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Social Justice

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Political Philosophy
21April2014
Social Justice What is social justice? Social Justice can mean something different depending on who you are talking to. The most common definition of social justice is a policy-making theory that tries to ensure that all members of society are treated fairly and that all have the same opportunities to partake of and share in the benefits of society. This could mean the end of discrimination based on sex, race, creed, ethnicity, or income. Another form of social justice could be equality through fair taxation and the distribution of wealth, resources, and property. It could also mean equal access to education and job placement for everybody. I believe that social justice is all of these things. In this …show more content…

are denying people a human right as basic as the air we breathe." Such protests exemplify the confrontations that come up when governments debate the unequal distribution of resources such as water, food, oil, and wood”.(Social Justice) These debates are exacerbated by the fact that most natural resources are held by industrialized nations in the Northern Hemisphere, while developing countries of the Third World are lacking.
Karl Marx thought along this line as well. In the opening chapter of the communist manifesto Marx says, “The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes”. Marx is talking about the struggle between what he calls the bourgeoisie and the proletarians. Marx argues that the bourgeoisie are the haves in the society, owning and controlling the means of production. The proletarians are the working class who represent the have-nots, “…who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital”.(Marx Communist Manifesto)
Marx argues that it is capitalists who create this disparity between the two classes of

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