On the Relationship Between Corrective and Distributive Justice

Abstract

Abstract Distributive justice is concerned with the just distribution of material resources, income, other forms of wealth, and perhaps certain other goods within a society. Corrective justice is concerned with the moral duty of repair, meaning the moral duty to pay compensation, that one individual can come to owe another as a result of having harmed him. In this essay, I inquire into the relationship between these two principles. More particularly, I ask whether corrective and distributive justice are independent principles, or whether they are related in either a conceptual or a normative sense. One common view is that corrective justice requires a prior distribution of entitlements upon which to operate, and that its purpose or point is to maintain that distribution; for that reason, it is regarded as both conceptually and normatively ancillary to distributive justice. Another, less common, view holds that corrective and distributive justice operate on quite distinct kinds of entitlement, and hence are conceptually and normatively independent of one another. The position I defend is that corrective justice is a general moral principle that is concerned, not with maintaining a just distribution, but rather with repairing harm. Individuals can be harmed in a number of different ways, and corrective justice accordingly protects a number of different kinds of interest and entitlement. Distributive justice often contributes to the legitimacy of an entitlement that corrective justice protects, and in that sense there is a normative connection between the two. But corrective justice does not protect the entitlement qua distributive share, and its purpose is not to maintain or preserve a distributive scheme as such. Rather it protects a legitimate entitlement because interference with the entitlement harms the entitlement-holder. In that sense, corrective and distributive justice are conceptually independent.