Rationally Speaking #170 - Will Wilkinson on "Social justice and political philosophy"

Rationally Speaking Podcast

New York City Skeptics

Society & Culture, Skepticism, Science, Philosophy

4.6 • 787 Ratings

🗓️ 16 October 2016

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

How did "social justice" come to mean what it does today? This episode features a chat with Will Wilkinson, a writer, political philosopher, and vice president of policy for the Niskanen Institute. Will and Julia discuss the libertarian reaction to social justice, whether or not social justice is a zero-sum game, and how the Internet exacerbates conflicts over social justice.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Rationally Speaking is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education.
0:22.6	For more information, please visit us at n.ycceptics.org.
0:35.3	Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.
0:41.7	I'm your host, Julia Galeith, and with me is today's guest, Will Wilkinson.
0:45.8	Will is the vice president for policy at the Niskanen Center in Washington, D.C.
0:50.9	He is also a writer focusing on politics and philosophy and society for a bunch of venues, including Vox and the Atlantic and The Economist.
1:00.6	And in addition to all this, he teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa.
1:04.6	Will, welcome to the show.
1:06.4	Hi, Julia. Thanks for having me on.
1:08.5	So let's jump in.
1:10.4	There's a topic that I've seen you write some pretty interesting posts about recently,
1:15.6	in which you argue that the concept of social justice has come to refer to this specific cluster of ideas or policies that's become very associated with the left wing in America.
1:31.7	And you argue that, you know, it didn't have to be that way, that this isn't the only or even the best,
1:38.5	necessarily the best way of defining what social justice should mean.
1:42.9	Can you elaborate on that?
1:44.1	Like, what is an alternate version of social justice that mean. Can you elaborate on that?
1:49.4	Like what is an alternate version of social justice that we could have had instead of the one we do have?
1:57.3	Well, the notion of distributive justice, or sorry, social justice that we have,
2:06.1	that was sort of dominant throughout the 20th century was largely about economic distribution, like who gets how big a piece of the pie from economic production.
2:15.3	And so it's, and in that sense, it's kind of a zero-sum notion. Like if you get more, I get less. It plays into a kind of, you know, sort of class war politics. And the, you know, sort of ideals of social justice throughout the 20th century were largely identified with
2:35.6	with a kind of soft socialism. But the idea was, the idea is dominated by the left, partly because
2:47.5	the right just conceded.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from New York City Skeptics, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of New York City Skeptics and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.