In intellectual area, when we talk about the history of some subject, we usually derive it to the ancient Greece. However, when people try to do that about the issue of distributive justice, Fleischacker calls for stopping, because in fact the meaning of the term "distributive justice" has changed in the history. As he indicated in his A Short History of distributive Justice, the phrase "distributive justice" indeed comes originally from Aristotle, but "the notion [in modern sense] is little more than two centuries old"(SHDJ,2).
"Distributive justice" in its modern sense calls on the state to guarantee that property is distributed throughout society so that everyone is supplied with a certain level of material means. However, in it's original, Aristotelian sense, "distributive justice" referred to the principles ensuring that deserving people are rewarded in accordance to their merits, especially regarding their political status, and was not seen as relevant at all to property rights. In short, the ancient principle has to do with distribution according to merit while the modern principle demands a distribution independent of merit.
Debates about distributive justice in modern sense tend to center on the amount of means to be guaranteed and pm the degree to which state intervention is necessary for those means to be distributed. If the level of goods everyone ought to have is low enough, it may be that the market can guarantee an adequate distribution; if everyone ought to have an ample basket of welfare protections, the state may need to redistribute goods to correct for market imperfections; if what everyone ought to had is an equal share of all goods, private property and the market will probably have to be replaced altogether by a state system for distributing goods. Distributive justice is thus understood go be necessary for any justification of property rights, and such that it may even entail a rejection of private property.
However, desert is essentially tied to merit for Aristotle; it makes no sense, in his framework, to think anyone could deserve something merely because she needs it. It is essential, that is, not accidental, to Aristotle's concept of distributive justice that a notion of merit is at work- a notion by which people deserve something because of excellent character traits they have or excellent actions they have performed. It is equally essential to the modern notion of distributive justice that people deserve certain goods regardless of their character traits or anything they have done.
Even if many religions state advocate helps for the poor but in many case it is concerned with the virtue of the giver, not with the notion that the poor deserve these things offered to them. According to Fleischacker, it is in eighteenth century that the attitudes toward the poor begin to change greatly and the modern sense of distributive justice begin to formulate. This change attributes to works made by Rousseau, Smith, Kant and Babeuf. Rousseau has some profound insight into the nature of inequality. In his sense, human beings are directly responsible for almost all human misery. If society causes most human sufferings, we can infer that society should also be able to cure most human evils. This leads us to the premise for the modern concept of distributive justice, that is, "the belief that redistributing property so as to minimize or eradicate poverty is possible"(p58).
Then, Smith first drew widespread attention to the harm done by poverty to the poor's private lives. He recommends that wealth can be redistributed in at least three ways: "(1) by a direct transfer of property from the rich to the poor, (2) by taxing the rich at a higher rate than the poor, or (3) by using tax revenues, gathered from rich and poor alike, to provide public resources that will mostly benefit the poor"(p63). Smith's most significant contribution is the picture of the poor he dignified, which is essential to help bring about the modern notion of distributive justice, that the poor deserve certain kinds of aids. Once one does have such kind of belief, some sort of welfare state comes to seem morally necessary.
Kant, more clearly and explicitly than any of his predecessors, proclaims the equal worth of all human beings. Every human being, indeed every rational being, exists as an end in himself and not merely as a means. Every human being is of "absolute worth", hence of equal worth. At a fundamental level all people are equally worthy, equally deserving of a good life. Moreover, Kant construes human nature such that we have a set of potentials for fully free action that we can realize only if we live in favorable natural and social circumstances. This view has important consequences for distributive justice, for the development of people's potentials may require a large number of material goods and social institutions. So if the value of a person's life requires the development of his or her potential, then it may be necessary for society to provide the material circumstances for developing those potentials to everyone who would not otherwise have them. (p74).
It is Bebeuf, a leader of the french revolution, who first explicitly proclaims that justice requires the state to redistribute goods to the poor. But according to Fleischacker, even Babeuf does not seem to have used the phrase "distributive justice" in its modern sense. Only when John Rawls began developing his theory of justice in the 1950s and 1960s did philosophers and political theorists begin to take seriously the individual right to well being that Babeuf had proclaimed in 1796. This is what I will introduce next week.
SHDJ, A Short History of Distributive Justice, Samuel Fleischacker, Harvard University Press, 2004.
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