Justice is collective and an individual concept.
Justice is about the largest number of people
in a society having access to basic goods,
we call them human rights.
Like the right to dignity, right to life, and so on.
So it's a range of rights that,
I think, constitute the concept.
I think social justice is a collective concept.
Social justice goes to rights,
but it specifically goes to the possibility
to live a dignified life.
So the right to food, the right to education,
the right to housing, those sorts of things.
When we talk about rights we should
also talk about obligations.
And so I think that we do owe an obligation to society
because we have rights as citizens,
and as citizens we have obligations too.
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Defining the limits of that obligation,
and who imposes the obligation,
and what the obligation looks like,
is also something that people differ about.
But I think that society cannot flourish
if we don't have some kind of
mutual obligation towards each other.
You cannot talk about social justice
without some redistribution.
And I'm not talking about socialism or communism.
I'm talking about ensuring that everybody
has access to a decent education.
Law is the premier vehicle through which
social justice is ensured, guaranteed,
implemented, enforced.
I think that social justice has no meaning
if people are gonna sleep in the streets.
So it has to be some way of redistributing justice.
I'm talking about as many people in the society
as possible living dignified lives.
People should be allowed to make as much money as they can
in a principled way, and we should do so
with integrity and within the rules.
Everybody should contribute to the best of their ability.
Probably the strongest definitions of social justice
are to be found in the constitutions of the world.
They found in United Nations documents,
like the International Covenant on Economic,
Social, and Cultural Rights, social justice
emanates from the United States Constitution.
When the constitution was first drafted,
the ideals were the ideals of social justice.
The one thing that I think the United States
constitution does not have, that newer constitutions have,
particularly constitutions drafted in the last 50 years,
is a commitment to social and economic rights.
I think that social justice
has become political and ideological.
Up until, I think, the middle of the last century,
the idea of social justice or justice
was largely about individual human rights.
The right to vote, a range of rights
that we call civil and political rights.
But more and more people look at social and economic rights.
And they look at distributive justice,
the way that we think about people
having access to material resources.
And that's where I think the philosophical
and ideological questions come in.
So it has evolved and it's also become political
because we see it in the way that
leaders in the world, city leaders, or state leaders,
or country leaders, talk about social justice
as some kind of promise.
I think the state must have a commitment to social justice.
And I think that individuals have the duty
to ensure that the state engages with the individual
in society regarding social justice.
That is why, not just voting, but continuous
civic engagement is a way that people
engage with the state around social justice.
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