The major libertarian argument against social justice goes as follows:

The Spontaneous Order Argument:

1. The distribution of goods, wealth, and opportunities on a free market is not the product of anyone’s intentions or design, but rather is something that emerges from countless individuals making free decisions. There is no more a “distribution of income” in a free market than there is a “distribution of mates” in our society.
2. Only the products of human intention can be judged just or unjust.
3. Therefore, the distribution of goods, wealth, and opportunities on a free market is neither just nor unjust.

In short: the concept of social justice is a category mistake.

The major response (which some libertarians accept) is to attack premise 2. As Matt illustrates in this video, the distribution of goods, wealth, and opportunities is in part the product of the basic institutions of a society, institutions which societies could change. Social justice is a standard (though not the only standard) by which we might judge a society’s institutions.

Yesterday, I thought of an analogy to illustrate this point. Consider language. If anything is a product of human action but not human design, language is. Languages are spontaneous orders. There may be an innate grammar (itself a product of spontaneous order through evolution), but most of the content and rules of any given language simply emerge spontaneously from human interactions. (There are of course, a bunch of ridiculous boards that try to regulate language.)

One might make the following argument:

1. The rules and content of a language are not the product of anyone’s intentions or design, but rather are things that emerge from countless individuals interacting with one another.
2. Only the products of human intention can be judged just or unjust.
3. Therefore, the rules and content of a language cannot be judged just or unjust.

On it’s face, this argument is compelling. But what if it’s not?

Imagine the following turned out to be true: Imagine we learned that using the English language, for whatever reason, tends to cause people to think in the short-term, and so causes a large segment of the population, though no fault of their own, to be poor. Now imagine that we also learn that Dutch has the opposite effect–using, thinking, and talking in Dutch cases people to think in the long-term, and so tends to prevent poverty. If we learned that, then we might conclude that English, is for that reason, kind of a lousy language. And if we had the option of transitioning from English to Dutch, we would have, all things equal, good grounds for doing so. So, even though English is a spontaneous order, not the product of anyone’s intention or design, we might judge it to be lousy from a moral point of view, and judge other languages to be superior.

By the way, that’s not just a silly thought experiment. There’s actual empirical evidence out there that a weaker, less dramatic version of this thought experiment might be true. Here’s the paper.

UPDATE: Some commentators noted that I said that, if those facts were true, then English would be lousy from a moral point of view, but I didn’t argue that it would necessarily be unjust. That’s right. One difference here has to do with coercive vs. non-coercive institutions. We use violence to enforce, say, property rights, but not to enforce language. Another difference has to do with demandingness. We think we can reasonably demand that others comply with property rights, but we don’t think we can demand that others speak any particular language, except in special circumstances. A third difference has to do with the ease of modification, whether we can do something about the results of the institution. So, for instance, hurricanes are a “natural evil,” but they aren’t unjust or just, because for now we can’t do anything about them. But property rights are something that we can modify, so it’s easy to say that our decision not to modify them is just or unjust. My point here is merely that we can assess the consequences of spontaneous orders from a moral point of view as good or bad.