>In the Anglo-American tradition of thought, which is nowadays undoubtedly the most vital one, political philosophy had for a long time been considered as an extinct discipline, i.e. it was believed that it no longer produces valuable results nor that it has any future whatsoever. That kind of attitude arose from the influence of logical positivism that banished metaphysics and all value judgments out of the rational debate. This meant the dismissal of political constructions deduced out of universal philosophical systems, and a dismissal of any attempt to create a proposal of a perfect - or at least well-ordered - society, since that kind of a plan has to have ground values. Only the empirical studies of politics were considered to be legitimate intellectual achievements: one could study how particular political systems or institutions functioned, how and under which conditions do they change, how different political measures influence other aspects of life, etc. What the philosophers had left as the only legitimate dealing with politics was analyzing the terms that are being used in the context of political debates or studying the history of political thought. But, in the latter role they were hardly really doing the job of their colleagues form the past - they were creating political philosophy just as much as those who interpret and put into a historical context, for example, Petrarch's or Milton's verses are indeed writing poetry. The appearance of John Rawls' book A Theory of Justice in 1971 marked a turning point for this entire dormant discipline. Fruitful philosophical discussions on many of the problems of politics came back alive, numerous new texts and books have sprung up, as did a whole pile of elaborations of old views now developed by means of modern analytical instruments and applied to new circumstances, etc. One of the central problems of the whole reawakened political philosophy is the one that concerns distributive or social justice. Roughly speaking, it is the question of the righteous division of wealth in a society; that is whether or not the income inequalities are justified, and if they are up to which degree they can be tolerated and what sources they can originate from. Someone might say that this is the same problem that was the driving force of the whole Marxist thought and that subsequently these are only old tales. But that is not correct because of the two main reasons. First, Marx and his orthodox followers did not at all deal with the question of righteous distribution; in fact they were developing and defending a specific theory of history which wanted to show that the arrival of communism, a non-conflict society, is inevitable. Still, one could claim that Marxism, even though it wasn't very much interested in the details of the just order, did indicate the manner how to create such a system. The response to this statement leads us to the second basic reason against the thesis that Marx occupied himself with the problem of distributive justice. It stresses the fact that Marxism was decisively denying that moral principles have any kind of timeless and truly critical value. For Marx, morality was just an ideology, a form of consciousness connected to a mode of production. The function of morality, according to the Marxists, is to protect the existing order by offering rules with the help of which all unavoidable conflicts can be resolved in a non-violent way within the frame of the system. To claim that morality is a timeless truth and to defend it means trying to forever preserve a particular, historically temporary social organization. Quite on the contrary, the true motive of Marxism was to overcome any state of affairs that can lead to conflicts. By removing the circumstances in which they can appear, the need for morality and all of its categories, among which is justice, is removed also. The ultimate goal of Marxism was a society beyond morality, a society which will have no need for any type of means for overcoming tensions since tensions will not exist. So, what motivated Marx to start searching for a realistic way of implementing communism was something significantly more ambitious than a request for distributive justice: he wanted the end of dehumanization, man's reconciliation with his "true self". No righteous distribution, even if it were meaningful and possible, would be enough to achieve that. Nevertheless, it is undeniably correct that social justice is a problem very close to many of the deliberations that have even so far been present in our community. Many, or almost a majority of the people who are interested in the question of ideal system have looked upon it in a less ambitious way than Marx himself, mainly in the categories of justice. That is why all of them can learn a lot if they get familiarized with how analytical philosophers debate about this problem. This paper wants to give a contribution to exactly this particular issue. Its intention is to, in short, present the basic standpoints in modern Anglo-American philosophy on how to solve the problem of the distribution of wealth in a society, and to state the main objections to which each of these viewpoints is exposed. In other words, my goal is to show the state of contemporary discussion on this problem. The theories in question are the work of utilitarian philosophers, John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, Robert Nozick, Michael Walzer, and David Miller. More about some of them in the next issue. Some notes about these philosophers are available on www.distibutive-justice.com (links theory and games).

Author: Neven Petrovic