The economic, political, and social frameworks that each society has—its laws, institutions, policies, etc.—result in different distributions of benefits and burdens across members of the society. These frameworks are the result of human political processes and they constantly change both across societies and within societies over time. The structure of these frameworks is important because the distributions of benefits and burdens resulting from them fundamentally affect people’s lives. Arguments about which frameworks and/or resulting distributions are morally preferable constitute the topic of distributive justice. Principles of distributive justice are therefore best thought of as providing moral guidance for the political processes and structures that affect the distribution of benefits and burdens in societies, and any principles which do offer this kind of moral guidance on distribution, regardless of the terminology they employ, should be considered principles of distributive justice.

we are left with questions of how to split the burden of collectively staying within the PBs. To know if e.g. a person or a company is absolute environmentally sustainable, we need to know that person’s or the company’s assigned SoSOS. How to determine a person’s or a company’s assigned SoSOS is not only normative, but essentially a question of distributive justice.

It provides a discursive shift to reframe environmental science and policy to pay attention to distributive justice6.

North decidingtheir Disputes not seldom, with that Impartiality and strictRegard to distributive Justice (for he was allowed, by all, aMan of admirable good natural Parts) that he ever sentaway, even the Party who was cast, satisfy’d with theReason, and content with the Equity of his Decisions.