Distributive justice and political ideologies: a rejoinder to Stoian

Abstract

In his reply to my article on distributive justice and political ideologies, published in a previous issue of Studia Politica, Valentin Stoian has raised a number of important points and has paved the way for a more indepth discussion on the concept of distributive justice. Stoian offers three central objections to my arguments. First, he claims that the view of distributive justice which I purport to describe is flawed both because it refers to specific distributive justice theories, not to distributive justice as a field of philosophical investigation, and because it implausibly narrows down the scope of the field due to its incorporation of the notion of a pattern (interpreted in a Nozickian sense) instead of a distributive principle. Second, he claims that one of the ideologies that I present in my article as being incompatible with distributive justice, i.e. anarchism, cannot be intelligibly discussed within the framework of distributive justice since it belongs to a different field, namely that of political obligations. Third, he claims that I offer an unfair construal of the European Left Platform (henceforth, ELP) manifesto by focusing on a holistic interpretation of Marxism and that under a more adequate account, the ELP is not incompatible with the idea of distributive justice. In this rejoinder I will largely concede the latter point but offer a refutation of the first two objections.