Diagnóstico y Determinación de necesidades

What does distributive justice require in each scenario?

For starters, proponents of all the three practice views of distributive justice we scrutinized accept a ban on unjustifiable harmful interferences with people outside our own associations as they occur in the ‘harmful externalities’ scenario D. As was explained before, the need to distinguish acceptable from objectionable disadvantages affecting those who do not participate in our practices highlights the need to specify some kind of global practice- independent distributive entitlements.

Besides these minimal requirements of justice to avoid objectionable harmful interference with non-participants philosophers who defend an actual practice view (like Thomas Nagel) only accept further duties in scenario A. This is because to Nagel distributive equality is a condition of the justification of the exercise of political authority – which is only possible in ‘common institutions’ situations. Philosophers like Aaron James, Darrel Moellendorf, Miriam Ronzoni, and Joshua Cohen who hold reformed practice views of justice, on the other hand, also argue for distributive obligations in the scenarios B, ‘interdependency’, and C, ‘optional cooperation’. They might even be willing to concede that the two societies have an obligation to start joint practices in scenario D, ‘harmful externalities’, if this is the only way that they can ensure that no one unjustly disadvantages the other side.

But supporters of neither the actual nor the reformed practices views can detect any injustice in the ‘natural inequalities’ scenario E. Here the differences between the opportunities and wealth of both societies can be entirely traced back to the naturally occurring unequal distribution of natural resources. If we want to be able to criticize this situation of naturally-caused inequality we have

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to hold a conception of justice that takes people’s entitlements to be independent of their membership in political communities and cooperative practices. Only on the basis of such a practice-independent view (as, for instance, Hillel Steiner’s) can we argue for more than negative obligations that we have toward each other with respect to those goods that make our lives go well in Scenario E type situations.

However, we just saw that practice-independence is not a sufficient criterion to accommodate all our central egalitarian beliefs. Theories like Steiner’s allow for inequalities that seem problematic. Thus, we really face a twofold task in finding a convincing egalitarian conception of justice. Besides the idea (a) that considerations of egalitarian justice cannot be limited to existing interactions the desired conception also has to do justice to the premise (b) that all people possess equal moral status which entitles them to protection from the detrimental effects of morally arbitrary factors. By ‘morally arbitrary’ we should understand those facts that are not reasons for something else. With respect to the distribution of goods that are beneficial to the lives of persons, all aspects are morally arbitrary which can influence this distribution but which no one can be thought to be entitled to. Rawls for this reason states that “there is no more reason to permit the distribution of income and wealth to be settled by the distribution of natural assets than by historical and social fortune.”3 4 2

Thus, since a plausible theory of distributive justice should accommodate all our egalitarian notions, we have reasons to think that the scope of justice this theory defends must be global in a dual sense. It has to (a) hold that the same idea of justice applies to all people wherever they live. And it must (b) accept the

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claim that all things that are morally arbitrary and influence how well off persons are have to be subject to considerations of egalitarian justice.

So far we have not found arguments (besides the moral equality of persons) for anything that would in principle and always be relevant for the distribution of goods. We saw that there are no features of states that could limit egalitarian justice to their domain. Such features either occur also outside of states (like coercion and the reciprocal production of collective goods) or they are not sufficient to justify egalitarian duties even within states (like having a common coercive authority). We furthermore saw that claims to an equal share of goods (if this includes, as it should, future opportunities) are not confinable to existing practices. What has not been disproven, though, is that the equal moral status of persons matters for the interpersonal distribution of goods. At this point it is therefore reasonable for us to assume that nothing principally limits persons’ entitlement to an equal share of goods. Thus, the scope of our theory of distributive justice should in this sense be thought of as universal.

A principle that accepts this claim is properly called global egalitarianism

because it holds that “there is nothing to make it just that some are better (or worse) off than others.”3 4 3 _{The implication of this principle is that we all have} duties to eliminate detrimental inequalities that people everywhere suffer from. Global egalitarianism is an intuitively plausible principle that seems to account for all of our important egalitarian notions. But can the principle be defended against its many critics?

343 _{Ingmar Persson, “A Defence of Extreme Egalitarianism” in Nils Holtug, Kasper Lippert -}

Rasmussen (eds.), Egalitarianism: New Essays on the Nature and Value of Equality (Oxford: Oxford Univ ersity Press, 2007 ): pp. 83-97 , p. 83.

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3. A Prominent but Unclear Distinction: Relational versus Non-