The Nature of Political Theory

112 The Nature of Political Theory

Part Three). All these species of justice are nonetheless tied to proportion and balance,
in reward or punishments, or exchanges of goods. They correspond with the equality
principle (and reason), namely, to treat ‘equals equally and unequals unequally, but
in proportion to their relevant differences’. The most significantspeciesof justice to
appear in the twentieth-century literature are procedural and distributive (or social
justice) notions, although retributive justice, remains a juridical subtext to some
justice discussion.^6 Another way of formulating this distinction is between patterned
and unpatterned distribution. Procedural or unpatterned notions can overlap with
the patterned or distributive in a number of areas. However, they will be kept distinct
here for heuristic purposes.
It is important to indicate briefly some of the general underpinning assumptions
of conceptions of justice. In sum, theories of justice presuppose they are dealing with
human agents in terms of their political, social, and economic arrangements. Human
agents are the central locus of value—both as the focus of value and of the process of
valuing. Second, all persons are, by degrees, regarded as rational and moderately self-
interested creatures.^7 Humans may be socialized, in some formats, but their altruism
or concern for others is still limited.^8 The notion of rationality here remains slightly
vague. The crucial questions here are—how does one deal with scarce resources,
and competition for those resources, amongst a groups of relatively self-interested
human beings? How does one attain a moderate degree of fairness in this situation?
Third, scarcity of resources implies some competition between individuals, which
needs to be regulated. This latter assumption could entail either minimal background
rules (Robert Nozick, David Gauthier, James Buchanan, or Friedrich Hayek), or a
much wider-scale redistribution of resources (John Rawls, Thomas Scanlon, or Brian
Barry). We can shorten these assumptions to: the centrality of human agency, the
inevitability of moderate self-interest, and competitiveness for scarce resources.
Each of the two major branches of justice theory mentioned above—proceduralism
and distributive justice—needs to be subdivided again, to grasp the diverse usage of
the concept in practice. The forms of proceduralism, which will be briefly discussed
are Friedrich Hayek’s commutative account of justice and Nozick’s slightly more awk-
wardly placed entitlement theory.^9 Under the rubric of distributive or social justice,
there is a great deal more complexity. Twentieth-century discussion of distributive (or
social) justice has been concerned largely with the slightly more abstract distributive
principle(s) ‘to each according to his or her due’, or, more simply, the fair allocation
of burdens and benefits in society.^10 The fine-tuning of this idea arises with the inter-
pretation of whatisthe more substantive principle that determinesdue. There are a
wide range of such principles. However, each principle can be formulated in a similar
way, for example: ‘to each according to his or her rights, deserts, needs, services, work,
moral worth, ability, skill or status’, and so forth. These diverse principles can be made
greater sense of if we subdivide them again betweendesertandnon-desertorientated
distributive principles. One other small point here is that different principles will
often link in with different ideals or visions of a good society.^11
Desert theory contends that if someone has performed a merit-worthy activity or
possesses a valuable quality, then they should be rewarded in relation to that activity