Distributive Justice

Every society must distribute wealth, power, status, rights, and its own membership. This course examines how those decisions are and ought to be made.

How do we decide who gets what and why? We debate healthcare, immigration, wealth distribution, and how we choose our leaders. What assumptions and values lie behind the arguments we raise in these questions? Long before economics was a social science, it was a branch of philosophy, closely related to both political theory and ethics. Societies, however defined, must produce both material wealth and more abstract things (like social roles, customs, political organization, and civil society) in order to survive. All of these things must be distributed on some basis.

This course will begin by tracing the major eighteenth and nineteenth century economic theorists such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, J.S. Mill, and Karl Marx as they lay out both traditionally “economic” and social and political explanations of how wealth is created and distributed. We will then discuss twentieth and twenty-first century moral and political philosophers, including Rawls, Walzer, Nozick, and Sandel, and explore how they have shaped both common understandings of justice and real-world policy debates. (Prior knowledge of these authors is not required.) Students will be expected to engage in both abstract philosophical reasoning and practical policy debate in class and in written assignments. This course will be reading-intensive, but the texts are fun!

For the application...

Prerequisites

This class has no formal pre-requisites, but please describe the highest levels of langauage arts instruction, history, and social studies you have. Any philosophy courses or economics courses you have taken are also relevant.

Relevant experience

Writing clubs, debate clubs, and any other perspectives you think you would bring to class.

Application Question (Core-specific free response)

1. Distributive justice has been much in the news lately after President Obama’s “Obamacare” healthcare intiative was enacted into law and supported by the Supreme Court. Is there a right and a wrong way to distribute healthcare? If so, how should we decide how healthcare is produced and distributed, and why is this the best way? If any method of distributing healthcare is valid, why don’t people have legitimate claims to have a “right” to healthcare, or the right to withhold it? Should healthcare be bought and sold, or distributed in some other way?

2. As of 2009, the bottom 80% of Americans held less than 13% of the nation’s wealth. Is this fair? Why or why not? What might go into justifying unequal distributions of wealth, and do they apply to the modern U.S? If the current distribution is unjust, how and by who should wealth be re-distributed?