ABSTRACT
The idea of distributive justice presupposes a bounded world, a community within which distributions take place, a group of people committed to dividing, exchanging, and sharing, first of all among themselves. It is possible to imagine such a group extended to include the entire human race, but no such extension has yet been achieved. For the present, we live in smaller distributive communities. Were the extension ever attempted, its success would depend upon decisions made within these smaller communities and by their members-who distribute decision-making power to one another and avoid, if they possibly can, sharing it with anyone else. When we think today about distributive justice, we think about independent states and commonwealths capable of arranging their own distributions, justly or unjustly. We assume an established group and a fixed population, and so we miss the first and most important distributive question: how is that group constituted?
