Theories of Justice PDF

Preview

Summary

Download Theories of Justice PDF

Description

Jurisprudence Lecture 13-14 Notes: Theories of Justice I.

Utilitarianism 1. Definition





 

This was a very innovative, original and erratic way of understanding morality and social relations, because what the theory was focused on was the actual consequences of actions Utilitarianism was not bothered with afterlife, will of god, metaphysical realm that was out there, they were only concerned with what is currently happening in the real world; and They made a radical claim that we need to be happier; we have a moral duty to be happy; we need to organise society so that that happiness can be achieved What matters is how happy or sad I am as an individual

2. Maximisation of good and Consequences

  

 

Utilitarianism is the maximisation of good through consequences in society Import of good that is caused by certain action If an action brings about more good than bad, then the consequences of the action will be considered good/worth pursuing; if a certain action yields more bad than good, then that actions needs to be avoided It seems simple, but this simplicity hides a lot of complexity What is good? What is it that we want to maximise? What is it that makes our lives worth living? What is the one thing that we should improve in society and in ourselves?



  

Whose good? Whose good shall we take into consideration in the calculation for the general increase in goodness? Should we be egoistic and consider the good of ourselves only? Or should we be altruistic and consider the general good of the whole society? What consequences? Actual consequences or foreseen/foreseeable consequences? What method? How to calculate those consequences? Each single act that we perform every day or should we go about planning how to maximise utility All these questions revolve around society; what we ought to do and what we owe to each other as individuals and society members and this is linked to what the notion of rights and obligations; what society should be like

3. Utilitarianism: What good?

a. Hedonism  Bentham’s suggestion was about happiness: hedonism; maximisation of pleasure and minimisation of pain; asset the amount of happiness or pain in our lives to decide if you are living the good life  This is basically how you consider you situation in everyday life; if your day was happy or sad; this is a reductionist argument i. Quantitative hedonism: what matter is just how much you experience pain and pleasure;  There is no difference between eating a good sandwich and listening to an arousing music playing, it depends on how much pleasure or pain those experiences give you,  if what matter is only the amount pleasure you experience throughout your life, if an intelligent human being who has died early at age 35, who has experience many beautiful things in life and compare with an oyster who has lived a simple life for longer live; the amount of happiness the human being and the oyster acquired would have been the same  But this seems odd; that a bare minimum life, that has been lived long enough has a higher amount of happiness than a live with has been lived to it’s full extent and with a higher consciousness; this is the problem with hedonism  this problem is countered with qualitative hedonism

ii.

Qualitative hedonism: there are some pleasures that are of a higher level than others; duration and intensity of pleasure that is experience, the quality of the pleasure matters (John Steward Miller)  This is problematic too, as we’re letting values instead of just pleasure and pain b. Preference: desire is what we should actually look at  Because people try to achieve their desire in order to happiness  In order to measure pleasure and pain, we need a proxy that people try to achieve, and this proxy is what people try to achieve; the preference that we express is the proxy that we should look at to decide the amount of pleasure of pain  Pluralistic idea of utilitarianism  Not just pleasure and pain, it is the things that you prefer to do that you should maximise.  Problem with this: the counting grass example; this guy who just sits on the lawn all day counting grass and he is happy with it, we think that this is a life wasted, we would like to suggest that there is an objective list of goods that makes life worth living c. Objective list  An objective list of good that is valuable, makes life worth living  Some goods are not types of feelings, what matter is what makes our life meaningful  Example: the love I have for my family is independent from the amount of pleasure or pain that I gain from spending time with my family  This is far from the simple idea of pleasure and pain calculation  If there is an objective list, then we should not care about the individual preferences, we should push people towards those goods in the objective list; and strive for a perfect society  Perfectionism: the moral duty that society has to push individuals to the list of objective goods 4. Whose good?

a. Individual  Whether certain people achieve a certain amount of utility(pleasure/pain)  Using a sort of egoism; you do something by making a choice that makes you happy b. Group  When you’re making decision for the group, you should have an agent neutral calculation c. Everyone affected  But what is a group, how far back should we go to consider who is in the group 5. What consequences?

a. Actual consequences  What is the right and wrong thing to do? b. Foreseeable consequences  What matter is what could have been expected of the action  Focus more on the agency of the person; was the person capable of expecting the results or not  More subjective; look at the practical interaction that has taken place  Foreseen vs. Foreseeable?

