Uppeldi og menntun - 01.06.2015, Side 80

Uppeldi og menntUn/icelandic JoUrnal of edUcation 24(1) 201580
leArning spAces And inclUsive prAcTices
We are not offered a deep understanding of social justice, nor are we meant to be.
Other chapters mention things like equality, equity, inclusion and participation as con-
stituents of social justice, which agrees well with the above account, even if rather
slim. Some scholars, especially those with a philosophical background, might com-
plain that this is too shallow; that more needs to be said in order to substantiate the
use of the term ‘social justice’, not least since it figures in the title of the book. I am not
convinced that the book would have benefitted from a more detailed account of the
concept, though I think that it would have been beneficial to include in the introduc-
tion something like the above quote from the last chapter.
Let me end by explaining briefly why I think an absence of a substantial discussion
of social justice is OK: Since the year 1971, when John Rawls published his seminal
work A Theory of Justice, most philosophical theorizing in the field falls under what we
might call (following Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice) institutional theories of justice.
The tradition goes all the way back to Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century. These the-
ories focus on institutions of society and how they contribute to a just society or fail
to do so. In contrast to the institutional theories such as Rawls’ – but not necessarily
in opposition to them – philosophers have also advanced what Sen refers to as reali-
zation based theories of justice, to which his own approach belongs. Sen describes his
task in The Idea of Justice in the following way:
In contrast with most modern theories of justice, which concentrate on the ‘just
society’, this book is an attempt to investigate the realization-based comparisons that
focus on the advancement or retreat of justice. (Sen, 2009, p. 8)
And a little later he says:
Importance must be attached to the starting point, in particular the selection of some
questions to be answered (for example, ‘how would justice be advanced?’), rather
than others (for example, ‘what would be perfectly just institutions?’). This departure
has the dual effect, first, of taking the comparative rather than the transcendental
route, and second, of focusing on actual realizations in the societies involved, rather
than only on institutions and rules. (Sen, 2009, p. 9)
The work described in Learning Spaces for Social Justice falls within the approach that
Sen is describing. We may easily recognize a case of injustice when we come across
one, even if we have no theory of justice to rely on. And we may work towards pro-
moting justice without basing our work on any explicit theory of social justice. So, the
absence of an elaboration on a theory of justice in the book need not be a defect as long
as the cases of justice and injustice dealt with are clear enough. And usually they are
and they have to do with issues like equality, equity, inclusion and participation. Thus,
even if there is no detailed or systematic discussion of the conception of social justice
in the book, the cases of justice and injustice described and discussed form a valuable
contribution to our understanding of social justice.