Social Justice

The principles of social justice are used to assess whether the distribution of benefits and burdens among members (or groups) of a society are appropriate, fair, and moral. The substance of such assessments usually consists of arguments about the concepts of rights, deserts, or needs. When applied to society as a whole, the term social justice pertains to whether the institutions of a society are arranged to produce appropriate, fair, and moral distributions of benefits and burdens among societal members and groups. As such, social justice is linked directly to the evaluation of social and educational programs, policies, and personnel because these entities, and their evaluations, directly affect the distribution of benefits and burdens. Of course, there are competing conceptions of social justice within liberal democratic societies, and social justice remains a controversial topic in evaluation.

In spite of the conceptual link between social justice and evaluation, social justice concerns are often omitted from evaluation discussions. There are at least two reasons for this. First, evaluators are not well versed in philosophy or political science and often feel unprepared to discuss such concepts. Many evaluators have had methodological training that does not deal with social justice issues. Second, and more important, social justice concerns have long been excluded from social science research for political reasons. In her history of the origins of American social science, Dorothy Ross documented how social justice concerns were indeed topics of discussion in the social sciences during the early 20th century. However, several “Red scare” episodes stemming from fears of Marxism swept the United States and intimidated many social researchers. Some prominent economists and sociologists were dismissed from their university positions for supporting labor unions, child labor laws, and other social policies opposed by university boards of trustees, who came mostly from business backgrounds.

The result was that mainstream social scientists retreated from issues that might be seen as politically risky into concerns about research methodology. If social researchers could be persecuted for taking stands on political and “values” issues, they would be safe if they focused on which tests of statistical significance to employ or what sampling procedures to use, issues of no interest to politicians or boards of trustees. Those social researchers who remained concerned about social justice issues were relegated to the fringes of their disciplines for being too political. Social science in other countries had different origins, differences reflected in different discourses today.

This shift into safer political waters was bolstered intellectually by the ascendant philosophy of science called logical positivism, which endorsed “value-free” research. Values-free social science became the accepted research dogma. In the view of the logical [Page 394]positivists and those influenced by them (knowingly or unknowingly), values were not researchable. Only entities that could be confirmed by direct reference to “facts” were appropriate for scientific research. Facts were one domain and values quite another. In this view, values were emotions or political stances or projections of feelings. Because they were nonrational, value positions simply had to be accepted or rejected.

Later historic, philosophical, and sociological investigations into the nature of scientific inquiry proved that this positivist view of facts was incorrect. It was not possible to compare concepts and theories directly with the facts because one's view of the facts was determined by one's concepts and theories to begin with, even in science. The primacy of facts doctrine was revised to one that compared propositions (beliefs) to the existing corpus of beliefs. Sometimes the new scientific claim had to be changed, and sometimes the corpus of beliefs had to be changed, but theory confirmation consisted of comparing the belief in question to other beliefs, not to pristine facts (called nonfoundationalism).

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