Charity, Justice, and Legitimacy

There's often a pretty low signal/noise ratio in blog comment threads, but every once in a while you get something really good. For example, here comes the very distinguished Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity at Harvard University T.M. Scanlon in a Decembrist thread:

Matt Yglesias was right to point out that Christian organizations do a lot of good works, mostly abroad. But I think it is misleading to cite this as a concern with social justice. At its best, it is admirable humanitarianism. But a concern with justice is not merely a concern ith alleviating suffering but a concern with changing unjust social institutions. There is little or none of this concern even at the level of rhetoric in the Christian movements. Your question asks, rightly, why this is so. In answering, we should distinguish between what may be true of the Christian revival you mention and what is true of the use that is made of it in our current politics. As far as the latter is concerned, it is noteworthy that the appeals to moral values almost never require any sacrifice on the part of those to whom these appeals are addressed. They are invited to feel good about their superiority to gays, righteous about their opposition to abortion, satisfied about their devotion to family and so on. Appeals to justice, on the other hand would have two quite different effects. First, achieving justice is likely to involve sacrifice, such as, shudder, paying higher taxes, changing one's life-style, or accepting greater risks of attack rather than violating other people's rights. These demands are the sort that liberals make. Second, when you raise questions of justice you raise quesitons about the legitimacy of our institutions and policies. As another commentor on your site recently observed many of the people to whom this religious revival appeals are people who feel their status and way of life to be threatened. Religion offers reassurance that they and their lives are in fact good and pure. This reassurance would be undermined by raising questions of justice, which suggest that American policies and instutions are open to moral criticism. Those questions, they are told, are raised only by people who "hate America." It is safer, then, to keep duties to the poor, focused mainly on the poor abroad, and to keep them in the realm of voluntary, admirable charity.

The distinction between charity and social justice is important, and I shouldn't have overlooked it. But the question of requiring "sacrifice" isn't especially relevant to the distinction (though it is important in understanding the popularity of moral concern about gay rights and so forth, which amounts to self-righteousness rather than a requirement that anyone actually do anything) since charity and justice alike demand sacrifice from their adherent. The point about legitimacy, however, is spot-on. A true demand for social justice necessarily calls into question the legitimacy of the social order, the legitimacy of my having what I have, and does not just ask me to sacrifice some of my property and my position, but admit to myself that my possession of my property and position is, to some extent, unjustifiable and unjust. This is a hard thing to admit, and while it's possible to conceptualize efforts to admit it and change the world as part of doing God's will, I think it's equally easy to reason that it can't have been God's will to erect an unjust system.