Theories of justice can be distinguished on the basis of whether they imply that distributive principles are universal or pluralistic in nature. The traditional approach to justice is to look for a single set of universal principles that are applicable across circumstances, i.e., to a wide range of goods. An alternative approach is to look for principles as they are practiced in a given culture or society and draw a connection between the social meanings and appropriate distributions of goods. This essay adopts the alternative perspective and argues that every society creates many kinds of social goods, each of which has its own sphere of distributive principles, procedures, and agents.
