus a rights-based perspective with an emphasis on fair treatment, which is value- and culture-laden (Morgaine, 2014). Hytten and Bettez (2011) organized social justice around five elements based on its contributions to the: (a) philosophical (i.e., meaning of justice), (b) theoretical (i.e., ideological positions connected to social movements), (c) democratic (i.e., problematization of oppression), (d) ethnographic (i.e., people’s lived experiences of justice/injustice), and (e) practical (i.e., application of social justice). These five elements often intersect and research should not be restricted to one element. Ultimately, social justice is about embracing diversity, equity, and inclusion while recognizing the roles of privilege and power.
Gene Patents and the Social Justice Lens
Published in The American Journal of Bioethics, 2018
Our social justice lens thus ought to be a multifactorial lens, rather than a one-dimensional lens, in terms of the values and aspirations it addresses. Social justice requires not only the mitigation of serious disadvantage, but it also requires promoting the public good more generally (including through innovation), respecting liberty, and prudence in investing limited governmental resources. I do not believe appeals to any one value or principle will permit us to proclaim that, “all-things-considered,” justice prohibits or permits gene patents. The ancient proverb “the devil is in the details!” is very apt in the case of morally assessing intellectual property rights. A conceptual-level analysis of gene patents and intellectual property more generally misses these details because it focuses on a limited set of normative concerns (typically only liberty or equality).
Related Knowledge Centers
- Bioethics
- Disability
- Distributive Justice
- Public Health
- Labour Law
- Age of Enlightenment
- Utilitarianism
- Dignity
- Unintended Consequences
- Health Equity