ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at four approaches to distributive justice that have been influential in how modern societies organise themselves with respect to what they think are justice's best guiding principles. These are utilitarianism, libertarianism, liberalism and socialism. A utilitarian approach to justice seeks to maximise average welfare in society. Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill were two of the most prominent advocates of this approach. The most famous expression of it sees the goal of increasing overall utility as being to achieve 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number'. John Rawls defends a version of political liberalism that sees coercive state power as legitimate in upholding liberty, but also and only where it addresses equality in the form of justice as fairness. One of the most influential political theories from the nineteenth century onwards is socialism. Socialists, by contrast, put the economy at the heart of their analyses of power and hence of any response to the inequalities in society.
