THEORY OF JUSTIFIED INEQUALITIES

Why are some economic inequalities regarded as justified while others are not? Knowing whether an outcome arose from effort, luck, need, or circumstance does not settle the question: what caused an outcome is distinct from what that cause should warrant. We develop a theory of the distributive allocation an evaluator regards as warranted, based on how the evaluator represents the situation, interprets its causes, and assigns normative significance to relevant facts. A normative bridge requirement establishes that causal explanation alone cannot generate entitlement. Together with an independence condition on pairwise comparisons, the bridge restrictions characterize a weighted claims representation governed by a single claim function. Egalitarian, contribution based, responsibility sensitive, and need based principles correspond to different forms of this function. Priority to the worst off falls outside this family, and we identify the axiom it violates. The representation also shows why causal and normative contributions to disagreement generally lack a unique decomposition. Shapley attribution provides the unique resolution satisfying efficiency and symmetry and can be identified through a design that varies causal interpretation and normative judgment independently. Treating an observed allocation as its own justification emerges as a degenerate claim function. Under incomplete information, observationally equivalent situations create room for divergent interpretations. The theory thus suggests an empirical strategy that separately elicits causal beliefs, judgments of entitlement, and warranted allocations. It shifts the study of distributive fairness from preferences over how much inequality exists to the construction of the inequality an evaluator regards as justified.