Amanda Joy PHI 100 Robert King Prelim #2 1) In this statement, “Any just society must ensure that whatever the property ownership arrangement in that society, they enable all people to meet their needs,” both the libertarianism and utilitarianism reject this egalitarian criterion of a just society. The libertarians would reject this claim due to the fact that they feel that a just society needs to protect the liberty and freedom of each individual to pursue his or her end desires. The Libertarian view requires them to be free to choose their own ends and free to pursue them without interference from others. Libertarians feel strongly that each person should have the same freedom to pursue his chosen ends and that each person is obligated to hold back from interfering with others in their freedom to pursue their ends. This is necessary to protect each individual's freedom. The Libertarians feel that having certain rights, which protect his or her liberty, are necessary to pursue a beautiful kind of life. Libertarians have three main requirements: life, liberty, and property. Property, in their opinion does not mean only real estate; it includes anything that you can declare your own. Property can include clothing, your car, your jewelry, your books and papers. The right of property is not the right to take it from others; this would interfere with their property rights. It is rather the right to work for it, to obtain non-coercively the money or services which you can present in voluntary exchanges. For example, depriving people of property is depriving them of the means by which they live, the freedom of the individual citizen to do what he wishes with his own life and to plan for the future. Without the right to prop... ... middle of paper ... ...egalitarian theory of justice? The main idea behind his theory is that all social primary goods of liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, must be distributed equally. The egalitarian way of thinking is simply that any situation must be equal, equally talented, equally motivated and therefore have equal life prospects. It requires a society that believes and lives by equality and more respect. That is exactly what Rawls has been attempting to demonstrate by using the veil of ignorance, the thought-experiment. All of these factors were demonstrating a main principle that Rawls wants people to seek the right to utilize their own talents without being worried about what others are going to think or feel about them; either they are good or bad. Rawls is suggesting that this is done by sharing one another’s fate, by doing this it will create a more equal society.
Equality deserves the right to be motivated in his own way, and the people in the world today would or would not benefit from being motivated in all the same ways. Firstly, the main character was creating electricity to finally be added into the House of Scholars. Next, he deserves the right to be motivated in this way because he is his own person. Finally, in today’s world if everyone was motivated in the same way we would not be our own person anymore. In conclusion, every man has his own
Libertarianism is a political philosophy that upholds free will as its pivotal objective. As a natural law, there are no events that happen by chance, each event is derived from a cause that led to a specific effect. The law of cause and effect is one of the most universal and most certain of all laws. Ted sider says “humans and humans alone transcend the laws of nature; they are free.” Only humans are dismissed from the effects of a cause when it comes to Free will. I believe it is flawed to assume that we are the only exception to a natural law of our universe. Something as complex as our brains, such as the universe for example, did not create itself, or the phenomenon’s that occur in it. We know that in our solar system events all derive from a specific cause and we also know that everything in our universe is made up of the same matter, and we are all connected energetically. With that being said, I think it is absurd to believe that humans transcend the most established law of
According to Liberalism, people should be granted liberty and equality. This political view is one in which it believes in free and fair elections, a Bill of Rights, and most importantly, civil rights. The foundation of the Liberalist political view can be traced all the way back to the 17th century when philosopher John Locke introduced the philosophy of people having natural rights. Locke’s philosophy included what is known as the Law of Nature in which he states that people use reason to pursue their own self-interest and that they are born with an innate sense of right and wrong. Locke also introduced the idea of State of Nature in which people live within reason without a government. Locke believed that in an absolute State of Nature, people could live together in a rational matter. For example, there would be a rational limitation on property. This means that people would only use as much land as they needed in order to survive. Of all the ideas Locke introduced, his most important one would be that people are born with natural rights. These natural rights Locke is referring to are the right to life, liberty, and property....
...is pretty solid. The most accessible way to argue against it is to argue against materialism. Arguing against materialism with a dualist view is only partially successful because it entails that there still is a material self that is determined which can’t be free in the libertarian sense. The only way to successfully unravel the argument is with an idealist—mind only—substance view. It you viewed humans in this way, humans would not be determined and able to have free will (even in the libertarian sense!) Even more daring would be trying to reject determinism and accept libertarian freedom using a material viewpoint. Although it is possible, it leads to quite a conflicting view. However, the view that makes the most sense is the argument. This seemingly valid argument says that humans are materials which make them determined which disallows their freedom.
This theory maybe seen as the far left of the free will argument and although this theory fits the ideology of most people on planet earth, it seems illogical to think freedom is absolute. Even in nature there are laws that all creatures must abide by. To demonstrate, one could look no further than the human life cycle, this is an event none have control over. The fact is that everyone lives, matures, and dies, this creates a great fallacy in the libertarian argument. Individuals also cannot choose where they are born, nor the parents that created them. These are merely rudimentary examples that free will is not an absolute, that mankind is left with choices that are not large scale, but simply minute decisions that cannot affect natural
In his treatise, Locke addresses the equality of all men. In order to correctly understand political philosophy, one must first understand the State of Nature man is born into, which is a state of perfect freedom. In the State of Nature, man has perfect freedom and is equal to all other men. Man’s freedom allows him to act as he pleases and to use or dispose of his possessions as he sees fit (Locke II.4). The freedom man enjoys is coupled with a state of equality, in which it is understood that all men entitled to the advantages of nature and the use of its resources. In the state of nature, no man has more “power or jurisdiction” (Locke II.4) than any other man. Although natural man is in a state of liberty, Locke takes great care to stress that man is not in a “state of license” (Locke II.6), for man is only free to act within the bounds of the law of nature (Locke II.4). The law of nature, which is reason, claims that because all men are “equal and independent,” and therefore, no man ought to cause harm to another man’s “life, health, liberty, or posses...
