She argues that the struggle to remain connected to an ancestral language and culture is a site of common ground: people from all backgrounds can recognize the crucial role of language in forming a sense of self. Buy Elsewhere Bookshop. Black lives matter. Black voices matter. Rawls included most of the liberties in the U. Bill of Rights, such as freedom of speech and due process of law. He added some liberties from the broader area of human rights, like freedom of travel. Rawls recognized the right of private individuals, corporations, or workers to own private property.
But he omitted the right to own the "means of production" e. He also left out the right to inherit wealth. These things were not basic liberties in his view. Rawls agreed that basic liberties could be limited, but "only for the sake of liberty. This Second Principle focused on equality. Rawls realized that a society could not avoid inequalities among its people. Inequalities result from such things as one's inherited characteristics, social class, personal motivation, and even luck.
Even so, Rawls insisted that a just society should find ways to reduce inequalities in areas where it can act. By "offices and positions" in his Second Principle, Rawls meant especially the best jobs in private business and public employment. He said that these jobs should be "open" to everyone by the society providing "fair equality of opportunity.
Another way would be to provide everyone easy access to education. The most controversial element of his theory of social justice was his Difference Principle. He first defined it in a essay. Later, when he wrote A Theory of Justice, he used the phrase, "least-advantaged members of society" to refer to those at the bottom of economic ladder.
These might be unskilled individuals, earning the lowest wages in the society. Under the Difference Principle, Rawls favored maximizing the improvement of the "least-advantaged" group in society. He would do this not only by providing "fair equality of opportunity," but also by such possible ways as a guaranteed minimum income or minimum wage his preference. Rawls agreed that this Difference Principle gave his theory of social justice a liberal character.
Finally, Rawls ranked his principles of social justice in the order of their priority. The First Principle "basic liberties" holds priority over the Second Principle. The first part of the Second Principle "fair equality of opportunity" holds priority over the second part Difference Principle. But he believed that both the First and Second Principles together are necessary for a just society.
Rawls was interested in political philosophy. Thus he focused on the basic institutions of society. Unless such institutions as the constitution, economy, and education system operated in a fair way for all, he argued, social justice would not exist in a society. Rawls set out to discover an impartial way to decide what the best principles for a just society were. He reached back several hundred years to philosophers like John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau who had developed the idea of a social contract.
Locke and Rousseau had written that people in the distant past had formed a contract between themselves and their leader. The people would obey their leader, usually a king, and he would guarantee their natural rights. This would be the basis for a just society.
Thomas Jefferson relied on this social contract idea in writing the Declaration of Independence. By the 20th century, most philosophers had dismissed the social contract as a quaint myth. Rawls, however, revived the social contract concept of people agreeing what constitutes a just society.
Rawls devised a hypothetical version of the social contract. Some have called it a "thought experiment" Rawls called it the "Original Position". This was not a real gathering with real people, bargaining over an agreement. Instead, it was an imaginary meeting held under strict conditions that permitted individuals to deliberate only by using their reason and logic. Their task was to evaluate principles of social justice and choose the best ones.
Their decision would be binding on their society forever. Rawls added a requirement to assure that the choice of social justice principles would truly be impartial. The persons in this mental exercise had to choose their justice principles under a "veil of ignorance. It was as if some force had plucked these people from a society and caused them to experience severe amnesia. Under the "veil of ignorance," these imaginary people would not know their own age, sex, race, social class, religion, abilities, preferences, life goals, or anything else about themselves.
They would also be ignorant of the society from which they came. For Donner , p. Again, it is not our purpose here to judge this proposition. Nevertheless, we believe this is not enough to prevent the promotion of the idea that the sacrifices imposed on human action by deontological constructs may also be too demanding to accommodate alternative competing rules of behavior.
The systems are not commensurable. More specifically, in addition to an overall presentation of his framework, we will focus on the aspects of his thought that are relevant to the establishment of the demandingness problem. The basic reference work is A Theory of Justice, which Rawls published in Rawls conceives justice as fairness at variance with the utilitarian views of human nature Lyons, In this theory, two are the guiding principles.
People are, for example, familiar with the concept of intelligence, but they do not know which individuals are more endowed with it; they know the place of pecuniary forces, but they do not know which individuals are the wealthiest. Allegedly, this would force people to evaluate generic principles solely based on general moral standards. These primary social goods are, roughly, rights, liberties, opportunities, and income and wealth Rawls, In their most complete versions, Rawls establishes them as follows.
Just like Nozick , one might question whether these principles would actually be the ones people agree on. We, on the other hand, assume they are true.
Our inquiry is placed after the definition of the principles, that is, in the association of two further characteristics involving them.
First, a priority rule establishes a lexical primacy of the first principle over the second Rawls, Second, the ambiguity of the difference principle generates four possible interpretations, which Rawls classifies in the following terms: a system of natural liberty; b natural aristocracy; c liberal equality; and d democratic equality.
