Conceptualizing Politics

2.   Distributive  justice
Distributive justice regards the rules of how to organise the distribution of material 
and immaterial goods to actors (persons, classes, countries) seen as members of a group 
of a given dimension (citizens of a country, countries of the world). Plain examples 

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178  Ethics and politics
of the rules are distribution proportional to the personal merits in meritocracy, to the 
hours worked on the workplace, to everybody’s needs and/or skills in an ideal society. 
Some of these topics are known to us from our reflections on equality, but now the 
corresponding models come provisioned explicitly with the predicate ‘just’.
From Plato onwards philosophers have theorised several models of polity based 
on increasingly elaborate conceptions of justice. The most sophisticated and, at the 
same time, the most interested in a political model of justice, ‘the first virtue of social 
institutions’ (Rawls 1999a, 3), remains John Rawls’s theory of justice as developed 
in 1971 (now Rawls 1999a, 1993 and 1999b). The purpose of Rawls’s research is 
how to ideally set up a polity or ‘well-ordered society’ whose institutions are based 
on justice as fairness; he understands this model of a constitutional democracy to be 
an alternative to utilitarianism, which is, in his view, unfit to secure the basis of such 
a regime because it gives the ‘calculus of social interests’ (Rawls 1999a, 4) priority 
over the liberties of equal citizenship. While rerunning the basics of the contractar-
ian tradition, from Locke to Rousseau and most importantly to Kant, Rawls designs 
an ‘original position’ in which citizens find out what the best principles of a just 
society are expected to look like. In doing so, their impartiality is assured by a ‘veil 
of ignorance’ that prevents them from knowing their social status, their possession 
of natural assets and abilities, the conception of the good they may adhere to, the 
generation of which they are a part (Rawls 1999a, 118–123). They are thus enabled 
to determine the best principles of society removed from particular interests and 
ideologies they would otherwise tend to let prevail. The outcome consists of the 
principle of greatest equal liberty for all and of a second principle, called the differ-
ence principle; they are both developments of a more general conception of justice:
All social values – liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the social 
bases of self respect – are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribu-
tion of any, or all, of these values is to everybody’s advantage.
(Rawls 1999a, 54)
The difference principle is contained in the qualification ‘unless . . .’ and is fur-
ther specified in §46 of A Theory of Justice in the sense that social and economic 
inequalities are to be arranged so that they ‘are to the greatest benefit of the least 
advantaged’ (Rawls 1999a, 266). This can, for example, justify fiscal policies that 
redistribute income in favour of the less advantaged layers of society, but also a 
rejection of radical egalitarianism, which would cancel the stimuli given to the 
efficiency of national economy by individual aspirations to higher income, to be 
attained by business creation and higher productivity. In Rawls’s order of priority, 
efficiency ranks, in any case, after equal liberty and welfare. The priority given to 
a ‘system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all’ 
(from the First principle as formulated in §46) explains why Rawls’s conception has 
been seen as the peak of (left-leaning) liberalism in the American sense of the word. 
In Political Liberalism (1993) Rawls corrected his own previous view of justice based 
on liberalism as a ‘comprehensive doctrine’ (including a theory of moral values and 
metaphysics) and focused on the political character of democratic liberalism. This 

