As part of its ongoing effort to identify a new vision for America’s Exhausted Majority, the Beacon Project is thrilled to publish guest posts by leading philosophers, leaders, and social scientists on how we build a country that works for everyone.
Today we are publishing our inaugural guest post by Dr. Michael Karlberg, professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Western Washington University. Dr. Karlberg recently coauthored a book titled Rethinking Social Justice: Theory and Action in an Age of Transition, which offers a compelling and original rethinking of social justice at a moment of global uncertainty and transformation. Written in an accessible style, the book explores whether an ethic of “contributive justice” can bring about collective flourishing.
We were struck by the resonance between contributive justice and potentialism, the political framework we’re exploring at the Beacon Project. What do you think? Does this perspective speak to you? Let us know in the comments!
The horizon of contributive justice
Contributive justice can be understood as a set of social conditions that allows every individual and group to develop their latent potentialities and thereby contribute to the flourishing of the entire social body, which in turn enables their own flourishing.
Contributive justice offers a unifying horizon that beckons us to see beyond the polarizing illusion of right/left binaries.
Conservatives tend to emphasize our moral responsibility to work hard and contribute to society, along with the rewards due to those who fulfill these duties. On the other hand, progressives emphasize our right to live in social conditions that enable us to develop and contribute, along with the government’s responsibility to ensure such conditions.
By emphasizing both rights and responsibilities, contributive justice encompasses and unifies both of these visions.
Contributive versus distributive justice
Contributive justice also addresses a challenge that lies at the heart of the question of how we build a fair society. Typically, when people and policymakers think about what people need to thrive, they think largely in material terms: that is, in terms of income, accumulated wealth, affordable housing, and so forth. This is an approach known as distributive justice: the idea that if we could identify a fair process for the state and markets to distribute goods and services, then that would create a just society.
These things are necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for true justice. Equally necessary are dignity, recognition, respect, appreciation, encouragement, nurturing, love, cooperation, and many other non-material conditions that enable people to develop their latent capacities to contribute to the betterment of society.
The latter conditions cannot be distributed by states or markets. They have to be cultivated in individuals and communities, through relationships and social practices. They have to be fostered in shared norms, values, and systems of meaning. They have to become manifest in human character and culture.
To the extent any of the conditions associated with contributive justice are present in any given context, we should seek to conserve them. To the extent they are lacking, we should seek to progress toward them. Contributive justice is thus a horizon that beckons to all of us. And it invites us to see beyond the false dichotomy of right versus left.
The Beacon Project’s idea of potentialism points toward this same horizon.
But how can a divided nation advance together toward this horizon?
The power of constructive agency
In our book Rethinking Social Justice, Derik Smith and I explore this question. The prevailing discourse on social justice suggests that when conventional politics fail us, we should turn to unconventional forms of contentious politics. It is in this context that familiar debates over violent or nonviolent approaches to social change play out.
For instance, most people recognize that we are facing a growing chasm of wealth and poverty in the United States, which has profound implications for human wellbeing. To rectify this, should we start destroying the property and threatening the lives of economic elites who benefit from current arrangements, to force change? Or should we take to streets in peaceful protest and engage in nonviolent acts of civil disobedience to bring about change?
Derik and I argue for a third option: constructive agency.
Constructive agency means building new patterns of community life, along with corresponding institutional structures — to supplant those unjust patterns and structures we have inherited from the past. Those anachronistic patterns and structures are failing us because, among things, they limit the development of human potential. They prevent us from developing and sharing our gifts—which in turn stifles our ability to create the world we desire.
We can’t simply protest our way to the world we want to live in. We have to actively construct it. This requires creativity, imagination, dedication, coordination, and perseverance. It also requires that our actions prefigure the world we want to live in. If we want to live in a world that embodies the principle of contributive justice – or the philosophy of potentialism – we need to learn how to draw out everyone’s latent capacity to contribute toward this end.
Inclusive and empowering forms of constructive action are how we advance. But this is impossible if we remain trapped by the dysfunctional logic of the right/left binary. That logic is just another divisive and disempowering form of othering that perpetuates the status quo.
Fortunately, Americans have more in common than our commercial media algorithms and our partisan pundits would like us to believe. And the way we move forward together is by building on what we share in common.
This is the path offered by contributive justice.
Thank you for sharing this! One of the synergies I see between the ideas of contributive justice and constructive agency with potentialism is the notion of when we see every individual as having something to contribute or a gift, could that imply also seeing everyone as having the capacity to be creative and innovative.
So that when we think of a society that enables individuals to develop their gifts and instills in them, their community and institutions a sense of responsibility to do so, does it at the same time see creativity as faculty of every soul and therefore supports contributions or gifts to be ones that helps the unimaginable to be imagined and advanced towards, especially in the name of contributing to the advancement of civilization.
Knowing we were chatting with you later today I think inspired me to jump into the meaning-posting game ;) https://zachill.substack.com/p/we-dont-need-a-new-politics-to-live