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Advocacy Practice for Social Justice 24 {

debates of political philosophers deserve considerable attention from social workers (Reamer, 1993). Allingham (2014) discusses four main theories of distributive justice. The first, justice as fairness (associated with John Rawls [1971]), considers any dis tribution of goods as if the persons with the least get more of the current dis tribution in order to bring them up to the level of others. The second, equality of resources (associated with Ronald Dworkin [2013]), indicates that a distri bution is fair if everyone has the same amount of resources from which to live. The third viewpoint (linked to libertarian theorists), that of common owner ship, states that a distribution is just if everyone starts off at the same level but allows for individuals to make voluntary transactions that may alter this initial beginning. Finally, the entitlements theory of Robert Nozick defines a just dis tribution as one that comes about from voluntary transfers of resources. In this situation, all inequality is acceptable. Although the literature on this topic is extensive, we focus in this section on two of the four approaches described by Allingham (2014): that of Rawls and that of Nozick, because these are the most “fundamentally opposing. . . . In essence, Rawls emphasizes equality while Nozick emphasizes liberty” (p. 4). Rawls and Nozick each penned very influential works on the subject of distri butive justice in the early 1970s. Their different interpretations of the concept have provided a great deal of material for debate since that time. Rawls (1971) asks his readers to imagine that they are going to develop the rules for a society knowing that people will be randomly “assigned” different places in society once the “game of life” begins. Participants in this thought experiment must agree ahead of time to live within the rules they develop, but they do not know what position in society they are going to be given. This is what Rawls calls the veil of ignorance. A person may be assigned a position among the wealthy elite, with many resources and privileges, or a position among those with very few material resources. However, for this type of inequality to exist, the rules agreed to have to allow for the ine- quality. Given the veil of ignorance about one’s future assigned position in society, Rawls argues that people will want to create the fairest set of rules possible, if only to protect themselves from being placed into a very difficult situation. According to Rawls, this set of “the fairest possible rules” would be based on two main principles. The first principle is that “each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all” (p. 302). This ensures that all are treated equally within the context of the rules, which are addressed in the second principle. This principle states that “social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) to JOHN RAWLS’S VIEWS ON DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE