Coming back, after a week or so, to the discussion with Norm about question begging, let me start by accepting completely this definition, also quoted by Norm in a later post:
To “beg the question” does not mean to raise or prompt the question. It means to assume in your premises the truth of your conclusion.
I had said that:
[Phrases such as "social justice"] do beg the question because they assume, implicitly, that a particular set of policies are “fair” or “just” without making that case, indeed they seem to be an attempt to win the labels of justice and fairness through assertion and repetition, rather than reasoned argument.
Norm’s fullest rebuttal of my suggestion of question begging was (linked above):
Yet I wasn’t begging the question. To beg the question is to assume, in your premises, the truth of the conclusion you have set out to establish; and in that post I hadn’t set out to establish anything. I was giving in summary form my own reasons for voting Labour. It would have been more than rash of me to think I could make a case for a whole conception of social justice in one or two lines. And I didn’t try. Neither will I now. But in a very short blogpost I feel entitled simply to telegraph, without more ado, that I think there are unjustified inequalities in our society, and that Labour has a better record of addressing these than the Conservative Party does, and is more likely than are either the Tories or the Lib-Dems to look to the needs of working people and the less well off.
Norm seems to be arguing that the phrase “social justice” is a form of shorthand, not question-begging. Indeed, he applied this distinction to another phrase, “useful idiot” when Oliver Kamm suggested it was a form of question-begging:
It’s true that if what you were doing was trying to make an argument about Clegg’s being a useful idiot, and you didn’t set out the evidence for the claim that he’d been outmanoeuvred by Cameron, then you’d be begging the question. But that doesn’t make the phrase ‘useful idiot’ intrinsically question-begging, as Oliver says it is; it is just a means of putting forward the outmanoeuvred-type claim. Oliver appears simply to assume that in arguing for such claims the person who does so won’t try to show what she or he ‘need[s] to show’. They might not but they also might.
But this could be said of any example of question-begging: that it was just shorthand for an argument that would, at that time under those circumstances, have been tedious to make. It is the form of the argument that was actually made that is question-begging; this is no reflection on the underlying validity of the case being made. Maybe it’s a good case, but that particular way of arguing it was question-begging.
Norm admits that the phrase “social justice” was intended as shorthand for a specific set of policies. This use begged the question: are those policies just? It begs this question whether it is just shorthand for a longer argument that doesn’t beg any questions, or whether it’s intended to be the full argument in itself.
To assume in your premises the truth of your conclusion is a sort of circular argument: I know that A is true because B is true; I know that B is true because A is true. Alternatively, A is B because B is A. At it’s most condensed, it can take the form of: A is true because A is true.
Here’s an example:
The majesty of creation proves the existence of God.
The idea that there was a creation, as opposed to some entirely natural physical process, at the origin of our universe, depends on the existence of a God. The above can be re-rendered, therefore, as follows:
{God exists} therefore {God exists}
How about this, though, from the Wikipedia page on Social Justice. I give you the very first line:
Social justice is the application of the concept of justice on a social scale.
And the first sentence of the second paragraph:
Social justice is also a concept that some use to describe the movement towards a socially just world.
Of course, a clumsy Wikipedia article is not Norm’s responsibility, but the circularity of these sentences is genuinely revealing (it’s hard to avoid) and they are question-begging. Here’s how.
The phrase “social justice” has a very specific meaning, it is a label for certain types of outcomes or for the political policies that are designed to achieve them. That these outcomes are just is the question being begged. The first Wiki quote could be paraphrased as follows:
{Socialist/Redistributive/Egalitarian policies} are the application of the concept of justice on a social scale.
But this isn’t true. They are the application of a certain type of conception of justice on a social scale. Some ex-Labour voters who have been drifting to the BNP seem to have a different conception of justice, one in which you put into one of the pans of the balance before you ask the state to drop anything into the other pan. The granting of housing to an immigrant who has never paid tax, in preference to someone who has lived here all her life and contributed accordingly, seems like a breach of justice to many people.
Perhaps some of Labour’s problems stem from an inability to hear, let alone understand, what some of their traditional supporters have been saying. Far from being a shorthand, phrases like “social justice” tend to eliminate further debate, being used to shout down anyone with a different view. You don’t want social JUSTICE? You bastard! Or even, in the case of the former Prime Minister, “You bigot!”. And all the time, the bastards and bigots are looking for justice, for exactly that, as they see it.
In passing, calling someone a “useful idiot” is similar; far from being a shorthand for a longer argument, it is an attempt to sabotage argument, to forestall it, to discredit a person not by drawing attention to flaws in the things they say, nor to the reasons why they might have said them. It’s the suggestion that they are unknowingly instrumental in the plans of a more powerful, and malevolent, other and that this, for some reason, undermines the person’s words. It’s an attempt to shout someone down.
Just as seeing the phrase “social justice” as a shorthand for a set of policies led to a substitution of words, seeing the word justice as a deeply subjective matter – in this context at least – means that we can further paraphrase the first Wiki sentence as follows:
{Socialist/Redistributive/Egalitarian policies} are the application of {Socialist/Redistributive/Egalitarian principles}.
Which is true enough.
David Cameron is very clever, I think. His use of words like “progressive” and “fair” to describe his own policies has been exactly right and that he should go further, adding “social justice” to his stable of reclaimed words and phrases. It might work, creating the need for actual debate about principles, rather than the trading of sloganised conclusions. Certainly, complaining about this sort of use of language hasn’t helped. Here’s someone, writing in 1946:
When one critic writes, “The outstanding feature of Mr. X’s work is its living quality,” while another writes, “The immediately striking thing about Mr. X’s work is its peculiar deadness,” the reader accepts this as a simple difference opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies “something not desirable.” The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Pétain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.
