According to The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (2003), distributive justice is “the principle or set of principles explaining what justice requires when some good (or bad) is distributed amongst persons”. In this case, distributive justice has a “general requirement”, which is suum cuique or to each his or her due. However, this does not completely explain how the “dues” should be determined for each person. Common bases for this calculation are needs, rights or entitlement, and desert. Hence what is due to a person would depend, respectively, on level of neediness (Reeve, 2003). Moreover, Chryssides and Kaler (1996) relate that distributive justice deals with showing that “there is no necessary connection with wrong-doing. It concerns the way in which benefits and burdens are to be shared out among people. Its aim is the morally correct division of things such as wealth, power, property, obligations” (p. 47)
One type of principle in distributive justice is the difference principle. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2007) deemed that what inspired the difference principle is the concept of economic wealth “is not a fixed amount from one period to the next”. Since, one person can produce more wealth, there should be a system where the people who are “more productive earn greater incomes”. In this case, Rawls (1993) argues that people would rationally choose and agree on the following two principles of justice. The first principle is the priority of liberty: Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others. The second principle is the difference principle: Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both: (a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged and (b) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity.
Individuals who support other distributive justice principle choose the principles that provide the fundamental foundation of the political, economic, and social structure, and they agree on these unanimously. Rawls considers that the principle of people’s choice, as the most general idea, should reflect the view that “all social primary goods—liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self-respect—are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any or all of these goods is to the advantage of the least favored” (the generalized difference principle). Further measuring of and allocating priorities among primary social goods leads him from this general view to the above two principles.
The first principle implies that fundamental human rights and liberty (the first of his list of primary social goods) must be given higher priority than the other economic and (social) status goods, provided the material welfare of the whole society exceeds the minimum level required. Rawls represents the priorities among primary social goods in the form of “lexical order”. That is, people consider it most important to retain political liberty and refuse to regard it as a freedom that may be traded off against economic and social benefits. Consequently, a social system will never be adopted if it contravenes political rights, however economically efficient that system may be.
The second principle deals with the distribution of economic and social-status goods, that is, what sort of offices and positions people may occupy, what powers and responsibilities they may exercise, and what income and wealth they may obtain. The second part of the second principle (b) requires the guarantee of “fair equality of opportunity”. In order to correct any remaining inequality, the first part of this principle (a) provides for consideration of the share of unfortunate people. In this case, the equality of opportunity requires that social institution should provide a guarantee of no difference in expectation of life, especially in terms of job opportunities, for people with the same ability. Such differences among people should not be brought about by social contingencies such as gender, race, parents’ social and economic position, or other differences in family circumstances. Preventing certain groups of people from taking some jobs means not only that they are excluded from certain economic rewards and social functions associated with the jobs, but also that they are debarred from “experiencing the realization of selves which comes from a skillful and devoted exercise of social duties”. Thus, Rawls always considers the distribution of jobs as primary goods together with its psychological implication—self-respect.
It is believed that the Difference Principle is the best principle of distributive justice because it is deemed that the most important effect of self-respect in social life is that it generates in one’s mind the sense of recognizing another person’s value and appreciating that person’s deeds. That is, the sense of self-respect creates in one’s mind a capacity for respecting other people. Each person’s self-respect brings about a reciprocal relationship in society. This is where Rawls finds the moment of emerging social empathy and cooperation. It was Rawls’ theory that originally demanded the construction of this assumption in order clearly to institute the situation of interpersonal confrontation in which the criteria for justice are required. More positively indeed, he could have insisted that true empathy among people is made possible only when all individuals have a sense of self-respect. With a little exaggeration, we may say that it is the choice of the egalitarian social institutions that generates the social empathy. The greatest significance of Rawls’ theory lies in the fact that it prompts us fundamentally to re-examine the problem of justice through its novel viewpoints and logic.
References
Chryssides, G. & Kaler, J.(1996). Essentials of Business Ethics. London : McGraw-Hill.
Distributive Justice.Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2007. Web.
Rawls, J. (1993). Political Liberalism, New York: Columbia University Press.
Reeve, A. (2003). Distributive Justice. In Mclean I. & Mcmillan, A. (eds.), The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.