SOCIAL JUSTICE: Distributive Principles and Beyond

Justice is one of the primary qualities of a good political order. With rising disparities of income, wealth and access to opportunity in most of the liberal societies, justice is now a concern of anyone for one’s rightful due. Each one in society wants and expects one’s fair share of wealth, income, political power, social recognition, education, and other resources and opportunities. The basic question is about the specific standard to be employed in assessing what one deserves.
To utilitarian theorists, a socially just allocation is ultimately an allocation that produces the greatest sum of happiness. The most ambitious attempt to answer these questions was provided by John Rawls. Rawls’s view is that justice demands ‘maximum equal liberty’ and a distribution of economic benefits which makes the least favoured person as well off as possible. Hayek and Nozick challenge John Rawls’s arguments saying that distributive principles are incompatible with individual liberty. In the traditional distributional approach, the sole emphasis on distribution without an examination of the underlying causes of the mal-distributions was not acceptable to several contemporary political theorists such as, Iris Young, Nancy Frazer, Axel Honneth and Charles Taylor. Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum have expanded the conception of justice beyond Rawls (distributive justice) by advancing capability approach. Today, even environmental and ecological justice have become very important themes of discussion for social and political theorists.
The idea of social justice implies more than just granting political and legal equality by the state. The book pursues this line of inquiry by providing students, scholars and policy makers with an extensive review of research on social justice.

Contributors

Mohit Bhattacharya
P.K. Chaubey
Naresh Dadhich
M.P. Dube
Debashis Guha
Sanjay Gupta
M. Kistaiah
Bhaskar Majumdar
Anand P. Mavalankar
Asok Mukhopadhyay
Chandrakala Padia
S.V. Pande
Sumita Parmar
Ramashray Roy
Ashish Saxena
Papia Sengupta
K.L. Sharma
T.R. Sharma
Mahendra Prasad Singh
Archana Srivastava
D.K. Verma