Social Justice : Distributive Principles and Beyond
Contents: Introduction. I. Theorizing social justice: 1. The concept of justice/Debashis Guha. 2. The idea of ‘justice as fairness’/Naresh Dadhich. 3. Rawls’s theory of justice/Asok Mukhopadhyay. 4. Theorizing social justice beyond distributive principles/M.P. Dube. 5. Affirmative action and justice/Ramashray Roy. 6. Beyond rawls: conceptualizing social justice in a Varna-based society/T.R. Sharma. 7. Justice for groups: multiculturalist critique of Rawls’s theory of justice/Papla Sengupta. 8. The question of justice in the contemporary global order: some guiding considerations/Anand P. Mavalankar. II. Social justice and marginalized sections in India: 9. Social development through social justice: the Indian context/S.V. Pande and Archana Srivastava. 10. Transformation of caste system into caste in contemporary India/K.L. Sharma. 11. Politics of social backwardness and empowerment of other and economically backward classes/D.K. Verma. 12. Social inclusion through exclusive provisions in India: the glass is half full/P.K. Chaubey. 13. Social justice and people at the margins/M. Kistaiah. 14. Issues of social justice and the marginalized: contextualizing scheduled castes in J&K state/Ashish Saxena. 15. Social justice in economic perspective: displacement of people by land acquisition for industrialization India/Bhaskar Majumdar. 16. Free legal aid as fundamental right in India: reality or still a distant dream?/Sanjay Gupta. III. Gender perspectives of social justice: 17. Gender and development: theoretical perspectives/Mohit Bhattacharya. 18. Women’s rights as human rights/Mahendra Prasad Singh. 19. Women and politics of violence: an essay on attitudinal fundamentalism/Chandrakala Padia. 20. Trajectories of women’s fiction in India/Sumita Parmar. Index.
Justice is one of the primary qualities of a good political order. With rising disparities of income, wealth and access to opportunity in most of the liberal societies, justice is now a concern of anyone for one’s rightful due. Each one in society wants and expects one’s fair share of wealth, income, political power, social recognition, education, and other resources and opportunities. The basic question is about the specific standard to be employed in assessing what one deserves.
To utilitarian theorists, a socially just allocation is ultimately an allocation that produces the greatest sum of happiness. The most ambitious attempt to answer these questions was provided by John Rawls. Rawls’s view is that justice demands ‘maximum equal liberty’ and a distribution of economic benefits which makes the least favoured person as well off as possible. Hayek and Nozick challenge John Rawls’s arguments saying that distributive principles are incompatible with individual liberty. In the traditional distributional approach, the sole emphasis on distribution without an examination of the underlying causes of the mal-distributions was not acceptable to several contemporary political theorists such as, Iris Young, Nancy Frazer, Axel Honneth and Charles Taylor. (jacket)
