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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Why do we disagree about the causes of and solutions to social inequality? What explains our different viewpoints on Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, income inequality, and immigration? In this tightly argued book, John Iceland, Eric Silver, and Ilana Redstone show how two clashing worldviews - one emphasizing Social Justice and another Social Order - are preventing Americans from solving their most pressing social problems. The authors show how each worldview provides a different understanding of human nature, morality, social change, and the wisdom of the past. They argue that, before Americans can find lasting solutions to today's seemingly intractable societal challenges, they will need to recognize that each side possesses a wisdom the other lacks. Only then can we achieve the common ground and consensus we seek.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
1 Introduction
Moral Intuitions, Visions, and Beliefs about Social Order and Social Justice
Implications for Social Scientific Research
Applying the Social Order–Social Justice Framework
A Few Caveats
Summary and Plan of the Book
2 The Social Order–Social Justice Framework
Fairness and Equality
Freedom, Choice, and Responsibility
Individual and Group-Based Morality
Social Change
Conclusion
3 Gender Inequality
Historical Overview of the Changing Roles of Men and Women
Fairness and Equality
Freedom, Choice, and Responsibility
Individual and Group-Based Morality
Social Change
Conclusion
4 Racial Inequality
Social Order and Social Justice
Fairness and Equality
Freedom, Choice, and Responsibility
Critical Race Theory and Systemic Racism
Factors Other than Discrimination that Help Explain Racial and Ethnic Differences
Individual and Group-Based Morality
Social Change
Conclusion
5 Income Inequality and Poverty
Fairness and Equality
Freedom, Choice, and Responsibility
Individual and Group-Based Morality
Social Change
Conclusion
6 Immigration
A Brief History of Immigration Policy in the United States
Fairness and Equality
Freedom, Choice, and Responsibility
Individual and Group-Based Morality
Social Change
Conclusion
7 Where Do We Go from Here?
Toward More Constructive Disagreement
Viewpoint Diversity in Media and Social Science
Viewpoint Diversity in Education
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Figures
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1
Women’s median annual earnings as a percent of men’s earnings for full-time, yea…
Figure 3.2
Percentage of 25- to 29-year-olds who have completed four years of college or mo…
Figure 3.3
Women as a percent of total employed in selected occupations, 2016
Figure 3.4
Labor force participation rates among parents by gender and age of children, 202…
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1
Percent of people 25 years and older who have completed college, by race and eth…
Figure 4.2
Percent poor, by race and ethnicity, 1959–2020
Figure 4.3
Median household income (constant 2020 dollars), by race and ethnicity, 1967–202…
Figure 4.4
Poverty rates by family structure, race, and Hispanic origin, 2020
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1
Household incomes by quintile, 1967–2020 (2020 dollars)
Figure 5.2
Gini coefficient for inequality in household income, 1967–2020
Figure 5.3
Official poverty rate, 1959–2020
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1
Annual number of legal US immigrants by decade and percent of immigrants by regi…
List of Tables
Chapter 2
Table 2.1
The Social Order and Social Justice framework
Chapter 4
Table 4.1
Characteristics of selected ethnic groups, 2016
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Begin Reading
References
Index
End User License Agreement
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WHY WE DISAGREE ABOUT INEQUALITY
Social Justice vs. Social Order
John Iceland, Eric Silver, and Ilana Redstone
polity
Copyright © John Iceland, Eric Silver, and Ilana Redstone 2023
The right of John Iceland, Eric Silver, and Ilana Redstone to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2023 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5714-1
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022946839
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
1Introduction
The events of May 25, 2020 shifted the US national conversation on Social Justice and Social Order. That was the day George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police during an arrest after a store clerk alleged that he had passed a counterfeit $20 bill. One of the four police officers called to the scene knelt on Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes during the arrest, which was recorded by bystanders. Floyd can be heard telling the officers over a dozen times that he can’t breathe (Hill et al., 2020).
This shocked and appalled many Americans. It also reignited the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. After Floyd’s tragic death, protests spread across the United States and the world, sometimes erupting in riots that left at least twenty-four dead in total (Beckett, 2020; Poujoulat, 2020). By the end of the summer, racial inequality had been catapulted to center stage in our national conversation more forcefully than it had in many years.
In the months that followed, different reactions to the protest movement emerged. In a June 2020 New York Times opinion piece titled, “America, This Is Your Chance,” legal scholar and civil rights lawyer Michelle Alexander hailed the protests as a moment of reckoning. She wrote: “Our only hope for our collective liberation is a politics of deep solidarity rooted in love. In recent days, we’ve seen what it looks like when people of all races, ethnicities, genders and backgrounds rise up together, standing in solidarity for justice, protesting, marching and singing together, even as SWAT teams and tanks roll in” (Alexander, 2020).
But not everyone viewed these events so positively. Social commentator Heather Mac Donald, in an opinion piece in City Journal titled “Breakdown,” warned that the rioting was a threat to social order and if left unchecked would culminate in a dramatic spike in violent crime in cities across the country. Mac Donald wrote:
These are no longer the warning signs of a possible breakdown of civilized life. That breakdown is upon us. If local and national leaders are unable to summon the will to defend our most basic institutions from false and inflammatory charges of racism, they have forfeited their right to govern. Unless new leaders come forth who understand their duty to maintain the rule of law, the country will not pull back from disaster. (Mac Donald, 2020)
Alexander and Mac Donald were reacting to the same events, but their reactions were rooted in competing moral and philosophical perspectives that go well beyond questions of racially biased policing (Silver et al., 2022). Alexander’s reaction reflects a Social Justice perspective that is concerned primarily with the plight of the vulnerable. Mac Donald’s reaction reflects a Social Order perspective that is concerned primarily with social stability and cohesion.
To further see these two languages in action, consider a second social movement with a far-reaching impact: #MeToo. This movement served the important role of highlighting the problem of sexual assault and harassment, especially in the workplace. The watershed moment of #MeToo was the 2017 exposé of the predatory behavior of Harvey Weinstein, a movie mogul accused by several women of sexual misconduct, including rape. As the allegations against Weinstein surfaced, many women came forward with their own experiences of sexual assault and harassment, thus launching a social movement to reduce gender violence and increase gender equality. While many of the ideals of the movement were widely shared across political divides, the definition of the range of misbehaviors that qualified as “sexual violence” and the preferred methods to address it differed (Silver and Silver, 2021).
In 2017, writer Sophie Gilbert aptly summarized the importance of the movement to so many women, and men:
The power of #MeToo … is that it takes something that women had long kept quiet about and transforms it into a movement. Unlike many kinds of social-media activism, it isn’t a call to action or the beginning of a campaign, culminating in a series of protests and speeches and events. It’s simply an attempt to get people to understand the prevalence of sexual harassment and assault in society. To get women, and men, to raise their hands. Recent revelations about the alleged abuses of Weinstein and Bill Cosby and Jimmy Savile and R. Kelly have proven that truth has power. There’s a monumental amount of work to be done in confronting a climate of serial sexual predation – one in which women are belittled and undermined and abused and sometimes pushed out of their industries altogether. (Gilbert, 2017)
However, other commentators argued that, while the #MeToo movement highlighted an important social problem, it also led to excesses. They raised concerns about presumptions of guilt without due process and the flattening of all sexual misconduct into a broad category of sexual violence. As commentator Andrew Sullivan wrote:
The act of anonymously disseminating serious allegations about people’s sex lives as a means to destroy their careers and livelihoods has long gone by a simple name. It’s called McCarthyism … I’ll tell you what’s also brave at the moment: to resist this McCarthyism, to admit complexity, to make distinctions between offenses, to mark a clear boundary between people’s sexual conduct in a workplace and outside of it, to defend due process, to defend sex itself, and privacy, and to rely on careful reporting to expose professional malfeasance. In this nihilist moment when Bannonites and left-feminists want simply to burn it all down, it’s especially vital to keep a fire brigade in good order. (Sullivan, 2018)
The #MeToo movement, like BLM, was inspired by a real social problem, yet it also elicited different reactions. These differing views were in large part reflections of Social Justice and Social Order concerns. When framed in this manner, we can more easily think through the tradeoffs involved in attempting to understand and solve these and other social problems. For Michelle Alexander and Sophie Gilbert, Social Justice is the salient orienting principle. They are willing to tolerate a degree of social upheaval in order to advance their cause and even view such upheaval as a necessary condition for social change. For Heather Mac Donald and Andrew Sullivan, who see value in the principles of Social Order, these movements have the potential to affect society in alarming ways. In this line of thinking, a too-strong focus on Social Justice in response to highly publicized cases can lead to an overly confident and overly rapid pursuit of social change that, despite good intentions, risks producing unintended negative consequences.
