Agreeing and Disagreeing on Justice

In the college reading course that I taught last semester, I introduced students to the two types of justice, retributive and distributive.  

Retributive justice is the issue of how crimes should be punished. In order to illustrate this, I used the Code of Hammurabi, which is where at least some of our notions of proportional punishment ("an eye for an eye") come from.  Notwithstanding the absences of gender and class equity in the code, this document puts forth the ideas, still widely accepted in many parts of the world, that a murderer should receive the death penalty and that a thief should have his hand cut off.  

It's interesting to note that conceptions of retributive justice are still highly controversial between different cultures and even individuals within the same culture.  Western Europe has banned capital punishment, and many Europeans believe that the United States is barbaric for still permitting it.  Americans generally find it repulsive that Saudi Arabia permits public stonings.  Within the United States, Southern states tend to condone varieties of the death penalty that appall people in the North.  

In contrast to retributive justice, distributive justice is the issue of how a society allocates goods to its members.  In today's world, even countries that are nominally Communist or socialist allow some degree of inequality among members of society, and generally speaking, Scandinavian countries permit less inequality than is present in many Mediterranean countries, which permit a lot less inequality than the United States does.  Nonetheless, there is widespread agreement (even among the 1%) that it's simply not fair for income inequality to approach the levels that it has in the world's two largest economies, China and the United States.  The world's two largest religions, Christianity and Islam, are partly founded upon and strongly committed to the idea of social justice, including some form of redistribution ensuring that the poor are not left behind.  

So, it's noteworthy that people are in complete disagreement about how to (or even whether to) punish a certain kind of crime, and relative agreement about the need to reverse the trend of income inequality.  Why is this?  We're willing to tolerate discussing a fairly wide range of potential punishments for those who we feel are morally undeserving, but we're less willing to neglect those whom we feel are innocent.