Domination and Distributive Justice

Abstract

Social power is not always troubling. One form of social power progressives are especially troubled by, however, is domination—meaning, roughly speaking, the arbitrary power that some persons or groups wield over other, dependent, persons or groups. This paper elaborates on this conception of domination and discusses why progressives should aim to minimize it. It then goes on to argue that minimizing domination entails a commitment to a particular sort of distributive justice—namely, some form of unconditional basic income. This argument for distributive justice is shown to be more compelling in various respects than the arguments offered by traditional liberal-contractualist theories of justice. Partly building on existing work in the area of nondomination, this paper aims to develop the largely ignored socioeconomic distributive justice implications of civic republicanism.