While the divergence between Social Order and Social Justice orientations can prove difficult to navigate even under the best of circumstances, increasing political polarization has made such navigation even more challenging. Because of polarization, elections have become more contentious, with people not only disagreeing with their opponents but often demonizing them. This observation is supported by opinion polls showing that partisan Americans increasingly dislike and distrust members of the opposing party (Iyengar et al., 2019; Molla, 2020).
The central thesis of this book is that two competing moral and philosophical perspectives – one oriented toward Social Justice and one oriented toward Social Order – constrain our collective conversations about social problems. We argue that the root cause of disagreements over social issues is not party affiliation, but rather a divide in people’s moral and philosophical beliefs and intuitions about what constitutes a good and just society and how best to achieve it (Haidt, 2012; Kling, 2017; Marietta and Barker, 2019; Sowell, 2007).
The goal of this book is to describe these two perspectives and put them on equal footing. In doing so, we hope to explain one “side” to the other in order to foster more fruitful conversations and solutions. We believe that complex social problems cannot be addressed without a shared understanding of their causes and magnitude. And to achieve this understanding policymakers and the public must first learn to recognize and become conversant in the moral language of their ideological opponents.
In the pages that follow, we attempt to provide new insight into the nature of a wide range of contemporary public disagreements. In doing so, we hope to help those who hold either a Social Order or Social Justice perspective to recognize the bases of their own convictions and to become better at understanding and communicating with those with whom they disagree – in the hope that we may all get better at working together to formulate effective, data-driven solutions to today’s most intractable social problems.
It is unfortunate when efforts to solve social problems founder due to lack of resources, but it is tragic when such efforts founder due to failed communication. We hope this book will help to avoid such tragedies.
Moral Intuitions, Visions, and Beliefs about Social Order and Social Justice
Psychological research suggests that moral intuitions are strong and relatively stable. They are the result of “fast thinking” cognitions that precede and influence our more deliberate moral reasoning (Greene, 2013; Haidt, 2001, 2012). Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has posited that our moral intuitions coalesce around two broad domains: “Individualizing moral intuitions” encourage us to suppress selfishness for the good of other individuals by putting the care and protection of individuals at the center of moral concern. “Binding moral intuitions” encourage us to suppress selfishness for the good of the group by putting social order and cohesion at the center of moral concern.
Upon hearing of a woman who feels unsafe when a co-worker tells a joke with sexual content, for example, or a citizen who speaks disrespectfully to a police officer during a traffic stop, many people feel a flash of anger. According to Haidt, those with strong individualizing moral intuitions will react more negatively to hearing about the woman who feels unsafe, while those with strong binding moral intuitions will react more negatively to hearing about the disrespectful citizen. Haidt explains that moral intuitions such as these are present to varying degrees in all humans due to innate mental structures that have arisen in response to adaptive challenges that faced our ancestors in our evolutionary past. The strength of each person’s moral intuitions, however, depends greatly on his or her prior learning and experience.
