Social Justice Warrior Training Video

Activists for “social justice” (a.k.a. Social Justice Warriors, or SJW’s) have risen to prominence in our culture in the last few years. I have a number of disagreements with them. But I’m going to tell you my biggest problem with the SJ movement: I don’t think that they value justice. I think that they are activists against justice.

Now, if my complaint were merely an ideological disagreement over the particular requirements of justice regarding certain issues, you might not be too worried. And indeed, some of my problem concerns such ideological disagreement. For example:

I don’t think that wealth inequality is unjust, and I don’t think redistribution is just. Instead, I think government wealth redistribution violates property rights and is thus unjust.

I don’t think affirmative action is just. Instead, I think it’s a form of unfair and harmful discrimination.

Related to the previous two points: I don’t think there are any group rights (e.g., rights of a race or class); there are only individual rights. So there cannot be any injustices to a group as such; there can only be injustices to individuals.

I don’t think natural events or their consequences can be unjust; only intentional, freely chosen actions and their consequences can be unjust. Thus, e.g., I reject luck egalitarianism.

Still, you can understand the philosophical disagreements about the above points, and so you can understand how people on both sides of the issues can be pursuing justice (de dicto, as philosophers say). If someone is advancing policies that are in fact unjust, they need not be opposed to justice per se; they may just be mistaken about what justice requires. Who knows; perhaps I am mistaken about what justice requires.

But some justice requirements are different. Some things are just core, uncontroversial requirements of justice. If someone rejects these, then you can really conclude that they do not value justice. If someone actively opposes satisfying such requirements, that person is an anti-justice activist. To say a little more about what I mean:

Uncontroversial requirements: These are things that anyone who understands the concept “justice” will agree to be implied by “justice”. Judgements about it do not vary across political party, for example. The best examples will be accepted throughout history, and across cultures.

Core requirements: These are things that are central and important to the concept of justice, rather than minor or peripheral implications.

The best example that I can think of:

It is unjust to punish a person for a crime they did not commit.

The principle of course applies not only to actual law-violations, but to any alleged misdeeds. The principle requires those who value justice to also care about truth. In particular, if a person is accused of doing X, then, if the person really did X, this may be cause for punishment. But if the person did not in fact do X, then, uncontroversially, the person should not be punished for X.

This is not some right-wing ideological conception of justice. This is a universal principle. This has always been recognized. Any society that has a notion of justice will agree with this. Nor is it a minor or peripheral aspect of justice. It is the most central, paradigmatic norm of justice that I can think of.

The other points I mentioned above are much less central, much more debatable. Whether inequality of wealth is an injustice, for example, is open to debate. Or whether hiring preferences for racial minorities are an injustice. You can have a conception of justice that takes either position, or no position, on those issues. But you cannot have a recognizable conception of justice that is either in favor of or neutral toward punishing the innocent.

Yet that, it seems, is how the conception of “social justice” is. Those who campaign for social justice are exercised about certain kinds of crimes or alleged crimes. Especially crimes of immoral belief or offensive speech. (Only about certain groups, of course; e.g., if you hold the immoral and offensive belief that terrorism against random American civilians is permissible, that is not something the SJWs will be particularly concerned about.) Of course, they are also concerned about more tangible deeds, such as physical attacks against these certain groups, but that’s common to everyone. The concern about immoral thought and speech is more distinctive of the social justice movement.

I’m not going to talk now about whether those are crimes genuinely worthy of punishment. That could obviously be debated. But if one thinks these alleged crimes are worthy of some kind of punishment (not necessarily legal punishment, but perhaps social sanctions), one must, if one claims to value justice, care about the truth of who did or did not commit them.

There seem to be a number of cases showing that a large portion of social justice activists do not in fact care about that. When someone is accused of a social-justice-related sin, there will be many activists who want that person punished, and they will not expend any effort to determine whether the person in fact committed the sin. If given evidence that the person did not do so, they will not care. They will not, e.g., apologize to the person or rescind their earlier condemnation. It’s not that SJWs specifically prefer to punish the innocent. It is just that punishing the innocent does not especially concern them.

