文章探讨了“正义”一词在现代社会中被广泛使用的现象，从经济正义到社会正义，再到环境正义，各种社会议题都被贴上了“正义”的标签。作者分析了这一趋势背后的含义和影响，以及不同框架下的言外之意。

🔍 文章指出，现代社会中“正义”概念的使用越来越频繁，涵盖了经济、种族、社会、环境等多个领域，形成了一种所谓的“正义泛化”现象。

📈 作者尝试通过Google Trends数据分析这一趋势，但未能找到明确的证据表明“正义”一词的使用频率在增加，这更多是作者的主观感受。

📚 文章提到，这种语义上的转变可能与哲学家罗尔斯有关，但也涉及到了阿马蒂亚·森等人的思想，尽管作者对森的了解不足以做出评价。

💡 作者认为，将“帮助穷人”转变为“追求经济正义”不仅仅是语言上的变化，这种不同的表述背后隐含着不同的含义和情感色彩。

🌍 最后，文章探讨了这种“正义”泛化对社会心态和行动的影响，如何塑造了我们对进步、救助和乌托邦的理解。

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/justice-creep

Freddie deBoer says we’re a planet of cops. Maybe that’s why justice is eating the world.

Helping the poor becomes economic justice. If they’re minorities, then it’s racial justice, itself a subspecies of social justice. Saving the environment becomes environmental justice, except when it’s about climate change in which case it’s climate justice. Caring about young people is actually about fighting for intergenerational justice. The very laws of space and time are subject to spatial justice and temporal justice.

I can’t find clear evidence on Google Trends that use of these terms is increasing - I just feel like I’ve been hearing them more and more often. Nor can I find a simple story behind why - it’s got to have something to do with Rawls, but I can’t trace any of these back to specific Rawlsian philosophers. Some of it seems to have something to do with Amartya Sen, who I don’t know enough about to have an opinion. But mostly it just seems to be the zeitgeist.

This is mostly a semantic shift - instead of saying “we should help the poor”, you can say “we should pursue economic justice”. But different framings have slightly different implications and connotations, and it’s worth examining what connotations all this justice talk has.

“We should help the poor” mildly suggests a friendly optimistic picture of progress. We are helpers - good people who are nice to others because that’s who we are. And the poor get helped - the world becomes a better place. Sometimes people go further: “We should save the poor” (or the whales, doesn’t matter). That makes us saviors, a rather more impressive title than helpers. And at the end of it, people/whales/whatever are saved - we’re one step closer to saving the world. Extrapolate the line out far enough, and you can dream of utopia.