Distributive justice and benevolence: The welfare state as practical, distributive, liberal social contract

Benevolence is the humanist virtue par excellence. Influential veil-of-ignorance theories of justice, issuing from the main streams of the humanist ethics of the Enlightenment, exclude benevolence from the short list of individual motives from which they derive their norms of justice. These norms of justice are built from hypothetical preferences of individuals, while the institutions of distributive justice in real-life democracies express, rely on, or are derived from individuals' actual preferences. Democratically implement-able norms of justice should be derived from individuals' actual preferences and from suitable norms of deliberation and communication in and through collective action. They are norms of benevolent justice, in the sense that they rely significantly on the altruistic motives of individuals. Contemporary welfare states are interpreted as practical achievements of such a norm of benevolent justice within the distributive liberal social contract.