DISTRIBUTIVE POLITICS AND DEMOCRATIC THEORY

Distributive strategies can be divided into two categories: those with public and binding rules about who gets what, and those in which these rules are absent or hidden. We began this study by emphasizing the contrast as a conceptual one, but one that was driven by real-world empirics. Here we shift lenses and consider this distinction from the point of view of political philosophy. What would contemporary theorists of justice say about programmatic and nonprogrammatic strategies? Given that reason and deliberation are at the center of normative democratic theory as it has evolved over the past half century, nonprogrammatic strategies appear to be antithetical to notions of just distribution.

Consider the theory of justice proposed by Rawls. Just distributions are ones that would be acceptable to free, equal, and rational citizens in the original position, people who do not know what their endowments in the society that they are constructing will be. Hidden criteria cannot be evaluated by these citizens. Hence how the particular distributive outcomes that these criteria might produce measure up to standards of justice is unknowable. Or consider the theory of justice put forth by Barry. Here distributive rules are just when they would be accepted as fair by reasonable people who would be harmed by them. It follows that rules of distribution that remain hidden from public view can never be shown to be just.