Subjectivity, relevance and the constitution of social justice

Classical conceptions of justice, starting from antiquity on, consider equality as one of the constitutive principles of justice. Especially when it comes to focusing “social justice” – a concept which obtained its  significance in the 20^th Century – the idea of equality is crucial, since the argumentation starts from the assumption that if social justice as shared value concept is present, the aim must be to establish juridical and economic conditions to diminish inequalities. Justice and equality can be referred to actions, individuals, institutions or social circumstances, but primarily individual actions can be classified as “just” or “unjust,” it is individuals who suffer from unjust individual or collective action or unjust social circumstances. Therefore, the argumentation focuses on the dialectical relationship between individual and society (Berger/Luckmann) in order to establish a framework which includes the subjectivity of the individual actor for a clarification of the idea of social justice. Social actors perceive their world according to shared ideas including hierarchies of “symbolic power” (Bourdieu), which form the basis for the experience of justice or injustice. But whether specific social circumstances are experienced as just or unjust by the individual actor depends on his or her knowledge and the subjectively experienced biographical situation. Individually experienced systems of “imposed relevances” pre-structure our ideas of social justice, but starting from our “intrinsic relevances” we spontaneously decide to act according to our chosen interests, which also can be considered as just or unjust by ourselves and others. Reflexions at the interface of sociology of knowledge and phenomenology are applied to describe the significance of the subjectivity of the individual actor for the constitution of social justice.