ABSTRACT
J. Rawls advocates an externalist strategy in which principles of distributive justice are derived from the right, rather than the good. Is it possible to avoid sacrifice in the context of issues of distributive justice or is sacrifice a necessary condition of the practice of distributive justice? The practice of distributive justice is intimately connected to constraints imposed by the empirical fact of scarcity. Amongst other things, the practice of distributive justice necessarily requires that the principles formulated be commensurable. However, principles of distributive justice provide distributive agencies with guidance in the allocation of goods. Sacrifice then is a necessary condition of the practice of distributive justice. In formulating his principles of justice, Robert Nozick uses a tacit conception of persons which, when implemented, enables these principles to distinguish between competing claims for distributive goods. T. M. Scanlon argues that any plausible theory of distributive justice must involve objective criteria.