John Rawls’ theory of justice is one of the most interesting philosophies to have emerged in modern times. It was introduced in the 1970s when A Theory of Justice was published. It was revised several times, with the most recent done in the year 1999. Essentially, the Rawlsian philosophy approaches justice according to the idea of fairness. The idea is that justice is a complex concept, and it could differ according to individual circumstance. Rawls contended that all of us are ignorant about ourselves and about others and, hence, we are not in a place - in such condition - to determine or apply the principles of justice. These positions allowed Rawls to address two contemporary issues that are equally important, but also tend oppose each other’s views: freedom and equality.
John Rawls is considered one of the most important political philosophers of the 20th century. His most famous work is on his theory of justice, which was later made into the book Justice as Fairness edited by Erin Kelly. In his work, Rawls sets out to discover what set of principles would best govern a just society. Rawls looks at the idea of a social contract, a concept first developed by philosophers John Locke and Kean Jacques Rousseau. Rawls, however, sets out to revive the social contract to create a realistic utopia that embodies the fair principles of justice. This approach holds that the society is in some sense an agreement among all those within the society on what constitutes a just society. Rawls believes that the fairest society would agree on his two principles of justice. Through his work, Rawls illustrates how and why a fair society would come to agree on these fair principles of justice, and at exactly what restrictions and presuppositions.
To achieve this, Campbell first sets out the two pre-suppositions necessary to the Libertarian argument. Firstly, he defines which kind of freedom he is discussing when he speaks of free will. Campbell characterizes “the freedom at issue” as one that predominantly concerns a person’s inner acts and decisions (377). A person’s observable acts are important only as they show an inner “life of choice”(377). Therefore the moral freedom assumed is that freedom which concerns inner acts.
Imagine that all of the sudden memories of your life and everyone you’ve ever known suddenly disappeared. In this scenario, all knowledge you had of your talents, social status, financial standing, physical ability, intelligence and the other characteristics that you viewed could to definitively set yourself apart from others. In other words, everything that made you who you are through years of socialization all of the sudden vanished. To the John Rawls this scenario is called the original position, one where your consciousness has been placed under a “veil of ignorance”. As a thought experiment, Rawls argues that if individuals of a society discuss and define their system of social justice from the original position, the result of the discussion
John Rawls most famous work, A Theory of Justice deals with a complex system of rules and principles. It introduces principles of justice to the world, principles which Rawls argues, are meant to create and strengthen equality while remove the inequality which exists within society. These principles are both meant as standalone laws and regulations but they can be joined as well. The main function of the first principle is to ensure the liberty of every individual while the second principle is meant to be the force for the removal of inequality through what Rawls calls distributive justice.
As human beings, we often have desires that are not always consistent with yielding the greatest good for the greatest amount of people. Utilitarianism would argue that putting one’s own desires first and pursuing one’s own interests is wrong and immoral behavior. While some moral theories acknowledge that pursuing one’s own interests can be morally optional, in Utilitarianism, it is always forbidden (Moral Theory, p. 135). This makes the theory overly demanding because one is constantly forced to consider others. Utilitarians can respond to this objection by challenging the claim that pursuing one’s own desires cannot ever be consistent with the greatest good for the greatest amount of people. Certainly there can be times when pursuing one’s own desires is also consistent with producing the greatest good for the greatest amount of people. Utilitarians might also point out that moral theories are meant to be demanding because they are teaching individuals how to act morally and acting morally is not always the desirable course of
In its political philosophy utilitarianism provides an alternative to theories of natural law and the social contract by basing the authority of government and the sanctity of individual rights upon their utility, or measure of happiness gained. As an egalitarian doctrine, where everyone’s happiness counts equally, the rational, relatively straightforward nature of utilitarianism offers an attractive model for democratic government. It offers practical methods for deciding the morally right course of action - “...an action is right as it tends to promote happiness, wrong as it tends to diminish it, for the party whose interests are in question” (Bentham, 1780). To discover what we should do in a given situation, we identify the various courses of action that we could take, then determine any foreseeable benefits and harms to all affected by the ramifications of our decision. In fact, some of the early pioneers of utilitarianism, such as Bentham and Mill, campaigned for equality in terms of women's suffrage, decriminalization of homosexuality, and abolition of slavery (Boralevi, 1984). Utilitarianism seems to support democracy as one could interpret governments working to promote the public interest and welfare of citizens as striving for liberty for the greatest amount of people. While utilitarianism at its heart is a theory that calls for progressive social change through peaceful political processes, there are some difficulties in relying on it as the sole method for moral decision-making. In this essay I will assess the effectiveness of utilitarianism as a philosophy of government by examining the arguments against it.
...e achieved when the Liberty and Difference Principle are enacted with the veil of ignorance. On the contrary, Nozick argues that Rawls’s theory is exactly the sort of patterned principle that infringes upon individual liberty. As an alternative, Nozick provides his unpatterned principle as the ideal distribution of goods in a society. To me, Rawls’s argues his theory in a manner where his principles of justice are not only difficult to achieve, but ultimately are exceedingly deficient in providing general utility. The veil of ignorance has proved to be almost impossible as well as unethical. The Difference Principle in itself is unable to justly distribute property since it clearly violates an individual’s liberty. Since Rawls’s method of distributive justice is rendered unreasonable and inefficient, it leaves us with a clear answer derived from two disjunctions.
for all persons (Rich and Walker 1). Egalitarianism deals with the acceptance of any gender or