Distributive Justice And All…

I know the issue of distributive justice has been written about already, but I wanted to cover my own little corner of it as well.

While the whole idea of distributive justice, or the balance between one’s merit and the wealth that they therefore receive from it, seems like an ideal situation for the distribution of wealth among society, I feel that it is an impossible if not ridiculously expectant program.

This ideal of geometric proportion and meritocracy seems impossible to accurately control. This balance between merit and wealth obviously proves hard to arrive at, or our society would today have this ideal stably in place. The biggest problem that I see in the concept is the decision of who would determine the level of merit that another person has, therefore determining how much wealth they would accumulate. How does one pick the correct judge of this? I feel that it is not something that can be adequately judged by another person, for the merit of some runs deeper than what is outwardly shown many times. Is it then that the best solution is to put this judgment into the hands of a higher power? And if this were the case would the inequality already seen in today’s society not already be resolved?

Furthermore, if society were to come up with a solution on how to judge merit, how would it be enforced? If a being were low in the amount of personal merit, they then would get less in wealth, correct? Well it seems to me that they would then be more inclined to forcefully take what they want, in no way recognizing this established rule of proportion, due in part to the lack of merit that they hold. This counteracts the system altogether, since it would also cause those who actually have merit to potentially lose what is rightly theirs to the people with less merit that are forcefully taking what they desire.

It just seems like this objective of having a meritocracy in a human society is not viable. Since we have no way to correctly judge the merit of others, we cannot correctly deem the portion of wealth that others receive. Therefore this whole idea, enticing as it is to fantasize about, is about as probable as the chance of Professor Johnson coming in to the next class and saying “Instead of class from now on we’re going to watch ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’ and bake cupcakes.” As wonderful as that would be, it is just not going to happen.