Remedial questions regarding justice in distribution arise in connection with rectifying injustice, responding to disaster and accident, addressing the problem of economic insecurity, and avoiding distributive choices that cause unjust harms.

Poverty and economic insecurity result primarily from violence, fraud, exploitation, and structural inequities – monopolies, subsidies, patents, tariffs, cartelizing licensing requirements, and artificial limitations on the availability of capital – that often reinforce the effect of prior wrongs. The long-term resolution of these problems will therefore depend much more on eliminating present injustices, shunning harmful distributive choices, and compensating people directly or indirectly victimized by past injustices, than on wealth transfers. Such transfers may sometimes, however, be useful or necessary in response to disaster, accident, and economic insecurity.

In Part I, I explain why many criticisms of the belief that people have remedial responsibilities to share wealth with others do not count against an understanding of these responsibilities grounded in natural law theory. In Part II, I emphasize that natural law theory leaves open a range of ways in which the effects of past or continuing injustice in distribution can be remedied and economic security fostered. In Part III, I suggest briefly that, as a way of fostering shared economic security, the members of a community might reasonably seek to ensure that each of them had access to adequate health care.