Social Darwinism and Social Justice Essay

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Fabian social justice on human nature, freedom, and ethics

Man had no problem in the Middle Ages with his money since Free Competition was non-existent. Each man had his class and protection can naturally to them.

It was Capitalism that unmoored all control and regulation from village, guild, central municipality, government and the individual leaving one individual to drown or be drowned by his other more monetarily successful fellow men with no laws in check to stop it. Neither the feudal system nor the guild system could compete with the chaos of the industrial age and the leaps and bounds of capitalist individualism, which seized political reins and ruled the country. The great political economists were ignorant of the suffering of the masses.

Shaw sees Marxism as solution to the problem. More specifically he advocates a form of Social Democracy where the burden of rent will be thrown to the national treasury instead of heaped on the unequal shoulders of individual laborers. This would, accordingly entail that the business themselves (that carry this rent) belong to the national treasury. And, indeed, this is the onus of Socialism.

There are practical difficulties to establishing this system, but these can be overcome when one considers the State to be the trustee and representative of the people. The State, in other words, becomes responsible for the rent of the people and owns the land of the people, so that it can be proportionally distributed and worked out with no suffering brought about on one more than another and with so single individual raising himself at the other's expense.

Shaw sees the passing of laws in recent years, such as the Income Tax, Poor Laws, and Factory Acts, to be leading onto such a metamorphosis.


Freedom according to Shaw, accordingly, is removal of the inglorious situation where huge gaps are maintained between the upper classes and the poor, where the wealthy are able to maintain huge sprawling mansions, but the leases of houses, shops, other entities of business of hardworking individuals fall to the groups because of the clasping hands of the wealthy. This is immoral and represents bondage to the masses. Shaw sees human nature as that consisting of a classless society -- somewhere like in the Middle Ages -- where there were laws and each had his private property that was not at risk of being stolen by those wealthier than he and where Capitalism with its chaos and injustice did not exist

View of Darwin's Social Darwinism on human nature, freedom, and ethics

Social Darwinism is based on Darwin's thesis of evolution where it is the fittest, namely the one who is best able to maneuver his or her personal environment and compete in that environment with his or her scheming and particular abilities -- which survives. This is the logic of human nature and in a naturally unfair world you cannot expect a system to ethics to exist. Freedom consists of the strongest one using his abilities to attain and maintain his toehold in the world. In a capitalist world, it is the one who is naturally best equipped with certain physical and mental traits who succeeds more frequently than others, and the accumulation of these virtues, as well as their exaggeration over time, may -- Darwin believed -- result in a distinctively different superior breed that may….....

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"Social Darwinism And Social Justice", 04 December 2011, Accessed.5 May. 2024,
https://www.aceyourpaper.com/essays/social-darwinism-social-justice-48175