The Coddling of the American Mind

by Greg Lukianoff

  What exactly is “social justice”? There is no widely shared definition. We’ll try to draw out its meaning by starting with “justice” and then showing in what ways “social justice” differs, conceptually, and in what ways it is the same.

  Intuitive Justice

  Justice is arguably the most important moral concept in the history of Western philosophy. From Plato’s Republic through John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, philosophers have tried to propose rules and principles that would underlie a fair or “just” society. Rather than review that history here in order to derive a philosophical definition of justice, we’ll take a shortcut and tell you about two major areas of psychological research that, when combined, give us a working definition of people’s everyday, ordinary, or “intuitive” notions of justice. Intuitive justice is the combination of distributive justice (the perception that people are getting what is deserved) and procedural justice (the perception that the process by which things are distributed and rules are enforced is fair and trustworthy). We’ll show where claims about social justice fit well with intuitive justice and where they don’t.

  DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE

  Sharing plays a big role in the moral lives of children, and they get a lot of practice dividing things equally. If there are four kids and twelve jelly beans, each kid should get three. Obviously. But what do kids do when the jelly beans are a reward for cleaning up the classroom, and one kid did most of the work while another kid did nothing? Even toddlers seem to recognize the importance of proportionality. In one experiment, two-year-olds showed signs of being surprised when two people were rewarded equally if only one of them did any work.6 By the age of six, kids show a clear preference for rewarding the hard worker in a group, even if equal pay is an option.7 At young ages, kids have trouble following this intuition when it means that they themselves get less reward, but by adolescence, they are much better at applying proportionality to themselves.8 Developmental psychologists Christina Starmans, Mark Sheskin, and Paul Bloom reviewed the research on fairness in children and concluded that “humans naturally favour fair distributions, not equal ones,” and “when fairness and equality clash, people prefer fair inequality over unfair equality.”9

  To be clear, sometimes distributive justice calls for equality. For example, Americans seem to have a common intuition that money inherited from a deceased parent should be divided equally among siblings, rather than trying to assess who did more for the parent or who needs the money more. And sometimes distributive justice calls for inequality; for example, when attending to need, particularly within a family or group that has some communal feeling and that thinks it fair and proper to route resources to whoever needs them most. But as the review by Starmans, Sheskin, and Bloom indicates, proportionality or merit is the most common and preferred principle children and adults use for allocating rewards outside a family.

  Proportionality is the heart of “equity theory,” the major theory of distributive justice in social psychology.10 Its core assertion is that when the ratio of outcomes to inputs is equal for all participants, people perceive that to be equitable, or fair.11 We can illustrate the theory with a simple equation, shown in Figure 11.1.

  FIGURE 11.1. Equity Theory. People keep close track of the ratio of everyone’s outcomes to their inputs. When the ratios are equal, people perceive that things are fair.

  The consistent finding in equity theory research is that in most relationships, people keep close track of how much reward each person is reaping (their outcomes, such as pay and perks) in proportion to how much they are contributing (their inputs, such as hours worked and the skills or credentials they bring). They do this more in work relationships and less in intimate relationships, but even in marriages, people are not oblivious to these ratios, and because of the power of self-serving biases, they often have a sense that they are doing more than their “fair share” of some or all tasks.12 When everyone perceives that all the proportions are equal, then everyone perceives that things are fair, and harmony is far more likely. When people believe that someone else’s ratio is too high, they are likely to feel resentful toward that person, whose rewards are disproportionate to their contributions. They may also feel resentment toward the boss, company, or system that allows such inequities to persist. People are not just being greedy. An early study testing equity theory found that when people were led to believe that they were being overpaid for a job, they worked harder in order to deserve the pay—to get their ratio back into line.13

  PROCEDURAL JUSTICE

  Intuitive justice is not just about how much each person gets. It’s also about the process by which decisions about distributions (and other matters) are made. The social psychologist Tom Tyler is one of the pioneers of research on “procedural justice.”14 His central finding is that people are much more willing to accept a decision or action, even one that goes against themselves, when they perceive that the process that led to the decision was fair.

  There are two basic concerns that people bring to their judgments of procedural justice. The first is how the decision is being made. This includes whether the decision-makers are doing their best to be objective and neutral and are therefore trustworthy, or whether they have conflicts of interest, prejudices, or other factors that lead them to be biased in favor of a particular person or outcome. It also includes transparency—is it clear to all how the process works? The second basic concern is how a person is being treated along the way, which means primarily: Are people being treated with dignity, and do they have a voice—do they get to fully state their case, and are they taken seriously when they do?

