Distributive Justice Principles

908 Words4 Pages

Everyone believes that they know the right way to deal with economic justice, however the issue of how to make a society economically just has been a problem debated between many different viewpoints of distributive justice for hundreds of years. These differing viewpoints all bring with them the ability to interpret information provided about the economic conditions in a society and tell if that society is just or not. The five major principles of distributive justice are as follows: libertarian, utilitarian, egalitarian, sufficiency, and priority. Given graphs of the American distribution of wealth and income, I will apply these principles and try to interpret if these graphs reveal and injustice in the distribution of wealth and income in …show more content…

Utilitarians often ignore the individual for the value of the community as a whole getting what they need to maximize utility. Everyone must work towards making the highest productive output of utility. Someone applying this principle to the graph’s provided would also come to the conclusion that it depends on other factors outside of the graphs provided to make a decision whether this form of inequality maximizes utility for the community or not. If the utility is maximized when there is this amount of inequality in wealth and income in the United States, then the utilitarian could say it is a just society, but if utility is not being maximized with this inequality, then the society is …show more content…

There should be no relative poverty in our society because everyone has the same. This principle “judges the distribution based on the relative holdings of individuals” (Von Platz, 7). Egalitarians are driven by a “sense of fairness,” in society and by using comparative egalitarianism, you can see what is fair (Temkin, 157). This is the only principle that can distinctly say based off of the graphs provided that our society in America is unjust because there is a larger amount of inequality in income and in wealth. The principle of egalitarianism states that everyone should have the same of everything, so that there should be no income inequality in the United States and no wealth