On the Quality of Relational Justice

ABSTRACT

By emphasising the role of concepts like social status, power and respect, all relational egalitarians seek to demonstrate that there is more to the political concept of equality than the distribution of goods. While there is a broad consensus on the nature of equality, however, the nature of justice is a matter of internal dispute. The aim of this paper is to disentangle these argumentative threads, building on work in early relational egalitarian scholarship to develop a relational approach to justice, both distinct from the distributive approach to justice and isolated from the relational approach to equality. In doing so, I reveal possible and sometimes surprising alliances between relational egalitarians and other scholars on the nature of justice.