Abstract
What is a just distribution of economic benefits and burdens? Principles of distributive justice help us answer this and related questions about how we should design the economic system. Principles of distributive justice guide our perception and judgment by telling us what facts to care about and when and why these facts reveal justice or injustice in the distribution of some good or burden. Thus, these principles bridge the gap between basic normative categories of right and wrong and facts about our social world, guiding our attempts to build more just societies. This chapter presents and discusses the main principles of distributive justice—the principles of equality, sufficiency, liberty, utility, priority, merit, and equality of opportunity.
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Notes
- 1.
Edward N. Wolff, “Household Wealth Trends in the United States, 1962 to 2016: Has Middle Class Wealth Recovered?”, NBER Working Paper No. 24085, (November 2017), from http://www.nber.org/papers/w24085; Emmanuel Saez, “Striking it Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States (Updated with 2015 preliminary estimates)”, from https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-UStopincomes-2015.pdf.
- 2.
Sarah Anderson, Scott Klinger, A Tale of Two Retirements, Institute for Policy Studies, (Updated December 2016) http://www.ips-dc.org/report-tale-two-retirements/.
- 3.
Michael D. Yates, The Great Inequality (Routledge, 2016).
- 4.
The question of the distribuendum of principles of distributive justice has been extensively debated in political philosophy. Some highlights of this debate include Amartya Sen, Equality of What?, McMurrin S., ed., Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Volume 1 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Inequality Reexamined (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Ronald Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Richard J. Arneson, “Equality and Equal Opportunity for Welfare”, Philosophical Studies, vol. 56 (1) (1989): pp. 77–93.
- 5.
David Hume raises this objection in An Inquiry Concerning Morals, III, ii. Derek Parfit offers an influential restatement in “Equality and Priority”, in M. Clayton & A. Williams eds., The Ideal of Equality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000): pp. 81–125.
- 6.
Larry Temkin, “Equality, Priority, and the Leveling Down Objection”, in M. Clayton & A. Williams eds., The Ideal of Equality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000): pp. 126–161.
- 7.
Harry Frankfurt, “Equality as a Moral Ideal”, Ethics, vol. 98 (1) (1987): pp. 21–43; Inequality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015); Roger Crisp, “Equality, Priority, and Compassion”, Ethics, vol. 113 (4) (2003): pp. 745–763.
- 8.
The utilitarian approach is more prominent in economics than in political philosophy. Welfare economics and social choice theory both assume that the better public choice is a function of individual preferences and are then concerned with how we can best construct this function (and how we should solve Arrow’s impossibility theorem, which tells us that any such function will violate one or more reasonable constraints on the choice). See, for example, John C. Harsanyi, “Cardinal Welfare, Individualistic Ethics, and Interpersonal Comparisons of Utility”, Journal of Political Economy, vol. 63 (4) (1955): pp. 309–321; Amartya Sen, Collective Choice and Social Welfare: An Expanded Edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017).
- 9.
This is a main claim of John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). For a utilitarian reply, see John C. Harsanyi, “Can the Maximin Principle Serve as a Basis for Morality? A Critique of John Rawls’s Theory”, American Political Science Review, vol. 69 (2) (1975): pp. 594–606.
- 10.
Cf. Derek Parfit, “Equality or Priority”.
- 11.
Cf. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974).
- 12.
Friedrich A. v. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1960).
- 13.
See, for example, Fred Feldman, Distributive Justice: Getting What We Deserve From Our Country (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
- 14.
Friedrich A. v. Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Volume 2: The Mirage of Social Justice (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978).
- 15.
Richard Arneson, “Luck-Egalitarianism Interpreted and Defended”, Philosophical Topics, vol. 32 (1/2) (2004): pp. 1–20; Kok-Chor Tan, “A Defense of Luck-Egalitarianism”, The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 105 (11) (2008): pp. 665–690.
- 16.
Shlomi Segall, Equality and Opportunity (Oxford University Press, 2013).
- 17.
In fact, I cannot think of a single defender of the principle of equality. The most spirited contemporary defense of outcome equality is Temkin’s, but he argues that the equally deserving should be equally well off, meaning that his defense is of the principle of merit, not outcome equality as such, cf. Larry S. Temkin, “Egalitarianism Defended”, Ethics, vol. 113 (4) (2003): pp. 764–782.
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von Platz, J. (2018). Principles of Distributive Justice. In: Boonin, D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Public Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93907-0_31
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