If you thought yesterday’s posting on participative justice
was a bit difficult to grasp, you ain’t heard nothing yet. Participative justice is relatively easy to
get across. It’s a new term, so there’s
no baggage to jettison before we started to talk about it. Unfortunately, everybody “knows” what
“distributive justice” is: just what Karl Marx said in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program: From each
according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.
Many people confuse the distributive principles of justice
with those of charity. Charity involves
the concept “to each according to his needs,” whereas “distributive justice” is
based on the idea “to each according to his contribution.” Confusing these principles leads to endless
conflict and scarcity, forcing government to intervene beyond its natural scope
to maintain social order.
That’s exactly and precisely . . . wrong.
As a principle of economic justice, “distributive Justice”
defines the “output” or “out-take” rights of an economic system matched to each
person’s labor and capital inputs. Through
the distributional features of private property within a free and open
marketplace, distributive justice becomes automatically linked to participative
justice. Incomes are linked directly to
productive contributions.
The principle of distributive justice involves the sanctity
of property and contracts, i.e.,
liberty, or freedom of association, which links both participative justice and
distributive justice to social justice (tune in tomorrow). Under the principle of distributive justice,
the free and open marketplace, not government, is the most objective and
democratic means for determining just prices, just wages, and just profits.
What is the philosophical justification for distributive
justice?
According
to both Aristotle and Aquinas, distributive justice involves people taking out
or receiving from a common endeavor in strict proportion to the relative value
of what they put in.
There
is no mention of need in the classical form of distributive justice. Need is a valid basis for distribution under
charity — but the faith-based virtue of charity fulfills and completes the
reason-based, natural law virtue of justice; charity does not, and cannot ever
replace or supersede justice.
The
need mentioned in, e.g., § 2411 of The Catechism of the Catholic
Church as relating to distributive justice refers to the State’s
responsibility to care for the common good under the natural law virtue of
distributive justice, not to distribution on the basis of need per se. Significantly, the Catechism states
that redistribution on the basis of need by the State is to be regulated
by the State under distributive justice, not compelled on the basis of
need under what might be called “redistributive pseudo-charity.”
After
all, the State is a unique social monopoly created by people for people. God did not create people for the State: “Man precedes the State, and possesses, prior to the
formation of any State, the right of providing for the substance of his body.”
(Rerum Novarum, § 7.)
People
vest the State with coercive powers in order to establish justice. The role of the State is not to compel
presumably voluntary works of charity dictated by someone’s faith, not
justice.
This might require some
explanation. As Pope Leo XIII explained
in § 22 of Rerum Novarum,
distribution on the basis of need comes under justice only in “extreme
cases.” As we at CESJ understand this, a
distribution on the basis of need by the State is permitted when the extremity
of the case is such that the common good is endangered.
In extreme cases, then, under
the principle of double effect, the State may redistribute a measure of
existing wealth sufficient to meet the emergency. The directed end of such redistribution is
not, however, the redistribution itself, that is, meeting people’s individual
material needs, but the care of the common good. The redistribution to meet the particular or
individual needs of people in extremis
is only the means by which the State carries out its responsibility to care for
the common good.
This is a key point. The State is charged with the care of the common good, not individual or particular
goods. As Aquinas reminded us, the
common good is not the aggregate of
individual or particular goods. (Summa,
IIa IIae, q. 58, a. 7 ad. 2.)
Were the theory correct that
the common good is the aggregate of individual or particular goods, the State
would, ipso facto, necessarily be
charged with providing for every individual or particular need. By controlling the disposition of all wealth,
the State would effectively become the universal proprietor, a subtle and
indirect form of socialism. As Pius XI
explained in § 120 of Quadragesimo Anno,
If Socialism, like
all errors, contains some truth (which, moreover, the Supreme Pontiffs have
never denied), it is based nevertheless on a theory of human society peculiar
to itself and irreconcilable with true Christianity. Religious socialism,
Christian socialism, are contradictory terms; no one can be at the same time a
good Catholic and a true socialist.
Consequently, the correct
understanding of the common good is, rather, that vast network of institutions
within which humanity, as moral and political creatures, meet their own
material needs, and acquire and develop virtue through their own efforts. People do not become more fully human by
having the State (socialism) or monopoly capitalists (capitalism) take care of
them and maintain them in a permanent condition of dependency — effective
slavery.
The belief that either the State or a tiny ownership elite
have the primary responsibility to care for people, rather than all members of
society having more equal opportunity to provide for themselves and their
dependents to meet that responsibility, is the strongest force undermining the
integrity and independence of the family today.
It turns the great mass of people into “mere creatures of the
State.” As Leo XIII explained in § 13 of
Rerum Novarum,
“A
family, no less than a State, is, as We have said, a true society, governed by
an authority peculiar to itself, that is to say, by the authority of the
father. Provided, therefore, the limits which are prescribed by the very
purposes for which it exists be not transgressed, the family has at least equal
rights with the State in the choice and pursuit of the things needful to its
preservation and its just liberty. We say, “at least equal rights”; for,
inasmuch as the domestic household is antecedent, as well in idea as in fact,
to the gathering of men into a community, the family must necessarily have
rights and duties which are prior to those of the community, and founded more
immediately in nature. If the citizens, if the families on entering into
association and fellowship, were to experience hindrance in a commonwealth
instead of help, and were to find their rights attacked instead of being
upheld, society would rightly be an object of detestation rather than of
desire.”
Thus, as Leo XIII made clear,
“That
right to property, therefore, which has been proved to belong naturally to
individual persons, must in like wise belong to a man in his capacity of head
of a family; nay, that right is all the stronger in proportion as the human
person receives a wider extension in the family group. It is a most sacred law
of nature that a father should provide food and all necessaries for those whom
he has begotten; and, similarly, it is natural that he should wish that his
children, who carry on, so to speak, and continue his personality, should be by
him provided with all that is needful to enable them to keep themselves
decently from want and misery amid the uncertainties of this mortal life. Now,
in no other way can a father effect this except by the ownership of productive
property, which he can transmit to his children by inheritance.”
To put it more succinctly, “Power naturally and necessarily
follows property.” (Daniel Webster,
Massachusetts Constitutional Convention of 1820.) The family will never be free and independent
as long as capital ownership, and thus productive power, remains concentrated
in either the State, as in socialism, or in a relatively small private sector
elite, as in capitalism.
All this, of course, becomes a key issue as Pope Francis
works to focus attention on the family as the cornerstone of society. The question becomes, when so many people are
convinced that distributive justice means distribution on the basis of need, how
are we to make a “course correction”?
That is the job of social justice, which we will look at
tomorrow.
