The theories of justice as general and income distribution in Turkey (since 1980)

Justice is an important principle required for cohabitation from the first humankind to the last one. Therefore John Rawls placed justice over all of the other values and he argued that the other values should be evaluated through justice as the Archimedes Point. In fact the principle of justice has attracted nearly all of the philosopher and thinker and caused them to develop theories on this issue. With regard to this issue, the philosophers in general divide into two camps; while some of them has dealt with justice through utilitarian approach and claimed that the structures guaranteeing the success and the interest of the person are just structures thus they have linked the justice with "interest" and "benefit", the others have emphasized the "impartiality" side of justice and framed the justice with ethics and have tried to liberalized it from the success. On the one hand the discussions concerning justice focuses what the source of justice is (whether it is divine or natural or humane or procedural), on the other hand how these principles can be applied to the real life is focused. The most caustic and heated debates deal with the problem how the social proceeds produced in the country is to be distributed among the classes, regions and individuals. This is briefly called as problem of distribution of income. In this study, we will examine a wide range of philosophers starting from "Plato" one of the philosophers developing ideas with regard to the question of "what is justice?" from past to present to American "John Rawls" developing the most significant justice theory of our era. In the following parts, the distribution of income in Turkey after 1980 is discussed under different titles based on empirical data and the developments are tried to be assessed in the framework of "justice" notion.