Distributive Justice and Poverty

Fourth Quarter 1998

The following is Part II of a five-part booklet soon to be released by the Center for Public Justice entitled Equal Partners: The Welfare Responsibility of Governments and Churches. Dr. Lugo, formerly associate director of the Center for Public Justice, is now director of the Religion Program of The Pew Charitable Trusts in Philadelphia. The booklet may be purchased from the Center.

Our chief concern [in raising the question of distributive justice] is with government's specific responsibility in addressing the social question and, in particular, the problem of poverty. This may be only one of government's many tasks, but surely it is one of its most important. Let's put aside for the moment the familiar debate over whether we need more or less government and focus instead on what the proper role of government might be in this area. For arguably the most important question is not, how much? but, what kind? of government we need.

The pluralist approach that frames this discussion is a much neglected strand of the Western political tradition. It is an approach that has been expressed most prominently in two main sources—modern Catholic social thought, which begins with Leo XIII's famous 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, and the Dutch neo-Calvinist school associated with the name of Abraham Kuyper, whose memorable address, "The Problem of Poverty," was delivered that same year and rep-resents a parallel Protestant statement on what once was commonly referred to as the social question.

The pluralist perspective helps illuminate economic no less than other areas of public policy. Its view is that government cannot fulfill its calling to ensure public justice unless it concerns itself with how society creates and distributes material goods. That is the case because the state's task is to promote the common good and to do so on a society-wide basis. Since the common good, as the Catholic Church's Catechism states, involves "the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily," the state must of necessity, concern itself with these matters. The state's three-fold task thus includes not only ensuring that the rights of persons are protected and that peace and order are maintained, but also making sure that the material conditions necessary for human flourishing are established.

Government's Primary Responsibility

In all our discussions of government's proper role in addressing the problem of poverty, we should never lose sight of the fact that its primary function is to uphold a just social and economic order. It is here, rather than in responding to emergencies or under-taking remedial steps, that government makes its greatest long-term contribution to the general welfare. Based on historical experience, can we not now say with a fair degree of confidence that providing for a market economy in the context of a strong legal framework may be the most effective anti-poverty program that any government is ever likely to implement? A growing awareness of this fact is likely what prompted John Paul II strongly to affirm the value of capitalism, which he defines as "an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property and the resulting responsibility for the means of production as well as free human creativity in the economic sector (Centesimus Annus, 1991).

More controversially, perhaps, the Catechism also contends that it is the responsibility of public authorities "to make accessible to each what is needed to lead a truly human life: food, clothing, health, work, education and culture, suitable information, the right to establish a family, and so on." Leaving aside for the moment what precisely is meant by making these things "accessible," the central point is the existence of such a duty. To put it somewhat differently, from a pluralist point of view distributive justice is an integral part of the state's overall calling to do public justice.

Behind this belief lies a high view of political community. The pluralist tradition holds that the civic community or body politic is something that has real and not merely instrumental value. In other words, political community is a natural expression of human sociability. This view stands in sharp contrast, for example, to the utilitarian bent of the classical liberal tradition, with its relatively thin notion of civic community and its minimalist view of the state. The tendency in that tradition has been to "privatize" the question of poverty.

This older liberalism today is most faithfully represented in libertarianism, an ideology that is often and rather ironically tagged with the "conservative" label. What accounts for this name inversion is the fact that in its modern guise liberalism has more and more looked to the state for the solution to social problems. Its tendency, in stark contrast to its earlier form, has been to politicize social welfare questions by assuming that these ought to be solved primarily at the level of the political community. Thus, when most modern liberals say that we must "do something" about poverty, they typically mean that government must do something about it. In spite of this more pronounced statist orientation, however, modern liberal-ism has retained an essentially instrumentalist view of government, now seen as the guarantor of an increasing array of entitlements. Communitarian critics of modern liberalism have attempted to provide a corrective by placing more of an emphasis on duties (in contrast to rights) and on the interests of the overall community (in contrast to the individual).

For the pluralist, then, political community is not an artificial construct or a necessary evil. It is indeed necessary, but it is so for a much deeper reason. As the Catechism puts it: "The human person needs to live in society. Society is not for him an extraneous addition but a requirement of his nature." Kuyper makes much the same point when he states that "the Christian religion seeks personal human dignity in the social relationships of an organically integrated society."

The State and Social Pluralism

The institutional expression of political community is what today we call the state, the agent of which is the government. From the standpoint of the pluralist tradition of political thought, it is entirely natural for the government to have a sense of obligation toward those citizens whose material deprivation keeps them from contributing fully to the life of society. The claim that the state has no business in these matters is a reflection of a more basic denial of the substantive character of political community. This denial runs counter to human nature and human experience and succeeds only in the abstract thought experiments of political philosophers. The human and Christian truth, pluralists insist, is that political community, as Kuyper puts it, is like "a body with limbs, subject to the law of life. We are members of each other, and thus the eye cannot get along without the foot, nor the foot without the eye."

The pluralist tradition is equally emphatic, however, in affirming that people, including poor people, are not just citizens. They also participate in many other communities besides the political, including families, churches, schools, neighborhoods. These other forms of community have their own integrity and purpose and correspond to different needs of the human person. Thus, while the political community may be the most geographically encompassing, it is not really exhaustive in the sense that it is able to meet all human needs. The temptation to make it so has been the misguided, and ultimately self-defeating, goal of all forms of collectivism, whether of the right or of the left.

It was the growth of these collectivist ideologies and the ensuing danger of excessive state intervention in the affairs of civil society that prompted the Catholic Church earlier in this century to elaborate the principle of subsidiarity. According to that principle, "a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to coordinate its activities with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good." As the Catechism explains, this principle is opposed to all forms of collectivism and sets definite limits on the degree of state intervention.

We should underscore that this is no arbitrary attempt to limit the role of government nor to deny its legitimate involvement in the social question. Rather it is a natural limitation that is imposed by the very existence of other institutions whose authority is independent of the state. This is brought out very clearly in the notion of sphere sovereignty, a teaching in the Reformed, Kuyperian tradition that closely corresponds to the Catholic idea of subsidiarity. Simply stated, sphere sovereignty holds that "state and society each has its own sphere, its own sovereignty," and so one should not try to absorb the other.

One way to express this complex and multifaceted reality of life in society is to say that the political community is a community of communities. That being the case, we should not think that the political common good is something that exists apart from, but rather in relation to, the good of every other human community. The plural nature of society is the correct starting point for thinking fruitfully about the state's proper role in this as well as in other areas of public policy.

The general idea, then, is that the role of the state is extensive but not intensive. Since the political common good is defined in terms of the sum total of social conditions in a given area, the state's responsibility to harmonize or integrate these diverse interests in a public legal order is appropriately broad, touching on every other institution of society. But though its functions may be extensive, they are assuredly not intensive. Government, therefore, must always be a help, never a hindrance, to these institutions, and it should resist the temptation of seeking to govern their internal life. Its task, rather, is to enable them to do their own work by providing them with the appropriate help and protection.