Distributive justice

Close to Marxism and committed on the left, Beauvoir sees material inequalities as a concrete obstacle to the freedom of the oppressed: liberation requires transforming economic and social conditions, not merely mentalities. This egalitarian leaning is, however, inferred from her engagements more than from any systematic theory of distributive justice.

The Second Sex (1949), the material conditions of emancipation · Force of Circumstance (1963), her commitments on the left

Concerned with the condition of workers, Mill criticises the distribution of wealth under laissez-faire and, in his later years, leans toward forms of cooperative socialism and limits on inheritance. The principle of utility, which counts each person's happiness equally, and the diminishing marginal utility of income tilt his distributive justice toward egalitarianism, without abolishing the market.

Principles of Political Economy (1848), book II (on distribution, socialism and inheritance) · Utilitarianism, ch. 5 (each to count for one, all happiness counted equally)

Confucius worries less about poverty than about inequality and disorder: what troubles the ruler is not scarcity of people but unequal distribution, not poverty but instability. The sovereign must provide for the people's welfare before instructing them, which betrays a concern for the equitable sharing of resources, within a hierarchical order.

Analects, XVI, 1 (what is to be feared is not poverty but inequality) · Analects, XIII, 9 (enrich the people, then instruct them)

The justice of the city rests on a distribution according to each person's function and natural aptitude: to each the task for which the soul is suited, and the community of goods among the guardians abolishes private wealth as a source of discord. This principle of "to each according to nature and function", foreign to market desert, leans toward a distribution fixed by the whole rather than by free exchange.

Republic, IV, 433a-434c · Republic, III, 416d-417b

Each person's happiness carries equal weight in the calculus, and the diminishing marginal utility of goods gives the movement a moderate redistributive leaning: the same resource benefits more those who have less. The tendency stays cautious, however, since utilitarianism is aggregative rather than strictly egalitarian: it maximizes the sum of welfare more than it equalizes its distribution, which could in principle justify increasing the suffering of a few to raise the total.

Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics · Mill, Utilitarianism, chapter 5

He contests equal shares as an extortion by the weak: just distribution, according to nature, gives more to the superior, not an identical portion to all. His rejection of egalitarianism rests not on self-ownership or the desert of labor but on natural superiority; it is by this refusal of equal sharing that he meets, from afar, the anti-redistributive side.

Plato, Gorgias, 483c; 490a-491a

Distributive justice follows a proportional (geometric) equality: goods and honours are apportioned according to each person's merit, not in equal shares. Refusing arithmetical equality in favour of proportion to merit inclines moderately toward the meritocratic pole, without absolutizing property.

Nicomachean Ethics, V.3 (1131a); Politics, III.9

Thomas takes up Aristotelian distributive justice, proportioned to merit and rank, but tempers it with the universal destination of goods: private property is legitimate for use and administration, not absolute, and in case of extreme necessity the poor person who takes what he needs to survive does not steal, since then all things are common. This limitation of the right of property in favour of the needy qualifies the meritocratic leaning toward a requirement of sufficiency.

Summa Theologiae, IIa-IIae, q. 61 (distributive justice); q. 66, a. 7 (theft in necessity)