Thomas Behr, Social Justice and Subsidiarity

Social Justice and Subsidiarity: Luigi Taparelli and the Origins of Modern Catholic Social Thought

CWR Dispatch: Recovering the historical roots, true meaning of “social justice” by Gerald J. Russello
A review of Thomas Behr’s Social Justice and Subsidiarity, which explores the work of Luigi Taparelli, a Catholic thinker who advocated an approach to politics based in Thomistic natural law argument.

The Catholic understanding of rights is different because it is based in a different understanding of the person. We do have rights from our nature as human beings, but Catholic thought sees rights as ordered to higher goods. Our entitlement to exercise our rights is bound not just by our historical circumstances and those of our particular society, but also by conscience and “the clarity and utility of a chosen action in relation to the pursuit of the highest good. … The more directly related it is to the highest good, the stronger the claim of right. That is why certain rights are ‘inalienable’ – they are ineluctable requirements of order, of the orientation of the intellect to truth, and of the striving of persons within society for the ultimate good.”

In other words, we have rights in order to do something, not simply to exercise those rights in whatever way we subjectively may wish and desire.

Related: Historian Explores Origins of Modern Catholic Social Thought

Thomistica.net: Taparelli's magnum opus available from La Civiltà Cattolica

Taparelli is perhaps best remembered (if at all) for his contribution to the concept of subsidiarity and for coining the term “social justice” (giustizia sociale). His understanding of social justice is not exactly the same as our contemporary notion of it. Thomas Burke (one of the few people who write about Taparelli in English — Thomas Behr is another) has this to say about Taparellian social justice:

It is one of the ironies of history that the quintessentially “liberal” idea of “social justice,” as it was to become (in American terminology), should have been originated by an ardent conservative … Unlike the conception of social justice generally accepted in our society at the present time, which is socialist and difficult, if not impossible, to harmonize with our ordinary conception of justice, Taparelli’s conception 1) is simply the ordinary and traditional conception of justice applied in a new area, namely the constitutional arrangements of society, 2) does not apply to states of affairs in society that could exist independently of human actions, 3) constitutes a defense of societal inequality, and 4) is conservative.

I will have to read Thomas Burke's paper.