Social Justice and the Indian Rope Trick.

• Author: Powell, Aaron Ross
• Position: Book review

Social Justice and the Indian Rope Trick

Anthony de Jasay

Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2014, 189 pp.

There's a clarity and straightforwardness to Anthony de Jasay's work that's always refreshing--even when I find myself disagreeing with what he's clearly and straightforwardly arguing. Jasay is unapologetic about his beliefs and that sense of purpose has animated his numerous contributions to libertarian thought. Yet, in this collection, that certainty occasionally leads him to offer incomplete arguments that miss their mark.

The essays collected in Social Justice and the Indian Rope Trick largely group into three different arguments, all intended in some degree to highlight what Jasay calls a "perilously ignored defect of modern political thought, namely the careless use, the misuse, and even the downright abuse of the language." The first target is the term "social justice," which Jasay thinks a pleonasm at best, a dangerous subversion of justice at worst. Then he turns to rights, which he finds conceptually unhelpful, tying us in intellectual knots we could shrug out of if we'd only recognize the primacy of rules. Finally, he addresses the problems of social contract theory and distinguishes it from his own preferred theory of conventions.

Of his three targets, social justice is where I most fear Jasay's arguments don't work. Or, at least, don't quite establish as much as he says they establish. Over the course of several essays, he makes many trenchant observations; he also often argues against concepts that, while familiar to advocates of social justice, won't look like the views they actually claim to hold. He also displays a tendency to get tied up in his own preferred terminology, thus allowing tricks of language to take the place of trenchant criticism.

He begins his critique by noting that a great many concepts exist in binaries with their opposites, and the binaries have value baked in. Thus "good" pairs with "bad," and we needn't build arguments for why we prefer the former. Good is obviously better than bad, and so a good result better than a bad one. Likewise with "beautiful-ugly, useful-useless, clever-dumb, adequate-inadequate, just-unjust." Contrast these with binaries that may have values associated with the sides but which aren't self-evident: "Big-small, long-short, loose-tight, heavy-light, soft-hard, equal-unequal." It's this last--equal-unequal--that sits at the heart of social justice, Jasay says, and so is the seed of...