Social Justice, Social Capital, and Wellbeing

The basic topic of the chapter addresses three concepts: social justice, social capital, and wellbeing and the relevant relationships among them. For the beginning, the concept of social rightness (different from that of social justice) is examined and defined based on its proper (five) sufficiency predicates. In the context, the relationship between natural law and positive law is brought into discussion, showing that the social rightness is (logically) assignable to natural law, while the social justice is (logically) assignable to positive law. The possibility of a theory of rightness is approached, by identifying the grounding principles (the “axioms”) of such a theory. In this conceptual framework, the very concept of social justice is put into examination, based on some connected concepts as: social wellbeing versus individual wellbeing, societal wellbeing, social capital versus social wellbeing. The issue of the stability regarding the relationship between social capital and social welfare is also analysed, and some implications on that relationships are highlighted: axiological implications, as well as the implications from the social justice perspective. Further, a triadic logical model is built up regarding: (a) social wellbeing; (b) social justice; (c) social capital. To this end, the fundamental functions of the social wellbeing and social justice, respectively, are established, and, on these bases, the functional of social wellbeing is, also, elaborated. Finally, the chapter proposes a co-evolutionary model of the triad “social wellbeing–social justice–social capital”.