Economic Justice

Meanings and Fundamental Questions

Understandings of economic justice fit within wider conceptions of a good and just society, about which there is vigorous intellectual and practical disagreement. Economic justice has to do with conditions of a society that enable individual persons to receive their due within their society, under conditions of finite material resources. One of the most basic questions in economic justice concerns which parties have moral status within a society—do all women and men, children, adults, and elderly people, persons of all races, IQs, and sexual orientations have equal claims within the society? Do foreign workers and national-citizen workers have the same (or different) status in terms of economic justice? Do members of future generations have any claim to economic justice? (For example, should their interests be considered in shaping a social security system or in deciding what forms of pollution are morally acceptable?) Finally, do nonhuman beings have claims in justice?

Whether economic justice should focus on opportunities, capabilities, resources, utilities, outcomes, or some other dimension or level is an additional matter of debate. So, too, is how broadly the term “economic” should be taken, since the economic system is closely related to political, social, cultural, religious, and familial arrangements in a society. The criterion of economic justice is another fundamental question: Should a society determine what is due to individuals according to inherent worth, need, social class, merit, work, prior possession, or in some other way?

Yet another issue in economic justice concerns the way in which the analyst relates an ideal conception of justice to the current injustices of a particular actual society. Justice as an end, arguably, is not fully attainable in any human society, and thus a key issue for any view of justice is how to prioritize leadership actions against various forms of injustice in order to approximate conditions of justice more fully.

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