Integrating Intermediate Goods to Theories of Distributive Justice: The Importance of Platforms Daniel Weinstock 1 Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015 Abstract There is an underappreciated disconnect between the ultimate values that lie at the heart of contemporary theories of distributive justice, and the practice of state institutions. State institutions deliver ‘‘intermediate goods’’ – goods such as health-care, education, housing, transportation, and the like – that are instrumental to a society being distributively just, but that do not in an of themselves constitute criteria of justice. Researchers who have emphasized the ‘‘social determinants of health’’ provide an insight that, when generalized, point us in a direction that theorists of distributive justice should follow, that of attending not just to the in- strinsic value of intermediate goods, but also to their causal contributions to real- izing the values that theories of distributive justice make central. ‘‘Platforms’’, which represent principle-driven attempts at designing compossible policies that attend both to the causal and to the intrinsic value of intermediate goods, should be given more importance within theories of distributive justice if such theories are to be policy-relevant, for they connect the ultimate values of these theories to the practices of state institutions. Keywords Distributive justice Á Health Á Intermediate goods Á Platforms Introduction According to Social Determinants of Health (SDH) researchers, social factors such as income, housing, transportation, education, and the like, have at least as great an impact on health outcomes as do the resources that have traditionally been thought of as contributing to people’s health, such as access to health-care professionals, & Daniel Weinstock daniel.weinstock2@mcgill.ca 1 Faculty of Law, McGill University, Montreal, Canada 123 Res Publica DOI 10.1007/s11158-015-9274-1