The four interpretations assume the first principle and its primacy as given. Our next exercise is, then, to evaluate the compatibility between the primacy of the principle of greatest equal liberty and the democratic equality interpretation.
Accordingly, the prospects of the more advantaged individuals are not to be improved unless the prospects of the less fortunate ones are improved as well. In this interpretation, Rawls argues, unlike the other three, pure procedural justice may be invoked, at least to some extent.
Even though justice is consistent with efficiency, the former has priority over the latter. In the case of an unfair arrangement, changes are necessary to make the system more just, even to the expense of efficiency. A pretensely equal society, therefore, in order to provide genuine equality of opportunity, must give extra care and attention to those whose natural endowments are scarcer and social positions are less favorable. The redressing of this inegalitarian bias is what truly represents treating people equally.
Social and natural handicaps are neither just nor unjust, but simply arbitrary natural facts. What is asked from society is that it deals with these facts.
Justice lies in the effort towards the improvement of the long-term expectations of the least favored through coordinated and egalitarian actions Rawls, More specifically, in the sense defined by Wight , the sort of Kantian reasoning found in TJ is characterized as duty-based deontology. The distinguishing features of this sort of ethical compass are: a the notion that actions are charged as right or moral for their own features and not for assuring good foreseeable outcomes; and b the demandingness to do the right action regardless of its results White, a ; Wight, It is our contention that, if these liberties cannot be restricted for any other reason, they also cannot be limited for the sake of a higher degree of social equality.
In fact, Rawls himself, in a clear denial of the utilitarian doctrine, imposes that rights are not subject to social calculus Rawls, Rawls recognized that an argument of this sort might be used to question his theory. That is not what we defend here. Rawls , p. Our position is, on the other hand, that this is something that should be granted by the inner primacy of his first principle. It is also important to remark, nonetheless, that the right to hold personal property excludes the right to hold the property of means of production, for which Rawls has been often attacked.
Concerning this specific acknowledgment about productive property, Rawls is straightforward, stating that the liberty to hold the means of production escapes the principles of justice and depends upon the historically-defined, social institutions and traditions of a country. Given that, in order to look for an internal tension, we take his principles for granted, we believe this point in case — albeit worth highlighting — does not affect our argument.
Furthermore, let us reconsider the two cases in which Rawls recognizes liberties might be restricted. First, liberties can be restricted if this movement strengthens the system of liberties shared by all. Therefore, we pragmatically argue, the system of basic liberties would be weakened by the restriction on the practice of basic liberty V. Second, liberties can be restricted if unequal liberties are acceptable to those with lesser freedom.
This is a more intricate subject than the previous one. These liberties are deontological rights of each individual.
In this setting, we claim, people would not agree on the restriction of any basic liberty on behalf of social equality. Utilitarianism is a version of consequentialism. Consequentialism, in its turn, is usually held to be the teleological approach to moral decisions in which the right action is simply the one that produces the highest net pleasure, that is, the most good Driver, ; MacIntyre, ; Wight, This gives every consequentialist action a distinctive excellence and condemns any other kind of non-consequentialist effort.
The latter two philosophical tenets are not necessarily incompatible, because they do not serve any specific ethical agenda, as utilitarianism does. The deontological way in which Rawls attempted to integrate these two ideas, however, creates a tension that might render liberalism and egalitarianism irreconcilable. The reason for this is that deontology, given its watertight condition, is nearly as much demanding as consequentialism White, a , b.
It is true that Rawls defines some situations in which liberty can be neglected on behalf of equality, but we believe that his effort is not enough to reconcile his system. The argument for this has already been presented and regards the binding characters of his assumptions. Accordingly, the moral pitfalls involved both in consequentialist and in deontological decision-making have the same root, but may yield opposite results. This problem, simply put, establishes that a train will kill five people tied to its track, unless it is led into a spur leading off to the right, where only one person is tied to the track.
From a deontological standpoint, on the other hand, one may believe that killing is unavoidably immoral, while letting five people die in a passive manner is not. Despite this net result, from a deontological perspective, this scenario would preserve the morality of the agent and no intrinsically immoral act would be undertaken. As defined in this essay, we believe this tension to be a product of the deontological ethics encompassing his integration of liberalism and egalitarianism.
There is no a priori impediment to the reconciliation between liberalism and egalitarianism, which could be approached in several forms. It is important to remark that this does not mean any deontological system is open-ended.
This tension, we defended, finds analogous ethical roots in utilitarian approaches, whose demandingness lies in the necessarily consequentialist bases they are built upon. We do not intend to remove Rawls from his honorary place in the histories of both philosophy and economics and we are not ambitious enough to think we are either able to do so or in a position to convince the scientific community that our conclusion is right. Barry, N. On classical liberalism and libertarianism.
Houndmills, UK: Macmillan. Berlin, I.
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