The American Search for Economic Justice

Economic justice has long been judged a national priority of first importance in the United States. Most Americans would consider a just economic system an integral part of a good society, and any improvement in the actual justice of their system, progress towards a better America. Yet attempts by thinkers of both left and right to identify a set of universal propositions that indicate the "right" or "just" choice in a given situation have been fundamentally flawed. In their search for universals, these arguments have failed to account for the processes by which ordinary people make ethical decisions in their daily lives, and have disregarded popular understandings of economic justice. In this book, McClelland explores this basic issue of ethical decision-making as it relates to distributive justice. He illuminates the intellectual debate by drawing on economic theory, social philosophy and an historical analysis of popular conceptions of economic justice. The author then moves on to this review to assess various policy recommendations designed to improve the justice of the American economic system.