Let us return from discussing the psychological aspect of the question, to the main substance of our discourse, which we have hitherto only grazed, or touched upon by way of illustrations. We have now to inquire whether the distribution of income and wealth is felt to be just or unjust at all and under what circumstances and conditions.
If we confine ourselves to the strictly philosophical reflections of ancient and modern times, there scarcely seems to be any controversy about the question. From Aristotle's doctrine of justice in distribution to the philosophers of to-day, there is controversy over the practical effect of the judgments in question, but hardly over the judgments themselves. Among more recent thinkers -- only to mention a few -- Herbart conceives the penal system and the economic conditions of a nation as a united whole; what elsewhere is called justice he denominates as equity.
On equity his so-called system of wages, which comprises the economic conditions and the penal law of a nation, is built up;the judgment requires recompense for benefits and retribution for misdeeds. The conceptions of the wage system must, according to Hartenstein, be applied equally to benefits and misdeeds. "The general idea must be maintained, that the social institutions and actions should be capable and fitted to requite equally merit and offence." And Trendelenburg, in a similar fashion, affirms that the moral estimation of political and economic affairs is, at bottom, derived from the same standpoint. "Indeed," he says, "in the structure of the State the constant proportion between duties and rights is the fundamental idea of justice, and the same proportion between labor and earnings should be aimed at in private intercourse, but the market price makes the exponent so variable, that it causes a constant inequality." The execution thus seems dim to him; but it appears to him the ideal condition, that labor and earnings should accord, as duty does with right.
There is no doubt that this conception is confronted by another which results from the investigation of details, which is not the outgrowth of popular instincts and sentiment, and is even often involuntarily denied by its very representatives, but through the authority of certain doctrines has become nevertheless of great importance for practical life. I mean the conception which sees in the difference between rich and poor only an occurrence of nature. In the investigation of the immediate causes of the distribution of wealth, this conception is not able to discover the remoter causes. It sees only demand and supply, proportions, natural phenomena, climatic influences, the accidents of life and death; all these are unquestionably mechanical causes which influence this or that distribution of incomes. The earnings of the individual, it is said, are determined by the "strength and the luck of the individual."Free intercourse appears as the analogy of the Darwinian struggle for existence. Might makes right; purposes and moral judgments are not here in consideration, or only to a limited extent. So far as mankind demands a just distribution of incomes, their ideas ate in the main foolish; justice may at the most be demanded of the State when it intervenes directly; opposed as it is to free intercourse and the legitimate influence of fortune, this striving is wrong. "Shall we," we hear from this quartet, "censure our God, that He so frequently interferes unjustly?
Shall we prescribe to Him where His lightnings shall strike and where He shall permit the bullets to hit? Shall we quarrel with nature because she grants the delicious fruits of the south and an olympic existence to one race, while she banishes another to the reeking hovels of the arctic?"We will not dismiss this conception of things by the accusation of materialism, for, though materialistic, it nevertheless has the merit of being realistic and of having further detailed investigation in certain directions. But whatever its merits in this direction, our question is not really touched at all by these arguments. The individual scholar who, in his researches, considers only forces, proportions, demand and supply, and endeavors to grasp them, may ignore the question whether the result be just, but the popular mind will always repeat the question as long as it sees before it human actions.
But only to this extent and always to this extent; and furthermore the uncertain results of fortune and the course of natural processes also will appear just or unjust to him who believes that they are governed by a just Providence ruling analogously to human actions; may the compensation only occur in another world, it is expected and demanded by the soul.
When on the other hand the intellect sees but blind forces, it consoles itself with the argument that it is not the task of humanity to master them; then he will no longer demand justice from the flashing lightning, from the hostile bullet from the demon of cholera and the sunny zephyrs, but always from all conscious actions of human beings.
The distinction is therefore not, as has been claimed, between State and chance, State and free intercourse, governmental distribution and distribution by demand and supply, but the antithesis is this: As far as human action governs and influences the distribution of incomes, so far this action will create the psychological processes whose final result is the judgment which finds the distribution just or unjust; so far as blind extra-human causes interfere, reasonable reflection will demand that men should submit to them with resignation.