6. What method?

a. Through acts: act utilitarianism  Calculate the effect of actions performed everyday, whether that action produced more utility or less utility b. Rule utilitarianism  Focuses on rules we need to follow  If we follow the rules, there will be good outcomes  If we follow rules only, then do we need not to look at outcomes? 7. Criticism of Utilitarianism a. Experience machine



It is not about just the outcome of the experience/utility; you experience, because you want the actual experience of doing the thing

b. Utility monster

c. Happiness pump

d. Repugnant conclusion

e. Interpersonal comparison

f. Offensive tastes

II.

Fairness (John Rawl’s theory of rights) 1. Justice as Fairness

2. Against utilitarianism

 



 



He started building his idea of justice by attacking the idea of utilitarianism as justice His problem with utilitarianism is that it makes a logical jump in its development; at individual level, it states that you are justified in suffering a bit/postponing your satisfaction if that act will eventually yield more overall satisfaction; While this is fair at individual level, utilitarians made a mistake by thinking that the whole society can think like this; that the individual suffering of some that leads to the overall happiness of all of society is a fair transaction; why somebody should give up for collective happiness

This flattens the distinctiveness of people, it treats everybody as an abstract amorphous atom within society, he doesn’t give each one of us due Rawls was very critical of utilitarianism from this point of view; he thinks that utilitarianism doesn’t treat everyone equally, but treats everyone amorphously; utilitarianism doesn’t care about differences in taste/preferences, in ideals He set out to imagine a different kind of society where people could develop their own preferences, own patterns of life, their own decision making processes and be responsible for those; what he wanted to do was imagine a



political system which had a minimal structure, institutional, legal and political and with a degree of redistribution of resources which allow people to pursue their goals and desires What is the structure? What are the elements that makes up this kind of society? The problem is we are biased, we come from backgrounds, we are historical creatures, we have talents, that makes us have a skewed view of what is right and what is wrong, what is fair and what is unjust

3. Original position: A thought experiment a. Archimedean Point

  



Thought experiment: let’s imagine we’re all on equal footing and imagine from that point of view a society to which all would agree But how do we as a society get to the original position? Cause it is easy to imagine but reality is much harder Recognizing that social institutions distort our views (by sometimes generating envy, resentment, alienation, or false consciousness) and bias matters in their own favor (by indoctrinating and habituating those who grow up under them), Rawls saw the need for a justificatory device that would give us critical distance from them. The original position (OP) is his “Archimedean Point,” the fulcrum he uses to obtain critical leverage. TJ at 230-32. The OP is a thought experiment that asks: what principles of social justice would be chosen by parties thoroughly knowledgeable about human affairs in general but wholly deprived—by the “veil of ignorance”—of information about the particular person or persons they represent? About their society, Rawls has the parties simply assume that it is characterized by the “circumstances of justice,” which principally include (a) the fact that material goods are scarce, but moderately so and (b) that there is, within society, a plurality of worldviews—“conceptions of the good” —moral, religious, and secular. TJ at sec. 22.

b. Veil of ignorance

 





 

