Distributive justice is a just economic system.

Also, this is a values debate, so while empirical statistics do have their place, philosophical analyses are more appropriate. Finally, no new arguments are to be made in the final round, as they will be impossible to answer. And with that. .. AFFIRMATIVE CASE First, some definitions: Justice is defined by Webster’s Revised Dictionary as “The rendering to every one his due or right; that which is due to one's conduct. ” The system of distributive justice is defined by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice as: “A system in which social and economic inequalities are arranged so that they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society. ” As the resolution asks what a just economic system ought to be, the highest value in today’s debate must be Justice. Since every person is due certain rights, and by definition, to do justice is to respect these rights, the criterion for achieving justice is respecting individual rights. Thus, if the economic system of distributive justice does not respect individual rights, it must be unjust and thus the resolution is proven false. I therefore present two contentions: CONTENTION 1: EVERY PERSON HAS AN UNALIENABLE RIGHT TO HIS OWN PROPERTY a) The right to property has its foundation in the basic right of Freedom. As the famous philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote in “The Metaphysics of Morals”: “If I am the holder of a thing, then anyone who touches it without my consent (for example, wrests an apple from my hand) affects and diminishes that which is internally mine, my freedom. Consequently, the maxim of his action stands in direct contradiction to the axiom of justice. ” b) Furthermore, not a single person has the prerogative to violate any other person’s right to his property. John Lock wrote in his “Second Treatise on Government”: “Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labor of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, he hath mixed his labor with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature hath placed it in, it hath by this labor something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other men: for this labor being the unquestionable property of the laborer, no man but he can have a right to it. ” CONTENTION 2: THE ECONOMIC SYSTEM OF DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE VIOLATES THE INDIVIDUAL’S RIGHT TO PROPERTY. a) This argument is articulated best by the Harvard political philosopher Robert Nozick, in his book, “Anarchy, State, and Utopia,” where he writes: “Suppose a distribution favored by one of these [distributive justice] conceptions is realized. Let us suppose it is your favorite one and let us call this distribution D1; perhaps everyone has an equal share, perhaps shares vary in accordance with some dimension you treasure. Nows uppose that Wilt Chamberlain is greatly in demand by basketball teams, being a great gate attraction. He signs the following sort of contract with a team: In each home game, twenty-five cents from the price of each ticket of admission goes to him. The season starts, and people cheerfully attend his team’s games; they buy their tickets, each time dropping a separate twenty-five cents of their admission price into a special box with Chamberlain’s name on it. They are excited about seeing him play; it is worth the total admission price to them. Let us suppose that in one season one million persons attend his home games, and Wilt Chamberlain winds up with $250,000, a much larger sum than the average income and larger even than anyone else has. Is he entitled to this income? Is this new distribution D2 unjust? If so, why? There is no question about whether each of the people was entitled to the control over the resources they held in D1; because that was the distribution that (for the purposes of argument) we assumed was acceptable. Each of these persons chose to give twenty-five cents of their money to Chamberlain. They could have spent it on going to the movies, or on candy bars, or on copies of Dissent magazine, or of Monthly Review. But they all, at least one million of them, converged on giving it to Wilt Chamberlain in exchange for watching him play basketball. If D1 was a just distribution, and people voluntarily moved from it to D2, transferring parts of their shares they were given under D1 (what was it for if not to do something with? ), isn’t D2 also just? The point of this example is that no distributional principle of justice can be continuously realized without continuous interference with people’s lives. Any favored pattern would be transformed into one unfavored by the principle, by people choosing to act in various ways; for example, by people exchanging goods and services with other people, or giving things to other people, things the transferrers are entitled to under the favored distributional pattern. To maintain a pattern one must either continually interfere to stop people from transferring resources as they wish to, or continually interfere to take from some persons resources that others for some reason chose to transfer to them. ” Nozick goes on to argue that the system of distributive justice is “on par with forced labor,” explaining that: “The central core of the notion of a property right in X is the right to determine what shall be done with X; the right to choose which of the constrained set of options concerning X shall be realized or attempted. When end-result principles of distributive justice are built into the legal structure of a society, they give each citizen an enforceable claim to some portion of the total social product; that is, to some portion of the sum total of the individually and jointly made products. Each person has a claim to the activities and the products of other persons, independently of whether the other persons voluntarily enter into particular relationships that give rise to these claims. Seizing the results of someone’s labor is equivalent to seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities. If people force you to do certain work, or unrewarded work, for a certain period of time, they decide what you are to do and what purposes your work is to serve apart from your decisions. This process whereby they take this decision from you makes them a part-owner of you; it gives them a property right in you. ” And thus, it is quite clear that distributive justice is not justice at all, it is institutionalized slavery; it violates the individual’s right to his own property, to his own life. It obviously does not respect individual rights and is therefore inherently unjust.