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The term distributive justice refers to theories that address the fairness of allocation of economic resources and social welfare within a society. Such theories both criticize and prescribe basic institutional arrangements in society. The term goes back as far as Aristotle, but his use of it does not conform to modern usage. Aristotle saw distributive justice primarily in political terms, as those principles that ensure that deserving people are rewarded in accordance with their merit. Modern conceptions of distributive justice begin from postulates of equality rather than merit or status. Everyone is entitled to a minimum of freedom from need regardless of merit. Theories of distributive justice are also distinct from religious and secular conceptions of mutual aid, compassion, or charity. The former rely on the ethics of care; distributive justice also includes state intervention to remediate the side effects of social and economic inequality.

Influences Of Distributive Justice

One source of modern notions of distributive justice is found in nineteenth-century British idealism. Influenced by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s philosophy of absolute idealism, British idealism also took up Hegel’s notion of development and the positive role of the state and applied it to social philosophy. British philosopher Thomas Hill Green especially argued that the state could play a positive role in the creation of the necessary conditions of the good life. Opposing utilitarianism, Green advocated extensive welfare measures such as schools and hospitals.

Marginalist economics was a second influence. The theory of marginal utility referred to the increase in utility of adding one unit of a good. At some point, that addition will have diminished value. The marginalist revolution in economics led by Carl Menger, William Stanley Jevons, and Leon Walras replaced older theories of value with subjective value. Marginalism held that a good, rather than having an intrinsic value, must be scarce and useful to a subject to have value. Neoclassical economics developed a theory that in a competitive market, the self-interested choices of individuals (when aggregated) yield an equilibrium that represents the optimal social welfare arrangement.

Much theorizing on distributive justice was utilitarian (a third source of major ideas). Utilitarianism holds that the morally good is that which is useful. Action should aim at the greatest good for the greatest number. Early utilitarians justified an unencumbered market, but later utilitarians argued that an egalitarian social arrangement produced the greatest good for the greatest number. Utilitarianism is a normative moral theory, but other schools of thought, like marginalist and rational choice economics, claimed to discover “scientific” and nonnormative welfare arrangements. Late twentieth-century utilitarian’s like John Harsanyi combined both trends. Harsanyi argued, like John Stuart Mill, that the greatest happiness principle meant the more egalitarian maximizing of average welfare among individuals and not total welfare, but he saw these principles of interpersonal comparison as social facts, not value postulates. Individuals were naturally rational decision makers who acted in accordance with an expected utility theory.

John Rawls’s Principles On Distributive Justice

The most celebrated theorist of distributive justice, John Rawls, began his career more sympathetic to utilitarianism and marginalize. By the time he published A Theory of Justice, Rawls had incorporated strong normative Kantian elements, including Immanuel Kant’s postulate of equal respect for persons, superseding any calculation of utility. Questions of social justice could not be solved through “science” but were normative in nature. Utilitarian theories, however, fell short in Rawls’s view. An account of justice based solely on self-interested individuals could never generate the moral reciprocity that Rawls found central to extensive equality and liberty.

Rawls’s theory of justice began from a Kantian outlook. In the “original position,” individuals were to decide basic social arrangements behind a veil of ignorance—a position in which they were presumed to be autonomous, free, and equal, but to have no knowledge of any particular characteristics of their own lives or others. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls employed a “thin theory of the good” to indicate those basic needs (rather than wants) that all individuals must have met for any plan of life that all could know. In this way, their decisions take place under conditions of reciprocity in which individual self-interest does not play a central role. Rawls held that under these conditions of justice, inequalities in wealth, power, status, or life chances could only be justified if they harm no one and provide net benefit.

Rawls’ two basic principles of justice are as follows:

Principle of Equal Liberty: Each person has an equal right to the most extensive liberties compatible with similar liberties for all (egalitarian).
Difference Principle: Social and economic inequalities should be arranged so that they are both (1) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged persons, and (2) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of equality of opportunity.

The first principle is a version of Kant’s principle of equal respect for person; the second is an interpretation of Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto’s optimality used in welfare economics. Pareto’s improvements refer to a condition in which a change in the allocation of goods makes one person better off without making others worse off. Pareto optimality is reached when no new allocation can make anyone better off without making others worse off. Inequalities are not justified simply by their contribution to the greater good, but because these inequities benefit everyone, especially the least advantaged. Rawls contended that utilitarian calculation of social needs isn’t compatible with basic reciprocity. The cost of helping the poor would always be too dear in strict economic terms to justify. Rawls’s position justified a very strong version of welfare state liberalism with extensive equality and redistribution of wealth and power.

Rawls argued those who are better endowed or who have a more advantageous social position are so not by merit alone. Rejecting this position, and Rawls’s defense of the welfare state, Robert Nozick, in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, challenged the notion of distributive justice on libertarian grounds. Reviving the neoliberal idea of the watchman state, Nozick held that the state should only be concerned with safety and security of citizens and that much taxation was illegitimate. He rejected equality for a conception of desert: One deserves what one achieves through one’s own effort. Inequalities that are a result of lack of effort or ability are fair and just, because they are deserved.

Other important critics of Rawls include Susan Moller Okin, who criticized Rawls for his neglect of gender and the family, and communitarian Michael Sandel, who criticized Rawls for employing a Kantian conception of the abstract individual, a purely cognitive subject without substantive qualities. Sandel held that this separates the right from the good. We cannot make sense of questions that Sandel argued without reference to our situated set of values and sense of the good. Economists like Kenneth Arrow and John Harsanyi criticized Rawls’s “maximin” principle on the grounds that it was designed to yield the principles Rawls desired, was circular, and that it otherwise prejudged outcomes.

While Rawls himself saw his theory as neutral in the contest between capitalism and socialism, there was lively debate whether Rawls’s conception of justice could in fact be applicable to a socialist order or whether it was more limited. Marxist critics like C. B. Macpherson argued that Rawls’s presumption that class-divided societies are inevitable limited the scope of distributive justice.

Rawls attempted to answer these critics and modify his position somewhat in series of essays later published as Political Liberalism. There he attempted to argue, for example, that the use of the original position was not metaphysic (and hence separating right and good) but was instead a political device for making decisions and that it has weakened the terms of the veil of ignorance. In so doing, he hoped to show that the subject of his theory of justice is a social one.

While drawing on earlier criticisms, analytical Marxists such as John Roemer, G. A. Cohen, and John Elster have extensively criticized Rawls’s approach to distributive justice for being insufficiently egalitarian. G. A. Cohen for example argues that Rawls’s egalitarianism should not apply simply to the basic structure of society but to the whole of society. It requires an egalitarian ethos among citizens. Even a just basic structure will not eliminate all the inequalities, nor are there inequalities that do not hurt the worst off. Roemer has tried to recast equality of opportunity so as to eliminate the contingencies of circumstances and allow equal effort to yield equal outcomes. Roemer is an instrumental egalitarian. Equality is not an intrinsic good but a means to bring about a reasonable quality of life.

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