ABSTRACT
Introduction Theories of justice are about what members of social and political communities are entitled to. Justice theories are distinguished in part by the ground or rationale for the provision of entitlements: the need for commensurate and proportionate punishment or praise for corrective justice; the need for fair or equal apportionment of resources, welfare or opportunities for distributive justice; and the need for fair play, dignity and respect for procedural (or relational) justice. Viewed separately, these entitlements may be allotted in terms of one or several of these rationales; or the allocation that one form of justice requires another may, in the circumstances, prohibit or limit. Tawney’s seminal vision was that inequality of income, status and respect (the inequality that truly matters to us) does not flow inexorably from natural differences between people but is a product of the way we organise society: the inequality that is morally deplorable is not ‘inequality of personal gifts, but of the social and economic environment’ (Tawney 1931: 50). This insight creates an account of justice that merges all three kinds of justice – or rather, one in which corrective and procedural justice are means towards the single goal of egalitarian distributive justice.
