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DA2. Justice

Statement

  1. What is distributive justice?
  2. In Chapter 2 of Business Ethics, read the case study named, “Three Forms of Justice”. Based on that case study, answer the following question: When people debate distributive justice today, what concerns do they raise about it?

Answer

Justice is a critical part of any society; almost all famous thinkers discussed justice a great deal. From the ancient Greeks and Chinese to the modern thinkers and across all schools of thought, justice has been divided into three main sections (Byars & Stanberry, 2022):

  • Legal justice is the law of the land, the state laws, or the legislation authority.
  • Commutative justice governs relationships among individuals, fixes the wrongs by returning the benefits or harms to the rightful owner, and enforces contracts.
  • Distributive justice governed the duty of the state to distribute benefits and burdens equitably among the people.

Distributive justice tries to establish justice by distributing goods and wealth fairly among the people; the definition of fair distribution is a matter of debate; but, John Rawls (1921–2002) proposed a theory of justice that puts the state in charge of distributing wealth to most devastated people while ensuring freedom and equality for all (Byars & Stanberry, 2022).

According to (Byars & Stanberry, 2022, p.44), Distributive justice is achieved today by imposing taxes on individuals and corporations, then putting the collected money into programs such as health insurance, college scholarships and grants, food stamps, social housing, ..etc that target the most devastated people. However, there are some criticisms to this system, that will be discussed in the following points.

The government’s social help is not fair to the taxpayers, why would they want to contribute to the state if they are not getting anything in return? If it was not for taxes; you would have to personally give the money to people in need as this is part of your duties towards the society. It is easier to give money to the state which has the resources to evaluate who is in need and distribute the money accordingly.

The government’s social help does not reach the true people in need; this is a valid argument as there is nothing 100% efficient, but the alternatives would be more error prune; and the current system is one of the best to have, although there is always room for improvement.

The government’s social help discourages people from work; this is a valid argument, but help programs are usually designed to provide the bare minimum for its recipient to survive; so, this argument will not be valid if corporations increased the minimum wage to a living wage, where people can get from work more than what they get from the state social help.

To conclude, distributive justice is a critical part of any society; the modern one reached this point based on centuries of debates and discussions. The current system is not perfect, but it is working well so far, and as technology and society evolve, the system may undergo some changes or be completely replaced by a better one.

References