Dobson reduces all environmental injustice to maldistribution of goods and bads

Evidence

Dobson (1998) offers a groundbreaking attempt to find common ground between social justice and environmental sustainability. This is a thorough and comprehensive study, and it begins with Dobson’s clear and explicit agreement with Barry’s more ‘narrow’ conception of justice (1999), that ‘all justice is distributive’ (Dobson 1998: 17). This bias toward the distributive is made quite continuously clear by Dobson’s interchangeable use of ‘social justice’ and ‘distributive justice’ throughout his work. Dobson (1998: 235–6) also explicitly argues that issues of respect and affinity, as they have been raised by numerous theorists of justice critical of the distributional focus, are not issues of justice, as they go beyond distribution. He remains within the distributional paradigm of justice, and does not address key issues of how identity, recognition, and political process play into environmental justice. All environmental injustice, then, is a matter of the maldistribution of environmental goods and bads. — David Schlosberg, Defining Environmental Justice, 403

Categorization

• XREF: This is the purest statement of the distributive-only paradigm the reader’s typology is built to critique — the ‘all justice is distributive’ claim running from ch10 forward. — connects to: Low and Gleeson’s own distributive principles secretly rest on recognition of nature — David Schlosberg, Defining Environmental Justice:…, 409