Philosophers often remark that many of our interpersonal relationships are valuable for their own sake. However, even the most intimate of these relationships —friendships, family ties and spiritual kinships— inevitably have instrumental value. Relationships provide stocks of goods that individuals can draw from to achieve a variety of ends. Some of these goods, such as emotional support, trust and influence, count as ‘relationship goods’—they either distinctively exist within interpersonal relationships or are themselves constitutive of such relationships. In this paper, I wish to defend the novel claim that relationship goods should be understood as appropriate objects of distribution (distribuenda), like income and wealth, and that the just redistribution of relational resources across society should be regarded as an imperative of distributive justice. By so arguing, my aim is not simply to add an extra category of goods to whatever existing list of distribuenda – an aim the importance of which would be limited. My objective is rather the much more ambitious one of showing that liberal theories of distributive justice have a direct, for inherently distributive, reason to care about how people relate to each other -- something they have long been accused of neglecting, both by communitarian and relational egalitarian critics.
