Rawls and Luck Egalitarianism

John Rawls ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 133-147
Author(s):  
Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen
Keyword(s):  
Luck Egalitarianism ◽  
Theory Of Justice ◽  
Early Appearance ◽  
The Social ◽  
Egalitarian Theory ◽  
Luck Egalitarian

In A Theory of Justice, Rawls famously noted that many (dis)advantages reflect the outcomes of the social and the natural lottery. In these remarks, inter alia, some have seen the early appearance in Rawls’s work of what was later developed into a full-blown luck egalitarian theory of justice. Luck egalitarianism says that it is unjust if some are worse off than others through no choice or fault of their own. This principle differs from Rawls’s theory of justice. This had led some political philosophers to criticize Rawls for not thinking through the implications of his luck egalitarian commitments. This chapter (1) presents conflicting interpretations of the role considerations about luck play in Rawls; (2) assesses the exegetical support on offer for these interpretations; and, finally, (3) discusses what role considerations about luck should play in a theory of justice in the light of recent relational egalitarian theories.

scholarly journals Fairness og statsborgerskab

Politik ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristian Kriegbaum Jensen ◽  
Lasse Nielsen
Keyword(s):  
Luck Egalitarianism ◽  
Theory Of Justice ◽  
Personal Effort ◽  
Luck Egalitarian

The Danish requirements for citizenship are often grounded on an ideal about rewarding personal effort and responsibility. A similar ideal is known from luck egalitarianism, a widely known and accepted theory of justice. This article unfolds a luck egalitarian argument in defence of the Danish requirements and investigates, in light of this argument, whether the requirements relevantly reflect effort and responsibility. The article concludes dismissively and offers a number of ways of improving Danish citizenship policy in terms of fairness.        

scholarly journals The Social Injustice of Parental Imprisonment

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-320
Author(s):  
William Bülow ◽  
Lars Lindblom
Keyword(s):  
Social Injustice ◽  
Luck Egalitarianism ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
Common View ◽  
The Social ◽  
Children Of Prisoners ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Fair Equality Of Opportunity ◽  
The Many ◽  
Luck Egalitarian

AbstractChildren of prisoners are often negatively affected by their parents’ incarceration, which raises issues of justice. A common view is that the many negative effects associated with parental imprisonment are unjust, simply because children of prisoners are impermissibly harmed or unjustly punished by their parents’ incarceration. We argue that proposals of this kind have problems with accounting for cases where it is intuitive that prison might create social injustices for children of prisoners. Therefore, we suggest that in addition to the question of whether children of prisoners are impermissibly harmed, we should ask whether the inequalities that these children endure because of their parent’s incarceration are objectionable from a social justice perspective. To answer this latter question, we examine the negative effects associated with parental imprisonment from the perspective of luck egalitarianism. We develop a luck egalitarian account that incorporates insights from the philosophy of childhood. On our account, children of prisoners might endure two different types of objectionable inequalities, since they are often deprived of resources that are important for ensuring fair equality of opportunity in adulthood, but also because they are likely to suffer inequalities in terms of childhood welfare. After defending this account, we explore its implications for policy.

Micah’s Theory of the Justice of Judgement (Micah 3:1-12)

2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Blessing Onoriode Boloje
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Justice ◽  
Background Structure ◽  
The Social ◽  
Egalitarian Society ◽  
The Gift ◽  
Special Concern

This article is an examination of Micah’s theory of justice within the overall context of his oracles of judgements. While there are competing perspectives in the justice of judgement in the book of Micah, particularly in relation to the extent of judgement, this article concerns itself with the interrelatedness and connection between sin and judgement. The judgements envisioned in Micah’s oracles are provoked by the violations of the traditional moral and social solidarities resulting from the Covenant, which formed the basis of society. As an egalitarian society, the social blueprint of Yahweh’s Torah for Israel advocated special concern for weak and vulnerable individuals as fundamental. The gift of Torah inaugurated Israel as a community meant to personify Yahweh’s justice. However, increasing injustice profoundly jeopardized this witness to God’s healing agenda. For failing to uphold justice the perpetrators are liable and the judgements constitute justice. This justice may not necessarily be corrective in quality but punitive. The article therefore examines briefly the background, structure, and approaches to the book of Micah, analyses a unit of judgement oracle (3:1–12), and concludes by synthesising Micah’s theory of justice within the overall context of his oracles of judgements.

Marcel Mauss and the Turn to the Gift

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Colesworthy
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Experimental Writing ◽  
Market Society ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Gift ◽  
New Material ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Leonard Woolf

Chapter 1 takes a cue from recent anthropologists who have stressed the influence of Mauss’s socialism on his sociological work. Returning to Mauss’s The Gift, the chapter argues that what links his essay to the experimental writing of his literary contemporaries is not their shared fascination with the primitive, as other critics have suggested, but rather their shared investment in reimagining social possibilities within market society. Mauss was, as his biographer notes, an “Anglophile.” Shedding light on his admiration of British socialism and especially the work of Beatrice and Sidney Webb—friends of Virginia and Leonard Woolf—as well as competing usages of the language of “gifts” in the social sciences and the arts, the chapter ultimately provides a new material and conceptual framework for understanding the intersection of largely French gift theory and Anglo-American modernist writing.

