Any claim to a particular distribution, including any existing distributive scheme, has to be impartially justified, i.e., no ownership will be recognized without justification.
On the admittedly disputable assumption that Rawls thinks that factors that are "arbitrary from a moral point of view" and affect people's interests are a matter of luck, one might read this passage as saying that under a just distribution, luck does not influence distributive shares (Rawls 1971, 72).
A salient problem here is what constitutes justified exceptions to equal distribution of goods — the main subfield in the debate over adequate conceptions of distributive equality and its currency.
It may be wise, all things considered, to accept that some distributive injustice is the price of policies that are best for the larger economy and for overall well-being.
To my mind, the upshot is that the distributive consequences of recession are even worse than they may have seemed.
My sense is that much of the public's anger over TARP flows from a sense that it perpetrated a good deal of distributive injustice.
But what exactly is in the box?Elaine Sternberg, an academic philosopher and business consultant (and a former investment banker), persuasively argues in her book, "Just Business", that there are two main things: "ordinary decency" and "distributive justice".
Classical "distributive justice" stipulates that those who contribute most to the business deserve most from the business.
This is contrary to his basic position in "The Constitution of Liberty" that "distributive justice" is a misnomer.
Assuming that they have also acted within the law, the next question is whether they have violated the standards of ordinary decency and distributive justice within the organisation.
These questions and answers on the theme of distributive justice will not surprise anyone who has seen this Socrates routine before, anywhere in the world, though Mr Sandel has tailored them slightly for India.
