55-01.242.407 Sowell: Social Justice Fallacies (T/P)

Instructors: Dr. Michael Oliva Cordoba

Event type: Advanced seminar

Displayed in timetable as:

Hours per week: 2

Credits: 4,0

Language of instruction: German

Min. | Max. participants: 5 | 25

Comments/contents:
The idea of social justice can be and is described in many different ways. Not all of these ways can coexist equally well: 

Brian Barry's approach in his influential book Why Social Justice Matters is eminently political in the sense of political theory. He describes the subject area of social justice theory through the rallying cry and reform programmes of social democracy, which he saw at work after the Second World War, particularly in Germany and Sweden: "1. the power of capital must be curtailed by strong trade unions. 2. the distribution of income and wealth created by capitalism [is] unacceptably unequal and should be changed by appropriate tax and transfer measures [....] (the 'welfare state'). 3. education and health services of uniformly high quality should be made available to everyone across the board. Housing [is also] generally too important to be left to market forces." (Barry 2005, 5f.) David Miller pursues a more moral philosophical approach, which takes into account which conceptions of justice are empirically found in societies, but above all seeks to distil the underlying moral principles, especially those of merit, need and equality. (Miller 2001, ix f.) The dominant conception of John Rawls, on the other hand, is more political in the sense of political philosophy. It derives its own claim from contractarianism and sees social justice as a separate kind of justice that differs from humanitarian justice, global justice and other forms of justice in social terms. What is special about social justice is that its main focus is on determining the conditions for social co-operation, which primarily involves a political determination of the basic structure of society. As with Barry and Miller, social justice is thus eminently political, but as with Miller, it is ultimately moral. For Rawls, the focus is on distributive justice, which he sees as part of social justice. His theory is therefore centrally concerned with the regulation of distributional, and in particular economic, relationships. It aims to determine the distribution of income among socially productive, free and equal citizens who co-operate freely with each other. (Cf. e.g. Rawls 1971, 86ff. & Freeman 2007, 125f.)

Central issues of social justice are therefore bread and butter issues that committed citizens discuss at the kitchen table, at the workplace and in clubs and associations: On the one hand, equality, taxes, redistribution, public goods; on the other, poverty, wealth, the environment, discrimination and the like. In line with the importance of these issues, discussions on social justice are often ideological, controversial and often dogmatic. The American economist and social scientist Thomas Sowell sees one reason for this in the fact that the many important aspects that are touched upon in discussions on social justice are regularly intermingled with errors of reasoning and false conclusions. Emotions often run high in such discussions because there is a lot of thunder and smoke, but it remains unclear who is actually fighting with whom and who is hitting whom and how. In our seminar, we want to follow Thomas Sowell on his quest to rid the discussion of important social justice issues of misconceptions and false conclusions. In his latest book Social Justice Fallacies, Sowell identifies four main types of fallacies:

1. Those that arise from confusions about the concept and meaning of equality ("equal chances fallacies");
   
2. Those that arise from typically monocausal analyses that routinely attribute injustice to racism ("racial fallacies");
   
3. Those that ignore the autonomy and subjectivity of citizens and overemphasise the possibility of unrestricted social engineering ("chess piece fallacies");
   
4. Those that imagine an all-knowing or better-knowing central authority and do not sufficiently take into account the decentralisation and fragmentation of social knowledge ("knowledge fallacies").
   

• Committed participation (including oral participation!),
  
• Thorough preparation of the reading assignments
  
• Weekly written answers to short questions on the previous session. The answers are to be presented in the seminar in turn (micro-presentation).
  

1. Please take note of the following information. Ignorance is NOT an excuse!
   
2. The self-registration procedure requires you to enter your examination registration in STiNE in the seventh week of the lecture period. WITHOUT this entry, admission to the examination is not possible. Please take care of this in good time.
   
3. It is also essential that you make individual arrangements before the end of the seventh week of lectures to determine the examination topic. Please make an appointment with me (via michael.oliva-cordoba@uni-hamburg.de) in good time for a consultation to discuss the examination topic.
   
4. WITHOUT this consultation hour, admission to the examination is not possible. Your STiNE booking would be ineffective, a meaningless database entry. Please make sure you organise the consultation hour in good time!
   
5. Admission to the examination is in any case subject to the cancelling condition of regular seminar attendance.