Social Justice and the Metaphor of Gaps

Minogue undertakes one of the subjects that are most crucial for contemporary liberal societies, namely that of social inequalities. It is not a new question, even though what was known the 19th century as the distinction between the ‘deserving’ and the ‘non-deserving’ poor that they themselves believed to be the most basic moral judgement has been abandoned. Currently, “the entire realm of moral actions has been interpreted as a function of social conditions.” Man is increasingly rarely perceived as a moral subject responsible for own deeds, and an increasing number of judgements concerning man is constrained by social conditions. A reason to worry is the ‘objectification’ of the person: “we are who we are on the power of social conditions, in which we have come to live”.The weakening of man’s autonomy is paralleled by the increase in the power of the state, which takes over the task of fighting inequalities. “If we are to prevent discrimination, the state must wield the power to control human preferences.” What follows, “if the state is to acquire this additional authority, discrimination must be recognised as an unfairness known as ‘social exclusion’”. The task of levelling up inequalities is the more dangerous that in every society there are inequalities that may be interpreted through the paradigm of ‘social exclusion’. To prove the existence of the social inequalities that need levelling up, the ‘gap metaphor’ is used. Constructed with statistical data which not only use approximate averages but, moreover, say nothing about the reasons behind the inequalities themselves. This is turn may lead to the solutions that absolutely miss the point from the point of view of social needs. One of the cases quoted by Minogue is the difference in life expectancy. In the United Kingdom, it is on average greater for the middle than for the working class. Does this mean discrimination that the state should fight? The actual difference results from the fact that the middleclass pays more attention to their lifestyle. “It is an irony of the progress that in the past we would imagine the poor as thin and undernutritioned, while today they are often obese and consume too much improper food.”The means provided by the state based on the statistics and the resultant gaps never solve the problems. The final paradox of the welfare state is that the same unfavourable situation which such means are to offset is continually reproduced through the unlimited provision of goods and services to the people who can cope quite well.