On the ideological incompatibilities of distributive justice

Abstract

"In this paper I provide a broad evaluation of the place which distibutive justice occupies within the space of political ideologies. Specifically, I decompose the concept of distributive justice into five constituent elements: pattern, currency, constraints on distribution, site and scope and show the incompatibilites which exist between operationalizations of these elements and various political ideologies. I conclude that social- democracy is the ideology which most faithfully embodies the ideal of distributive justice and that under certain interpretations of its elements, feminism, environmentalism and cosmopolitanism also require distributive justice as part of their ideological cores. I claim that, by contrast, right-wing libertarianism, conservatism, anarchism and monist ideologies are necessarily disqualified by some of the elements of distributive justice and that under mainstream theories on distributive constraints, socialism seems to fall into the same category.