Distributive Justice Quotes

Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice.

Fairness is not about statistical equality.

What is superfluous to your poor estate, distribute. This is distributive charity: a virtue so sacred that crimes against it are the forerunner of inevitable doom.

All social institutions should aim at the moral, intellectual and physical improvement of the most numerous and poorest class. All privileges of birth to be abolished without exception. The task of each be according to his capacity, the wealth of each be according to his works.

If one person has a right to something he did not earn, of necessity it requires that another person not have a right to something that he did earn.

The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance.

Economic issues are a subset of social justice. Social justice is unimaginable without economic justice. Isn't that obvious?

Equity is the only acceptable goal

Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.

The purpose of social work should not be to distribute favours, but to restore rights.

The modernizing elite in the technologically and economically poor nations responded to colonialism by seizing the power of the state and using it to change their societies, hoping to achieve justice at home and economic and cultural parity abroad. The politics of changing traditional social structures and processes by using state power did not always result in social progress and economic development, but it did lead to state supremacy and autocracy. In the more extreme cases autocratic regimes were transformed to either forward-looking or reactionary totalitarianism-of socialist-Marxist, fascist, or religious-fundamentalist types. These systems clearly failed or are failing. But at the time they were adopted, to many they represented hope and a promise of economic change, distributive justice, and a better future.

Justice is Equality...but equality of what?

Because of my experience in Occupy, instead of asking the question, "Who will benefit from this system I'm implementing with the data?" I started to ask the question, "What will happen to the most vulnerable?" Or "Who is going to lose under this system? How will this affect the worst-off person?" Which is a very different question from "How does this improve certain people's lives?"

If the poor, for example, because they are more in number, divide among themselves the property of the rich,- is not this unjust? . . this law of confiscation clearly cannot be just.

The aim of justice is to give everyone his due.

Justice requires that everyone should have enough to eat. But it also requires that everyone should contribute to the production of food.

Education for all seems to be the product of a type of distributive justice that is in no way related to the individual.

All is for all! If the man and the woman bear their fair share of work, they have a right to their fair share of all that is produced by all, and that share is enough to secure them well-being. No more of such vague formulas as "The Right to work," or "To each the whole result of his labour." What we proclaim is The Right to Well-Being: Well-Being for All!

The concept of justice I take to be defined, then, by the role of its principles in assigning rights and duties and in defining the appropriate division of social advantages. A conception of justice is an interpretation of this role.

One kind of justice is that which is manifested in distributions of honour or money or the other things that fall to be divided among those who have a share in the constitution ... and another kind is that which plays a rectifying part in transactions.

My favorite class as an undergraduate was a political theory class on justice. Now, 'justice' is hardly a self-defining term, and much smarter men than I have developed various definitions over the centuries. The class put Plato at one end and Nietzsche at the other, and off we went.

How many men ever went to a barbecue and would let one man take off the table what's intended for 9/10th of the people to eat? The only way you'll ever be able to feed the balance of the people is to make that man come back and bring back some of that grub that he ain't got no business with!

In its pursuit of justice for a segment of society, in disregard of the consequences for society as a whole, what is called 'social justice' might more accurately be called anti-social justice, since what consistently gets ignored or dismissed are precisely the costs to society. Such a conception of justice seeks to correct, not only biased or discriminatory acts by individuals or by social institutions, but unmerited disadvantages in general, from whatever source they may arise.

It is unjust that the whole of society should contribute towards an expense of which the benefit is confined to a part of the society.

The idea of social justice is that the state should treat different people unequally in order to make them equal.