![]()
1
What is economic justice?
If you ask people, ‘Are you in favour of justice?’, most if not all will reply, ‘Yes.’ It would be unusual to find someone who says he or she supports injustice. But if you ask people, ‘What do you mean by “justice”?’, then you are more likely to get a wide range of responses. Is ‘justice’ about fairness? Or is it to do with just performance of one’s moral obligations? Or is it about due reward and/or punishment? Or is ‘justice’ more to do with equity and perhaps equality?
There are dictionary definitions of ‘justice’ – although these are often quite lengthy. For example, the Webster online dictionary distinguishes four different aspects of justice.1 And this complexity serves to support my suggestion that there is a wide range of views about what ‘justice’ is.
When we focus more specifically on ‘social justice’ and ‘economic justice’, then the diversity of opinions becomes stronger. Some people believe that justice in society must be based on rights – and often on human rights. Many of us probably have at least some sympathy with that idea. The United Nations ‘Declaration of Human Rights’ is a powerful statement along these lines. These rights are believed by many people to be in some way innate to one’s very existence as a human being – irrespective of, say, ethnicity or place of birth or gender. We could speak, then, about the ‘right to education’, or the ‘right to shelter’, or to food and water. Social justice would, on this approach, have something to do with ensuring that these rights are fulfilled in reality.
Some other people, however, believe that justice is based on needs – which is not really the same basis as rights. Needs are often quite personal, quite individual – specific to someone’s circumstances. (Rights, by contrast, are defined – as noted in the previous paragraph – as being innate to one’s existence as a human being and are not specific to one’s circumstances.) People trapped in slavery are in desperate need and may well cry out for justice. A whole community is close to death because of a famine: they need food, and we might say that it is a matter of justice that their needs are met.
Confusingly, there is yet a third possible basis for ‘justice’: and this is merit or desert – what is merited or deserved. It is sometimes said, ‘A fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work’: this understands fairness or justice to be a matter of reward, merit, desert. There is also a (negative) flipside of this: justice as punishment. If, say, an employee or manager commits a crime – for example a financial misdemeanour – then we can speak of a just punishment: such as losing a job, or even being imprisoned. Someone receives his or her ‘just deserts’, as we might say.
So we have rights, needs and merits: three alternative foundations for justice. The problem is that these three are typically in conflict with one another. For example, consider any situation where there is some limit on available resources: should these resources be allocated to people on the basis of rights, needs or merits? That rights, needs and merits are mutually incompatible foundations for justice is clear when we take into account differences across the globe in relation to culture, climate, age and the stage of economic development.
All this presents us with a huge difficulty: if there is no agreement on what ‘social justice’ or ‘economic justice’ is, how can we agree with each other on how to move towards greater justice?
The intensity of this problem can be seen more plainly when we consider the political left–right spectrum. Political ideas and thinking on the left tend to pay particular attention to rights: so, for example, people on the left tend to regard large differences in income and wealth within a society as in some sense unjust. This is often because it is a rights-based understanding of justice that holds sway on the left. For example, if everyone has the right to the same share of national income, then it would follow that large inequalities in income are unjust.
By contrast, political ideas towards the right of the spectrum tend to pay more attention to merit; so it is thought that people who have a high income deserve that high income – the efforts of the higher-earning people merit the outcome: ‘They have worked hard for their fortune, fair enough.’ On this view, there is nothing unjust about large differences in income or wealth.
Can you see the problem? The two approaches are deploying entirely different, and mutually incompatible, ideas of what justice is. Who is to say which is better or more valid? How could anyone judge (so to speak) between them?
There is another way of seeing this problem. Over many centuries, when philosophers and others have thought deeply about justice – especially in economic life – they have often distinguished between, on the one hand, justice in production or exchange and, on the other hand, justice in distribution.2 The problem – as I will explain shortly – is that when people think about ‘economic justice’, they often choose one or the other. So there is again no agreement on what justice is.
The first of these two categories, justice in production or exchange, focuses on whether there is any exploitation between producers and suppliers, or between retailers and consumers, or between firms and employees. By exploitation I mean something that is the opposite of justice. For example, suppose that in country X there is only one supermarket chain, call it ‘Cheapsell’ – there are no, or hardly any, competitors to Cheapsell. In this situation Cheapsell has such power in the marketplace that it is potentially able to exploit the suppliers of, say, food produce. It is in a position where it can force down to an extremely low price the amount it pays to suppliers – far lower than would be the case if there were some degree of competition between rival supermarkets. If Cheapsell utilizes its power in such a way, then farmers may virtually be unable to survive on the meagre amounts of money they receive. So Cheapsell has the power to exploit its suppliers: to behave unjustly.
We can easily imagine a similar situation between firms and employees: a large and powerful firm in one sector of the economy may be able to drive down to an extremely low level the wages it pays to its employees. (Assume for the moment that there is no minimum-wage legislation in that country.) Or, in (say) the market for electricity, if there is only one provider of electricity, then that firm may potentially be in a position to drive up the price of electricity that households have to pay, to the point where we can say, ‘That’s not fair!’
All of these can be seen as examples of exploitation: one organization, or individual, acting unjustly towards other people in the context of production, employment, exchange or trade.
The second category for justice in economic life centres on justice in distribution. Instead of the focus being on justice in production and exchange, this second category considers how income and wealth are distributed across the population. That is, rather than looking at the processes involved in making a cake, one looks at how the cake is shared out. In particular, the question asked is, ‘Is this distribution just?’ Is it fair? In particular, people often want to examine whether the share going to the poor is getting larger or smaller, and whether the share enjoyed by the rich is getting larger or smaller.
This second category – justice in distribution – may also make use of the idea of justice based on need, or sometimes the concept of justice based on rights. People often ask whether income is distributed in such a way that the needs of the poorest are provided for. Those who favour justice based on rights often assess whether or not the distribution of income and wealth is becoming more equal.
O...
