During our initial planning of this website, we spent a while discussing if we should be called Complex Systems and Social Justice or Complex Systems and Society.

While discussing this, we began to realize that we don't have a good grasp on what social justice means, much less what we mean by it. Or perhaps, everyone else realized this all along and it finally just dawned on me.

Attempts to define Social Justice seem to bring up lots of baggage and conflicting idealogies. Even the neutrality of Wikipedia's article on Social Justice is currently under dispute (on July 4, 2008, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_justice). Still, the first paragraph of the article defines a concept intuitively clear and fair to me.

Social justice refers to the concept of a society in which justice is achieved in every aspect of society, rather than merely the administration of law. It is generally thought of as a world which affords individuals and groups fair treatment and an impartial share of the benefits of society.

The problem is in the details of the implementation. According to Wikipedia, folks disagree on the definitions of fair treatment and impartial share. I'll leave an exploration of those definitions to one of the philosphers on the site (Chris?).

In any case, I think we can still do good and interesting things while either teasing apart, or possibly even sidestepping, the complexity of the term Social Justice.