MEANING
Concerned with how benefits, burdens, or resources are shared among people or groups.
Use it for
fairness of outcomes; allocation of resources; who gains and losesAsk which groups receive the benefits and bear the costs.
Words that belong together
- distributive justice
- distributive effects
- distributive consequences
On the page
The proposal has distributive consequences even if total revenue remains unchanged.
A theory of distributive justice must explain why its preferred allocation is fair.
The review ignored distributive effects by reporting only the national average.
Nearby words
Related words
Word forms
- Base
- distributive
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Usage notes
Primary category: academic. Academic, especially ethics and policy. Distributive justice concerns allocation, while procedural justice concerns how decisions are made. Also has mathematical and grammatical senses. Normally non-gradable in this sense; comparison requires a specific contextual scale. Derived family (not inflections): distribution, distributively.
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