Justice and Social Structure – How to Justify Inequality

Abstract

The considerations about social structure either in the field of philosophy or real (empirical) science on society often besides ordinary description, functional or genetic explanation comprise also value or normative judgments. This is because the considerable part of social thinkers refers to the problems of the existing structure or indicating directions in which it should be reshaped. A proper social structure is to guarantee individual’s happiness or at least decent life and order of the whole society. It is not surprising then that for many thinkers perceiving social reality differently such as Plato, Aristotle, Marx, Parsons and others this was the fundamental issue. The above defined problem was the interest of not only scholars but also cognitively activated and forced to actions ‘ordinary’ people. Social structure (also today) especially in its distributive aspect seems to many (in common judgment) a the manifestation of injustice, the expression of often unjust divisions into the rich and the poor, the privileged or the underprivileged, the powerful and the powerless. Also the way of using these different forms of capital is criticized. In this article the selected elements of social thought directed at the support or negation of legitimacy of clear structural divisions are presented.

In this article also the division into distributive and relational understanding of social structure fundamental for ‘structural’ considerations will be described.