Chris Lyon

Social justice has something important to do with ‘social relations’. This is the upshot of much recent work, both in political philosophy/theory (including explicitly as relational egalitarianism), and in wider applications. But what is a ‘social relation’ in the sense that is of interest to normative political thought? And what is the nature of our evaluative and prescriptive concern with social relations? I argue that we can identify two different tendencies within relational thinking about justice and equality. One of these (‘interactional’) concerns itself primarily with the quality of and principles embodied by social and political interpersonal interactions. The other (‘structural’) concerns itself with evaluation of more macroscopic and durable relations between social groups or positions. These two tendencies will sometimes pull normative judgement in divergent directions. I illustrate this by re-examining the debate among egalitarians over private fee-paying schools, where an excessively ‘interactional’ conception of relations leads to misguided defences of a policy that egalitarians have far stronger reasons to oppose.

In social justice theory, it seems both important, but also potentially normatively and metaphysically suspect, to treat social groups as units of normative concern. This is also the source of much current controversy surrounding social justice politics. I argue that normative individualism is a metaethical clarification, but not necessarily a binding guide for all other normative theory or practice in the way we might assume. Supra-individual social entities can, in fact, be the irreducible subjects of concern in valid normative evaluations or prescriptions, owing to future-relevant causal properties. However, this idea is complex and requires careful elucidation. I address likely objections pertaining to group definitions, social ontology, conceptions of causation, counterfactuals, and the non-identity problem.