Distributive Justice

This module examines some of the central debates about distributive justice that have taken place in Anglo-American political philosophy from the publication of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice in 1971 to today. Rawls's work has stimulated responses from the right, most notably from Robert Nozick, a libertarian, as well as from the left, including authors like G. A. Cohen, feminists like Susan Okin and other liberal egalitarians like Ronald Dworkin and Amartya Sen.

Topic organization: Responses to Rawls can be organized via three main debates.

• The first concerns the search for the correct principles of distributive justice. For example, is it important to distribute benefits equally or is all that matters that people have enough?
• The second, known as the debate on "the currency or metric of justice", concerns what are the correct standards for interpersonal comparisons. For example, what should be distributed equally (or according to whatever turns out to be the right principle or combination of principles) in a just society? Is it primary goods, as Rawls argues, or resources, as Dworkin advocates? Is it access to advantage, as Cohen believes, or is it what Sen describes as capabilities and functionings?
• The second half of the course is devoted to the third and more extensive debate in distributive justice, which concerns the scope of application of whatever combination of principles and currencies turns out to be correct. Many employ the term "distributive justice" as if it were coextensive with social justice. However, those terms aren't equivalent. One important reason is that discussing the ethics of distribution is relevant at both micro- and macro-levels. For example, Cohen has argued that those principles should apply all the way down to individuals and even specific actions, including those concerning occupational choice. He appeals to the feminist slogan "the personal is political", which those concerned with gender equality have also employed to argue in favor of including the family as a legitimate site for distributive justice. Distributive justice, thus, has sub-social applications. It also has supra-social applications, as it can also apply across countries, generations, and even species. Each application will be discussed in a different session.

Topics

I. Introduction.

• *J.S. Mill, Utilitarianism. (Any edition).
• *John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001)
• John Rawls, "Reply to Alexander and Musgrave" (extracts), in The Ideal of Equality ed. Matthew Clayton and Andrew Williams (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002)

II. Equality or Priority?

• *Derek Parfit, "Equality or Priority?", The Ideal of Equality, ed. Clayton and Williams (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002)
• Larry Temkin, Inequality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), Ch. 9.
• Michael Otsuka and Alex Voorhoeve, "Why It Matters That Some Are Worse Off Than Others", Philosophy and Public Affairs (2009)

III. Equality or Sufficiency?

• *Paula Casal, "Why Sufficiency Is Not Enough", Ethics (2007)
• Harry Frankfurt, "Equality as a Moral Ideal", Ethics (1987)

IV. Equality of what?

• *Ronald Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue (Harvard University Press, 2000), Chs. 1 and 2.
• Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), Appendix I "What Makes Someone's Life Go Best"
• Amartya Sen, "Equality of What?", in http://www.tannerlectures.utah.edu/ and Equal Freedom ed. Stephen Darwall (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995)
• G. A. Cohen, "On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice", Ethics (1989)

V. The rejection of distributive justice

• *Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Basic Books, 1974) Ch. 7

VI. The egalitarian ethos

• *G. A. Cohen (1995). "The Pareto Argument for Inequality", Social Philosophy and Policy, 12, pp. 160–185. doi:10.1017/S026505250000460X
• G. A. Cohen, "Incentives, Inequality and Community", http://www.tannerlectures.utah.edu/
• Rescuing Justice and Equality (Harvard UP, 2008)

VII. Justice within the family

• *Susan Okin, Justice, Gender and the Family (Basic Books, 1989) Ch. 7.
• Catharine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Harvard UP, 1989)
• Jennifer Saul, Feminism (OUP, 2003)
• Alison Jaggar (ed.) Living with Contradictions (Westview, 1994)

VIII. International and global justice

• *Paula Casal, "Global Taxes on Natural Resources", with replies from Pogge and Steiner, Journal of Moral Philosophy (2011)
• Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights (Polity, 2008) ch. 9.
• Hillel Steiner, "Just Taxation and International Redistribution", NOMOS XLI (1999)

IX. Inter-generational distributive justice

• Joseph Mazor, "Liberal Justice, Future People, and Natural Resource Conservation", Philosophy and Public Affairs (2010).
• Paula Casal, "Sufficiency, Nature and the Future", Political Philosophy 1(1):79. Open access: https://politicalphilosophyjournal.org/article/id/15252/
• *Lukas Meyer and Dominic Roser, "Enough for the Future", in Intergenerational Justice, ed. Axel Gosseries and Lukas Meyer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 219–48.

X. Justice across species

• Paula Casal, Distributive Justice and Animals, Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy 2026. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/144779346/CASAL_2025_Distributive_Justice_and_Animals
• *Peter Vallentyne, "Of Mice and Men: Equality and Animals", in Egalitarianism, ed. Nils Holtug and Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen (Oxford University Press, 2007).
• Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights (OUP, 2011).
• Animals and the Right to Politics (OUP, 2025).
• Oscar Horta, "Zoopolis, Intervention and the State of Nature", Law, Ethics and Philosophy 1 (2013), pp. 113–125.