Creating Justice Narratives

Here’s a meme that was going around Twitter:

Notice anything striking? Never once does it occur to the creator of these cartoons to ask: who the hell planted the tree?

As Yaron Brook and I explain in Equal Is Unfair, egalitarians—people who think “equality” or “equity” is the highest moral and political value—start out by treating wealth as a fixed, social pie, not something created by and belonging to individuals. 

Their entire moral perspective is built on the common intuition that if two of us stumble on some gift neither of us earned, what’s fair is for you to get half and me to get half. 

But that’s a wrong model for most of life. In most contexts, values have to be earned: they require individuals to exercise thought and take productive action. And that changes the intuition. Yes, if you and I stumble on $50, then it seems fair to divide it up evenly. But what if I spend the summer working and buy a bike, and you spend the summer playing video games? Is it fair for you to get to use the bike half the time?

The point I want to stress here is the implications for communication. Specifically the issue of justice narratives.  

In a policy context, usually we’re using justice narratives to illustrate what’s wrong with a bad policy or to encourage a good policy. For example, in America's Persecuted Minority: Big Business, Ayn Rand uses a justice narrative to illustrate the evil of antitrust. Businessmen were penalized by non-objective laws because they were successful.

But for a justice narrative to work, you have to give people the full context: the audience has to understand the legitimate expectations and contributions of the parties involved, the virtues at work on the side of the good and the vices involved in the side of the bad, and how the good was unjustly blocked or punished and/or the bad was unjustly encouraged or rewarded. 

Let me give you an example. Much of the way companies are viewed is in effect that they come along and impose some consequences on society against society’s will and against the will of the government, and if we don’t like those consequences, the government is doing something just by putting a stop to it. 

So, for example, an oil company shows up one day and starts digging for oil, and spews some pollution in the air, uses a lot of water, creates toxic byproducts that have to be dealt with, all for personal profit—they’re benefiting by introducing a bunch of negatives that weren’t happening before and so now it’s just for the government to come along and stop or penalize them.

What’s the full context? The government in effect invites in oil companies by defining property rights, including what constitutes proper protections against pollution. The company wins over the support of the property owner by purchasing mineral rights on the land, wins over the support of community members by employing them, and it does this with everyone being really clear about both the positives and the potential negatives of the oil project. Then the oil company creates a value that people in the area choose to use and benefit from. The company follows the rules, it prospers, the community prospers, the government prospers. 

Now, given that context, we’re in a radically different position to evaluate a policy used to “clamp down” or punish on an oil producer.

What’s changed in these scenarios, in part, is that we see the community and government not as passive victims, but active participants in a process where the rules are known and the potential consequences are accepted going in. And so to later vilify and penalize the oil company is unjust because it amounts to reneging on an agreement we all made together. 

Bottom line: injustices are justified by judging things out of context. To weave a real justice narrative, you need to supply the full context.