10 Impartiality, Solidarity, and Distributive Justice

As the increasing loss of ecosystem services severely affects life perspectives of today's poor and future populations, governing access to, and use of, ecosystem services in an intragenerational and intergenerational just way is an urgent issue. The author argues that theories of distributive justice should consider the distribution of access rights to ecosystem services. Three specific demands that a theory of distributive justice should fulfill to adequately cope with the distribution of access rights to ecosystem services, and show that Rawls’ “A Theory of Justice” (1971) can be consistently extended to meet the identified demands.

This paper explores the moral and theological imperative of distributive justice as a basis for equitable government support to faith-based universities in Malawi and Zambia. Despite their significant contributions to national development, private religious institutions-including Seventh-day Adventist (SDA), Reformed Church of Zambia (RCZ), Church of Central African Presbyterian (CCAP), Baptist, Catholic, and Islamic universities, remain largely excluded from government financial assistance, even though their students, faculty, and guardians contribute taxes that sustain public systems. Drawing on John Rawls’s theory of distributive justice and Christian ethical principles, the study contends that government support for non-profit faith-based higher education is both a moral obligation and a recognition of human rights. Empirical evidence from Malawi and Zambia indicates that these institutions consistently produce highly employable graduates and complement government efforts in expanding access to quality education. The paper argues that equitable resource allocation would not only enhance sustainability across all higher education institutions but also promote justice, fairness, and the common good as enshrined in the constitutions of both countries. The findings carry particular implications for SDA and other faith-based universities, highlighting their indispensable role in shaping ethical, skilled, and socially responsible citizens. This study combines theological ethics and moral philosophy with emerging empirical data-such as enrollment patterns, funding disparities, and graduate employability-to substantiate its argument. It draws upon Rawlsian fairness, Christian ethics, and African communitarian principles to propose an inclusive distributive justice framework for higher education policy reform. (NCHE, 2023; Ministry of Education, 2022). It draws upon Rawlsian fairness (Rawls, 1971), Christian ethics (Tillich, 1954), and African communitarian principles such as Ubuntu (Mbiti, 1969; Shutte, 2001) to propose an inclusive distributive justice framework for higher education policy reform.

Rawls’ theory of distributive justice may serve as a useful model in conceptualizing a model of the ideal political economy – one that seeks to keep inequalities that have come about as a result of natural accident to a minimum. Moreover, his principles of justice can be used correctively, to address institutional inequalities that have the effect of entrenching social dislocation. Kenya has, over the decades up until now, been riven by injustices relating to land. This has led to the development of a small cluster of landed elites while the majority of citizens are effectively denied land access rights. This is regardless of the fact that most of the land so acquired by the former was acquired irregularly and with disregard of bona fide title of the original occupants. The concept and process of transitional justice may be viewed as the vehicle toward attaining corrective justice and accountability for offences committed in times of national crisis as a restorative measure.

Recent studies by economists such as Piketty (2013, 2019) and Atkinson (2015) have contested the well-established view that post-war redistribution policies have been successful in the long term at slowing down the rise of structural inequalities. In reality, the claim goes, they have dealt mostly with reducing inequalities of income through redistribution and have left inequalities of wealth and capital ownership uncontrolled. These, according to their studies, have now risen in the developed world and reached levels more typical of 19th Century Europe. To make matters worse, perceptions of and attitudes towards fighting inequalities as unjust that Rawls saw as based on a wide consensus of citizens' "considered judgments" (Rawls, 1999, p. 17), have changed, leading to them being accepted as the justified and even necessary price to pay for economic growth and as a reward for merit. Economic arguments based on the need for incentives for raising productivity and the "trickle-down effect" have become widely accepted as if the price of economic efficiency should be disconnected from the demands of equity. Meritocracy has provided ethical arguments too. As John Roemer says, "today the most important problem for the social sciences of inequality is understanding how electorates have come to acquiesce to policies which increase inequality… and to try revealing the logic of the I would like to thank the editors of the Special Issue on Rawls for inviting me to develop ideas that I first presented in a previous paper published in French in 2016, "L'état-providence face aux inégalités et la démocratie de propriétaires: une comparaison entre Meade, Rawls, Ackerman et Piketty," Tocqueville Review, 2/2016), as well as in another paper in English in 2018: « Self-development and Social Justice ». I hope to be able to develop these ideas in a future book on property-owning democracy and its philosophical justifications.