  Tyler’s findings are especially important for understanding how people respond to the police. When people perceive that the police are following fair procedures and treating them and people like them with dignity, they are much more willing to support the police, help them to fight crime, and even accept occasionally being stopped and frisked by the police, whom they see as working to keep their neighborhood safe. But if people think that the way the police select people to frisk is racially biased and that people like them are treated disrespectfully, with hostility, or, even worse, with violence, they will understandably be angry and will see the police as the enemy. In a study published in 2002, Tyler and psychologist Yuen Huo found that white and nonwhite residents of two California cities had similar ideas about what procedural justice entails, but their experiences gave them very different perceptions of how the police treated people. It was this difference that explained racial differences in attitudes toward the police.15

  Combining the two forms of justice, we can say this: Intuitive justice involves perceptions of distributive justice (as given by equity theory) and procedural justice. If you want to motivate people to support a new policy or join a movement in the name of justice, you need to activate in them a clear perception, or intuition, that someone didn’t get what he or she deserved (distributive injustice) or that someone was a victim of an unfair process (procedural injustice). If you can’t elicit at least one of those feelings, then people are much more likely to be content with the status quo, even if it is one in which some people or groups end up with more resources or more status than others.16

  Proportional-Procedural Social Justice

  Some conservatives and libertarians have argued that “social justice” is a useless term—there is only justice, and tacking on the word “social” adds nothing.17 We don’t agree. We think there are two forms of social justice identifiable in modern political debates across the Western world, one of which is a subset of intuitive justice and one of which is not.

  Here’s a definition of social justice that accords with intuitive notions of justice, from the National Association of Social Workers: “Social justice is the view that everyone deserves equal economic, political and social rights and opportunities. Social workers aim to open the doors of access and opportunity for everyone, particularly those in greatest need.”18
Most Americans would agree that everyone should have equal rights and opportunities and that doors should be open for everyone.19 Much of the left-right divide on social policy involves how far the government should go to equalize opportunity for children who are born into unequal circumstances (and whether it is the federal government, state governments, or local governments that should be responsible for that equalization).

  Using that definition of social justice, we’ll define proportional-procedural social justice as the effort to find and fix cases where distributive or procedural justice is denied to people because they were born into poverty or belong to a socially disadvantaged category. Some of these cases are extremely obvious. The Jim Crow laws of the American South before 1965 were shockingly explicit violations of procedural justice: racist police, judges, and legislatures cruelly disregarded the dignity of black Americans and brutally violated their rights. These violations of procedural justice led directly to egregious violations of distributive justice in almost every area of life, including very unequal public expenditures on separate and vastly unequal schools.

  The civil rights campaign was a long struggle for proportional-procedural social justice. Not everyone could see the injustice early on, and many white people were motivated to not see it.20 This is why common-humanity identity politics—which emphasizes an overarching common humanity while calling attention to cases in which people are denied dignity and rights—was ultimately so effective. It did not try to force white Americans to accept a new conception of justice; it tried to help white Americans to see that their country was violating its own conceptions of justice, which had been so nobly expressed by the Founding Fathers but so imperfectly realized.

  In our account, proportional-procedural social justice falls entirely within the larger domain of intuitive justice. That doesn’t mean we should discard the term “social justice.” Some injustices based on race, gender, or other factors (and their intersections) are obvious, but others are subtle, and people who do not experience them can be unaware of them (as Kimberlé Crenshaw noted).21 It is useful to have specialists within the domain of justice research who focus on this subset of injustices. Furthermore, when such injustices are pointed out, members of the majority group are often motivated to ignore or deny them.22 It is among the most important requirements of a democratic society that it provide a way for people and groups to make new claims about justice. An open democratic society considers such claims, debates them, and then acts on claims that combine compelling arguments with effective political pressure. If the outcome is new laws that are supported by widely shared new norms, as happened in the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, that’s pretty much the definition of moral and social progress in a democracy.

  To take just one example of a subtle injustice: Suppose there’s a high school that is composed of 80% white students and 20% black students. The student committee planning the senior prom must decide what songs to play, and at this school, musical tastes tend to vary by race. The committee takes a vote on how to proceed, and the winning plan is to let students nominate a long list of songs, each of which will then be voted on by the entire student body. Democracy is all about voting, right? And the process itself was decided on democratically, so we have procedural fairness, right?

