Since it appeared in 1971, John Rawls's A Theory of Justice has become a classic. The author has now revised the original edition to clear up a number of difficulties he and others have found in the original book. Rawls aims to express an essential part of the common core of the democratic tradition--justice as fairness--and to provide an alternative to utilitarianism, which had dominated the Anglo-Saxon tradition of political thought since the nineteenth century. Rawls substitutes the ideal of the (...) social contract as a more satisfactory account of the basic rights and liberties of citizens as free and equal persons. "Each person," writes Rawls, "possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override." Advancing the ideas of Rousseau, Kant, Emerson, and Lincoln, Rawls's theory is as powerful today as it was when first published. (shrink)

Though the revised edition of A Theory of Justice, published in 1999, is the definitive statement of Rawls's view, so much of the extensive literature on Rawls's theory refers to the first edition. This reissue makes the first edition once again available for scholars and serious students of Rawls's work.

The idea that a just political system must ignore or nullify socially caused initial advantages in competing for positions and other social benefits is as old as political philosophy itself. Plato called for social mobility among his classes so that all could gravitate toward the classes for which their temperaments naturally suited them. The idea that the system must take positive steps to correct for these differences among individuals is likewise as old as the concept of public education, the supposed (...) great equalizer. But the claim that society must correct also for natural differences among individuals – differences in intelligence, talents, beauty, and physical prowess – is far more recent, having been articulated most forcefully by Rawls. The reasoning underlying this further step toward a more radical notion of equal opportunity appeals to the fact that natural differences are equally arbitrary from a moral point of view as a basis for differential rewards as are socially caused differences. A person no more deserves to be born smart than rich. Why then should the former but not the latter be allowed to influence future benefits and rewards? A negative answer, however, creates a tension within a liberal theory of justice between the demand to nullify natural differences, or to use them to the benefit of those least well endowed, and the demand to respect distinct individuals that supposedly grounds such a theory. (shrink)

The varying demands of justice are often thought to depend on a distinction between natural and social inequalities, but making this distinction has been little discussed, and it has been dismissed by philosophers of biology. It cannot be established by a simple causal criterion, nor by use of the analysis of variance, nor by distinguishing the innate from the acquired. Whether an inequality can be socially controlled provides the most plausible criterion, so 'natural' and 'social' are misleading labels for types (...) of inequality. The analysis of these depends, besides, on how fine-grained the descriptions are; so it is implausible to think that the natural/social distinction, when drawn in terms of social control, is relevant to theories of justice. (shrink)

Temkin presents a new way of thinking about equality and inequality that challenges the assumptions of philosophers, welfare economists, and others, and has significant implications on both a practical and theoretical level.

Debates concerning principles of justice need to be attentive to various types of social process. One concerns the distribution of resources between groups defined as talented and untalented. Another concerns the social mechanisms by which people come to be categorised as talented and untalented. Political philosophers have paid considerable attention to the former issues, much less to the latter. That, I shall argue, represents a significant oversight.

In this article I argue against Ronald Dworkin's rejection of the labour auction in his ‘Equality of Resources’. I criticize Dworkin's claims that the talented would envy the untalented in such an auction, and that the talented in particular would be enslaved by it. I identify some ways in which the talent auction is underdescribed and I compare the results for the condition of the talented of different further descriptions of it. I conclude that Dworkin's deviation from the ‘envy test’ (...) criterion results in an inequality between the talented and the untalented which cannot be justified in egalitarian terms. Correspondence:c1 [email protected]. (shrink)

Debates concerning principles of justice need to be attentive to various types of social process. One concerns the distribution of resources between groups defined as talented and untalented. Another concerns the social mechanisms by which people come to be categorised as talented and untalented. Political philosophers have paid considerable attention to the former issues, much less to the latter. That, I shall argue, represents a significant oversight.

Many recent political philosophers have attempted to demonstrate that choice and responsibility can be incorporated into the framework of an egalitarian theory of distributive justice. This article argues, however, that the project of developing a responsibility-based conception of egalitarian justice is misconceived. The project represents an attempt to defuse conservative criticism of the welfare state and of egalitarian liberalism more generally. But by mimicking the conservative’s emphasis on choice and responsibility, advocates of responsibility-based egalitarianism unwittingly inherit the conservative’s unsustainable justificatory (...) ambitions, unattractive moralism, and questionable metaphysical commitments. More importantly, they misrepresent the nature of our concern with equality as a value. (shrink)

As an imprint of Confucian culture, China’s education intersects state governance in making and governing educational subjects as ‘talent’, an official translation of the Chinese term ‘rencai’ (literally, human-talent). Whereas the English word ‘talent’ itself denotes ‘[people with] natural aptitude or skill’, ‘talent’ is currently mobilized in China not only as a globalized discourse that speaks to the most aspired educational subjects for the 21st century but also as a re-invoked cultural notion that relates to Confucian wisdom. Drawing upon Foucault’s (...) biopower hypothesis and Confucian thought, this paper leverages upon China’s unique manipulation of ‘talent’ as certain skills and human subjects, both cultivable through education, to problematize China’s talent making and governing in two dimensions. First, it unpacks the various technologies of power entangled in China’s talent making and governing within its ‘state governance’ paradigm. Second, it unpacks Confucian thought as an archaeological prototype for China’s present talent appeal, meanwhile explicating their divergences in defining ‘human’, ‘talent’, and the human-talent interpellation. In so doing, this paper makes two arguments. First, the linguistic notion of ‘talent’ functions as a Foucauldian apparatus of biopower, making (up) new kinds of people and normalizing a certain population as the objective/object of China’s state governance. Second, CPC’s re-invocation of Confucian talent discourses is more of a rhetorical strategy than an authentic cultural renaissance gesture. (shrink)

There is an important distinction between a person's ’initial genetic endowment’ and his ’post‐conception inputs’ such as nutrition and education. From a left‐libertarian perspective that views persons as self‐owning, children have an enforceable claim that parents should provide adequate ’post‐conception’ inputs. Moreover, with the revolution in genetic science, it is now possible to effect genetic changes without altering identity. If so, children can, in principle, claim a right against ’genetic‐disablement’.

One of the central theses of egalitarian liberals in the domain of distributive justice is that talented individuals should not be allowed to keep their entire market-income even if it flows solely from their greater abilities. This claim is usually supported by one of several arguments or some mixture of them, but in the present paper, I want to concentrate on the version that invokes equality of opportunity as its starting point. Namely, it is claimed that every human being should (...) enjoy an equal starting point in the life-race but that this is not secured insofar as some have greater natural talents than others. Therefore, egalitarians hold that results that arise from such an unfair situation are unjust and should be corrected by a redistributive taxation. I want to criticize this argument by hoping to show that it presupposes an untenable view about identity of persons. (shrink)