Theories of Justice
Theories of justice ask what individuals and institutions owe one another, and by what principles benefits, burdens, rights, and resources should be assigned within a society.
Definition
Justice is the moral standard by which the arrangements of social institutions — and the distribution of rights, opportunities, wealth, and power they produce — are judged fair or unfair. A theory of justice articulates and defends such standards.
Scope
This area covers systematic accounts of social and political justice: distributive justice (how goods are allocated), the principles that should govern the basic structure of society, and rival traditions including egalitarian liberalism, libertarianism, and the capability approach. It excludes purely criminal-justice and corrective-justice doctrine except where it bears on general principles.
Sub-topics
Core questions
- What is the primary subject of justice — individual conduct, or the basic structure of society?
- How should social and economic goods be distributed, and according to which principle (need, desert, equality, entitlement)?
- Can inequalities ever be just, and if so under what conditions?
- Is justice best specified by ideal principles or by comparing actual states of affairs?
- What do the better-off owe the worst-off members of society?
Key concepts
- distributive justice
- the basic structure
- veil of ignorance
- difference principle
- entitlement
- capabilities and functionings
- ideal vs. non-ideal theory
Key theories
- Justice as fairness
- Rawls argues that principles of justice are those that free and equal persons would choose behind a 'veil of ignorance', yielding equal basic liberties and the difference principle, under which inequalities are just only if they benefit the least advantaged.
- Entitlement theory
- Nozick holds that a distribution is just if it arises through just acquisition and voluntary transfer; patterned or end-state principles of distribution are illegitimate because enforcing them violates individual rights.
- Capability approach
- Sen reframes justice around the real freedoms (capabilities) people have to achieve valued functionings, and argues for a comparative, realization-focused assessment of justice rather than a search for perfectly just institutions.
History
Reflection on justice runs from Plato's Republic and Aristotle's distinction between distributive and corrective justice through social-contract thinkers such as Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. The modern field was reshaped by John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971), which revived contractarian argument; Nozick's libertarian reply (1974) and Sen's capability approach (from the 1980s) define much of the subsequent debate.
Debates
- Patterned vs. historical principles
- Whether justice in holdings is fixed by an end-state pattern (e.g., equality or the difference principle) or solely by the history of legitimate acquisition and transfer, as Nozick contends against Rawls.
- Ideal vs. comparative theorizing
- Whether a theory of justice should specify perfectly just institutions or instead rank actual social states by their relative justice, as Sen argues against the Rawlsian transcendental approach.
Key figures
- John Rawls
- Robert Nozick
- Amartya Sen
- David Miller
- Ronald Dworkin
Related topics
Seminal works
- rawls1971
- nozick1974
- sen2009
Frequently asked questions
- What is the difference between distributive and corrective justice?
- Distributive justice concerns how benefits and burdens are shared across a society, while corrective justice concerns rectifying wrongful losses between particular parties; theories of justice in this area focus chiefly on the former.
- Does a theory of justice require equality?
- Not necessarily. Egalitarian theories favour equality of some currency, but Rawls permits inequalities that help the worst-off, and libertarian theories reject equality as an aim altogether, focusing on rights and entitlements.