The United States and Distributive Justice Dilemma

Philosophical Ethics

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

The United States and Distributive Justice Dilemma

A recent report by the University of California, Berkeley states that even after the “Great Recession” of 2008, the income of the top one percent of Americans grew by 19.6% while the other ninety-nine percent only had an income growth rate of 1%. As if this statistic wasn’t bad enough, 2012 report by Harvard’s Michael Norton and Duke’s Dan Ariely revealed that the top one percent of Americans hold 40% of the entire nations wealth. While these facts are significant in an economic sense, they also call upon numerous ethical, moral, and philosophical principles namely distributive and political justice. This paper will present leading, relevant philosophical ideas centered around societal obligation to aid the economically underprivileged—a leading problem in the United States. More specifically, it will answer two important questions: (1) As a whole, does Society have an obligation to help the less well off? (2) Is economic inequality beneficial to society? These questions will be addresses through the highly differentiated philosophical and moral lenses of Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, John Rawls, and Robert Nozick. I will conclude the paper with my personal position on whether or not society has a moral obligation to help its less fortunate members.

Before a proper analysis can be preformed, the philosophical principle of distributive justice needs to be defined. Distributive Justice involves the morality behind the regulations, policies, and programs established in a society to control the distribution of “economic benefits and burdens across society” (Lomont). Morality, in terms of distributive justice, has to be viewed from both an individual and societal perspective. The “inputs” of all members of society, have to proportionally equal the “outputs” that each of these members receives.