Social Justice
Senses of Justice
Patterned vs. Historical Approach
Justice
• The most general meaning of justice is giving to
each person his or her due.
– Giving to each person what that person needs, what
that person deserves, or a share equal to what others
are about to receive
• Agreement: Justice is giving to each what is due
• Disagreement: Whether “what is due” means
assigning shares according to …
– Need
– Merit
– Equality
Arguments:
• Justice is essential to autonomy
• Individuals cannot be fully autonomous unless
they receive a fair share of political and economic
goods.
– These form the basis for access to other goods crucial
to autonomy
• This access can be threatened when goods are
scarce and other hoard more than their fair share
(=what is due to them)
Arguments:
• Spheres of Justice Approach
• There are several distinct spheres of practical
activity.
• Each has its own unique principle of justice
(principle of fair distribution)
– Educational (need/equality)
– Economic (merit, effort)
– Political (strictly equal or egalitarian)
Forms of Justice
• Distributive: dividing benefits and burdens fairly
– Goods: economic (money and what it buys) and
political (rights and liberties)
• Retributive: fair and impartial administration of
punishments
– Does criminal and civil law meet standards of
retributive justice? What about strict liability or
liability without fault? What about finding and
punishing those responsible for the criminal behavior
of corporations?
Forms of Justice
• Administrative: fair and impartial administration of
rules
–
–
–
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Human Resource Department
Promotions/Demotions
Performance evaluations
Hiring/Firing
• Compensatory: how to fairly recompense those who
have been wrongfully treated or harmed by others
– Burden of civil law
– How do characteristics like due care, negligence,
recklessness, and preponderance of evidence carry out
compensatory justice?
Patterned Approaches
• Distributive justice results from finding an ideal pattern of
distribution, comparing actual distribution, and adjusting
actual distribution to ideal through means such as taxation.
• Equality: equal shares to all
• Merit: greatest shares to those who deserve it
• Need: greatest shares to those who need it
• Some Problems
– Do need and equality patterns of distribution take away
incentive to work hard and innovate? (The pay’s the same no
matter what)
– Do merit-based systems give undue weight to natural talents
(=talents we are born with)? Do we deserve our natural
endowments?
Historical Approaches
• Current pattern is irrelevant. Justice depends on how those
who possess goods came to possess them
• Entitlement Theory of Justice: Negative Argument
– Patterned approaches can be maintained only by continual
interference with natural, liberty-based transactions. (We pay
Michael Jordan to see him play and then take from him when he
gets too much)
• Entitlement Theory of Justice: Positive Argument
– Justice in Acquisition (we mixed our labor with something and
transformed it in this way)
– Justice in Transfer (we received something acquired by
someone else)
– We are entitled to what we have if we can show it to be the
result of repeated applications of Justice in Acquisition and
Justice in Transfer
– This process must be free of force and fraud.
Rawls’ Two Principles of Justice
• Equal Liberties
– “each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic
liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others”
– (freedom of speech and assembly, liberty of conscience, freedom of
thought, freedom of the person, etc.)
– What pattern does this most resemble?
• Difference Principles
– “social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are
both (a) reasonable expected to be to everyone’s advantage and (b)
attached to positions and offices open to all….”
– Economic goods
– What pattern(s) does this most resemble?
• Rawls can be seen as indicating a synthesis of the patterns of merit,
need, and equality. (How? Where?)
• How should Rawls respond to the Michael Jordan argument?
Practical Lenses for SocioTechnical Systems
How technology conveys educational
philosophy
Why MIT Laptops may not be for all children
How different power systems promote
different political structures
What is a “lens”?
• Definition:
– “a practice lens…examine[s] how people, as they interact with a
technology in their ongoing practices, enact structures which shape
their emergent and situated use of that technology.” (Orlikowski)
• Reimagining the technical artifact: bicycle, computer, cell phone,
television, automobile
• Old account: the technical artifact is a physical object that,
somehow, embodies value
– Value embodied in the structure of the object
– User appropriates the object through use but the object (via the
values or politics it embodies) highly constrains the user in terms of its
structure
• New account: Orlikowski
– A structure that emerges as agents interact with an object in a context
(STS)
– So the same object (say a software program) can take on entirely
different forms when enacted by different people in different contexts
• A lens represents a conception of the relation
between technology and society
• It also presents an ideology or a picture of the
world
• Each lens opens a different line of inquiry and
suggests different, yet productive, questions
• Comparing different lenses…
– Reveals the partiality of each
– Sets up the possibility of integrating them into a
broader, more comprehensive standpoint
Technological Determinism
Readings from Heilbroner, Winner, Pinch and
Bijker are from Johnson and Wetmore, eds.
Technology and Society: Building Our
Sociotechnical Future
MIT Press: 2009
Heilbroner Quoting Marx
• From Marx
– “The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal
lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial
capitalism.”
– Straight-line determinism: the technology (handmill, steam-mill) determines the social form
(feudal society, industrial capitalism)
General Statement of Technological
Determinism
• Feenberg, Questioning Technology, 77
• TD = UP + DB
• Unilinear Progress:
– “Technological progress appears to follow a unilinear course, a
fixed track, from less to more advanced configurations. Each
stage of technological development enables the next, and there
are no branches off the main line.”
• Determinism by Base:
– “Technological determinism also affirms that social institutions
must adapt to the “imperatives” of the technological base.
This view, which no doubt has its source in a certain reading of
Marx, is long since the common sense of the social sciences.
Adopting a technology necessarily constrains one to adopt
certain practices that are connected with its employment.”
What are the politics of the
technology?