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stance is deemed to facilitate reaching an ‘overlapping consensus’ (another key item 
in Rawls’s vocabulary) among different conceptions of justice, provided the debate 
is regulated by ‘public reason’, which acknowledges only rules that can be justified 
in front of those to whom the rules apply; for example, civic rules deriving from 
a particular religion are not of this sort, since among the citizens to whom they 
are expected to apply some or many are no believers and are not ready to accept 
religious justifications of those rules.
Of the innumerable debates ignited by Rawls’s philosophy since 1971 I shall name 
only a few here: first the dissent about international justice that unfolded within his 
own followers; then, in the last part of the section, follows a brief account of the cri-
tique launched by what we could dub the opposition (Nozick’s libertarianism, com-
munitarianism, Derrida). Only later on we will deal with the existential question as to 
how far general normative theory or ‘ideal theory’ makes sense in political philosophy.
Rawls conceives of international society as a society of peoples (scil. countries), 
not free and equal individuals; remaining far away of any cosmopolitan egalitarian-
ism, he sees for wealthier countries only a duty of ‘assistance’ to ‘burdened’ societies, 
helping them attain decent and stable domestic institutions that respect human 
rights; this does not include a duty to narrow the gap between rich and poor. This 
is, with various arguments, criticised by cosmopolitan theorists of justice such as 
Charles Beitz (2000) and Thomas Pogge (2001), and this discussion has given birth 
to a current of studies and suggestions called ‘global justice’ that issues and assesses 
policy proposals concerning problems such as poverty, the reduction of illiteracy, 
the promotion of gender equality, a better food production and distribution, but 
also issues of international criminal justice, particularly after the creation of the 
International Criminal Court. Contrary to this tendency, David Miller (2000) has 
argued that, as nation states are ethical communities, we owe to our fellow-nationals 
duties that are not only different from, but also more extensive than, the duties we 
owe to human beings as such.
My thoughts in Chapter 7 on how to treat with respect and fairness the people of 
the far future may seem to come closer to this current, except that they differ from 
‘global justice’ for two reasons: first, my proposal results from a political philosophy of 
man-made lethal challenges, not from elaborating on general normative principles. 
Second, the time universalism I propose finds correspondence neither in Rawls’s 
principle of the ‘just savings’ for future generations nor in the global justice literature, 
focused as it is almost exclusively on space universalism. A further difference lies in 
the political (as different from moral) reflection that reducing inequality and promot-
ing retributive justice for human rights violations worldwide is not only a normative 
issue of justice, but also an issue of stability and peace. Egalitarian steps, for example, 
allowing more and more immigration from less wealthy countries because all human 
beings have a right to what Rawls dubs primary goods, cannot be undertaken simply 
out of their rightness, but must find the consent of the hosting populations, which 
cannot be expected to flow from discourses of charity or justice, but as the result of 
a well-designed political process, in which the interests of both guests and hosts are 
both taken into consideration. Large-scale and efficient development aid delivered in 
the emigration countries (side-stepping if necessary their rogue regimes) can prevent 

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mass emigration, which is unavoidably tied to human suffering. In any case, the cat-
egory of solidarity fits these problems better than that of justice, as we shall see.
* * *
Opposition to Rawls’s theory of justice came up vigorously three years after its 
publication with Nozick’s minarchism or theory of the minimal state (Nozick 1974), 
in which freedom, rather than distributive justice, is the leading principle and ‘end-
state theories’, so-called because the final distribution is normatively fixed once 
and for all, are rejected. Nozick favours a historical theory of distribution, which 
respects property as it was originally distributed or later acquired, though a rec-
tification procedure for past injustices is also foreseen. In his utopia people who 
disagree with the state of affairs in their own society can leave and found another 
one. In this extreme case of ideal theory (see below), the relationship between lib-
erty and equality is brought back to the radical opposition that marked the original 
tension between liberalism and democracy.
A more systemic and less otherworldly opposition to the theory of justice and 
liberalism altogether is represented by communitarianism, a wide field including phi-
losophers of quite diverse orientation such as: Alisdair MacIntyre (1981), Michael 
Sandel (1982),
3
 Charles Taylor (1989), Michael Walzer (1983). The landscape here is 
totally different: not the isolated, atomized, unencumbered individuals of liberalism, 
who in this communitarian description are all driven by self-interest, but the com-
munity with its traditions and customs. In it alone can individuals achieve a sense 
of their associate existence in a mindset that is guided by the search for meaningful 
ends rather than the enacting of abstract rights. The good is more important and 
a better motivating force than the right, as the communitarians believe in a shift 
backwards from a deontological to a teleological posture.
4
In the communitarian rejection of liberal individualism themes come up which 
were all anticipated in Hegel’s critique of Kant’s moral philosophy; this was sort of 
inevitable, since Rawls himself presents his theory as a rerunning of Kant under-
taken after (and against) the utilitarian wave that went through (Anglo-American) 
thought in the last two centuries. Kant reborn could not but evoke a renewed 
Hegelian wave, though communitarians lack Hegel’s view on world history. They 
do rather echo the anti-liberal and anti-capitalist, in a word anti-modern, stance 
of Romanticism and recall to mind the conception of community/Gemeinschaft 
examined in Chapter 4. Though not without influence on the philosophical debate 
in Europe, communitarianism has been almost exclusively an American phenom-
enon, and the ‘community’ it intends can only be fully understood by keeping in 
mind American social history and the particular aura this word is surrounded with 
in American political and religious language.
A critical comment on the liberal notion of justice has been formulated in 
France by Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), the philosopher of the now popular 
deconstructionism. He has pointed out the amount of force and willful decision 
that lies at the origin of whatever system of justice, which must therefore remain 

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self-contradictory and impossible; his philosophy of democracy is, rather, centred 
on the notion of hospitality, along with the tension between the unconditional and 
the conditional versions of it.