This document contains an overview for the course Contemporary Political Philosophy, given during block 3 of the second year of IRO. The summary contains the key concepts and ideas for each lecture. This summary is perfect for studying/revising for your exam/resit next to your lecture notes. By usi...
Justice Rawls & Fairness
What principles of justice would you pick if you did not know how you were going to
be affected by them?
● Original position & Veil of ignorance
● Outcome: hypothetical contract of perfectly fair terms of deliberation
1. All people have basic liberties
2. All people have equal opportunity & access
a. Inequalities should maximize the position of the worst off
(= difference principle)
Rawls = distribution-based (give everything away due to the veil of ignorance)
Nozick & Entitlement
We begin with an unfair distribution of holdings, justice begins by protecting those
holding (assuming that they are justly acquired). Freedom is being able to decide
what to do with one’s holdings.
● Outcome: a minimal state that protects the holdings of the people, against
redistribution because that would interfere with property rights
● Outcome: NO TAXATION, wealth must be given to the poor on a voluntary
basis not because the state forces them to do so.
Desert
The conventional view that people should get what they deserve. Hard work and
talent are rewarded (logic of the market). However, some people have talents that
get rewarded and some people don’t.
Rawls’ view:
● It is right to think that it’s unfair for anyone to be better/worse off than others
as a result of how they do in the natural lottery (brute luck)
● He also thinks that people’s choices should also make no difference to how
well off they are (option luck).
The frame of justice:
Rawls: justice is a closed system and ends at the border
● Cosmopolitan view: all humans are equal, so why should justice stop at the
border?
● Statist view: We owe more to our co-nationals than to foreigners
Global justice= Justice without respect to the policy (so for all individuals)
, Liberty Republican liberty
= Citizens are actively part of a free self-governing political community that is not
subject to foreigners
Liberal liberty
= Individuals are free when there are no constraints by others (non-interference)
Idealist liberty
= The free self has autonomy over the mind
Berlin’s two concepts of liberty
Liberty prescribed the limits to what the state can do (the scope of coercion)
● Negative liberty: freedom from interference → LIBERAL
● Positive liberty: freedom defined by what you can do → IDEALIST
Negative liberty:
= a boundary space for human action, against coercion, the boundary around the
self in which others can’t enter
(optimists have trust in human nature so for them the bubble is small, pessimists
have a large bubble where the state can’t coerce them)
Positive liberty:
= freedom to do what you want after the laws, if there is no law for it then you are
allowed to do it.
(positive liberty opens the door to totalitarianism, because it accepts the idea that
there is a ‘divided self’ your smart and dumb self, if people only listened to their
dumb side, it becomes justifiable to coerce men in the name of some goal)
Berlin’s opinion:
● Freedom should be negative (freedom from interference)
● Rights can only be considered absolute (power means nothing)
● Outcome: individualism (people are protected against the state)
MacCallum’s response on Berlin:
There is a triadic relationship between positive and negative liberty. The only real
difference between positive and negative liberty is the agent (X) that defines the kind
of freedom.
Conceptions of liberty:
● Formal freedom= lack of state law PREVENTING you from acting
● Effective freedom= having the means to act as one wishes
● Freedom as autonomy= Freedom as autonomy refers to the ability of
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