Inheritance and Luck

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Halliday
Keyword(s):  
Luck Egalitarianism ◽  
Mediating Effects ◽  
Inherited Wealth ◽  
Luck Egalitarian

This chapter reviews and criticizes varieties of the luck egalitarian conception of justice. It begins with the ‘naïve’ distinction between choice and circumstance, on which inequalities are permissible insofar as they depend on the former rather than the latter. The bulk of the chapter discusses more sophisticated versions of luck egalitarianism, which either supplement the naïve view with some countervailing principle (e.g. by appeal to personal prerogatives) or by constraining its scope (e.g. by focusing on the mediating effects of institutions). Later parts of the chapter evaluate other contemporary oppositions to inherited wealth grounded in interpretations of reciprocity and a concern about the role of inheritance in enabling freeriding. The chapter ends with a discussion of Ronald Dworkin’s views, which bear a formal resemblance to the position defended in the following two chapters.

The Rhetoric of the Page

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurie Maguire
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Anthropology ◽  
Blank Space ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
The Social ◽  
Google Books ◽  
The Rich

This book explores blank space in early modern printed books; it addresses physical blank space (from missing words to vacant pages) as well as the concept of the blank. It is a book about typographical marks, readerly response, and editorial treatment. It is a story of the journey from incunabula to Google books, told through the signifiers of blank space: empty brackets, dashes, the et cetera, the asterisk. It is about the semiotics of print and about the social anthropology of reading. The book explores blank space as an extension of Elizabethan rhetoric with readers learning to interpret the mise-en-page as part of a text’s persuasive tactics. It looks at blanks as creators of both anxiety and of opportunity, showing how readers respond to what is not there and how writers come to anticipate that response. Each chapter focuses on one typographical form of what is not there on the page: physical gaps (Chapter 1), the &c (Chapter 2) and the asterisk (Chapter 3). The Epilogue uncovers the rich metaphoric life of these textual phenomena and the ways in which Elizabethan printers experimented with typographical features as they considered how to turn plays into print.

Who Was This Man?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mitch Kachun
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Life Experiences ◽  
Broad Context ◽  
Military Power ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Revolution

Chapter 1 introduces the broad context of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world in which Crispus Attucks lived, describes the events of the Boston Massacre, and assesses what we know about Attucks’s life. It also addresses some of the most widely known speculations and unsupported stories about Attucks’s life, experiences, and family. Much of what is assumed about Attucks today is drawn from a fictionalized juvenile biography from 1965, which was based largely on research in nineteenth-century sources. Attucks’s characterization as an unsavory outsider and a threat to the social order emerged during the soldiers’ trial. Subsequently, American Revolutionaries in Boston began the construction of a heroic Attucks as they used the memory of the massacre and all its victims to serve their own political agendas during the Revolution by portraying the victims as respectable, innocent citizens struck down by a tyrannical military power.

Luck Egalitarianism and Relational Egalitarianism: An Internal Tension in Cohen’s Theory of Justice

2020 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 219-240
Author(s):  
Jiangjin Chen
Keyword(s):  
Social Relationships ◽  
Market Mechanism ◽  
Value Pluralism ◽  
Luck Egalitarianism ◽  
Theory Of Justice ◽  
Egalitarian Ethos

AbstractRelational Egalitarianism focuses on the construction of equal social relationships between persons. It strongly opposes luck egalitarianism, which understands equality as a distributive ideal. In Cohen’s theory of justice, luck egalitarianism and relational egalitarianism simultaneously exist, and Cohen provides arguments corresponding to each. In this paper, we explore the manifestation of tension between these two forms of egalitarianism in his theory. In addition, we also reconstruct some possible solutions provided by Cohen to soften this tension, including the three approaches of market mechanism, egalitarian ethos and value pluralism, and find them to be unsuccessful. This tension is a serious challenge that needs to be addressed in Cohen’s theory of justice.

Justice as Fairness: For Groups?

1975 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 607-614 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vernon Van Dyke
Keyword(s):  
John Rawls ◽  
Homogeneous State ◽  
Dominant Form ◽  
Justice As Fairness ◽  
Theory Of Justice ◽  
Indigenous Groups ◽  
The Social ◽  
Principles Of Justice ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Almost All

In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls assumes that the principles of justice are for individuals in a society, and in general he assumes that the society is an ethnically homogeneous state. He thus follows the tradition associated with the dominant form of the social contract theory, which focuses on the individual and the state. His assumptions neglect the fact that almost all states are ethnically plural or heterogeneous, and that many of them confer special status and rights on ethnic groups as collective entities; for example, many of them confer special status and rights on indigenous groups, on groups disadvantaged by prior discrimination, and on minorities and other groups conceded a right to survive as distinct cultural entities. Status and rights for groups necessarily mean differentiation among individuals depending on their membership; and this in turn means that a theory of justice that focuses on the individual and neglects the group both fails to account for existing practices and fails to give guidance where the practices are at issue.

The Origins of “Social Justice” in the Natural Law Philosophy of Antonio Rosmini

2018 ◽  
Vol 80 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert P. Kraynak
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Social Teaching ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Theory Of Justice ◽  
Social Nature ◽  
The Social ◽  
Natural Law Theory ◽  
The Common

Abstract“Social justice” is a powerful idea today, but its origins and meaning are unclear. One of the first to use the term was Antonio Rosmini, author of The Constitution under Social Justice (1848) and other works of moral philosophy. I argue that Rosmini arrived at his idea of social justice by developing Thomistic natural law theory into a novel view of the common good that balances two principles: (1) the equal rights and dignity of persons as ends-in-themselves, a version of “personalism” influenced by Kant and Christianity; and (2) unequal rewards for those who contribute most to society, a version of Aristotelian “proportionalism” based on the social nature of man. I conclude by comparing Rosmini's idea of social justice to John Rawls's “theory of justice” and Catholic social teaching.

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