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Three Modern Approaches
Introduction
Rawls, Nozick, and MacIntyre
Have significant new approaches
Which are related to past approaches
And show the continuing openness of debate
Is that a good thing? After 2500 years?
Rawls on the Just State
John Rawls (1921 – 2002)
A Theory of Justice (1971)
Rawls on the Just State
Justice as fairness
A just society is one run on just principles
A just society would be a fair society
Fairness involves Distributive Justice
There is a fair distribution of primary social goods
wealth,
opportunities,
liberties and privileges,
bases of self respect (e.g. equality of political representation)
Rawls on the Just State
What is a Fair Society?
Would a fair society would be one that any rational,
self-interested person would want to join?
Not quite. They will be biased to their own talents.
Rawls on the Just State
The Veil of Ignorance
Suppose they chose from behind a Veil of Ignorance
where they didn’t know what their talents were or
where they would be placed in society?
They would choose a society that would be fair to all
because they’d have to live with their choice
So, a fair society is one that any rational, selfinterested person behind the veil of ignorance would
want to join
Rawls on the Just State
The Original Position
Rawls is a Social Contract Theorist
In forming a social contract we decide upon the
basic structure of society
We do so as self-interested and rational choosers,
from behind the veil of ignorance
This choice position Rawls calls The Original Position
Rawls on the Just State
The Original Position
How would we choose?
We are choosing fundamental social conditions
determining our life prospects
We get to choose just once
We would follow a maximin choice principle
choose the setup in which your worst outcome is better
than your worst outcome in any other setup
We wouldn’t give up fundamental rights and liberties
Rawls on the Just State
Two Principles of Justice
1. Each person has an equal claim to a fully adequate
scheme of basic rights and liberties, compatible with
the same scheme for all
2.Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two
conditions:
a. they are to be attached to positions and offices open to
all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity;
b. they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least
advantaged members of society (The Difference Pinciple)
Rawls on the Just State
Prioritizing the Principles of Justice
There are really three principles here:
Principle of Liberty
Equality of Opportunity
Difference Principle
They can conflict and are ordered by lexical priority.
The Principle of Liberty must be satisfied before any
other principle.
Equality of Opportunity must be satisfied before the
Difference Principle.
Rawls on the Just State
The Difference Principle
If primary social goods were distributed evenly, we
would have a perfectly egalitarian society.
But there are good reasons for thinking that
everyone would be economically worse off in such a
society.
One obvious reason is that incentives are needed for
people to work hard and use their talents to create
wealth
Rawls on the Just State
The Difference Principle
Taxation is a means of redistributing wealth for the
benefit of the least well-off
But, everyone, including the least well-off, would
suffer with excessive taxation
On the other hand, too little taxation and the least
well-off suffer economically
Between these extremes there will be an optimum
taxation level, according to the difference principle
Nozick on the Minimal State
Robert Nozick (1938 – 2002)
Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974)
Nozick on the Minimal State
Justice as Respect
Recall Kant’s Principle of Ends
Act to treat others as means not just as ends
People can’t be used as ‘resources’
A state committed to ‘distributive justice’ must treat
its citizens as means to a distributive end
Any such action is unethical
Therefore distributive justice can’t be an ethical goal
Nozick on the Minimal State
Distributive Justice vs. Entitlements
DJ assumes wealth is just a natural resource
Nozick thinks that justice in wealth involves a
recursive definition of entitlement:
1. Justice in original acquisition
2. Justice in transaction
3. No wealth is held justly except by combinations of 1 & 2
NB. Redistribution can’t produce justice in holdings
Nozick on the Minimal State
Distributive Justice vs. Entitlements
There may be unjust holdings because of past
history but that doesn’t make the theory of
entitlement incorrect
Compare: a state may in fact distribute wealth badly – but
that doesn’t affect the theory of DJ.
There needs to be an entitlement theory of
rectification
MacIntyre on the Moral Order
Alasdair Macintyre (1929 – )
After Virtue (1984)
MacIntyre on the Moral Order
The current moral disorder
Imagine a catastrophe where most scientific
knowledge and the habits of science were lost
MacIntyre on the Moral Order
The current moral disorder
Imagine a catastrophe where most scientific
knowledge and the habits of science were lost
Then suppose the survivors tried to reconstruct
science from the leftover fragments
MacIntyre on the Moral Order
The current moral disorder
Imagine a catastrophe where most scientific
knowledge and the habits of science were lost
Then suppose the survivors tried to reconstruct
science from the leftover fragments
They’d probably produce gibberish that ‘looked like’
science but wasn’t
MacIntyre on the Moral Order
The current moral disorder
MacIntyre thinks there’s been a slow catastrophe
where most moral knowledge has been lost
MacIntyre on the Moral Order
The current moral disorder
MacIntyre thinks there’s been a slow catastrophe
where most moral knowledge has been lost
We have tried to reconstruct morality from the
fragments
MacIntyre on the Moral Order
The current moral disorder
MacIntyre thinks there’s been a slow catastrophe
where most moral knowledge has been lost
We have tried to reconstruct morality from the
fragments
We have produced gibberish that ‘looks like’ morals
but isn’t
MacIntyre on the Moral Order
The current moral disorder
Since moral arguments are gibberish they can’t be
conclusive in deciding what to do
But we must decide what to do so we adopt another
method
We use emotions, passions, self interest, …
Since we have incompatible desires our politics has
become
civil war carried on by other means’
MacIntyre on the Moral Order
Bring back virtue!
The Aristotelian version of ethics with an end
towards which we can aim makes sense of ‘ought’
statements.
‘We ought to do X to achieve this end’ is understandable
‘We ought to do X … just because’ is not
Absent any conception of what human beings are supposed to
become if they realized their telos, there can be no ethical
theory, because it simply has no purpose. For people with no
destination, a road map has no value