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Any concept of justice that hopes to win broad support in the real world has to be political in these three ways: to be narrow in scope; to be free-standing of any comprehensive moral doctrine; and to be grounded in widely shared ideas drawn from the public political culture. The original position ensures that Rawls’s principles possess these featu
... See moreDaniel Chandler • Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society
The Straussian Moment
gwern.netThe secular argument for human freedom, launched almost three centuries ago under the rubric of “natural rights,” has often been reduced to a calculation of probabilities: democracy and the personal freedoms it protects are good not because they have an inherent moral superiority over other forms of organizing society, but because they are the leas
... See moreGeorge Weigel • Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II
When we talk about justice today, we almost always find ourselves talking about rights we believe are entrenched in nature and have been enshrined in our founding documents. This language reflects a liberal conception of human action and interaction, casting us as rational agents who reach agreements with one another through calculation and negotia
... See morePeople are not monads. A real, live human self is always already partial to certain, select others. Morality needs to take this essential fact about human selfhood into account rather than pretend to override it.
Shai Held • Judaism Is About Love: Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life
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Jonathan Wolff • Ethics and Public Policy
By contrast, modern political philosophers—from Immanuel Kant in the eighteenth century to John Rawls in the twentieth century—argue that the principles of justice that define our rights should not rest on any particular conception of virtue, or of the best way to live. Instead, a just society respects each person’s freedom to choose his or her own
... See moreMichael J. Sandel • Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?
Rawls’s case for the priority of the right over the good reflects the conviction that a “moral person is a subject with ends he has chosen.”30 As moral agents, we are defined not by our ends but by our capacity for choice. “It is not our aims that primarily reveal our nature” but rather the framework of rights we would choose if we could abstract f
... See moreMichael J. Sandel • Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?
In philosophical circles, Rawls’s approach is described as asserting the “priority of the right over the good.” On this view, our rights define a framework within which we can each pursue our beliefs about how to live; in contrast to the alternative, where we start with a particular conception of the good, and design rights in order to promote it.