Describe Economic Justice: Classical Moral Philosophy

Economic Justice
Name
Institution
Course and Prefix Number
Economic Justice
Economic justice is part of social justice. It regards the moral values and principles for building economic institutions. Economic justice serves to provide equality and thus equal opportunities for all people. In this way, every individual in the society gets the significant and material base to live in a productive, dignified and creative life beyond economics. The fundamentals of economic justice stipulate that official policies should facilitate equal allocation of benefits to all in an economy (McKinnon & Fiala, 2014). Accordingly, the understudy delineates the aspects of economic inequality, conceptions of social justice, the related political and economic theories and the alignment of economic justice with different moral theories.
Economic Inequality
Justice is one of the cardinal values of classical moral philosophy. This makes social and economic justice critical components of morality and moral philosophy. The challenges of economic justice relate to issue of fairness, just and equality. Thus, the two intertwine and interrelate and thus the need to espouse economic realities with moral philosophies. This gives a balance hence economic justice which if achieved can help resolve many social and economic issues such as crime, poverty, inequality, discrimination, drug abuse, poor health outcomes, and violence among others.
Economic inequality is viewed in aspects regarding; pay, income levels, and wealth disparities. Other factors influence individualistic economic disparities. These include disabilities, gender, race and even ethnic backgrounds. Such factors must be considered in the effective narrowing of the economic disparities gap. Income inequality regards the unevenness of the degree to which income is distributed among people. Income comes from savings, investments, employment earnings, pensions, benefits and other received payments. Pay inequalities regard the differences between peoples’ pay. Wealth inequalities are general encompassing the amount of assets different people own.
The Gini coefficient is one way used to measure economic inequality. It measures the inequality across the entire society. Archibald (2013) elucidates that the United States of America has a high Gini coefficient of zero point four five. This is the second highest ratio compared to other nations. Other measurement techniques include Palma ratio and ratio measures. Poverty is closely associated with economic inequality. Poverty is a situation whereby a certain class of people is considered economically worse off than the rest of the population (McKinnon & Fiala, 2014). This means that the people in this class are not able to get and access basic goods and services for an acceptable living standard.
People in poverty are often unable to access proper quality medical/health care services. This may be attributable to their lack of insurance coverage. For this reason, economic inequality leads to other forms of inequalities such as undesired health care disparities in a nation.
Conceptions of Social Justice
The concepts of distributive justice provide moral guidance for political processes and structures which influence the a...