So here’s a good rule of thumb: don’t add anything to your cognitive toolbox that looks like an “anti-tool” to a tool that is already inside of it. Anything that you suspect makes you know less, be dumber, or require you to forsake trustworthy tools is safe & recommendable to ignore. (In keeping with the social justice topic, a subcategory of bad beliefs to incorporate are those that cause you to succumb to, rather than resist, what you know to be flaws in your cognitive hardware, such as an ingroup-outgroup bias or affect heuristics—that’s why, I think, one should avoid getting too deep into the “privilege” crowd of social justice even if the arguments make sense to one.)
Why is privilege such a dangerous idea? I suspect that your answer is along the lines of “A main tenet of privilege theory is that privileged people do not understand how society really works (they don’t experience discrimination, etc.), therefore it can make you despair of ever figuring anything out, and this is harmful.” But reading about cognitive biases can have a similar effect. Why is learning about bias due to privilege especially harmful to your cognitive toolbox?
It seems possible that when your friend said, in effect, that there can never be any axioms for social justice, what they really meant was simply, “I don’t know the axioms either.” That would indeed be a map/territory confusion on their part, but it’s a pretty common and understandable one. The statement, “Flying machines are impossible” is not equivalent to “I don’t know how to build a flying machine,” but in the short term they are making the same prediction: no one is flying anywhere today.
Actually, and I don’t know if you’ve thought of it this way, but in asking for the axioms of social justice theory, weren’t you in effect asking for something close to the solution to the Friendly AI problem? No wonder your friend couldn’t come up with a good answer on the spot!