Justice, Distributive

Distributive justice concerns the way in which the resources of a society are to be justly distributed among its members. The theory of distributive justice attempts to answer the following question: “How should the scarce goods of society be allocated among claimants?” Thus, distributive justice contrasts with other questions of justice such as compensatory justice, commutative justice, retributory justice, and so on. Distributive justice is also sometimes called social justice or economic justice.

The theory of distributive justice assesses alternative distributional principles, outcomes, and institutional arrangements of a society from a moral perspective. For example, some would consider a society in which goods are unequally distributed to be prima facie unjust based simply on that unequal distribution. By contrast, other theories focus exclusively on the justness of procedures in a society with respect to the transfer of goods from one person or group of persons to another. For example, some would see any interference with strict property rights as unjust, even if such interference were designed to bring about a more equal distribution of goods across the members of a society.

Theories also differ on the question of which goods can be justly or unjustly distributed. These goods could range from various social and political rights, such as voting privileges, to awards and honors, to the material goods of a society, such as those that can be valued in monetary terms. In contemporary discussions, the overwhelming focus of concern is the distribution of material and financial resources. This is due partly to the fact that questions of the just distribution of various nonmaterial resources seem to be settled issues, at least in industrialized societies. For example, the question of how voting privileges should be allocated across individuals or groups based on wealth, race, and gender are no longer controversial in many societies.

Many theories focus on the distribution of material and financial resources, rather than the full range of things valuable for human life, because so many of the good things in life are incommensurable, plus they may not be subject to redistribution. What goods are to count in assessing whether a distribution is just: money, beauty, life prospects, well-being, resources, intelligence, or even happiness? Some of these desirable features of a human life are not subject to very effective redistribution, such as beauty, intelligence, happiness, and life prospects. Many are incommensurable with others. For example, how can we value the relative worth of intelligence, beauty, happiness, and money? It seems reasonable that possessing these virtues or assets in some measure adds to the quality of human life, but the contribution of each of these to the quality of a human life cannot be readily assessed in terms of the others. For example, we are told that money cannot buy happiness, but as Aristotle duly noted, a life of destitution is unlikely to be fully happy. What is the trade-off between money and happiness in general? It seems that there is no answer to such a question and that the trade-off between any two of the [Page 1217]assets or qualities on the list will differ from person to person—some place a relatively higher value on beauty compared to intelligence than do others.

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