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From Individual Morality to Political Legitimacy:
Teaching a process for social justice
Social justice connotes substantive goals that are subject to cultural interpretation
and political context. For example, some see social justice as tolerance for religious
differences while others see social justice as secularism manifest as intolerance of certain
religious practices. Recent legislation in France bans headscarves in public schools with
the intention of fulfilling its separation of church and state and preserving its intolerance
for all religious practice in state funded schools. At the same time, the motivation for the
intolerance of religious symbol and practice may be the preservation of religious
tolerance and the prevention of religious discrimination in the public and education
sphere. The complexity is apparent. Social justice necessarily includes value judgments
and these value judgments likely confront alternative and opposing values. Even if
groups settle on a common value outcome, the complexity of conflicting values deepens
in terms of the strategies to reach the particular outcome. Anyone living through the
Clinton health care reform debate understands that it is relatively benign to have people
agree that universal health care is a good thing. The challenge is to generate support for
the same strategies. The strategies imply another layer of value that is subject to intense
disagreement. Who should pay for reform? How much support is fair? Who should be
responsible for monitoring and administering change and how do you enforce change?
These questions are broad enough to capture the complexity of social justice well beyond
the particular issues of headscarves and universal health care. And it is this complexity
that confronts the decision of goals and the decision of strategies in the pursuit of social
justice.
Convention