Contextualism, Pluralism, and Distributive Justice

THE INAPPLICABILITY THESISThere is a gap between the idea of distributive justice and the many factors that are morally relevant for decision making on economic issues. Only to a degree can this gap be attributed to the distance between “ideal reach” and “practical grasp,” to the legitimate difference in detail between an abstractly delineated economic scenario and a concrete set of circumstances, and to the disparate idioms and metaphors of theoretical and practical discourse. Rather, the gap indicates a fundamental problem with the concept of distributive justice. The problem, that is here termed the “inapplicability thesis,” is that even if distributive justice in abstract formulation were to be accepted as a value, its application in economic decision making is indeterminate.