Distributive versus Corrective Justice

A family shares out the sweets left after a wedding feast, weighing who is the guest of honour and who worked in the kitchen: a question of dividing a common stock. Next day one cousin snatches another's plate. The elders do not ask which cousin is more deserving; they return the plate. That is a question of restoring what was wrongly taken. The first is distributive justice, the second corrective justice, and Aristotle drew the line between them more than two thousand years ago. Note 21 introduces both among the theories of justice; this note explains the contrast in depth and shows how modern law wears both faces.

Figure: Aristotle's two kinds of particular justice: distributive justice gives P, Q and R shares of honours, wealth and office in proportion to their merit (geometric equality), while corrective justice restores the balance between A and B after a wrong by taking A's gain and restoring B's loss, whatever their merit (arithmetic equality)

1. Aristotle's Map of Justice

In Book V of the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle distinguished two senses of 'just'. In the universal or general sense, the just is the lawful: obedience to laws aimed at the common good, which amounts to complete virtue in relation to others. In the particular sense, the just is the fair or equal, concerned with shares of goods such as honour, money and safety, and opposed to the vice of grasping for more than one's share (pleonexia). Particular justice takes two forms, which differ in the kind of equality they apply.

2. Distributive Justice: Dividing by Merit

Distributive justice governs the sharing of common goods among the members of a community: honours, offices and wealth, and in modern terms taxes, benefits and burdens. It involves at least four terms, two persons and two shares, and requires that the ratio between the shares match the ratio between the persons' merits. If P's merit is twice Q's, P's share should be twice Q's. This is geometric or proportional equality. Injustice arises both when equals receive unequal shares and when unequals receive equal ones.

Aristotle saw that the formula leaves the key question open: merit according to what? Democrats say free birth, oligarchs wealth, aristocrats virtue. Because it requires a choice of criterion for the whole community, distributive justice is chiefly the business of the legislator, not the judge.

3. Corrective Justice: Restoring the Balance

Corrective or rectificatory justice operates in transactions between two persons. Aristotle divided them into voluntary transactions, such as sale, purchase, loan, pledge, deposit and hire, which begin with consent, and involuntary ones, some clandestine (theft, poisoning, false witness) and some violent (assault, imprisonment, robbery). The modern lawyer sees contract in the first class and tort and crime in the second.

Here the law ignores the parties' merit. It makes no difference, Aristotle said, whether a good man has defrauded a bad man or a bad man a good one; the law looks only at the harm and treats the parties as equals. The wrong gives one party a gain and the other a loss, and the judge restores the position by arithmetic equality: he takes the gain from the one and restores it to the other, returning both to the mean. The judge is meant to be a kind of living justice who finds the middle. Aristotle admitted that 'gain' fits some cases awkwardly, since a man who strikes a blow gains nothing obvious, but the structure is the same: a balance disturbed and then restored.

4. Aquinas and Commutative Justice

Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Theologiae, reworked Aristotle's scheme. Particular justice concerns either the relation of one individual to another, which he called commutative justice (from commutatio, exchange), or the relation of the community to its members, which is distributive justice. Commutative justice uses arithmetic equality and covers both fair exchange and the rectification of wrongs, so it is somewhat wider than Aristotle's corrective justice, which treated exchange separately under reciprocity.

5. Modern Theories of Distribution

Most modern political philosophy is about distributive justice (Note 21). Rawls (A Theory of Justice, 1971) chose principles behind a veil of ignorance: equal basic liberties first, then fair equality of opportunity, then the difference principle, under which inequalities are just only if they benefit the least advantaged. Nozick (Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 1974) rejected patterned principles: a distribution is just if it arose by just acquisition and voluntary transfer, and maintaining any pattern requires continual interference with liberty. Significantly, Nozick's third principle, the rectification of past injustice, is itself a corrective idea. Marx (1875) looked to a higher phase of communist society distributing according to needs, a principle that is his, not Aristotle's. Each theory answers Aristotle's open question: merit according to what?

6. Corrective Justice as the Form of Private Law

Corrective justice has enjoyed a revival in private law theory. Ernest Weinrib, in The Idea of Private Law (1995), argued that private law is intelligible only as an expression of corrective justice. Its central feature is correlativity: the defendant's doing of harm and the plaintiff's suffering of it are two sides of one injustice, and the remedy undoes exactly that injustice by moving the same sum from the one to the other. On this view it is a mistake to explain tort law by goals such as deterrence or loss spreading (Note 49), because those goals would not require this defendant to pay this plaintiff. Weinrib insists that corrective and distributive justice are distinct forms that cannot be blended in one relationship without incoherence. Jules Coleman, in Risks and Wrongs (1992), defended a mixed view: corrective justice imposes on wrongdoers a duty to repair the wrongful losses they cause, but it can coexist with institutions, such as no-fault compensation schemes, that allocate losses on distributive grounds.

7. The Two Compared

8. Law's Two Faces in India

The Indian Constitution is openly distributive. The Preamble promises justice, social, economic and political. Art. 38 directs the State to secure a social order in which such justice informs all institutions and, by clause (2) added by the 44th Amendment (1978), to minimise inequalities in income, status, facilities and opportunities. Art. 39(b) requires that the ownership and control of the material resources of the community be so distributed as best to subserve the common good, and Art. 39(c) that the operation of the economic system not result in the concentration of wealth and means of production to the common detriment. Reservation, taxation and welfare laws are distributive justice in action.

Corrective justice is the everyday business of the civil courts: compensation for breach of contract (Section 73 of the Contract Act), damages in tort, and restitution of benefits unjustly received (Sections 68 to 72). The constitutional courts carried it into public law.

M.C. Mehta shows why theorists argue about mixing the two. On Weinrib's view the capacity measure breaks the correlativity of private law; on the Court's view it serves the Constitution's commitment to social justice and deterrence. Learn to recognise which face of justice a rule wears.

9. Evaluation

Aristotle's distinction has survived because it maps onto a real division of legal labour. Legislatures decide who gets what, and their answers are contestable and revisable; courts, in ordinary private disputes, restore what one person has wrongly taken from another without reopening the whole distribution of society. Each depends on the other: corrective justice protects holdings whose justice is fixed by distributive rules, and distributive schemes rely on corrective enforcement. Critics note that corrective justice can freeze an unjust status quo, restoring a rich man's loss as scrupulously as a poor man's. The mature view is that a legal system needs both: distribution sets the baseline, and correction guards it.

10. Frequently Asked Questions

Q. What is the difference between distributive and corrective justice?
A. Distributive justice shares the common goods of a community among its members in proportion to merit (geometric equality) and is chiefly the legislator's concern. Corrective justice deals with transactions and wrongs between two persons, treating them as equals and restoring the gain and loss (arithmetic equality), and is the judge's concern.

Q. Why is corrective justice called arithmetic?
A. Because it ignores the parties' worth and simply restores equal quantities: whatever the wrongdoer gained at the victim's expense is taken back and returned, bringing both to the midpoint between them.

Q. Is reservation distributive or corrective justice?
A. Primarily distributive: it allocates public goods (posts, seats) among groups according to a chosen criterion. It is sometimes defended as correcting historical injustice, but that argument is closer to Nozick's rectification of past injustice than to Aristotle's corrective justice, which operates between two individuals.

See also: Note 21 (justice), Note 48 (liberty and equality), Note 51 (law versus justice), Note 97 (justice versus equity), Note 86 (strict versus absolute liability), Note 49 (economic analysis of law).