COMMUNITARIANISM ADVANTAGES 72

AVOID DOMINATION AND IMPOVERISHMENT

COMMUNITARIANS WOULD SEEK TO REMEDY THE CONSEQUENCES OF DOMINATION AND IMPOVERISHMENT

PHILIP SELZNICK, professor emeritus of law and sociology at the School of Law, University of California at Berkeley, 1996; Social Justice: A Communitarian Perspective, The Responsive Community, Volume 6, Issue 4, Fall 1996, http://www.gwu.edu/~icps/selznick.html // acs-EE2001

We cannot vindicate moral equality–and thereby do justice–if we do not remedy the most important effects of domination and impoverishment. Social justice requires a regime in which everyone’s basic needs for life, health, liberty, and hope are respected and addressed. Therefore we must be committed to a baseline equality of condition, that is, a social minimum of nurture and opportunity. This can and should be conditional. It may well require a reciprocal exercise of personal responsibility with respect to work, education, and deferred gratification; and the level of the baseline will necessarily reflect the level of prosperity in the community as a whole. Moreover, inequality as such is not the issue. There is no question of requiring those who have more to help those who have less just because they have less. The obligation is owed to people who suffer or are degraded because they are oppressed and impoverished; to people who are in danger of being despised and excluded–that is, rejected as objects of moral concern.

COMMUNITARIANISM ACTS TO RESTRAIN SOCIAL DOMINATION

PHILIP SELZNICK, professor emeritus of law and sociology at the School of Law, University of California at Berkeley, 1996; Social Justice: A Communitarian Perspective, The Responsive Community, Volume 6, Issue 4, Fall 1996, http://www.gwu.edu/~icps/selznick.html // acs-EE2001

Restraining Domination. Mutuality presumes rough equality in the free play of exchange, association, interest, and power. This condition is threatened by the viruses of domination and exploitation. Enter social justice, whose chief office is to protect the weak against the strong. This it does by strengthening the rule of law and by correcting imbalances of social power, especially gross inequalities of wealth, education, and opportunity.