• Does the technology require an authoritarian
system of control
– Example: Nuclear reactor with risk of catastrophic
meltdown. Control must be exercised to avoid
this
• Or does technology encourage adopting a
participative approach where control is
distributed and decentralized?
Questions from Technological
Determinism
What forms of political, economic, and social organization does the
technology require?
Individualistic to Collective
What kind of decision-making structure does the technology require
Horizontal/participative to vertical/top-down control
What approach to working does technology require?
Division of labor or overlapping role responsibilities
How does technology stand in relation to power?
Power centralized in the control of a few or decentralized and distributed
over many?
Is the technology democratic or autocratic (Mumford)?
Shrader-Frachette argues that the soft energy path (renewable resources) is
democratic while the hard energy path (nonrenewable) is authoritarian.
Social Construction
Pinch and Bijker
Stages in the development of a
technology
• Interpretive Flexibility
• Closing of interpretive flexibility through exercise
of social choice
• Technology becomes “black box” in that it
appears inevitable or determined from the
beginning
• See next 3 slides for more explanation of these
stages
First Stage: Interpretive Flexibility
• Meaning of technology is open
– Is bicycle a recreational vehicle or a mode of transportation?
• Social interaction generates different variations
– Boneshaker, Penny Farthing, Lawson’s Bicyclette
• Positive competition stimulates creativity
– Individuals interact with variations, experiment with them, and
clarify their needs and interests vis a vis this interaction
• Interests, needs, and problems become filters that select
some variations (those conducive) and de-select others
(those that become obsolete)
Second Stage: Closing of Interpretive
Flexibility
• Variations in design begin to disappear
• Needs, interests and problems stabilize as
process of experimenting with variations
closes
• Designs that pass through
interest/needs/problem filters emerge as
dominant, others retreat as recessive
Third Stage: Black Box
• Closure is achieved through
– rhetorical means (advertising)
– problem definition (fixing on smooth ride for rubber
tires)
– inclusion in a wider context (variations are integrated
into broader STS)
• Closure conceals historical process where
variations are developed, tested, and filtered
• Dominant design becomes a black box
Social Construction Questions
What is the historical process that has culminated in the
formation of the technology at hand? (This forces opening
of the black box)
What variations competed for dominance in the
interpretative flexibility stage?
How did users and non-experts interact with these
variations?
What interests, needs, and problems emerged as a result of this
stage?
What rhetorical means, problem definitions, and STS
integrations led to a closing of interpretive flexibility?
Determinisms or Codetermination
Langdon Winner: Technologies have
politics
Summary taken from Hickman
John Dewey’s Pragmatic Technology. Indiana University
Press, 148 and following
• Winner rejects “straight-line” notion of tool use
– Guns aren’t good or bad; only the people who use them
• Winner also rejects (in text) technological determinism
(211)
– “technology develops as the sole result of an internal
dynamic and then unmediated by any other influence,
molds society to fits its patterns.”
• Winner finally rejects social determinism of technology
– “What matters is not the technology itself, but the social or
economic system in which it is embedded. …This view
provides an antidote to naïve technological
determinism….But it has its own shortcomings; taken
literally, it suggests that technical things do not matter at
all”
Winner’s Positive Argument Against
Social Construction
• Manifest Complexity:
– The technology or tool displays complexity such as
“tightly coupled systems” and “non-linear” chains of
causality. For example, nuclear reactors
• Concealed Complexity:
– Technologies are frequently backed by decisionmaking procedures that are opaque to independent
scrutiny.
• Pre-market regulation of nuclear reactors by NRC
• Pre-market equivalence (built on previously-approved
design)
Winner’s Positive Argument Against
Social Construction
• Technological Imperative:
– Technologies transform and redefine human needs.
Machine needs become imperative and trump human
needs.
– Finding food, clothing and shelter require first
responding to machine requirements such as
electrical power, highways, bridges, sewers, and other
infrastructure
• Reverse Adaptation:
– Because complex technologies redefine needs (and
values) we are forced to adapt ourselves (and our
needs) to them
Lens Questions
Assess the manifest complexity of the technology in question
What is the manifest complexity of wind turbines?
Assess the concealed complexity?
What is the regulatory process concerning the adoption of eolic
technology? Pre-market approval procedures? Pre-market
equivalence?
Identify the operation of any technology imperatives.
Are there any technological needs that are pushing aside and
replacing human needs?
Identify any instances of reverse adaptation
Does the technology require reverse adaption? Does it require
humans to adapt to its needs rather than vice versa?
One Technology, five different
enactments
Wanda J. Orlikowski. (2000). “Using
Technology and Constituting Structures: A
Practice Lens for Studying Technology in
Organizations.” Organization Science, 11(4),
July-August 2000: 404-428.
What is interesting here is that…
one and the same technical
artifact generates a series of
different technologies as
individuals with different values
working in different cultures
interact with it
Notes (groupware)
developed by Lotus Development Corporation
• Features
– Electronic messaging
– Text Editing (word processing)
– Document Management
– Customization potentiality
– Replication (copying and distributing documents)
– Security (password protection)
– Application Development (database)
Developers Use Notes
• Distributed Authority
• Participative Culture
• Nonhierarchical Structure
• Technology-in-Practice
– “Developers use Notes extensively to collaborate on
the design and development of the Notes Product”
Consultants Use Notes
• Individual Incentive Structure
• Competitive Culture with time-based billing structure
• Relationship Management
• Limited Use TIP
• Technology-in-Practice
– “consultants use Notes minimally, sporadically, and
perfunctorily”
Remember
• Technologies have politics and can impose
structure that influence and determine how
society develops
• But technologies themselves undergo a process
of social construction and take on forms never
intended by their designers
• A given technology can take on different forms or
enactments depending on who enacts what in
which context