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In this stimulating work of political philosophy, acclaimed philosopher G. A. Cohen sets out to rescue the egalitarian thesis that in a society in which distributive justice prevails, peopleâes material prospects are roughly equal. Arguing against the Rawlsian version of a just society, Cohen demonstrates that distributive justice does not tolerate deep inequality. In the course of providing a deep and sophisticated critique of Rawlsâes theory of justice, Cohen demonstrates that questions of distributive justice arise not only for the state (...) but also for people in their daily lives. The right rules for the macro scale of public institutions and policies also apply, with suitable adjustments, to the micro level of individual decision-making. Cohen also charges Rawlsâes constructivism with systematically conflating the concept of justice with other concepts. Within the Rawlsian architectonic, justice is not distinguished either from other values or from optimal rules of social regulation. The elimination of those conflations brings justice closer to equality. (shrink)

In the Stoics we find a combination of two perspectives which are commonly thought to conflict: the embedded perspective from within one's social context, and the universal perspective of the member of the moral community of rational beings. I argue that the Stoics do have a unified theory, one which avoids problems that trouble some modern theories which try to unite these perspectives.

Some of the earliest Western ideas about the virtues of character gave justice a prominent position, but if moral philosophy has made any progress at all in the past two centuries, we might think it worthwhile to reconsider what that virtue involves. Kant seems (even to most non-Kantians) to have crystallized something important to our relations with others in formulating a proscription against treating others merely as means. And twentieth-century moral and political theory put the justice of social institutions in (...) the spotlight in an unprecedented way. Here I explore the significance of these developments for what it is to be a just person (the nature of “individual justice”) as it was originally understood, within the eudaimonist virtue-ethical theories of the ancient Greeks. By any standard, ancient thinking about individual justice seems to have been incomplete in important ways; perhaps, in virtue of these advances in moral theory, we are in position to enrich our thinking about it. (shrink)

In this book, T. M. Scanlon offers new answers to these questions, as they apply to the central part of morality that concerns what we owe to each other.

Previous edition, 1st, published in 1971.

The purpose is to stage a dialogue between a pre-liberal conception of justice, represented by Aristotle as revived with the help of ideas of Lucas, Jouvenel and G. A. Cohen, and a liberal conception, as founded in Kant and refurbished, renewed and worked out in A Theory of Justice by John Rawls. Among the questions at issue are the roles of habit, disposition and formation; the nature of the dependency between the justice of the citizen of a polity and the (...) justice of the constitutional arrangements of the polity; the superior prospects of a piecemeal, bottom-up approach to justice or of a top-down, contractual approach; the remedial/restorative conception of justice versus more than merely remedial/restorative conceptions; tolerance of contingency; the propensity of liberal regimes to replace by managerial procedures more and more of the arrangements that previously entrusted important matters to the practical judgement of individuals; the multiplicity and diversity of the neo-Aristotelian requisites for a good polity versus the rather simpler demands of liberalism, which relate mostly to legitimacy; the idea of equality proper to a just and good polity; the closed, open enough, or completely open character of such a polity. (shrink)

One important objection to virtue ethical theories is that they apparently must account for the wrongness of a wrong action in terms of a lack of virtue (or presence of vice) in the agent, and not in terms of the effects of the action on its victim. We take such effects to ground deontic constraints on how we may act, and virtue theory appears unable to account for such constraints. I claim, however, that eudaimonist virtue theory can account for wrongness (...) in just this way. I draw on recent work by Stephen Darwall on the “second-person standpoint,” in which we see others as independent sources of claims on us —as sources of “deontic constraints.” We have reason to occupy that standpoint as a matter of virtue, and thus virtuous agents should and will have reasons to respect deontic constraints. I argue for this claim as an element of a plausible eudaimonist virtue theory, and rebut objections that the view misunderstands the nature of or reasons for respecting such constraints. (shrink)

Liberalism is a distinctively modern political conception. Only in modern times do we find, as the object of both systematic reflection and widespread allegiance and institutionalization, the idea that the principles of political association, being coercive, should be justifiable to all whom they are to bind. And so only here do we find the idea that these principles should rest, so far as possible, on a core, minimal morality which reasonable people can share, given their expectably divergent religious convictions and (...) conceptions of the meaning of life. No longer does it seem evident—as it did, let us say, before the seventeenth century—that the aim of political association must be to bring man into harmony with God's purposes or to serve some comprehensive vision of the good life. The causes of this transformation are various, and not all of them lie at the level of moral principle. But a change in moral consciousness has certainly been one of the factors involved. As Hegel observed, modern culture is inherently a reflective one: notions of principle are essential to our self-understanding and thus to the stability of the social forms in which we participate. Modern culture has no room for a dichotomy between “in principle” and “in practice.” It is worth determining, then, what new moral conceptions have been responsible for the emergence of modern liberalism. Not only will we thereby better understand how we have become who we are, we will also have a surer grasp of the principles that sustain our political life. (shrink)

睰osalind Hursthouse; XIII*—After Hume's Justice1, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 91, Issue 1, 1 June 1991, Pages 229–246, https://doi.org/10.10.

