Reply to Arnold McKee

Abstract

more adequately from the very beginning. However, because all of us humans are more or less imperfect beings, a second-effort such as this frequently is necessary if we are to make any headway at all against our own ignorance. My remarks will be brief and are confined to the issues of meaning and role. My implicit intention in the article was to unravel the meaning of justice in the narrow sense, and, for that reason, I referred to it generally as justice. In retrospect, it might have been wiser to leave out entirely any references to justice in the wider sense. In any case, what matters finally for social economics and the social economy is a correct and complete understanding of the duties of producers, consumers, and resourceholders (including labor), in the marketplace and the workplace. The labels employed to designate those meanings logically derive from those meanings. Regrettably, a certain careless? ness in the past with regard to the labels that have been employed signals some confusion with regard to meaning. Fortunately, McKee and I are agreed on the three-part classification of economic justice: equivalence (he prefers commutative), distribu? tive, and contributive. And we are agreed on another significant matter: the business of social economists is to apply those principles to economic affairs so that we understand more fully how the social economy actually functions. When we have done that work properly, then and only then will we be able to convince the Biblical simplifiers that social economics and, more importantly, the social economy are best grounded in neo-scholastic thought. They are not likely to accept our foundations without first seeing the structure that we build on them. I have no problem, in general, with McKee's interpretation of charity including social charity. Nor do I take exception to his assertion that social charity is a requirement ? if by that he means a requirement of conscience because as Leo XIII stated and I cited in the article