Currently viewing the tag: "John Rawls"

David Friedman on Social Justice and Utilitarianism

By On May 6, 2012 · 35 Comments · In Consequentialism, Libertarianism, Social Justice

One of the themes in my recent conversation at Cato Unbound with David Friedman was whether utilitarianism or social justice is a better concept for thinking about the moral obligations we have to the poor. I recently continued that conversation on this blog with a

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Social Justice: Concept and Conceptions

By On May 2, 2012 · 13 Comments · In Libertarianism, Social Justice

Between the Todd Seavey mini-bru-ha-ha, the Cato Unbound discussion, our awesome symposium on libertarianism and land, several recent BHL posts, one from Bryan Caplan and one from Ilya Somin, we keep coming back to a single question: What is social justice? A [...]

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Rawls on Economists and Philosophers

By On April 30, 2012 · 2 Comments · In Academic Philosophy, Economics

My colleague David Levy recently alerted me to a discussion in Rawls’s Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy (2007, p. 162) on the intellectual relationship between economists and philosophers.  As Rawls points out Hume and Smith were both utilitarian philosophers and economists, and the same is true for Bentham, James Mill, John Stuart Mill and [...]

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A Defense of the Unreasonable

By On March 16, 2012 · 51 Comments · In Academic Philosophy, Democracy, Liberalism, Toleration

I really enjoyed Kevin’s recent discussion of the ‘contraception mandate,’ particularly because his posts highlight a deep and important divide in political philosophy that I think merits attention. Kevin sketches the following view about whether a law is justified:

“(The) principle of public justification (PPJ) …holds that a coercive law L is only justified [...]

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John Tomasi’s Free Market Fairness

By On February 6, 2012 · 27 Comments · In Academic Philosophy, Book/Article Reviews, Current Events, Libertarianism, Social Justice

John Tomasi’s new book, Free Market Fairness, is scheduled for release this week. I read this book in draft form almost exactly a year ago, when John was out in San Diego for a Liberty Fund conference I was running on Classical Liberalism in Contemporary Political Philosophy. A few of us (including [...]

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The Department of the Difference Principle (Or: Confused Reasons to Reject Social Justice)

By On March 3, 2011 · 21 Comments · In Social Justice

If a government wants promote some value, it could do so directly or indirectly. The distinction is best illustrated by an analogy. Suppose you think government’s one and only job is to promote good art. (No one thinks that, I know.) This alone doesn’t tell you what government should do. Setting goals doesn’t automatically tell you [...]

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