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What is the difference between distributive and procedural justice? How do world events in your teen years help shape your political views?
Authors Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff describe social justice theories in their book The Coddling of the American Mind. They state that distributive justice means that benefits received should be commensurate with the amount of effort or work one puts in, whereas procedural justice is concerned with fair and transparent rules and processes.
Keep reading to learn more about distributive and procedural justice theories.
Social Justice Theories
Political science research shows that people have a strong tendency to form lasting political views during their teens years and early adulthood. For a certain subset of baby boomers, the experiences of the civil rights movement, the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., the Vietnam War, and Watergate shifted their political orientation decisively—and permanently—to the left and to the Democratic Party.
A similar dynamic has taken place with iGen, whose members came of age during the period running roughly from 2008-2017. This was an era of immense social and political turmoil, particularly around questions of identity and racial and gender equity. Some of the events from this era included:
- The election of the nation’s first African-American president
- A growing acceptance of LGBTQA rights, culminating in the Supreme Court’s landmark 2016 Obergefell V. Hodges decision that fully legalized same-sex marriage
- A spate of killings of unarmed black men at the hands of police officers, sparking the Black Lives Matter movement
- The rise of the #MeToo movement, which has exposed the culture of sexual assault within America’s leading political, social, and economic institutions
Amplified by social media, these movements for justice and equity led by people of historically marginalized groups have profoundly influenced young people’s notions of fairness. Young people today are highly skeptical of traditional racial, gender, and class hierarchies.
Two Theories of Justice
Before we delve more deeply into evolving norms of justice and equity, it’s worth exploring how people in a liberal democracy like the United States have customarily understood these concepts. There are two main theories of justice: distributive justice and procedural justice.
Distributive Justice
Distributive justice is centered around the idea that rewards or benefits received ought to be commensurate with the amount of effort or work one puts in.
If someone is under-compensated relative to their labor, this constitutes a violation of distributive justice; a violation likewise occurs when someone is overcompensated for putting in no effort.
Much of this is rooted in what social psychologists call equity theory—that people will intuitively judge an outcome to be fair if the ratio of outcomes to inputs is equal for all participants. Thus, something like unequal pay for equal work (as when women are paid 70 cents for every dollar earned by a man doing the same job) offends our sense of distributive justice.
Procedural Justice
On the other hand, procedural justice is concerned with fair and transparent rules and processes.
If rules are vague, arbitrary, or seem to be applied on an unequal basis to different individuals (or to different groups) then it violates our sense of fairness. Social science research shows that people are quite willing to accept outcomes that are disfavorable to them as long as they have confidence that they were given fair consideration and did not suffer any prejudice or discrimination.
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