Distributive Justice

Justice is often taken to hold over two domains: the distributive and the corrective. The latter is concerned with questions of punishment and rectifications of injustices. The former concerns the just distribution of the benefits and (nonpunitive) burdens of social life. These include civil and political rights as well as income, wealth, health care, and so on. Debates about distributive justice are critical to contemporary politics. In this entry, we consider arguments that justice requires promoting welfare; an equal distribution of holdings; a distribution that benefits the worst off; and a distribution that merely respects the rights of property holders. Finally, we ask whether justice [Page 198]should have the central place accorded it in contemporary political thinking.

Justice is a matter of each person receiving what is due to him or her. In the liberal tradition, this ties it closely to the formal idea of equality that requires that things that are relevantly alike should be treated alike. In the absence of relevant differences between people, justice requires that each be treated as an equal. Of course, without an account of “relevant differences” and of what it is to be “treated as an equal,” this does not tell us very much. Indeed, one way to characterize many of the debates in distributive justice is as being about the characteristics or properties that might count in distinguishing persons and over the meaning of the demand to treat persons as equals.

These debates have tended to focus on the distribution of income, wealth, and the goods of economic activity generally (and that will be the focus here). In the matter of civil and political rights, there is a broad consensus that has held since the end of World War II that there are no relevant differences between sane, adult, citizens and that each is entitled to an equal share of such rights in recognition of his or her status as a citizen (although even here there are debates about the scope of justice—whether it applies only to citizens, or to everyone, or to everyone in a territory including migrants and children, etc.; this entry will not consider these questions).