Combining the two is key to progressive policy goals

Martin O’Neill, “Power, Predistribution, and Social Justice,” Philosophy, vol. 95, no. 1, January 2020, pp. 88-89, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/philosophy/article/power-predistribution-and-social-justice/02449FCC840979032236220D38D11A4F.

It is a familiar objection directed at advocates of a political focus on predistribution, that even effective policies of predistribution would not eradicate the need for forms of redistribution, both in the form of direct cash transfers, and in the form of indirect transfers through the provision of public services funded through taxation. Obviously, the advocate of predistribution should have no argument with this objection, not least because, as we have seen in sections 4–6 above, such redistributive policies frequently have a distinctively predistributive justification. Moving away from the Hacker-type view that sees predistribution as a kind of policy as opposed to a kind of aim or goal, or valuable effect, helps to forestall this kind of unilluminating disagreement between advocates of predistribution and their opponents. Moreover, it should be no part of advocating predistributive public policies to think that there might not also be a justification for transfers or public service provision that was based on purely redistributive considerations – i.e. because one person or group is in need, or suffering some absolute level of privation, and the transfer from a relatively advantaged person or group would rectify this. After all, our concerns as egalitarians are complex, combining consideration of both how well each individual fares, and of the nature of the social relations between individuals.43 There may also be cases where purely redistributive aims could be most efficiently enacted by means of the kinds of policy mechanisms associated with predistribution. In many cases, the same policies might be favoured by progressives and egalitarians for both their redistributive and predistributive effects, operating at once but by means of distinct mechanisms. None of these cases would constitute an objection to either our characterisation of the idea of predistribution, or to the claim that progressive or egalitarian politics should treat predistribution as a central priority.