Three Paradigms of Social Justice

I’ve just recently started reading Fuyuki Kurasawa’s “The Work of Global Justice: Human Rights as Practices” and I was struck by a similarity in his “three paradigms of social justice” to Tom Gleason’s notion of the fourth autonomy.

This correlation of sorts, that exists between their respective areas, is apparent when they are viewed as systems models. Gleason’s three autonomies relate to the role of design in a post enlightenment era. He speaks of the three autonomies of art, science and morality (or politics) and envisions design as a forth autonomy that uses the others to inform a praxis through design (or at least that is how I interpreted it).

Fuyuki Kurasawa writes of three paradigms of social justice that are philosophical normativism, politico-legal institutionalism, and global civil society empiricism. According to Kurasawa, “although [this is not] a comprehensive review of the multiplicity of writings on global justice”, these “three key paradigms” figure strongly in the shaping of current global social justice practices.

While links between the two may be somewhat tenuous, I think that the practice of doing so anyway may be quite useful to stimulate other ideas toward the formulation of a model for this research. So I acknowledge that I may be splicing a pear with an apple but I’m hoping the result will suit these growing conditions.

1. Politico-legal institutionalism corresponds to the autonomy of morality, in that it deals with systems of legal and political institutions “in order to increase democratic accountability and socio-economic fairness”.

2. Global civil society empiricism corresponds to the autonomy of science, in that it uses a structuralist approach to analyzing, measuring and quantifying data about the various actors in the field of social justice.

3. Philosophical normativism could be seen to correspond to the autonomy of the arts in that it exists in the domain of sociology and specifically the notions of a larger personal world view or umwelt and, as a result, “specify a universal moral principles, such as hospitality and egalitarian reciprocity”.

But where notions of design as a forth autonomy that utilises the knowledge of the autonomies of art, science and morality, Kurasawa writes of a concern that all these approaches (accepting the model correlation) are fundamentally “top down” and neglect the fundamental “realities of participants involved in the social labour of global justice”.

This seems a particularly important consideration to address. It suggests that great care should be taken not to focus exclusively on the authoritative domains at the top, and remember to give due consideration to those in a more grassroots position.