Distributive Justice: A Basic Bibliography [revised: 8/14/12]

I thought our readers might be interested in this select bibliography on justice. There are of course several kinds of, and different ways of approaching, the subject of justice, and these kinds and approaches may in some respects be related to each other. We might speak, for example, of commutative justice (also ‘rectificatory’ or ‘corrective’: Aristotle and the Catholic tradition), retributive justice, restorative or reparative justice, transitional justice, local justice, intergenerational justice, procedural justice, legal justice, political justice, constitutional justice, ethical justice, economic justice, social justice, and theological or metaphysical justice. Most of the following titles fall largely within the category of distributive justice. For a fairly comprehensive bibliography on distributive justice (up to 2007), see this appended supplement to SEP’s entry on distributive justice. 

“The modern theory of justice…is at least as much economics as it is philosophy (which includes ethics), and it should logically occupy a very large part of economics. Economics, indeed, is the science of the allocation of scarce resources, where ‘scarce’ refers to human wants. It is concerned with both how this allocation is performed and how it should be performed. The second half of the topic is therefore a priori and logically half the discipline. This is normative economics. Since the reference is to agents’ desires or needs, the foundation and certainly the challenging part of normative economics is economic justice. Given the functions of politics and of the state, normative economics and economic justice have a large common ground with public economics, the economics of the public sector. Moreover, economic justice is not only a very large part of justice in society, it can also be seen as all of it, since desires, interests, conditions, and rivalries between them can be expressed in economic terms. Finally, the specific tools, concepts, methods, and analyses elaborated by economics have a prominent place in the modern theory of justice.”—Serge-Christophe Kolm

“Principles of distributive justice are normative principles designed to guide the allocation of the benefits and burdens of economic activity. [….] Distributive principles may vary in numerous dimensions. They can vary in what is subject to distribution (income, wealth, opportunities, jobs, welfare, utility, etc.); in the nature of the subjects of the distribution (natural persons, groups of persons, reference classes, etc.); and on what basis distribution should be made (equality, maximization, according to individual characteristics, according to free transactions, etc.).” (Julian Lamont and Christi Favor)

Fundamental distributive principles are typically egalitarian (in a strict form), welfarist (in a utilitarian or consequentialist sense), desert-based, libertarian, and, loosely, feminist. The “functionings and capabilities”approach to distributive justice questions elaborated differently in the works of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum (respectively freedom- and human nature-based) could be said to combine elements of all but the aforementioned desert-based prinicples. Justice as a virtue, which includes but is not limited to virtue-ethical approaches to justice, focuses on the character and other traits and actions of the individual person and is sometimes linked to avowedly feminist principles or is feminist in inspiration, as evidenced in the concern with an ethics of trust or an ethics of care. Given the somewhat schizophrenic division one often finds in the modern world between an individualist ethics or morality confined to the private or intimate realm of close interpersonal relations and a more publicly oriented morality designed for public or collective conduct (in essence, a ‘doctrine of double moral standards’), the latter with its correspondingly less demanding ethical standards and requirements, most philosophical and economic treatments of distributive justice show a lack of concern with the notion of justice as a virtue, or when they do broach the topic, as with Rawls, “justice as an individual virtue is derivative from justice as a social virtue.” However, as Michael Sandel has noted in Justice: What is the Right Thing to Do? (2009), most of us intuitively if inchoately believe that justice is somehow bound up with or implicated in the promotion of virtue, and thus cannot be “neutral” or wholly agnostic when it comes to questions of the good life, of human flourishing in a classical eudaimonistic sense.

