Social Justice as Coordination Self-Interest

The standard case for social justice rests on moral premises — fairness, compassion, human rights, the inherent dignity of persons. These premises are real but they are also rejectable. They require the powerful to be good. History suggests this is an unreliable mechanism. The EPPM provides an alternative case that requires no moral premises. It rests entirely on coordination dynamics and self-interest. The argument: elites are coupled to the populations they depend on. A population whose coordination capacity (Kc ) is chronically depleted generates entropy (Ep ) that propagates across coupling boundaries into the elite’s own coordination environment. Elite viability is structurally dependent on population Kc whether the elite recognizes this or not. Degrading population Kc is not exploitation that benefits the elite at the population’s expense — it is entropy generation that degrades the coordination environment the elite requires for its own functioning.Social justice is not charity. It is coordination infrastructure maintenance. The case does not require anyone to be good. It requires only that they can count.