The economist Thomas Sowell describes how differences of opinion on a wide range of social issues are shaped by what he calls conflicting “visions” of human nature. Like Haidt, Sowell describes these visions as “pre-analytic cognitive acts” that we experience before we engage in logical reasoning (Sowell, 2007: 4). Sowell outlines two basic visions. The “constrained” vision is grounded in the belief that people are flawed and therefore incapable of achieving perfection themselves or of engineering a perfect society. Because of our inherent flaws, we need social control mechanisms, such as religion, markets, and government to serve the important role of regulating human behavior to minimize the amount of pain we would otherwise inflict on one another. In this view, social control practices grow gradually out of experience, wisdom, and hard-won lessons over long spans of time. The complex knowledge contained within social control practices is greater than what any single human being can fully comprehend. In Sowell’s constrained vision, rapid social change – regardless of the good intentions of those who advocate for it – runs the risk of disrupting longstanding social control solutions, including such things as norms, laws, and institutions, and, in doing so, risks ushering in social disorder and misery.
In contrast, Sowell’s unconstrained vision holds that, while people might rightly be considered “flawed,” they and the societies they live in can be improved, and perhaps even perfected. In this view, people can use their moral and intellectual powers to design a better world and, in doing so, transform social relations from a default position of selfishness to one of generosity. Those with intellectual acumen and a selfless moral nature can help make better decisions for society, thus eliminating the need to rely on the past as a source of wisdom. In fact, in this view, we shouldn’t rely on the past, since it contains many social practices that are neither rational nor just. The unconstrained vision thus lends itself to activism that relies on human intelligence, compassion, and empathy and that aims to eliminate what are seen as outdated social practices, mindsets, institutions, and laws.
Building on the work of Haidt and Sowell, the economist Arnold Kling describes how people’s intuitions about social problems are shaped by what he calls the “three languages of politics.” The three languages function as interpretive lenses through which progressives (i.e., liberals in the United States), conservatives, and libertarians come to identify, support, and condemn the perceived protagonists and antagonists involved in a range of social problems. Progressives use the language of “oppressor/oppressed,” which reflects a belief that “certain groups or categories of people intrinsically fall into [one or the other of these] categories” (Kling, 2017: 5). This leads them to see social problems as the result of abuses of power and authority in which oppressors dominate and exploit those with less power.
Conservatives are also concerned about social problems. However, according to Kling, they use the language of “order/chaos,” which reflects the view that social problems are the result of a breakdown in traditional values brought on by rebellious individuals and groups who are “indifferent to the assault on the moral virtues and traditions that are the foundation of our civilization” (2017: 4). Conservatives thus tend to resist efforts to alter society too quickly out of a concern over the unintended negative consequences that are likely to occur when flawed human beings attempt to improve a social order that has taken generations to evolve.
Finally, in Kling’s description, libertarians use the language of “freedom/constraint,” which reflects their inclination to see social problems as a struggle between those who would permit or enable the rights and autonomy of individuals to be sacrificed in service of a higher purpose and those who would resist such efforts. The freedom/constraint lens leads libertarians to oppose policies that would limit or reduce individual freedom of choice and to be especially sensitive to government overreach into the private affairs of citizens.
Table 1.1 shows how the perspectives of Haidt, Sowell, and Kling overlap. Each has something useful to offer as we attempt to understand why contemporary Americans struggle to communicate about social problems. On its own, however, each shines only a narrow spotlight on the nature of the challenge. For instance, one might argue that we should recognize that individuals with strong individualizing moral intuitions are also fully capable of binding themselves into tribal coalitions in order to pursue their social justice aims. Or one could assert that Kling doesn’t consider the fact that people’s preferences for one narrative language over another may run deep and at times contradict the political label (i.e., progressive, conservative, libertarian) with which they identify. Or one might contend that Sowell’s categories (i.e., constrained and unconstrained) are overly abstract and often far removed from the terminology that real-world individuals see themselves reflected in. One might also point out that Sowell’s “unconstrained vision” is not only a problem on the left but is rather a problem inherent in most forms of political extremism, regardless of political orientation.
