Distributive justice in its modern sense calls on the state to
guarantee that everyone is supplied with a certain level of
material means. Samuel Fleischacker argues that guaranteeing aid to
the poor is a modern idea, developed only in the last two
centuries.
Earlier notions of justice, including Aristotle's, were
concerned with the distribution of political office, not of
property. It was only in the eighteenth century, in the work of
philosophers such as Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant, that justice
began to be applied to the problem of poverty. To attribute a
longer pedigree to distributive justice is to fail to distinguish
between justice and charity.
Fleischacker explains how confusing these principles has
created misconceptions about the historical development of the
welfare state. Socialists, for instance, often claim that modern
economics obliterated ancient ideals of equality and social
justice. Free-market promoters agree but applaud the apparent
triumph of skepticism and social-scientific rigor. Both
interpretations overlook the gradual changes in thinking that
yielded our current assumption that justice calls for everyone, if
possible, to be lifted out of poverty. By examining major writings
in ancient, medieval, and modern political philosophy, Fleischacker
shows how we arrived at the contemporary meaning of distributive
justice.
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