For the most part, I'm willing to bet that most fiction authors have a social conscience. I say that because I see it in their writing. We see it on television. When you consider a classic television episode still very much alive in people's memory, it's perhaps because it brought up a social issue that was a particular concern during that time.
Even when I published my first book and had no idea what I was doing, I still needed to bring up social issues that were important to me. Of course, I was still getting my feet wet back then, so it's mild compared to the topics I bring up in my more recent books, especially the Hernandez series. These days my books feature issues like racism, indigenous issues, poverty, homelessness, Big Pharma, mental health issues, bullying, political corruption, police misconduct, white supremacy, environmental concerns...and that's just off the top of my head. I'm sure there are other social issues I have missed.
Not to say that I have an entire book about any of these topics. It could be as simple as a subject touched on in a book like environmental issues, or it could be something like racism, which comes up in most of this series.
I like to bring up these subjects within the storyline because it puts a face on a topic. Readers see through the character's eyes, getting a peek into their world, which helps create compassion or, at the very least, some understanding of their point of view.
Our world is much smaller than we think, and as people, we have more in common than our egos sometimes want us to believe.