This new and up-to-date edition of a book that has been central to political philosophy, history, and revolutionary thought for two hundred years offers readers a dire warning of the consequences that follow the mismanagement of change. Written for a generation presented with challenges of terrible proportions--the Industrial, American, and French Revolutions, to name the most obvious--Burke's Reflections of the Revolution in France displays an acute awareness of how high political stakes can be, as well as a keen ability to (...) set contemporary problems within a wider context of political theory. (shrink)

Argues that role obligations are not marginal, "that they are central to morality and should be taken seriously." "A 'role obligation' is a moral requirement, which attaches to an institutional role, whose content is fixed by the function of the role, and whose normative force flows from the role." Rejects what he calls the doctrine of perfect adequacy which holds that role obligations are both comprehensive and transparent. Although this may have been plausible at earlier times, it is clearly implausible (...) now. It is the implausibility of this doctrine which has led theorists to accept the standard view: which holds that role obligations that are noncontractual are extremely problematic. Once we reject the doctrine of perfect adequacy, however, we can see the significance of role obligations more clearly. [The content of role obligations, Hardimon admits, is indeterminate in the sense that it is subject to constructive interpretation. This suggests, however, that the obligations are not the source of their normative power, rather it is their justifying value which explains why some role requirements are obligatory. This is confirmed by the rest of the article.] One thing that should lead us to question the notion that we do not have obligations of this sort by considering what it would be like to have no noncontractual role obligations. [This, however, does not establish that the force of role obligations flows from the obligations themselves.] One objection to NCR obligations is that they may require acting in accordance with an unjust institution. However, the solution here is the same as with contractual obligations: unjust institutions and contracts do not bind. Moves on to identity. "What I am assuming is that most of us do at least tacitly conceive of ourselves as family members and citizens, that these self-understandings are central to our own general self-conception, and that we can, through reflection come to recognize that we do in fact conceive of ourselves in these ways. If this is correct, then abandoning the idea that we have noncontractual role obligations would require radical revision of our self-conception, for we cannot give up the idea of nonctractual role obligation without also ceasing to conceive of ourselves as family members and citizens. What, after all, would it mean to say that we conceive of ourselves as family members but regard oursleves as having no familial obligations whatsoever?...The upshot of the last two paragraphs is that the cost of abandoning our conception of ourselves as family members and citizens would be enormous." [The moral significance of identity is unclear here - is the only normative element loss of identity with rejection of role obligations? What of the case when one's identity is caught up in a role which requires one to act immorally in other ways?] If impressment is our concern, it shouldn't be, for role obligations are not like impressment - one is born into them, not impressed [how does this make a difference?]. Role must be reflectively acceptable to produce genuine obligations. "Determining whether a given social role is reflectively acceptable involves stepping back from that role in thought and asking whether it is a role people ought to occupy and play. Determining that a given social role is reflectively acceptable involves judging that it is meaningful, rational, or good." [Hence, some independent value is going to do all the work for role obligations - the normative force of a role does not flow from the role itself.] Concerning voluntary roles - even if we agree that voluntary acceptance is essential, this omits important elements of role identification. "The key component of the idea of identifying with a role is that of conceiving of oneself as someone for whom the norms, that is, the evaluative standards associated with a role, its rights, duties, virtues, ideals, and supererogations, have reason-giving force. Here is the idea. If you identify with a role, its norms will function for you as reasons. If you are a judge who identifies with the role of judge, the fact that this is something judges do will give you a reason for doing it." [Clearly a non-sequiter - conceiving of oneself as having a reason does not give oneself a reason for doing - there must actually be a reason for doing something. Moreover, the content of the role may be in question - and here we are to engage in constructive interpretation, which is just to say that we are to identify some underlying value and this will serve to justify and determine the content of the role. Refers to usage of "look, its your job" as basis for substantiating claims about the normative force of identity. "But here a basic point of similarity emerges between contractual and noncontractual role obligations. People can and do identify with their noncontractual roles and not just with their contractual roles. And when they do, assuming that the appropriate background moral conditions are in place, the fact taht they occupy these roles will provide them with reasons for carrying out the tasks of their noncontractual roles...The basic form of motivation provided by identification with contractual and noncontractual role obligations is the same.". (shrink)

Kant claims that autonomy is possible only if the law that determines the will disregards any incentive grounded in the natural world. Here I develop and defend an alternative notion of autonomy, drawn from the ancient eudaimonists, on which practical reason is grounded in our interest in living well. This allows eudaimonism a conception of the autonomy of the will in which (like Kant’s) the will is the source of its own laws, but in which (unlike Kant’s) it has an (...) object that is thoroughly situated in the empirical world. (shrink)