Social Justice is a term you hear almost every day. But did you ever hear anybody define what it actually means? Jonah Goldberg of the American Enterprise Institute tries to pin this catchall phrase to the wall. In doing so, he exposes the not-so-hidden agenda of those who use it. What sounds so caring and noble turns out to be something very different.
What is Social Justice? – Prager University
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IN PUBLIC HEALTH we consider ‘social justice’ to mean:
first, that resources attend the public health needs of all stakeholders in public health. In many ways for many years the public health issues and needs of some populations, subpopulation, communities, regions and other stakeholders had/have/are being ignored. Yet they too are ‘the public’ and it is unjust not to include their issues and needs.
also, that resources should flow toward the most significant public health issues and needs. There will always be many, not one or a few, public health needs, so different public health agencies may assign significance in different ways at different times through different processes. But data on prevalence and incidence, impact and consequences (including future costs) ensure that there are data-driven methods within the political processes. ‘Political’ is not a nasty word in public health: various methods of politics help ensure that public health problems are properly understood (e.g. public meetings, community advisory panels, audits and reviews, etc). Another data driven process of public health is evaluation: of processes, or programs, and of impacts. We might hope that other uses of public resources would be as heavily data driven and evaluation driven as public health (e.g. apply data driven processes to criminal justice? apply data driven processes to highway planning and construction? apply rigorous evaluation to legislative systems? etc).
also, public health considers ‘resources’ very broadly in order to account for the real, complete costs of actions. Attention is a resource that has costs (surveillance is critical in public health). Planning is vital (opportunities of public input to review data and to assess programs across many levels of the public are critical to successful public health efforts).
All of these processes are a part of achieving social justice in public health.
Rush Limbaugh said it best. “Social justice” is simply, “code for communism”.