[Purpose] This study investigates educational welfare policies to address the widening educational disparities among low-income children and adolescents under increasing social polarization. It focuses on analyzing the enactment of social justice in the Head Start program in the USA, Sure Start in the UK, and Dream Start in South Korea.
 [Methods] Employing Gewirtz and Cribb's(2002) plural models of social justice, an extension of John Rawls' theory of distributive justice, this study examines the threefold aspects of 'distributive, cultural, and organizational justice' in these policies.
 [Results] Key findings highlight that these policies variously achieve distributive, cultural, and organizational justice through effective resource allocation, information accessibility, recognition of beneficiary diversity, and democratic participation. Specific emphasis is placed on the need for equitable information distribution in distributive justice, acknowledgment of diversity in cultural justice, and democratic stakeholder participation in organizational justice.
 [Conclusion] The study underscores the necessity of exploring how these justice dimensions interact and coexist, proposing policy recommendations for the future trajectory of child education welfare.

In political philosophy, reflective equilibrium is a standard method used to systematically reconcile intuitive judgments with theoretical principles. In this paper, we propose that survey experiments and a model selection method—i.e., the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC)-based model selection method—can be viewed together as a methodological means of satisfying the epistemic desiderata implicit in reflective equilibrium. To show this, we conduct a survey experiment on two theories of distributive justice, prioritarianism and sufficientarianism. Our experimental test case and AIC-based model selection method demonstrate that the refined sufficientarian principle, a widely accepted principle of distributive justice, is no more plausible than the prioritarian principle. This tells us that some changes of certain intuitions revolving around sufficientarianism should be examined (separately) based on the findings of the survey experiment and AIC model selection. This shows the potential of our approach—both practically and methodologically—as a novel way of applying reflective equilibrium in political philosophy.

Is the Market Wage the Just Wage? A Reassessment of Factor Pricing and Distributive Justice

Towards Accountability: The Articulation and Formalization of Fairness in Machine Learning

The aim of this paper is to formulate new and more precise predictions regarding behavioral reactions to distributive and procedural injustice via insights from resource theory. The three theories share focus on discrepancies between actual and ideal states of existence as well as on psychological and behavioral reactions to discrepancy. But they also differ from each other in their conceptualizations and theorizing about these matters. Equity theory conceptualizes discrepancy as a perceived mismatch between inputs and outcomes; multiprinciple distributive justice and procedural justice theories view discrepancy as a mismatch between expected and applied distribution and procedural rules, respectively. Resulting feelings of inequity/injustice may trigger attempts to restore justice. Within the framework of resource theory, discrepancy concerns an inappropriate match between the nature of the provided and received resources. This leads to frustration which, in turn, may trigger attempts at retaliation. Limitations of the theories are discussed, with particular focus on their inability to match specific discrepancies with appropriate behavioral reactions. Behavioral predictions are based upon established congruence between behavioral reactions and violated procedural rules as well as type of inequity, as determined via their respective resource isomorphism. Limitations of the present integration attempt are discussed.

Theories of distributive justice are most severely tested in the area of disability. In this book, Mark Stein argues that utilitarianism performs better than egalitarian theories in this area: whereas egalitarian theories help the disabled either too little or too much, utilitarianism achieves the proper balance by placing resources where they will do the most good. Stein offers what may be the broadest critique of egalitarian theory from a utilitarian perspective. He addresses the work of egalitarian theorists John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, Amartya Sen, Bruce Ackerman, Martha Nussbaum, Norman Daniels, Philippe Van Parijs, and others. Stein claims that egalitarians are often driven to borrow elements of utilitarianism in order to make their theories at all plausible. The book concludes with an acknowledgment that both utilitarians and egalitarians face problems in the distribution of life-saving medical resources. Stein advocates a version of utilitarianism that would distribute life-saving resources based on life expectancy, not quality of life. Egalitarian theories, he argues, ignore life expectancy and so are again found wanting. Distributive Justice and Disability is a powerful and engaging book that helps to reframe the debate between egalitarian and utilitarian thinkers.

This chapter explicates many of the words of Plato’s Socrates on the problem of distributive justice. One of the main points of this chapter is to demonstrate how the Socratic Anti-Mouthpiece Interpretation can and ought to function when it interprets the words placed in Socrates’ mouth by Plato. One of the leading contemporary philosophers of Plato, Richard Kraut , argues that Plato has a theory of distributive justice. However, while this chapter will argue that there is no theory of distributive justice found in the words of Plato’s Socrates, there are philosophically interesting concepts and arguments which are articulated and may be useful to contemporary moral, legal, social and political philosophers.

