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
Every man who is willing to work has, therefore, an inborn right to
sustenance from the earth on reasonable terms or conditions. This
cannot mean that all persons have a right to equal amounts of
sustenance or income; for we have seen on a preceding page that men's
needs, the primary title to property, are not equal, and that other
canons and factors of distribution have to be allowed some weight in
determining the division of goods and opportunities. Nevertheless,
there is a certain minimum of goods to which every worker is entitled
by reason of his inherent right of access to the earth. He has a right
to at least a _decent_ livelihood. That is; he has a right to so much
of the requisites of sustenance as will enable him to live in a manner
worthy of a human being. The elements of a decent livelihood may be
summarily described as: food, clothing, and housing sufficient in
quantity and quality to maintain the worker in normal health, in
elementary comfort, and in an environment suitable to the protection
of morality and religion; sufficient provision for the future to bring
elementary contentment, and security against sickness, accident, and
invalidity; and sufficient opportunities of recreation, social
intercourse, education, and church-membership to conserve health and
strength, and to render possible in some degree the exercise of the
higher faculties.
On what ground is it contended that a worker has a right to a decent
livelihood, as thus defined, rather than to a bare subsistence? On the
same ground that validates his right to life, marriage, or any of the
other fundamental goods of human existence. On the dignity of
personality. Why is it wrong and unjust to kill or maim an innocent
man? Because human life and the human person possess intrinsic worth;
because personality is sacred. But the intrinsic worth and sacredness
of personality imply something more than security of life and limb,
and the material means of bare existence. The man who is not provided
with the requisites of normal health, efficiency, and contentment
lives a maimed life, not a reasonable life. His physical condition is
not worthy of a human being. Furthermore, man's personal dignity
demands not merely the conditions of reasonable physical existence,
but the opportunity of pursuing self perfection through the harmonious
development of all his faculties. Unlike the brutes, he is endowed
with a rational soul, and the capacity of indefinite self
improvement. A due regard to these endowments requires that man shall
have the opportunity of becoming not only physically stronger, but
intellectually wiser, morally better, and spiritually nearer to God.
If he is deprived of these opportunities he cannot realise the
potentialities of his nature nor attain the divinely appointed end of
his nature. He remains on the plane of the lower animals. His
personality is violated quite as fundamentally as when his body is
injured or his life destroyed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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