IB Philosophy 7.2.2 Distributive Justice, Retributive Justice, and Punishment Notes

Theories of Distributive Justice

1. Distributive justice asks how goods, opportunities, and burdens should be shared across a political community. Unlike commutative justice (which is about fairness in one-to-one exchanges, for example, whether you were paid a fair price for your work), distributive justice deals with the bigger structural question: who gets what across society as a whole, and why?
   1. The answer a society gives reflects its deepest commitments about equality, merit, and need.
   2. For the conceptual debate between Rawls and Hayek over whether social justice is a coherent concept, see 7.2.1.
2. John Rawls offered a landmark alternative in A Theory of Justice (1971). His difference principle permits economic inequalities only when they benefit the least advantaged members of society.
   1. Rawls argued that rational agents choosing behind a veil of ignorance would select principles that protect them against the worst possible outcomes, ensuring a fair baseline for all.
3. Robert Nozick challenged Rawls in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), defending an entitlement theory of justice.
   1. Nozick argued that a distribution is just if it arises from legitimate acquisitions and voluntary transfers, regardless of the resulting pattern.
   2. On this libertarian view, redistributive taxation amounts to a form of forced labour because it compels individuals to work for the benefit of others.

Utilitarian and Capabilities Approaches

1. Utilitarian approaches to distribution are rooted in Jeremy Bentham's principle of the greatest happiness of the greatest number. They hold that resources should be allocated so as to produce the greatest overall well-being across society. The just distribution, on this view, is whichever arrangement creates the most total happiness, regardless of how that happiness is spread.
   1. Progressive taxation illustrates the utilitarian logic: transferring £1,000 from a millionaire to someone in poverty produces a net gain in happiness, since the millionaire barely notices the loss while the recipient’s life improves significantly.
   2. Critics object that utilitarianism can justify sacrificing the interests of minorities whenever doing so increases the total. A utilitarian calculus might, in principle, endorse enslaving a small group if the benefits to the majority were large enough.
2. The debate between patterned and unpatterned theories is central here. A patterned theory (like Rawls's) says the final distribution must match a specific template of fairness, for example, inequalities must benefit the worst-off. An unpatterned theory (like Nozick's) says a distribution is just simply if it came about through free choices, the end result does not need to match any particular pattern. For Nozick, any attempt to impose a pattern requires constant interference with what people freely do with what they own.
3. Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum shifted the focus from income and wealth to capabilities, arguing that justice requires ensuring each person can actually do the things that make a decent life possible.
4. Examples include being healthy, getting an education, and taking part in political life, rather than just handing them a set of resources and leaving them to it.
5. This framework addresses limitations in both utilitarian and Rawlsian models (those that follow Rawls's approach of distributing goods fairly) by focusing on what people can actually do and be, not just what they own.
   1. A wheelchair user given the same income as an able-bodied person may still lack the capability to move freely if public spaces are inaccessible.
   2. Sen argues that justice must look beyond equal distribution of resources to what people can actually do and be: equal income does not produce equal freedom when individuals face different obstacles.
   3. Nussbaum specifies a list of central capabilities, including bodily health, bodily integrity (the right to control what happens to your own body), practical reason (the ability to form your own life plan and act on it), and political participation. A just society must secure a minimum threshold of each of these for every citizen.

Marxist and Feminist Critiques

1. Karl Marx proposed that distributive justice under capitalism is inherently contradictory. The principle “from each according to ability, to each according to need” envisions a post-capitalist society in which distribution responds to human need rather than market mechanisms.
   1. Marxist critiques highlight how existing distributions reflect power relations rather than impartial principles.
   2. Factory workers in nineteenth-century Manchester produced vast wealth but received subsistence wages, while factory owners accumulated capital. Marx argued that the ‘just wage’ set by the market masked exploitation: workers were paid less than the value they created, and the surplus was appropriated by the capitalist class.
   3. If the distribution of wealth under capitalism systematically reflects power rather than desert or need, then no amount of redistribution within a capitalist framework can achieve genuine justice.
2. Feminist theorists such as Susan Moller Okin have argued that mainstream theories of distributive justice overlook the gendered division of labour within households. If unpaid care work is invisible to theories that only look at who gets what in the public economy, then apparent equality in the workplace may mask deep structural injustice in the home.
   1. In a household where one partner works full-time while the other provides unpaid childcare, a divorce leaves the caregiver with diminished earnings, savings, and career prospects. This injustice is invisible to distributive frameworks that measure only market income or public entitlements.
   2. Okin argued that justice requires scrutinising the internal distribution of resources and labour within families, not just the distribution of goods across society.

Retributive Justice and the Justification of Punishment