Theory and State of the Art

One of humankind’s most pressing questions is how to distribute a society’s goods and burdens. Especially in the case of goods, we know that some moderate scarcity exists, making it impossible to give everyone the goods they desire. As a result, scholars from antiquity to the present have asked, from a normative perspective, what ideal distributions of goods and burdens should look like. However, distributive justice cannot be approached only from this perspective. Many disciplines of the social sciences study distributive justice from an empirical perspective and examine individuals’ preferences for distributions.