• Adler, Matthew D. Well-Being and Fair Distribution: Beyond Cost-Benefit Analysis. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
• Alam, Shawkat, Natalie Klein, and Juliette Overland, eds. Globalisation and the Quest for Social and Environmental Justice: The Relevance of International Law in an Evolving World Order. New York: Routledge, 2010.
• Aristotle (translated by W.D. Ross, revised by Leslie Brown). Nicomachean Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009 ed.
• Bhala, Raj. Trade, Development and Social Justice. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2003.
• Barry, Brian. Why Social Justice Matters. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2005.
• Barry, Christian and Thomas W. Pogge, eds. Global Institutions and Responsibilities: Achieving Social Justice. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005.
• Brighouse, Harry and Ingrid Robeyns, eds. Measuring Justice: Primary Goods and Capabilities. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
• Brock, Gillian. Global Justice: A Cosmopolitan Account. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
• Brock, Gillian and Darrel Moellendorf, eds. Current Debates in Global Justice. Berlin: Springer, 2005.
• Brooks, Thom, ed. The Global Justice Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008.
• Buchanan, Allen. Marx and Justice: The Radical Critique of Liberalism. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1984.
• Buchanan, Allen. Justice, Legitimacy, and Self-Determination: Moral Foundations for International Law. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
• Caney, Simon. Justice beyond Borders: A Global Political Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
• Carmody, Chi, Frank Garcia and John Linarelli, eds. Distributive Justice and International Economic Law. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
• Chodosh, Hiram E. Global Justice Reform: A Comparative Methodology. New York: New York University Press, 2005.
• Cohen, G.A. Rescuing Justice and Equality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.
• Cohen, G.A. (Michael Otsuka, ed.) On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice, and Other Essays in Political Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011.
• Cohen, Joshua. The Arc of the Moral Universe and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.
• Cramee, Olaf and Patrick Diamond, eds. Social Justice in the Global Age. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2009.
• Daniels, Norman. Justice and Justification: Reflective Equilibrium in Theory and Practice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
• De Greiff, Pablo and Ciaran Cronin, eds. Global Justice and Transnational Politics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.
• Dowding, Keith, Robert E. Goodin, and Carole Pateman, eds. Justice and Democracy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
• Dworkin, Ronald. Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
• Elster, Jon. Local Justice: How Institutions Allocate Scarce Goods and Necessary Burdens. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1993.
• Finnis, John. Natural Law and Natural Rights. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1980.
• Fleischacker, Samuel. A Short History of Distributive Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
• Fleurbaey, Marc. Fairness, Responsibility, and Welfare. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
• Follesdal, Andreas and Thomas Pogge, eds. Real World Justice: Grounds, Principles, Rights, and Social Institutions. Berlin: Springer, 2005.
• Foot, Rosemary, John Lewis Gaddis and Andrew Hurrell, eds. Order and Justice In International Relations. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
• Galston, William A. Justice and the Human Good. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
• Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982 and (with a new preface) 1993.
• Goodin, Robert E. Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
• Griffin, James. Well-Being: Its Meaning, Measurement and Moral Importance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
• Hahnel, Robin. Economic Justice and Democracy: From Competition to Cooperation. New York: Routledge, 2005.
• Hoffman, Martin. Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and Justice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
• Jones, Charles. Global Justice: Defending Cosmopolitanism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
• Khadduri, Majid. The Islamic Conception of Justice. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984.
• Knight, Carl and Zofia Stemplowska, eds. Responsibility and Distributive Justice. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
• Kolm, Serge-Christophe. Modern Theories of Justice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996.
• Kolm, Serge-Christophe. Justice and Equity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997.
• Kolm, Serge-Christophe. Macrojustice: the political economy of fairness. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
• Mandle, Jon. Global Justice. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2006.
• Mehmet, Ozay. Global Governance, Economy and Law: Waiting for Justice. New York: Routledge, 2003.
• Miller, David. Principles of Social Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
• Miller, David. National Responsibility and Global Justice. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
• Miller, Richard W. Globalizing Justice: The Ethics of Poverty and Power. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
• Moellendorf, Darrel. Cosmopolitan Justice. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2002.
• Nielsen, Kai. Globalization and Justice. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2003.
• Noddings, Nel. Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1984.
• Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State and Utopia. New York: Basic Books, 1974.
• Nussbaum, Martha C. Sex and Social Justice. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
• Nussbaum, Martha C. Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006.
• Okin, Susan Moller. Justice, Gender and the Family. New York: Basic Books, 1991.
• Olsaretti, Serena, ed. Desert and Justice. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
• Peffer, R.G. Marxism, Morality, and Social Justice. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990.
• Plato (R.E. Allen, trans.). Republic. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006.
• Pogge, Thomas W., ed. Global Justice. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001.
• Pogge, Thomas W. and Darrel Mollendorf, eds. Global Justice: Seminal Essays. New York, Paragon House, 2008.
• Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971.
• Rawls, John. The Law of Peoples. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
• Rawls, John (Erin Kelly, ed.). Justice as Fairness: A Restatement. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001.
• Rescher, Nicholas. Distributive Justice: A Constructive Critique of the Utilitarian Theory of Distribution. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966.
• Roemer, John E. Theories of Distributive Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.
• Sadurski, Wojciech. Giving Desert Its Due, 2 Vols. Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1985.
• Sandel, Michael J. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 1998.
• Sandel, Michael J. Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009.
• Scheffler, Samuel. Boundaries and Allegiances: Problems of Justice and Responsibility in Liberal Thought. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
• Sen, Amartya. The Idea of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009.
• Sher, George. Desert. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987.
• Shrader-Frechette, Kristin. Environmental Justice: Creating Equality, Reclaiming Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
• Shapiro, Ian. Democratic Justice. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009.
• Sunstein, Cass R. Free Markets and Social Justice. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
• Tan, Kok-Chor. Justice Without Borders: Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Patriotism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
• Tan, Kok-Chor. Justice, Institutions, and Luck: The Site, Ground, and Scope of Equality. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012.
• Walzer, Michael. Spheres of Justice. New York: Basic Books, 1984.
• Young, Iris Marion. Responsibility for Justice. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
• Zucker, Ross. Democratic Distributive Justice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.