Table 1.1 Three overlapping perspectives
Social Justice
Social Order
Haidt
Individualizing moral intuitions that put the individual at the center of moral concern
Binding moral intuitions that put social groups at the center of moral concern
Sowell
Unconstrained vision of people’s ability to improve and perfect social institutions and society
Constrained vision of people’s ability to improve and perfect social institutions and society
Kling
Oppressor/oppressed lens for interpreting social events
Order/chaos lens for interpreting social events
What is needed, therefore, is a framework that both simply and directly organizes the underlying currents of these three frameworks in a way that: (1) is intelligible to people outside of academia; (2) facilitates understanding among people with opposing viewpoints; and (3) is useful to those interested in better understanding how and why twenty-first-century Americans disagree over social problems and their solutions.
We wrote this book to provide such a framework. In it we suggest that a Social Order or Social Justice orientation, both deeply rooted in moral intuitions, visions, and narrative lenses, underlies Americans’ divergent responses to today’s most pressing social problems. Proponents of each orientation have distinct ways of experiencing and thinking about human nature, the nature of social systems, social change, empathy, inequality, fairness, rights, responsibilities, agency, and the value of past social practices.
Those with a Social Order orientation tend to believe that human nature contains both good and evil and, importantly, cannot fundamentally change. This makes them wary of efforts to transform society that depend on people becoming more compassionate, generous, or universalistic in their moral concern for others. They observe that most people naturally empathize most strongly with those in their tribe and believe that getting them to do otherwise will always be an uphill climb.
They may further believe that all good things come with a cost, that no society is perfect or perfectible, and that as a result every social system is built on a complex set of tradeoffs. This means, for example, that one should not expect to successfully eradicate all forms of bias from individuals and institutions without at the same time imposing costly and perhaps morally or philosophically undesirable enforcement practices. Because no system is perfect or perfectible, and because of the weight the Social Order perspective places on the lessons of the past, its proponents tend to believe that success is best pursued by working within the existing system rather than attempting to fundamentally reform it or the people who comprise it. In short, those with a Social Order perspective tend to exhibit binding moral intuitions, a constrained vision of human nature, and a tendency to view social problems and solutions in terms of their implications for order and stability in society.
In contrast, those with a Social Justice orientation don’t emphasize such constraints. They tend to believe that individuals and society can and should be reformed to make them more equitable and compassionate than they currently are. This encourages them to empathize with those who are marginalized by the current social order and to advocate for social and individual change.
Those with a Social Justice orientation are less willing to accept that transforming a social system involves unwanted tradeoffs and, even when they see such tradeoffs, they are more likely to view them as necessary to achieve their social justice goals. For example, some people with a Social Justice orientation acknowledge that social policies such as affirmative action and social programs such as welfare may not be perfect, but they argue that the laudable goal of social justice justifies the use of less-than-perfect means to achieve it (as in, “to make an omelet, you have to break some eggs”). In short, those with a Social Justice orientation tend to exhibit individualizing moral intuitions, an unconstrained vision of human nature, and a tendency to view social problems and solutions in terms of their implications for the oppressed in society.
Implications for Social Scientific Research
Opposing sides on any issue often point to empirical studies to support their arguments. This means that social scientific research plays a unique role in our understanding of inequality. It is therefore both necessary and useful to consider how the framework we’ve outlined shapes our collective understanding of the social world.