Michael Walzer has argued that `distributive justice presupposes a bounded world', but what counts as a relevant boundary? The article criticizes two arguments holding that boundaries should not count at all: a negative argument that there is no relevant difference between human relationships within and across state borders and a positive argument that principles of justice must, as a matter of logic, be universal in scope. It then examines three rival accounts of the bounded scope of distributive justice: the cooperative practice view, the political coercion view, and the common identity view. Although each has plausible arguments to support it, none turns out to give necessary and sufficient conditions for principles of distributive justice to apply. Importantly, however, the idea of social justice has emerged within political units (nation-states) that to a large extent combine the three features in question. To the extent that this overlap breaks down, we will need to develop new theories of transnational justice.

The theory of distributive justice is concerned with the way in which socially valued rewards, such as salaries, promotions, or special privileges, get allocated to members of a social system. The two basic notions are: (1) individuals have what they regard as legitimate expectations about how rewards shiould be allocated, and (2) if such expectations are violated there is both strain and pressures for social change. In considering injustice or inequity, the idea of relative deprivation has played a key role. That is, feelings of dissatisfaction and associated pressures for change depend not on the absolute level of reward received but on the relationship between rewards received and rewards expected. The idea of relative deprivation was already prominent in studies of military personnel in World War H. It was found, for instance, that the Air Force, despite objectively greater opportunities for promotion than the Military Police, showed more dissatisfaction with its promotion opportunities because of its greater expe tations for promotion.' In general, relative deprivation occurs where similar individuals are not given similar rewards. For example, whatever their absolute wage, airline mechanics will be upset if they are paid less than automobile mechanics if they believe that they are as skiUled as automobile mechanics. Thus, inequity in the reward-allocation process is found whenever similar actors are given dissimilar rewards, or dissimilar actors are given similar rewards. For example: Homans describes the billing office of a public utility in which one status, the ledger clerks, is rewarded as more skilled than a second status, the cash posters, but the two are paid the same wage. The wage policy is regarded by girls in both statuses as -unjust and they agitate in their union for a wage differential.2 Investigators have found numerous responses to injustice or inequity, ranging from status protest to some psychosomatic symptoms, but the response is always some form of socially or psychologically disruptive condition. There are basically two formulations of the theory of distributive justice: an exchange formulation most prominently represented by the works of Homans3 and Adams 4, and a status-value formulation developed recently by ourselves. Elsewhere we have stated in some detail why we prefer a status-value to the exchange formulation.5 We shall not repeat the arguments here. We are currently engaged in experimental work that contrasts predictions made using the status-value formulation with predictions from the exchange theory of distributive justice.

Planning with justice: Using spatial modelling to incorporate justice in electricity pricing – The case of Tanzania

If distributive justice or injustice is to exist, there must be something that is just or unjust: something to which moral assessments at issue attach. I argue in this paper against one popular candidate for that role: global basic structure. I argue that principles of distributive justice that basic structure fail to satisfy a crucial action guidance desideratum and that this problem points to an alternative that philosophers of justice have yet to widely acknowledge. We ought to exclu- sively direct our principles at subspheres of politics: disaggregating justice for a disaggregated world. In order for justice or injustice to exist, there must be something in politics that is just or unjust: something to which moral as- sessments at issue attach. Which thing or things should play that role in our theory? What should be target of principles of justice? One popular answer to this question is the basic structure. In this paper I join those who argue against this answer, but my treatment of issue is distinctive in two ways. First, my reasons for rejecting basic structure as justice's differ from those of most other theorists. While most critics focus on denying that order constitutes a basic structure—in sense of instantiating same forms of association that ground claims of justice in domestic poli- tics—I argue that resolving that dispute is largely beside point. This is because, even if a basic structure in foregoing sense exists, principles that it will fail to satisfy a crucial action guidance de- sideratum for principles of justice. This desideratum imposes two re- quirements that principles pitched at order are not well placed to meet: we must be able to use our principles of justice to generate ade- quately informative answers to well-formed questions of justice in politics, and we must be able to identify agents who could regulate their conduct in accordance with those principles. I argue that a duty to alter basic structure is not a duty with which any agent we currently see, or would want to see, could feasibly comply. And principles target-