In case anyone has been living in a cave and needs some examples of what I’m talking about, here are a few:

The Duke lacrosse case: In 2006, the Duke University lacrosse team was basically accused of gang raping a black woman whom they had hired as a stripper for a party. The accused were all white men. The university community was outraged by the horrific crime, especially left-wing social justice people. Some protestors urged the castration of the lacrosse players. A group of 88 faculty members signed a public statement apparently presupposing the guilt of the players and thanking protestors for not waiting for the police investigation to conclude (https://web.archive.org/web/20070720032604/http://listening.nfshost.com/listening.htm). In fact, the case against the players was extremely weak. Eventually, the Attorney General dropped the charges, declaring the players innocent, and the original prosecutor of the case was disbarred for his misconduct in the case (something that virtually never happens, by the way). But in the end, only three members of the group of 88 ever apologized for their rush to judgment. (See KC Johnson’s blog on the case: http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/.)

The Noah Carl case: More recently, a group of about 600 academics signed a letter that succeeded in getting Noah Carl fired from a research fellowship position at St. Edmund’s college, for his alleged “racist pseudoscience” (https://medium.com/@racescienceopenletter/open-letter-no-to-racist-pseudoscience-at-cambridge-472e1a7c6dca). The letter accuses Carl’s work of being “ethically suspect and methodologically flawed”, of relying on “discredited ‘race sciences’”, of being “nothing more than an expression of opinion on various social matters”. But it doesn’t cite any evidence of any of this, and the accusations appear to be just factually false. One critic complained about Carl’s use of the term “genetic intelligence”, yet Carl does not in fact use that term. It appears that a major impetus for the attacks was that Carl defended the right of researchers to investigate race and intelligence (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40806-018-0152-x), though he did not himself investigate that topic. The signatories of the letter do not appear to have actually read Carl’s work; see https://quillette.com/2018/12/07/academics-mobbing-of-a-young-scholar-must-be-denounced/.

The Rebecca Tuvel case: In this case, Tuvel was attacked, again with a large number of signatories to a public statement against her, for publishing a paper comparing “transracialism” (identifying with a different race from one’s race-at-birth, so to speak) to transgenderism. (See the statement.) Some of the attacks were factually false or misleading in a way that is obvious if you read the paper, e.g., the obviously unfair complaint about “deadnaming”. The overall thrust of the complaint seems to be that Tuvel’s article was transphobic. But if you read the article, it’s just obvious that that is not, as a matter of fact, true. She is not against accepting transgender people; rather, she is in favor of accepting transracial people.

There are many cases like this. Now, what is noteworthy is not simply that errors were made. What is noteworthy is the lack of concern about the truth – e.g., the lack of interest in waiting to find out what actually happened, in doing the most basic investigation of the facts of a case before signing a statement about it, and the almost total lack of regret for attacking innocent people.

A person who cares about justice can make mistakes. They can inflict punishment on a person for a thing the person did not in fact do – because, after all, all humans are fallible. What a person who values justice cannot do is to not care about making this kind of mistake. Not punishing people for things they did not do is a non-negotiable commitment of justice. If you do not care about that, then you do not care about justice.

Now, you might say that perhaps the SJWs have identified some other, valid principles of justice that they are really committed to that I have failed to perceive. Maybe they’re right about those controversial justice issues I mentioned at the start, about inequality or affirmative action. But if a person can’t get on the right side of the most basic, uncontroversial aspects of justice, I don’t think you should trust them about much more fraught issues.

Notice also that it is not just a few SJWs who have this problem. In each of these cases, there were public letters signed by a lot of people. And not just by random internet trolls, but by university scholars. That, I think, really reveals something about the social justice movement; it’s not just a fluke or a minor failing.

This is not something that would happen with other movements – you would not get hundreds of people, in a movement nominally dedicated to some value X, to publicly, obviously violate a core principle of X. You could not, e.g., get hundreds of libertarian scholars to directly help the state enslave some people. You could not get hundreds of Christian scholars to pee on a statue of Christ.

So what is it that the SJWs value? I don’t know. Maybe they value equality. Maybe they are just opposed to whatever they see as belonging to the dominant culture. I suspect that the motivation for signing public statements like those mentioned above is essentially tribal: they are publicly signaling their group affiliation. Some people call it “virtue signaling”, but a more accurate term would be “faction signaling”. It’s like waving a big flag for your social faction. And it kind of feels good to be part of a mob. If that’s what you want to do, then indeed it does not matter what the facts of a particular case may be; the case is just an excuse to wave that flag. The facts only matter if you’re actually trying to do justice.

Justice is blind to social factions. Justice, for example, will not automatically support the side of a black woman against a group of wealthy, white, male athletes. It won’t just support the people you find most sympathetic or most aligned with your faction.

That’s why so few people care about justice.