The Social Order and Social Justice perspectives reflect not only how we perceive social problems, but also how we understand and think about their causes and solutions. Social scientific research is unrivaled in its ability to help us discern important social facts – such as the extent of demographic change over time or how much poverty there is in a society. But it has only limited power to pinpoint causal relationships between phenomena. Few natural experiments exist in the social world that allow us to hold all variables constant except the explanatory one of interest – the analytic approach that most powerfully demonstrates causality. Social science research thus puts us in the unenviable position of having to sift through alternative explanations to account for the particular social facts we observe. What’s more, the explanations we rule out or rule in often are subjective and ideologically driven.
There is thus considerable room for our moral and philosophical worldviews to shape our interpretations of social facts and the relationships among them. Our worldviews are linked to motivated reasoning, the human tendency to interpret data in a way that confirms our view of how the world works. Motivated reasoning helps explain why we struggle to get on the same page regarding the causes of gender inequality, racial inequality, the impact of immigration, and so on, despite having access to the same empirical studies (or facts).
Motivated reasoning doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to come to a better understanding of the connection between various social phenomena. Throughout this book we discuss many basic claims about the social world on which there is much agreement. But we also recognize that when it comes to inequality the facts aren’t always clear and motivated reasoning provides a distinct challenge. This is especially true given the changing nature of the extent and causes of problems within our social, economic, and political systems. In the final analysis, we agree with Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s (1983) contention that “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” We believe that by better understanding the different perspectives we bring to the data, the more we will be able we to discern the facts.
The challenge of interpreting social science research becomes even more pronounced when the research is being done disproportionately by people with one ideological orientation or another. Because academic research grows and evolves based on a system of peer review, it becomes distorted when the people doing and reviewing the research share the same ideological orientation. When one orientation emerges as dominant, groupthink and confirmation bias grow while resentment festers among those whose views are sidelined.
The Social Justice perspective currently is ascendant in the social sciences because most social scientists locate themselves on the left side of the political spectrum (Abrams, 2016). The orienting concern for many of these scholars is reducing social inequality (Smith, 2014). By contrast, there are few social scientists today whose main concern is understanding or safeguarding the social order (Turner et al., 2012), which means the concerns of most social scientists are out of step with those of the American polity (Turner, 2019). This points to the importance of employing researchers and policymakers with diverse viewpoints to study and address social problems, a point we address at the end of the book.
Applying the Social Order–Social Justice Framework
In the chapters that follow, we apply the Social Order–Social Justice framework to disagreements over a wide variety of topics. As an example of our approach, in the following sections we briefly show how our framework can be applied to both racial inequality, which we return to later in the book, and the COVID-19 pandemic
Racial inequality
Many commentators with a Social Justice orientation view the existence of racial disparities as a self-evident indictment of the system that is believed to generate them. In other words, the thinking is, but for a flawed, oppressive system that serves the interests of those in power, inequality wouldn’t exist. Consider the comments of history professor Ibram X. Kendi when asked about the findings of a study showing considerable racial inequality in patterns of economic mobility: “As an anti-racist, when I see racial disparities, I see racism.”
He continues, describing his view of how others might come to a different conclusion:
But I know for many racist Americans, when they see racial disparities they see black inferiority. So I was not surprised in the least by the number of comments claiming racism is not a major factor in the lives of black males. So many of our neighbors are unfortunately still living in their post-racial fantasy world. Let’s hope this study thrusts some of them into the racist real world. (Miller et al., 2018)
Kendi’s response and his characterization of his detractors’ responses reflects precisely the breakdown in conversation that motivates this book.
In his other written work, Kendi has advocated for addressing racial inequality through race-conscious, affirmative action policies in institutions where there is an unequal representation of groups (Kendi, 2019a). Further, he advocates for the establishment of a new federal Department of Anti-Racism (DOA), “comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees”:
The DOA would be responsible for preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas. (Kendi, 2019b)
To some, the mere suggestion of such a department raises concerns of authoritarianism. Yet, in this view, the goal of social justice (i.e., “making the omelet”) more than justifies the means of getting there (“breaking a few eggs”).
