It has become increasingly popular to add adjectives to “justice.” This has led to “social justice,” “racial justice,” environmental justice,” and now, “housing justice.” As an example, Casey Dawkins, Professor of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of Maryland, claims that we must develop a new understanding of justice as it applies to housing. In his book Just Housing, he writes,
I argue that certain contextual conditions influence housing’s distribution and valuation, and these conditions call for an approach to justice that considers housing’s distinctive qualities.
Every value has “certain contextual conditions” that influence its distribution and valuation. But we don’t need separate concepts of justice for “smart phone justice,” or “television justice,” or “automobile justice.” All we need is a proper definition of justice.
Not surprisingly, Dawkins does not offer a proper definition. What Dawkins proposes is the obliteration of justice:
While some equate justice with morality writ large, most theories of justice pertain more narrowly to what “we owe to each other” (particularly as these obligations are instantiated in actions taken by the nation-state or its agents to distribute goods, resources, and opportunities)….
I interpret housing justice to be a particular understanding of distributive justice that addresses moral questions about the production, distribution, occupancy, and ownership of housing.
Adding adjectives to justice does not provide greater clarity or understanding. What it does do is confuse the issue and allow the concept of justice to be perverted.
Properly understood, justice does pertain to “what we owe to each other.” Properly understood, justice demands that owe to others that which they have earned, that which they deserve. This is true no matter which particular issue we are considering.
To Dawkins, justice does not pertain to what an individual has earned. It means an equal distribution of values, regardless of an individual’s actions or inactions to produce or earn those values. To Dawkins, individuals deserve housing because they exist. This isn’t justice; it is injustice.
Not only do the advocates of “housing justice” want to grant unearned rewards, they seek to impose undeserved penalties on housing producers. The growing popularity of rent control is one example. Eviction moratoriums is another. Across the nation, controls and restrictions are being imposed on landlords in the name of “housing justice.”
This illustrates a point that Peter Schwartz once made: political disasters are always preceded by epistemological disasters. The goals of “housing justice warriors” would be impossible to achieve without first perverting the meaning of the concept “justice.”