To get to the original position, John Rawls proposed the veil of ignorance imagine that we are all delegates of the rest of the population, and that we have the power to decide for the rest of the population what society should look like; what are the basic structure, institution and entitlements that are present in society But again, we do not know at all who we are representing, the thing you need to assume as a delegate is you’re representing somebody who would like more primary goods than not; you would like a minimum amount of rights of liberties, equality, of political participation; you would like an equal amount or larger than smaller amount of opportunities in your life; you would like a higher rather than a smaller amount of redistribution of resources Here is the result of the attack on utilitarianism; cause an utilitarianism would say clearly you would like a society that would either average utility or create a maximum amount of utility for each person available In Rawl’s theory of justice as fairness, this is not what people would like as in utilitarianism The parties in the hypothetical OP are to choose on behalf of persons in society, for whom they are, in effect, trustees. PL at 76, 106. The veil of ignorance, however, prevents the parties from knowing anything particular about the preferences, likes or dislikes, commitments or aversions of those persons. They also know nothing particular about the society for which they are choosing. On what basis, then, can the parties choose? To ascribe to them a full theory of the human good would fly in the face of the facts of pluralism, for such theories are deeply controversial. Instead, Rawls suggests, we should ascribe to them a “thinner” or less controversial set of commitments. At the core of these are what he calls the “primary goods:” rights, liberties, and opportunities; income and wealth; and the social bases of self-respect. To give the parties a definite basis on which to reason, Rawls postulates that the parties “normally prefer more primary goods rather than less.” TJ at 123.

c. Maximum choice



 

Rawl’s suggest that you would be conservative and choose the distribution of resources of primary goods that ensures the most comfortable arrangement for the worst off Because you don’t know who you’re going to represent, you will always go for the maximin: the maximisation of the minimum standard If we operate behind the veil of ignorance and we are placed in the original position, we have all the incentives to guarantee individuals at the bottom tier of the social structure the maximum amount of resources in any configuration

d. The principles of Justice

  

The principle of justice as fairness; in a given just society, we should have 2 principles of justice Define justice as an exercise in fairness The liberty principle addresses the essentials of the constitutional structure of a given society; it holds that society must assure each citizen an equal claim to

 









a fully adequate scheme of equal basic rights and liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme for all We should all have the same amount of liberty and equality in a given society The equality principle: the first part holds that of the second principle holds that the social structures that shape this distribution must satisfy the requirements of “fair equality of opportunity.”; they need to give each and every individual the chance to acquire any position in society, it doesn’t mean that everyone CAN do that, but in principle there’s no limitation/preclusion to get to any position The second part of the second principle is the famous—or infamous— “Difference Principle.” It holds that social and economic inequalities … are to be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society; this means that we can have differences in wealth and position/success, but these differences are to be accepted only and in so far they improve the position of the worst off in society; it is acceptable to have people who have outrageous amount of wealth, but only in so far that the least advantageous people in society get an advantage over that

This suggests a redistribution of resources throughout society; that we shouldn’t limit enterprise and talents of people in the name of an equality of distribution; rather we should let people thrive on the basis of their talents, inclinations, ambitions, choices but that is on the basis that even those who are worst off will actually enjoy an improvement of their conditions on that basis This difference principle doesn’t suggest that the distance between the wealthy and the poor should be kept the same throughout a given period of time, but the mechanism between rich and poor can be increase, only if that the worst off will be better off because of that change Each of these three centrally addresses a different set of primary goods: the First Principle concerns rights and liberties; the principle of Fair Equality of Opportunity concerns opportunities; and the Difference Principle primarily





concerns income and wealth. (That the view adequately secures the social basis of self-respect is something that Rawls argues more holistically). Rawl’s is trying to strike a balance between the fact that you don’t deserve the talents that you have, you didn’t do anything to be tall, strong, intelligent, driven; you don’t have much entitlement to those talents, but on the other hand, you shouldn’t be punished for those talents, you shouldn’t be used as a mule for society This is very different from utilitarian’s take on what a just society should be, it doesn’t take into consideration the maximization of happiness, but what you deserve on the basis of your actions

4. Reflective equilibrium







III.

Rawl’s strongly supported this idea, and he foresaw the need to work from both ends, our moral convictions, pulling and adjusting things as we go; it means that when we think of any moral conundrum that we encounter, you conceive from two perspective; One is our moral intuitionism, you feel immediately what is the right thing to do; when deciding right and wrong, our thought process will go through a general abstract justification/judgement, ex: wrong to impose suffering on living beings, having general ideas on what is good and is to be done; sometimes they conflict; So we either adjust

Entitlement...