  Harvard legal scholar Lani Guinier explored cases like this in her 1994 book, The Tyranny of the Majority.23 She pointed out that seemingly fair processes can sometimes lead to a group that is in the minority getting entirely shut out at the end of the process. In the high school example above, it’s quite possible that 100% of the songs chosen would be those nominated by the white students. If that example seems trivial to you, just imagine that you’re choosing state legislators instead of songs. Guinier suggested some alternative ways that communities could run elections and divide electoral power, ways that would not exclude or disadvantage minorities.

  Guinier’s ideas elicited an angry reaction from some politicians on the right, particularly when she suggested methods that would change the basic system of “one person, one vote per seat.” She was called a “quota queen” in The Wall Street Journal.24 The controversy surrounding her ideas derailed her nomination to become Bill Clinton’s assistant attorney general for civil rights.25 But the principle she was elaborating is sound, even if her preferred methods are open to debate. This principle—the need for democracies to protect the rights of minorities—was one of the reasons that the U.S. Constitution’s first ten amendments (the Bill of Rights) were added so quickly. (You don’t need a Bill of Rights to protect the rights of the majority in a democracy, because the vote already does that.)

  When social justice is about searching for and ending violations of human or civil rights, particularly when those violations are related to membership in social identity groups, then it is about removing obstacles and creating equality of opportunity. It is exactly what those social workers called for when they defined social justice as the quest to “open the doors of access and opportunity for everyone, particularly those in greatest need.” Proportional-procedural social justice is justice, and justice is never the enemy of truth. Justice requires truth and honesty, and justice is entirely compatible with the purpose, values, and daily life of a university. But what happens when social justice activists focus on a desired end-state and pursue that goal in ways that violate either distributive or procedural justice?

  Equal-Outcomes Social Justice

  When Jon taught at the University of Virginia (UVA), he sometimes hired members of the UVA men’s crew team to do yard work for him. Each fall and spring, young men on the team put flyers in all faculty mailboxes, advertising their “rent-a-rower” service. At least, Jon thought he was hiring members of the UVA men’s crew team. But after talking to the rowers, he learned that there is no such thing as the UVA men’s crew team. There is only the Virginia Rowing Association. The men who row for the association are all students at the University of Virginia, but the university does not provide funding for their sport. They must each pay more than a thousand dollars a year to belong to the association, and they are also required to participate in the rent-a-rower program in order to raise money for their boats, coaching staff, travel to races, and other expenses. They share a boathouse on the Rivanna Reservoir with the UVA Women’s Rowing Team—for which all expenses, including travel, coaching staff, and snacks at the boathouse, are fully funded by the university.

  Why are UVA students who want to row treated so differently based on their gender? Because the implementation of Title IX was changed over the years. From its original goal of providing equal access to educational opportunities for women and men, the program morphed into one that pushes universities to obtain equal outcomes regardless of inputs.

  On its face, Title IX is eminently fair and reasonable. It prohibits colleges that accept federal funds from discriminating against women with respect to “educational opportunity.” In 1979, the Carter administration used an equal-opportunity interpretation of Title IX when applying it to college sports: scholarships were to be “available on a substantially proportional basis to the number of male and female participants in the institution’s athletic program.” Furthermore, “the governing principle in this area is that the athletic interests and abilities of male and female students must be equally effectively accommodated.”26 Outcomes (such as scholarships and slots on teams) had to be proportional to inputs (such as interest in participating). Men and women should find it equally easy to obtain a sports-related scholarship or a slot on a team.

  But in 1996, the Clinton administration began to put pressure on schools to achieve equal outcomes.27 The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights issued a “Dear Colleague” letter (a general directive regarding Title IX compliance) to all schools receiving federal funding,28 clarifying how schools could comply with Title IX’s relevant obligations.29 One compliance option was for schools to show that their sports programs (taken all together) mirrored
the gender balance of the overall student body. The letter also offered two other ways to comply,30 but in practice, if schools chose those options, they were in a compliance gray zone that invited monitoring and possible investigation by the Office for Civil Rights, so hardly any schools did. Furthermore, with the press and various organizations watching closely, schools would be judged by their overall numbers anyway.31 Schools therefore began to strive for equal outcomes. Some schools cut men’s sports teams as part of their effort to improve their gender balance, sometimes citing Title IX as the reason for the cuts.32 More commonly, schools added women’s teams, which is more consistent with the original spirit of Title IX, but that, too, sometimes created unequal treatment. That’s what happened at UVA: before 1994, men’s and women’s crew had both been club sports—there was no varsity crew program. In its efforts to comply with Title IX, UVA elevated women’s crew to a varsity sport, but did not do the same for the men’s team.