Today in a discussion at IPH, Meena said “we should all fight against discrimination”. And Prashanth asked “Isn’t that your personal politics? What if people don’t agree with it?” What Prashanth was really asking was “Is there any logic to the demand for social justice?” “Isn’t it just politics?”
This is the same discussion I had over lunch with Viswanathan (CVN) at MFC’s mid-annual meet in Kozhikode. CVN is widely known for saying “Science is the only way of knowing” which I have wrote about in the past. In the meet also CVN made the same point (I have posted a transcript of the comment here). CVN told about the enlightenment project
[…]By the term “modern society”, I mean a society that upholds the values of “liberty, equality, fraternity and justice”. These values, which we call constitutional values, are really values of ‘Enlightenment’ – or ‘European Enlightenment’ if you insist.
Enlightenment project is a sociopolitical project that nobody likes in today’s India. The right wing hates it, the left wing has only contempt for it. Of course, this was always a minority’s concern in our country, historically speaking. Unlike the ‘National movement’, this ‘movement’ – if you can call it that name – came up from the ‘depressed castes’. If I am to name a few ‘big names’ that would represent this camp, almost everyone comes from the Dalit-Bahujan background. Mahatma Phule, Babasaheb Ambedkar, Thanthai Periyar, Mahatma Ayyankali, Sahodaran Ayyappan – all from the depressed castes. This is a movement that developed as a response to the day-to-day existential insults heaped upon the depressed caste people over millenia.[…]
So while eating chicken and ghee rice, I asked CVN, “if you say science is the only way of knowing, how do you know that the values of enlightenment is what we need to work towards?” I was asking what’s the “logic” of working for social justice.
CVN initially said “This is outside the realm of science. It is a question for morality.”
But I wouldn’t relent. I was like “We KNOW that social justice is the right thing. And ‘science’ is the only way of knowing. Then what’s the logic with which we say social justice is the right thing?” I said it was important for us to articulate that logic or if not we wouldn’t have any way to convince others that it was important to fight for social justice.*
*I actually said that we do have a few other ways. One is to use guns. Another is to use love. And that I am exploring the latter. But the quest for a logic was so important.
CVN sought more time to think about it.
And that brings me to an important fight with the postmodernists. In mfc group, I’ve had several sleepless days debating with a bunch of people who think that we have no way of knowing whether homeopathy, ayurveda, etc could be bullshit. That there’s a “possibility” that these are true. That our ability to know the “truth” will always be influenced by where we’re coming from. They think we’re living in some crazy world where we can never know anything, and just everything could be true.
In that fight, it became clear to me that there is some sort of “logic” which I was looking for in everything. That it is this “logic” or rationality that I was calling science. In another discussion with Prashanth we decided to not call it ‘science’ because it was confused by several people to mean the establishment, but to call it ‘jnana’ or so.
So, science (broadly construed), or rationality, or ‘jnana’ whatever you call it, is how we tend to get answers to everything.
Then what’s the science of social justice? What’s the logic of social justice?
How do we ‘know’ that social justice is necessary?
That’s the crux of the challenge.
One way to answer this would be that this is beyond the realm of science. That it is politics. Or morality.
If you’ve gone through Michael Sandel’s famous course or book on “Justice”, you’ll notice that MS gives many different “logics” – utilitarianism, libertarianism, Kant, Aristotle, etc. But again, the choice is left to us. So we’re again left with the question of “what’s the logic of our choice to work for social justice and how do we objectively describe it to a skeptic?”
Let’s do the 2024 thing, and ask Claude.ai what it thinks.
You’ve raised a profound and challenging question that gets to the heart of moral philosophy. You’re correct that there’s no universally agreed-upon, objective foundation for pursuing justice or any other moral goal. This leads us to the realm of metaethics – the study of the nature of ethical statements and judgments.
There are several perspectives on this:
- Moral Realism: Some philosophers argue that objective moral truths exist independently of what any individual or culture believes. Under this view, pursuing justice could be objectively right, even if we can’t always discern what justice entails.
- Moral Relativism: This view holds that moral truths are relative to cultures or individuals. From this perspective, justice is indeed optional, as it’s just one of many possible value systems.
- Moral Non-Cognitivism: This approach suggests that moral statements aren’t truth-apt (capable of being true or false) but are expressions of emotion or prescriptions for action.
- Evolutionary Ethics: Some argue that our sense of justice and morality evolved because it was beneficial for group survival, but this doesn’t necessarily make it objectively “true.”
- Pragmatism: This view suggests we should pursue justice because it leads to better outcomes for societies, even if we can’t prove it’s objectively correct.
You’re right that, in a sense, all moral frameworks are “optional.” There’s no physical law of the universe that compels us to be just or moral. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that morality is arbitrary or unimportant.
Many philosophers argue that even without an objective foundation, we can still have robust, rational discussions about ethics and justice. They suggest that we can use reason, empathy, and shared human experiences to build ethical frameworks that, while not objectively provable, are defensible and beneficial.
Moreover, from a practical standpoint, societies need some shared ethical framework to function. While the specifics of what constitutes justice may vary, the concept of justice itself seems to be a near-universal feature of human societies.
In the end, whether to pursue justice (or any moral goal) is a choice we make as individuals and societies. But it’s a choice with profound implications for how we live and interact with others. The lack of an objective foundation doesn’t negate the importance of these choices; if anything, it makes our moral deliberations even more crucial.
That should settle it. If generations of philosophers haven’t found an answer, can we really find a logic to social justice?
But there’s an alluring charm to the search for a logic. If only we had an objective way to say justice is right, we could go about our lives much more easily. We just have to tell everyone the logic and abracadabra they are now working for social justice too. The whole world could just be transformed.
Yet there’s no logic. And therefore the fight for social justice is hard. It is an illogical choice. It is something we enter into through our own free will. And so all the methods of how we transfer “knowledge” comes of no use for us. Because it is not “knowledge”. Social justice is a choice. How do we convey our choice to someone else? That’s the question we actually need to answer.
As I’ve written before, after exploring power and realizing it doesn’t work I’ve been exploring love as a framework for this. I’ll write soon about how this has been working out for me in the last two years.