A Short History of Distributive Justice
Samuel Fleischacker
Language: English
Pages: 204
ISBN: 0674018311
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Distributive justice in its modern sense calls on the state to guarantee that everyone is supplied with a certain level of material means. Samuel Fleischacker argues that guaranteeing aid to the poor is a modern idea, developed only in the last two centuries.
Earlier notions of justice, including Aristotle's, were concerned with the distribution of political office, not of property. It was only in the eighteenth century, in the work of philosophers such as Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant, that justice began to be applied to the problem of poverty. To attribute a longer pedigree to distributive justice is to fail to distinguish between justice and charity.
Fleischacker explains how confusing these principles has created misconceptions about the historical development of the welfare state. Socialists, for instance, often claim that modern economics obliterated ancient ideals of equality and social justice. Free-market promoters agree but applaud the apparent triumph of skepticism and social-scientific rigor. Both interpretations overlook the gradual changes in thinking that yielded our current assumption that justice calls for everyone, if possible, to be lifted out of poverty. By examining major writings in ancient, medieval, and modern political philosophy, Fleischacker shows how we arrived at the contemporary meaning of distributive justice.
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will keep him from extreme want where he has no means to subsist otherwise” (Tr I 4.42).23 Similarly, in the late 1690s, the Quaker John Bellers recommended his remarkably forwardlooking programs for eliminating poverty as an exercise of “Charity,” or “Mercy and Virtue,” not an expression of justice. He was indeed very ready to grant that the poor are filled with “evil Qualities,” that they are undeserving of help, and that only the love that comes of faithful Christianity can motivate such
in these arrangements than did the needs of the recipients.”76 Canon lawyers worried also about the proper soul-state of the beneficiaries of charity. Acts of charity were opportunities for the display of two virtues: generosity on the part of the giver and humility on the part of the receiver.77 Unsurprisingly, the poor person’s relationship with the church, in this context, made a difference to his or her ability to obtain relief. Those who were poor by reason of sin or who committed the sin of
philosopher of great learning, penetration, and literary persuasiveness published his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.”20 Smith combated both the explicit condescension of the first view and the implicit condescension of the second one. He was a virulent opponent of the notion that the poor are inferior in any way to the well-off. Over and over again in the Wealth of Nations, Smith pricks the vanity upholding a contemptuous picture of the virtues and skills of the poor.
legal interest of the nett money he has paid.”49 The indigent elderly, that is, deserve their pension as a rebate on excessive payments they have already made, not because they are unable to work, much less because they are human and all humans deserve not to be poor. I think we can safely assume that if Paine, one of the most unabashedly radical of eighteenth-century writers, had thought that his readers would accept the claim that all human beings deserve to be raised out of poverty “not as a
pp. 423–424). D. D. Raphael takes this to be an anticipation of modern arguments for the justice of the welfare state in Concepts of Justice, p. 236. But while it might be useful to employ Reid’s analogy today to clarify or defend what we call distributive justice, Reid himself clearly means to defend nothing more than the traditional right of necessity (this is especially clear when the passage is read in context, which argues for other, classically accepted features of the natural law account