What is distributive justice?
Distributive justice concerns the socially just allocation of resources, goods, and opportunity in a society. It focuses on how to allocate these items fairly among members of a community.
Distributive justice concerns the socially just allocation of resources, goods, and opportunity in a society. It focuses on how to allocate these items fairly among members of a community.
John Rawls outlined his famous theory about justice as fairness in his book A Theory of Justice published in 1971. His theory consists of three core components regarding rights, opportunities, and economic inequalities.
Friedrich von Hayek was one of the most famous opposers of distributive justice in post-WWII Western democracies. In his book The Road to Serfdom he argued social and distributive justice were meaningless concepts.
Improving perceptions of justice increases employee performance and engagement according to a meta-analysis by Cohen-Charash and Spector conducted in 2001. Karriker and Williams studied organizational citizenship behaviors in 2009 and found such behaviors depend on the degree to which an organization is perceived to be distributively just.
Donelson R. Forsyth identified five types of distributive norms that dictate allocations including equality, equity, power, need, and responsibility. Equality suggests all group members should be given an equal share regardless of inputs while equity states members outcomes should be based upon their inputs.