Distributive Justice (review)

224 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY the best part of this essay is the section devoted to relating Husserl's conception of the Lebenswelt to the psychological field theory of Kurt Lewin and his successors. Taken together, the primary effect of the ten essays is to place portions of the phenomenological and existential movements in historical perspective. This perspective is, of course, quite limited. The anguished and literary forerunners of contemporary existentialism, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, and Kafka are mentioned only briefly in the essays and omitted entirely from the "Index of Names." Only three paragraphs are devoted to Jaspers, while Marcel, Camus, and Husserl's older associates are almost completely ignored. I mention these omissions not as a point of criticism, but merely to indicate the scope of this volume. This book is not a history of phenomenology and existentialism, but a collection of essentially historical essays--a very good collection at that. RICHARDKAMB~ Susquehanna University Distributive Justice. By Nicholas Rescher. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966. Pp. xvi + 166. $6) Nicholas Rescher's Distributive Justice is best described by its sub-title: "a constructive critique of the utilitarian theory of distribution." Rescher examines the general problem of the distribution of goods and evils in social situations in order to develop a theory of distributive justice, in other words, "to establish a principle by which the 'assessment' of alternative possible distributions can be carried out" (7). "Possible" is the critical word here, for it should be taken not as an abstract ideal but in the Leibnizian sense of a realizable alternative. Rescher has no patience with a principle which is applicable only to abstract theoretical ideals. He insists on "a criterion of merit for suboptimal alternatives" (8), a theory which will facilitate the kind of relative evaluations necessary for the distribution of goods in an imperfect world. By abandoning an ethics of the ideal, Rescher rules out several otherwise interesting theories and achieves for his analysis an immediate practical directness which is refreshingly instructive. Rescher approaches the theory of distributive justice through utilitarianism for several reasons: first, the doctrine of utilitarianism has a distinguished history in philosophic, economic, and other circles; secondly, the concept of "utility" has the advantage of being able to stand as a general gloss for "the good things of life," thus providing a convenient point of entry for an analysis of the distribution of such goods; and thirdly, the utilitarian framework is particularly amenable to mathematical and quantitative modes of thought which favor a clear and precise discussion of the basic topic. Granting this perspective, Rescher's methodology is quite simple. His technique is to confront any proposed principle of distributive justice "with hypothetical examples of a choice between specified alternative distributions of a certain putative good among certain recipients" (i8). The principle is then evaluated "in terms of its ability to answer in a nonequivocal and not patently unacceptable way the question of which (if any) among a given group of individuals is to be preferred" (ibid.). Though simple, it should be noted that this procedure rests on at least one major assumption and involves two limiting factors--which Rescher brings to the immediate attention of his readers. The assumption is that the examiner and his readers are able to make immediate and accurate values appraisals of the relative BOOK REVIEWS 225 justness of the proposed alternative distributions. This is a kind of "moral sense" approach, although it centers on a commonsense insight directed to particular cases, not to the principles themselves. It rests on the concept of a "prima-facie preferable distribution" in the given instance. The first limitation is that Rescher's analysis focuses on the alternatives themselves to the exclusion of all issues relating to the context of the distribution. This external perspective is defended in terms of its methodological value in avoiding subjective involvement in the complexities of the total concrete situation. The second limitation is that Rescher's point of view is retrospective rather than prospective as is usual in a utilitarian theory. Rescher hopes that an ex post facto observer may avoid the empirical dimensions of actual causal consequences and preclude unknown redistributions of the given division. The adoption of this methodology, according...