Economic justice — what it requires

Economic justice is among the most contested terms in the justice vocabulary — conservatives use it to mean freedom from economic interference, progressives to mean redistribution sufficient to meet basic needs, socialists to mean structural transformation of ownership and power. What the traditions converge on is more limited but real: extreme economic inequality produces conditions — in health, in political power, in the capacity for self-determination — that are incompatible with any robust account of human dignity. The specific requirements of economic justice remain genuinely contested; the minimum threshold is less so.