scholarly journals The Perfectionisms of John Rawls

1998 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 383-415 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve Sheppard
Keyword(s):  
John Rawls ◽  
Good Life ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Original Design ◽  
Liberal State ◽  
Liberal Neutrality ◽  
Practical Effect ◽  
The Government ◽  
Good And Evil

The acts of even the godsHave ends beyond their intent.John Rawls stands in a small pantheon of writers whose ideas have shaped the vocabularies of their age. Like a classical deity, his work has been invoked by disciple and dissenter alike as the essential totem of the modern liberal state. But his Promethean creation has grown independent from its original design, attaining significance not only for its initial merits but also for the competition it offers to the plan of its creator. So from the stage of Rawlsian liberal neutrality stalks the idea of legal perfectionism.Legal perfectionism is the doctrine according to which officials may adopt and enforce laws according to the officials’ understanding of a good life, with the intended practical effect that people governed by such laws will lead better lives. In other words, legal perfectionism broadly enshrines the notion, sometime unpopular among Western theorists, that the government has, or should have, the power to reflect ideas of good and evil—the content of the good life or of good projects or of excellence—in framing the laws. While related both to older ideas of human perfection and perfectibility and to perennial concepts of virtue and morality, legal perfectionism has developed a distinct, modern meaning.

Criminalization and Liberalism

2020 ◽  
pp. 37-52
Author(s):  
Stuart P. Green
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
Sexual Misconduct ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Criminal Offenders ◽  
Important Method ◽  
Liberal Neutrality ◽  
Criminal Sanctions ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Conception Of The Good

This chapter considers the concepts of criminalization and liberalism. Criminal sanctions are just one of a range of means by which society can respond to sexual misconduct, but they are a particularly important method in light of their stigmatizing effects and potential to deprive persons of liberty. The theory developed here assumes that it is intrinsically wrong to punish criminal offenders who are blameless and also wrong to punish blameworthy offenders more harshly than they deserve. One of the most important elements of blameworthiness is wrongfulness, which is understood to involve a violation of a victim’s rights. The approach followed here is liberal in the sense that it emphasizes the freedom of the individual. It recognizes that the government has an obligation to protect individuals from being harmed by others but also that government itself can pose a threat to liberty. A key feature of this approach is liberal neutrality, the idea that the state should not reward or punish particular conceptions of the good life but should instead provide a neutral framework within which citizens can pursue their own conception of the good.

Who Gets Power and Why

1949 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 120-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ithiel de Sola Pool
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Max Weber ◽  
The State ◽  
Social Goals ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Substantive Rationality ◽  
The Government

A Feature of Western ideology, particularly its American variant, is consciousness of tension between ideals and reality. One source of this tension is a propensity to seek social goals by way of adventitious motives. Education seeks marks not knowledge; business seeks profits not products; politics seeks power not the good life. To protest this lack of what Max Weber called substantive rationality, and to demand that first things be put first is labelled “idealism,” while acceptance of the immediate incentive and disregard for the final end is labelled “realism.”Thus in political science the name “realistic” has been largely applied to that tradition which concentrates on power relations and assumes that its subjects behave as “political men,” that is, that they strive to maximize power. The “realist” assumes that all men in politics share the same drive. So deeply ingrained is this identification of politics and power that it appears even in the unconscious where the state is a father symbol. It appears also in everyday idioms where to be in the government is “to be in power” and to go into politics means not to pave streets but to enter a game of hierarchical advancement. It appears also in scholarly thought. Unlike Aristotle, who defined the polis as that association formed for the highest good and which comprehends the rest, most modern scholars find in a monopoly of coercion the distinctive attribute of the state.

