wealth and income or the fact of debilitating need. Whatever prin-
ciple is employed to defend the distribution of income and wealth
prior to the sequence of market transactions must be available for
judgement on the outcome. That the outcome was not anticipated,
that the consequences were not intended, that the resultant pat-
tern was not designed: none of these claims (and we can grant
their truth) are to the point if the upshot is inconsistent with the
principles of justice employed to vindicate the initial set of
holdings.
I said earlier that this discussion of Hayek would amount to
crude surgery. Followers of Hayek will no doubt call it butchery.
So be it. It certainly does no justice to Hayek’s positive defence of
the free market as against regimes of central planning (but one
can deny that the only way of recognizing demands of social just-
ice is by establishing the bureaucracy of the pre-1989 Soviet-style
planned economy or through the acceptance of institutions which
irrevocably lead in that or other totalitarian directions) and it
does not address Hayek’s philosophical criticisms of specific con-
ceptions of social justice. It does not discuss his conception of the
rule of law (except to insist that the law of property must be justi-
fied in accordance with principles that find application in the
moral judgement of states of affairs that issue from the observance
of such laws) and it does not examine his anguished discussion of
constitutional law-making (fuelled by a distrust of the common
people who are at once citizens of a democracy and members of
trades unions). What I claim (to a readership whom, I suppose, can
easily identify my hostility to Hayek’s views) is that social justice
is not a value that can be dumped in the rubbish bin of
philosophical fairy-stories or pseudo-concepts as a consequence
of Hayek’s assaults, but must be carefully articulated and
investigated.
Private property
My conclusion is that, in considering the problem of justice in the
distribution of goods, the first step must always be the articulation
of a theory of property. We need to know what principles can be
advanced to legitimate a system of holdings. Thus far we have been
DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE