When we advise members on working with social movements we are often asked the question: “What makes these people move, what do they want?” And the simplest and the most accurate answer to this question is – justice! But this answer needs clarification.
Indeed, we’ve established in a previous article that the fragmented visions of our reality held by different social groups and movements, on the left and the right, have one thing in common – they see our societies as increasingly unfair and unjust, and they blame the opposing groups for it.
This was true of the Black Lives Matters supporters who protested peacefully in front of the US Capitol, and of the alt-right extremists who stormed it a few months later, with deadly consequences.
Equity and fairness are, then, fluid concepts, if they can mean practically opposing things to different people. Moreover, the term “social justice” is particularly unfortunate. Conservative media love to caricature and dismiss people they disagree with as “social justice warriors.” Progressive causes are happy to fly the flag of social justice, but many come to recognize that the term is too theoretical, with limited potential to motivate and inspire action.
At the Altruist League, we prefer to speak simply of Justice, an ideal with a very clear meaning: everyone is the same before the law; everyone has the same chance to succeed or fail in life according to their abilities; everyone is paid fairly for the work that they do, irrespective of who they are and how they look; everyone pays their fair share of taxes. This concept is clear enough that it can be measured, both in practice and in citizens’ perceptions.
Our view is grounded in academic thinking. Discussions around the theory of justice in the second part of the 20th century tend to center on John Rawls’s seminal work (Theory of Justice, 1971), in which he draws on Kantian and social contract theory to provide an alternative to utilitarianism and define what a socially just distribution of goods in a society looks like.
Rawls felt that the best structure of rights and obligations in a society would be the one that was the best for the worst-off members of that society. Why would those better-off agree with this? Well, to solve this Rawls introduced the concept of the “veil of ignorance.”
Under the veil of ignorance assumption, as we define the laws of a society we should act as if we don’t know what our own position in it will be. We do not know how much talent, wealth, or health we will have, what our gender will be or where we will live. Therefore, it is in our interest to ensure that everyone in a society can have a decent living, just in case we ourselves, when we roll the dice, end up with less privilege and opportunity than most.
Rawls’s extensive body of work goes far beyond this, and has been criticised and adapted over the past half-century, most famously in Robert Nozick’s work from 1974, Anarchy, State and Utopia. However, even from the little that we have discussed so far, an obvious objection is that the veil of ignorance clearly does not hold. Those with the power to define the laws are aware of their position and will prefer the laws that perpetuate their power. Those with wealth will prefer laws that help them accumulate more of it and pass it on to the next generation.
This is a key concern. When we support initiatives that change the world, we must do so in ways that make the world more fair not less, more equitable, not less. Here, both Rawls (particularly in his Justice as Fairness) and Nozick are clear – more fair means more fair for the people on the ground, for the least privileged ones. Who gets to decide whether this is the case or not? They do.
It might seem shocking at first to think that we don’t get to be the self-evaluators of the effects of our own philanthropy, but it is the only way of thinking coherent with a justice-increasing approach.
It is even more uncomfortable that the idea of what is fair keeps evolving in the minds of our partners. For a long time, we were content to go over to a faraway country, give money to a few NGOs and come out feeling warm inside, being met with nothing but gratitude along the way.
Today, our partners are posing uncomfortable questions. Why are country directors all White expats? Why do we support fossil fuels elsewhere in our portfolios? Why have we been in their country for decades and the systemic problems of democracy and inequality have only become worse?
The bar of fairness and justice is rising ever higher, and we must evolve to clear it.
Now, does increasing justice necessarily mean losing power for the philanthropist? Simplistic criticism of recent text, the ones that write off modern philanthropy as cynical and self-serving, adopt a strictly zero-sum view of power. Here and there, wealthy people and those trying to win their favor write op-eds arguing the contrary, that philanthropy can indeed empower without diminishing the privilege of the rich.
The latter views sometimes have the right arguments but the people holding them often lack the credibility, because for too long they have been part of a model of philanthropy that was a tool for perpetuating the status quo.
We believe in increasing the total amount of power in a society, and we believe that philanthropy can do this. But only the new model of philanthropy as the League members conduct it, trust-based and ground-led, done by belief-driven altruists determined to leave a legacy to the world by solving large, systemic problems. Nothing else will do.
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