Religious Liberty and the Rawlsian Idea of Legitimacy: The French Laïcité Project between Comprehensive and Political Liberalisms

2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eoin Daly
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Comprehensive Doctrine ◽  
Social Goal ◽  
Liberal State ◽  
Public Commitment ◽  
Liberty Of Conscience ◽  
Comprehensive Doctrines ◽  
Ways Of Life

AbstractKahn has argued that the French Laïcité project has degenerated, in some of its recent incarnations, into an illiberal public commitment to a ‘comprehensive’ doctrine of enlightened or emancipated autonomy. He suggests it can instead be conceived in a Rawlsian sense, a concept of right derived independently of ‘comprehensive’ conceptions of the good—thus, merely an institutional appendage to liberty of conscience, distinct from any deeper social goal. The attempt at separating out ‘political’ and ‘comprehensive’ secularisms is best viewed through the prism of the headscarved school-goer whom the liberal state deems unfree. Can such a state intervene to ensure the autonomy of its child-citizens with regard to comprehensive doctrines, or is this to impose a conception of the emancipated rational life, freely lived? Is this autonomy of conscience distinguishable from an idea of the good life, a merely ‘political’ guarantee of self-determination—or is this distinction even viable? The figure of the headscarved child-citizen ostensibly challenges the Rawlsian assumption that the state’s claim to neutrality between comprehensive doctrines can transcend or stand outside these doctrines, and represent anything other than an ends-oriented project of liberal emancipation. This arises because, on one view, the state must, in order to guarantee schoolchildren freedom to choose between ways of life, paradoxically first impose such a particular conception, of emancipation or rational autonomy. However, this article suggests that despite its ostensible allure, the dualism of ‘political’ and ‘comprehensive’ secularisms is not the best lens through which to critique the French Laïcité project.

Questioning technology in South America

Thesis Eleven ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 138 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl Martens
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Economy ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Knowledge Society ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Buen Vivir ◽  
Politics Of Technology ◽  
The Government

This paper examines Andrew Feenberg’s radical democratic politics of technology in relation to the context of Ecuador’s free and open software movement. It considers the articulation of this movement via the government sponsored activist project FLOK Society (Free/Libre Open Knowledge Society). Based on an ethnographic study (2015–16), which included interviews with FLOK Society coordinators, the paper discusses how such government-activist collaborations, may be useful in expanding Feenberg’s notion of technical politics and the nature of representation in the technical sphere. More specifically, the paper looks at the political shaping of technology, in relation to concepts about ‘the Good Life’, or ‘Buen Vivir’ in the case of Ecuador, and its drive toward a knowledge economy, based on the concepts of ‘Buen Conocer’ and ‘Bioconocimiento’ (Good Knowing and Bioknowledge). The paper argues that certain premises held by Feenberg concerning technical politics, democracy and populism in particular may need to be reconsidered in light of developments in Ecuador.

scholarly journals „VORES ØL“ Ajon og sociale relationer i Teso, Østuganda

1998 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Henriques
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Cultural Reproduction ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Community Life ◽  
Or Practice ◽  
Good And Evil ◽  
Central Social

Peter Henriques: Our Beer: Ajon and Social Relations among the Iteso, East Uganda When it comes to a description of Iteso community life and commensality, the first thing which comes to mind, both to the Iteso themselves and to outside observers, is the local beer, ajon. I claim here that the consumption of ajon is a way of practicing “the good life”, an ordered life where oppositions in the system of social and cultural reproduction are temporarily muted. Ajon drinking is presented here as mediating the ambivalence of good and evil found in all central social relations among Iteso. But if the consumption ideally is supposed to be only merry sociability, this sociability is under constant threat because of fear of people who might want to harm others. Ajon consumption can be dangerous, since the beer party is also a place where people, under cover of friendliness, may try to poison you or practice witchcraft.

scholarly journals Aristotle and the Ọmọlúwàbí Ethos: Ethical Implications for Public Morality in Nigeria

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Sunday Olaoluwa Dada
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Democratic Governance ◽  
Political Elite ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Public Morality ◽  
The Public ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Government

