Distributive Justice: What the People Think

TLDR: In this paper, the authors bring together two bodies of literature that often seem to run on parallel tracks with only the barest mutual acknowledgment: the steadily expanding range of works in political theory on social or distributive justice, and the body of empirical work on people's beliefs about justice and the expression of these beliefs in practice.

Abstract: This article attempts to bring together in a creative way two bodies of literature that often seem to run on parallel tracks with only the barest mutual acknowledgment. One is the steadily expanding range of works in political theory on social or distributive justice.' The other is the body of empirical work on people's beliefs aboutjustice and the expression of these beliefs in practice. One might expect there to be a fruitful symbiosis between these two bodies of research, with political theorists setting the agenda for empirical studies of justice, while the results of these studies were fed back into the theoretical literature as data against which more abstract claims about the nature ofjustice could be tested. But this is not the case. There is a small amount of traffic across the border in one direction. Most empirical researchers are aware of the major landmarks in the field of theory-they have heard of Rawls's A Theory of Justice (Rawls 1971), for instance, and a few experiments (discussed below) have been devised to test its claims. But almost without exception political theorists have failed to consider the bearing that empirical findings might have on their formulations.2 There are several reasons for this neglect, of greatly differing character and strength. One is simply the insularity of academic disciplines. Much of the research I shall consider is found in journals that no political theorist would look at as a matter of course. Along with this goes an unfamiliar academic jargon and a style of presentation which (in the case of the social psychology literature, especially) is likely to seem unusually wooden and ponderous. Then there is the view that empirical studies of justice are of little value in getting at