Thursday, September 29, 2011

John Rawls and distributive justice

(The reader will note that I addressed this issue some three years ago. Since then I have had some more time to reflect on the issue of distributive justice. I have also had the opportunity to re-read John Rawls' book, "A Theory of Justice." What follows here is the reformulated version of my older post - to include some more thoughts on the claims of distributive justice as it pertains to the issue of a natural lottery in the distribution of (dis)advantages.)

To a question posed to the world regarding the claims of distributive justice: Why shouldn't the government redistribute body parts? Since some people are born with physical problems, and others might have physical advantages, why, in the name of fairness, does government not require this kind of redistribution?

My Response:
Your premise misses a fundamental point regarding one of the purposes of distributive justice. One of the great purposes of redistribution is to avoid the artificial (Man-made) pooling of, say, wealth, in the hands of a few persons to the detriment of the many. Without organized redistribution there are few civilized methods for achieving this goal. Redistribution becomes one of the few methods society has of maintaining any sense of merit-based (or entitlement-based) distribution of goods - something a 'pooling' of resources clearly works against. The pooling of physical talents - or as your point suggests, the pooling of inferior physical qualities - does not easily fit into the claims of distributive justice. That is because, unlike the artificial pooling of assets and wealth in the hands of slave owners at the expense of slaves (producing inequalities that may persist for generations to come) it is just as likely that the slave's son, or the slave owner's son, will be born blind. Thus, it might be said: The natural distribution of physical advantages, or disadvantages, is neither just, nor unjust (unlike questions regarding the distribution or pooling of wealth, which will necessarily engage questions of justice). They are, quite simply, matters of fact. What is a matter of justice, however, is how we, and our institutions, deal with the results that flow from the unmerited advantages or disadvantages people derive from this natural distribution. Thus, it is the effects of such distributions and perhaps more importantly, humanity's ability to deal fairly and justly with the unmerited disadvantages and advantages that flow therefrom that distributive justice is most concerned to address.
T.D. Marshall