13 - Compensation and redistribution

Summary

Compensatory justice is profoundly conservative, standardly serving to restore some status quo ante. The essential aim of redistributive justice, in contrast, is to alter those antecedent distributions which compensatory justice is at such pains to re-create. The two notions thus seem unalterably at odds, compensation striving to preserve what redistribution seeks to change and redistribution altering what compensation strives to preserve.

If forced to choose, rarely will it be compensatory justice that we choose to abandon. We are not prepared to let wrongs go unrighted, merely on the ground that the wronged are far richer than the wrongdoers; we are not prepared to deny workers compensation for accidental injuries at work, merely because they were being overpaid anyway. Principles of compensatory justice in this way have us firmly in their hold, and insofar as they do, principles of redistributive justice (seen as their polar opposites) have trouble getting any grip at all.

Contemporary contractarians of a right-wing cast make much of that point. For them, the permissibility of interventions is predicated upon the agreement (real or hypothetical) of everyone affected; and people's agreement in turn is predicated on compensation (direct or indirect, explicit or implicit) for any losses. From that pair of propositions, writers such as Nozick and Epstein conclude that any genuinely redistributive interventions must be decisively blocked. Those antiredistributivist conclusions follow, however, not from any positive arguments (which are no more than arguments in favor of compensation) but merely from the further supposition that redistribution is necessarily the antithesis of compensation.