Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture, and Philosophy (1997). Moody-Adams is a lifetime honorary fellow of Somerville College, Oxford, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Making Space for Justice: Social Movements, Collective Imagination, and Political Hope, and reported the following:
Philosophers have made important contributions to debates about the nature of justice, at least since Socrates discussed the question in Plato’s Republic. At the end of the 20th century, the debates were enlivened by influential work from philosophers such as John Rawls (A Theory of Justice) and Robert Nozick (Anarchy State and Utopia). But I argue in Making Space for Justice: Social Movements, Collective Imagination, and Political Hope, that for the last two centuries some of the most important contributions to understanding social justice have emerged from the social criticism and political struggles conducted by progressive social movements.Visit Michele Moody-Adams's website.
Many of the relevant movements—including 19th century abolitionism, and the 20th century projects of the civil rights movement and the women’s movement—have sought to reform societies purporting to be already democratic. Other significant movements have sought to create democracy where it did not exist, as in the Velvet Revolution in the former Czechoslovakia and the political projects of the Arab Spring. Making Space for Justice shows that what we learn from both kinds of movements must be taken seriously if we want to understand the nature of justice.
A central insight to be gleaned from social movements is the idea that social justice is humane regard, understood as a combination of robust respect for human agency and compassionate concern to limit unnecessary suffering. As I state on page 98, “social justice is achieved when people are able to constructively exercise their capacity for choice and action without unwarranted interference, coercion, or violence, and when they are also able to live a life that is relatively free from unnecessary pain and suffering.” The reader who opens Making Space for Justice at page 99 will thus encounter a critical part of the answer to a central question in the book: the question of what a society must understand (and then do) to promote social justice.
As part of that answer, page 99 presents two important ideas.
First, page 99 argues that there are five main ways in which a society’s institutions, policies and practices can produce and sustain injustice: (1 ) by the arbitrary exercise of coercive political power and the unwarranted use of state violence; (2) by allowing persistent and poorly addressed threats to physical security and safety; (3) through deliberate or persistently unaddressed environmental degradation; (4) by not alleviating poverty, as well as the economic insecurity affecting many who do not qualify as poor; (5) by sustaining severely limited access to material and cultural conditions of human flourishing.
Second, page 99 urges that eliminating these obstacles to social justice is not a matter of applying a single principle, or finite set of principles, in the hope of fairly ‘distributing’ social benefits and burdens.. A principal aim of Making Space for Justice is to challenge this reductive approach to justice that has shaped influential contributions to contemporary political philosophy—including the work of Rawls and Nozick.
Page 99 thus turns out to be remarkably informative about the fundamental aims and arguments of Making Space for Justice.
Yet what page 99 does not show is that Making Space for Justice is not merely an account of what social movements contribute to theorizing about justice. The book also explores what these movements teach us about the activities required to achieve justice. It is tempting to assume that social movements rely mainly on sit-ins, marches, boycotts, and various public protests. But Making Space for Justice shows that the most effective social movements have recognized the need for additional methods such as narrative activism (as in 19th century slave narratives); language activism (as in the development of the concept of sexual harassment in the 20th-century women’s movement), and aesthetic activism (as in 21st-century efforts of protestors seeking to remove stigmatizing monuments from places of public honor).
--Marshal Zeringue
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