Monday, May 12, 2008

Social Justice by Christine4Heysoo

Social justice has been around for I do not know how long and it inevitably became the fundamental framework that strengthened the United States and its people. There were many movements taken placed in order to achieve social justice in the society. However, its definition is found to be somewhat contradictory. Though we tried to treat individuals and groups equally which gives an impartial share of the benefits of society. The distribution of power creates advantages and disadvantages within a community. For example, in education especially during applying for scholarships base on merit, students who tend to have greater resources in order to do really well in classes allow them maybe to get better grades compare to the ones who live in slump or poverty have less resources and will therefore less likely to be able to partake to the scholarships available due to less resources for them in the first place. The gap between the rich, middle class, and the poor grow bigger because more opportunities and better things are then offered to rich kids while the middle or poor class gets the left over and lower-standard. I think people who have more than enough have more privilege than those that does not. Social injustice is so evident especially in courts when rich people violate the law and hurt someone. They use their name and power to navigate themselves to avoid paying the price. Of course in jobs, those who work for minimum and have no educational background are being abuse all the time by the corporate companies who do not give them health and medical care when workers get sick but instead companies either lay off them or fire them. What has gone wrong in this world we live in today? People have consumes their lives trying to be on the top and accumulating power. What will we do to that power when our life expired? We become so busy to be powerful that we are not truly living our life but become a slave of our own desires.

Social justice is not an easy goal but individuals alone can not make it happen without unity and common mission. I do agree from the author Novak that justice is social. However, what make a social are many individuals that practice in giving back to their community to make improvements across the whole spectrum. We ethically interpret injustice as being racist, sexism, favoritism, etc. In part of the reading, the author wrote how “one interpretation as better than another when it is simpler, more plausible,…” and before this, he wrote that “to interpret is to hypothesize about the intentional causes of whatever it is that is being interpreted”. I disagree in this because I think when we hypothesize something; there are no wrong answers because they are only from our observation to why it is. It is from our experiment that we get either get the explanation or fit to the case or not. Therefore there should be no better hypotheses. I heard once about a situation where one person has a virus riding in a car with other 10 people. Using a frame of reference, to the person who has the virus, he would probably see it as an unjust act to be killed. On contrary, in the frame references of the other 10 people, they would see it as a just act because they are trying to save themselves from being infected. We should act justly in face of social injustices by giving things that it is due. I am not sure whether we can ever justify poverty. Because of the total separation and huge gap, people that are wealthy are opening more opportunities for economically disadvantage people in order for them to go school or jobs that are compatible with their gifting and talents. Correcting social injustice is not so easy in that everyone has their own free will. However, we should understand the purpose on to why we are living and so that we do not deceive ourselves. We all need to start at evaluating who we are and aligning them with our values. We did to understand that we are givers and receivers. So whatever action we make, other people might receive the consequences of it or vice versa.

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