This essay explores the philosophical affinity between Aristotle’s concept of virtue as character habituation and the Yorùbá ethical and ontological understanding of ọmọlúwàbí as the foundation for re-examining the philosophical foundation of democratic governance in Nigeria. Based on the Aristotelian insistence that the good life is the end of politics, the essay argues for a rethinking of the concept of public morality as character-based political dynamics that enables politicians to think more about the social contract between the government and the governed, rather than an amoral understanding of politics that eschew morality and undermines the well-being of the citizens. The absence of public morality, the essay argues, has resulted in a neopatrimonial framework within which the political elite willfully circumvent constitutional rules and regulation in order to vitiate the public interest. The essay concludes by arguing for a rigorous public enlightenment as well as a reform of the educational curriculum through an injection of virtue ethics.

Liberal Neutrality and the Value of Autonomy

1995 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 136-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Sher
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
The State ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Liberal Neutrality ◽  
Normative Principle ◽  
Conception Of The Good

Many liberals believe that government should not base its decisions on any particular conception of the good life. Many believe, further, that this principle of neutrality is best defended through appeal to some normative principle about autonomy. In this essay, I shall discuss the prospects of mounting one such defense. I say only “one such defense” because neutralists can invoke the demands of autonomy in two quite different ways. They can argue, first, that because autonomy itself has such great value, the state can produce the best results by simply allowing each citizen to shape his own life; or they can argue, second, that even if non-neutral policies would produce the most value, the state remains obligated to eschew them out of respect for its citizens' autonomy. Here I shall discuss only the first and more consequentialist of these arguments.

Part I, 3 Liberal Perspectives

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ahdar Rex ◽  
Leigh Ian
Keyword(s):  
John Rawls ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Public Reason ◽  
Religious Freedom ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Faith Communities ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Faith Based ◽  
State Neutrality ◽  
Litmus Test

This chapter discusses liberal political thought and its understanding and treatment of religion. Section II begins by briefly outlining the nature and character of liberalism. The premise is that liberalism is the principal philosophical foundation for law in modern liberal democracy. Our contemporary notions of ‘religious freedom’ are ones that have been indubitably shaped by liberal attitudes to religion, faith communities, and the call of conscience. The chapter then turns to the liberal claim of neutrality between competing conceptions of the good life. Is liberalism as impartial as it purports to be? What does state neutrality towards religion in practice actually require? This chapter also examines the privatization of religious (and other) beliefs in a liberal polity, and considers a leading liberal litmus test for public policy — John Rawls' concept of ‘public reason’. Section III analyses the principal secular liberal justifications for religious freedom. It argues that unless we know why religious liberty is worth protecting, our ability to deal with new and increasingly insistent faith-based claims for legal recognition and protection will be hampered.

scholarly journals Perpetual Struggle

Hypatia ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-19
Author(s):  
Kathryn J. Norlock
Keyword(s):  
John Rawls ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Moral Motivation ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Aldo Leopold ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human History ◽  
Feminist Ethic

What if it doesn't get better? Against more hopeful and optimistic views that it is not just ideal but possible to put an end to what John Rawls calls “the great evils of human history,” I aver that when it comes to evils caused by human beings, the situation is hopeless. We are better off with the heavy knowledge that evils recur than we are with idealizations of progress, perfection, and completeness; an appropriate ethic for living with such heavy knowledge could include resisting evils, improving the lives of victims, and even enjoying ourselves. Better conceptions of the objects of hope, and the good life, inform a praxis‐centered, nonideal, feminist ethic, supportive of sustained moral motivation, resilience, and even cheer. I connect elements of stoic and pessimistic philosophy in order to outline some normative recommendations for living with evils. A praxis‐centered ethic would helpfully adjust our expectations from changing an uncontrollable future to developing better skills for living in a world that exceeds our control. As Aldo Leopold once said, “That the situation is hopeless should not prevent us from doing our best.”

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