Distributive Justice

Distributive justice concerns how the benefits and burdens of social cooperation — income, wealth, opportunities, and other goods — ought to be shared among members of a society.

Definition

Distributive justice is that part of justice concerned with the morally proper allocation of divisible benefits and burdens across the members of a community, as opposed to corrective or retributive justice.

Scope

Covers the principles proposed to govern distribution (equality, need, desert, entitlement, the difference principle), the distinction between patterned and historical conceptions, and the unit and currency of distribution. It is the central problem of theories of justice in this area.

Core questions

• What principle should govern the distribution of social goods?
• Should distribution track need, desert, equal shares, or legitimate entitlement?
• Is the relevant question the resulting pattern or the process that produced it?
• What is the proper subject of distribution — the basic structure, or particular transactions?

Key concepts

• patterned vs. historical principles
• need
• desert
• the difference principle
• entitlement
• the currency of distribution

Key theories

The difference principle

Rawls holds that social and economic inequalities are just only insofar as they work to the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society, against a background of fair equality of opportunity.

Entitlement (historical) theory

Nozick argues that a distribution is just if and only if it arose by just original acquisition and voluntary transfer, rejecting any end-state pattern as a criterion of distributive justice.

Pluralist principles of social justice

Miller argues that no single principle governs distribution; rather, need, desert, and equality each apply within different modes of human relationship (solidaristic community, instrumental association, and citizenship).

History

The topic traces to Aristotle's account of distributive justice as proportional to merit. It was transformed by Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971), whose difference principle provoked Nozick's historical-entitlement reply (1974); pluralist and contextual accounts such as Miller's later complicated the search for a single master principle.

Debates

One principle or many?

Whether distributive justice is governed by a single master principle, such as Rawls's difference principle, or by a plurality of principles indexed to different social relationships, as Miller contends.

Pattern vs. process

Whether the justice of a distribution depends on its resulting pattern or solely on the legitimacy of the process that produced it, the crux of the Rawls-Nozick dispute.

Key figures

• John Rawls
• Robert Nozick
• David Miller
• Aristotle

Seminal works

• rawls1971
• nozick1974
• miller1999

Frequently asked questions

How does distributive justice differ from corrective justice?

Distributive justice concerns the fair sharing of goods across society as a whole, whereas corrective justice concerns restoring a fair balance between parties after a wrong or loss.