DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE

Theories of distributive justice (or social justice) usually take for granted the belief that political states (or societies) make up the relevant distributive units. As a result, these theories have, either explicitly or implicitly, been presented as if a just distribution of benefits and burdens only concerns citizens of the same state. This focus on states as the relevant distributive units has left the confusion that that the scope of distributive justice is equivalent to state borders.

Such a view implies that obligations of distributive justice only arise between compatriots. In recent years, sociologists have tended to examine the once-accepted beliefs that the best way to analyze a society is to consider the citizens of that society as they function within the state borders.

There is little doubt that state borders do play a crucial role in the distribution of benefits and burdens

in the contemporary world order. Indeed, it could be argued that one's citizenship by birth has a major impact upon that person's life-prospects, and is, for the most part, not subject to change by an individual's will and efforts. The main concern of this essay is to discuss the following question: "Is there such a thing as a just society?" In this paper, I will examine four competing views to this vexing question.

The views that will be examined are those presented in the works of four commentators: Karl Marx, Max

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e necessity of discovering the proper level of abstraction in order to grasp the concrete nature of things. "As a rule the most general abstractions arise only in the midst of the richest possible concrete development, where one thing appears as common to many. It follows that we need to go beyond partial explanations in order to track down the actual, efficient causes. . . at that level of abstraction where the individual causes all act together" (Marx, 1844, 1978, 203). That is the need we face in this paper; the need to go beyond partial explanations (what Durkheim "thought" or MacKinnon's "philosophy") and track down the actual, efficient causes of a "just" society. The next step on that journey is to consider the works of the man who is often called one of the fathers of Sociology, Emile Durkheim, was born in 1858, some 14 years after Marx published his major works. Where Marx concentrated primarily on the "needs" of man, Durkheim considered the "wants." In most of his works, he sees man as a creature whose desires were unlimited. Because of this great desire, there is an equally strong need to control those desires. There is, according to his thinking no human occurrence that cannot be called social. Every indivi
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Approximate Word count = 2035
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

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