Spheres of Justice #1

I read Spheres of Justice by Michael Walzer. By “spheres” he means different domains of social life – politics, economics, education, family and friends – that call for different principles of distributive justice. I found his observations of similarities and differences between the different spheres, and how principles reflected by practice have changed over centuries, both interesting and thought provoking.

Throughout history, the market has been one of the most important mechanisms for the distribution of social goods – ones that are made, exchanged, divided, or shared – but it has never been a complete system. Similarly, no state power has been so pervasive as to regulate all patterns of making, sharing, exchanging, or dividing to fully control all distribution (p. 4).

Philosophers have mostly sought a single principle, criterion or underlying unity for distributive justice. Such philosophical impulse is unavoidable, but he argues that such a search is to misunderstand the subject (p. 4).

He argues against the simple equality of egalitarianism and favors a “complex equality” with different distributive principles in different spheres.

All the book reviews on Amazon are very short. There are longer ones, but most are in journals and hence not easily, freely accessible.

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