ABSTRACT
We need clearer thinking about social justice if our efforts to change the world are to be successful. Disputes about social justice often rest on confusion, such as confusion about what social justice means and how social justice pursuits should relate to scientific knowledge. Sociology can help clarify our thinking, but in practice sociologists have often just made things more confusing. To think better about social justice, though, we need sociology, even if we have to learn how to avoid bad sociology. We need to realize first of all that we’ll do better if we learn about the world before changing it. Auguste Comte and other early sociologists have pointed us toward the usefulness of sociological knowledge, and we should incorporate their insights, but they’ve had a tendency to try to move too quickly—to give up too soon on the hard work of understanding the world before moving on to a plan for a new society. They were right, though, that we need sociology to inform our social justice pursuits even if they were wrong to think knowledge about the social world would come easily.
