The battle-cry, “social justice,” is an oxymoron

“There needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them.” — John Stuart Mill, opposing the extrajudicial determination of guilt; and extrajudicial punishment

Andrew Sullivan: “Social-justice ideology does everything a religion should. It offers an account of the whole: that human life and society and any kind of truth must be seen entirely as a function of social power structures, in which various groups have spent all of human existence oppressing other groups. And it provides a set of practices to resist and reverse this interlocking web of oppression — from regulating the workplace and policing the classroom to checking your own sin and even seeking to control language itself.”

“Social justice,” from the Roman lawyer Cicero’s appeal to “right reason” to the present, has lacked the fundamentals of actual justice:

1. Presumption of innocence
2. Notification
3. Rules of evidence
4. The right to confront witnesses  
5. The right of appeal 
6. Most important, constraint by the existing body of law
   

In short, due process.

If the judgment of “the community,” the collective, the mob, anyone who wants to gang up on someone who is different, was sufficient, the justice system would not be needed. “The madness of crowds” determines your fate.

In On Liberty, about page 3, the author questions the valorization of “social” implied by such terms as “social justice.”

“Society can and does execute its own mandates,” wrote Mill, “and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.”

Mill continued, “Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.”