Distributive Justice: The Right and Wrong of Our Present Distribution of WealthRyan, John A. (John Augustine)
PhilosophyChristian
Distributive Justice: The Right and Wrong of Our Present Distribution of Wealth
Ryan, John A. (John Augustine)
Economic history; Income distribution -- Moral and ethical aspects; Wealth -- Religious aspects
Indeed, Professor Clark nowhere explicitly asserts that productivity
is an adequate rule of justice. "We might raise the question," he
says, "whether a rule that gives to a man his product is in the
highest sense just."[238] Scattered throughout his volume, however,
are many expressions which might fairly be interpreted as answering
this question in the affirmative. The statements that distribution
according to product is a "natural law," and that if the labourer does
not get his full specific product he is "despoiled," suggest if they
do not imply that wages according to productivity is not merely the
economic but the ethical norm. At any rate, the assumption of
productivity as the adequate canon of wage justice, is very widely
adopted, and is frequently brought forward to give sanction to
insufficient rates of remuneration. Hence it has been thought well to
show that the economic basis of the assumption, i.e., that the
labourer gets what he produces, is unproved and unprovable.
_Carver's Modified Version of Productivity_
Professor Carver makes no attempt to ascertain or state the exact
physical productivity of labour as compared with that of capital, but
confines his attention to what he calls the "economic" productivity of
a given unit of labour in a given productive process.[239] "Find out
accurately how much the community produces with his [the labourer's]
help, over and above what it produces without his help, and you have
an exact measure of his productivity."[240] By this rule we can
determine a man's productivity not only as compared with his
inactivity in relation to a given industry or establishment, but as
compared with the productivity of some other man who might be
substituted for him. Thus understood, productivity expresses the
economic value of a man to the industrial process in which he
participates. It "determines how much a man is worth, and
consequently, according to our criterion of justice, how much a man
ought to have as a reward for his work."[241]
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