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44 J. Value Inquiry 1 (2010)

handle is hein.journals/jrnlvi44 and id is 1 raw text is: J Value Inquiry (2010) 44:1-16 DOI 10.1007/s10790-009-9197-1 Regulative and Distributive Justice Ian Hunt Published online: 6 January 2010 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 1 Introduction John Rawls has introduced at least two important ideas to the discussion of distributive justice. The first is that distributive justice fundamentally concerns fair terms of social cooperation that cannot be reduced to a matter of fairness in individual transactions. Fair terms of social cooperation require not only fair dealing between individuals but also a collectively organized framework for cooperation between individuals to ensure that the circumstances of their upbringing, different natural advantages and differing fortune in life are made consistent with a fair balance between their claims to the burdens and benefits of social cooperation over lifetimes and generations. Rawls calls this framework the basic structure.1 The second idea is that we cannot rely on a criterion for fair individual shares of the burdens and benefits of social cooperation to make adjustments to the process of social cooperation so that its outcomes become fair. The demands on any such criterion, especially if it is used to maintain justice over generations, are simply too complex. Instead, we must arrange the effectively and impartially administered rules of the basic structure so that they may be judged fair by a criterion of fairness for rules. When these rules are followed their outcomes will be fair, whatever they turn out to be. Rawls illustrates this with the outcome of a fair gamble, such as buying a ticket in a lottery. There is no criterion for whether it is fair that a particular person receives the lottery prize independent of whether the person has the ticket picked as the winning one in accordance with the accepted rules of the lottery.2 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 6-7. 2 Ibid., p. 75. I. Hunt (E) Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia e-mail: ian.hunt@flinders.edu.au I Springer

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