Persons Interests And Justice

In our lives, we aim to achieve welfare for ourselves, that is, to live good lives. But we also have another, more impartial perspective, where we aim to balance our concern for our own welfare against a concern for the welfare of others. This is a perspective of justice. Nils Holtug examines these two perspectives and the relations between them. The first part of the book is concerned with prudence; more precisely, with what the necessary and sufficient conditions are for having a self-interest in a particular benefit. It includes discussions of the extent to which self-interest depends on preferences, personal identity, and what matters in survival. It also considers the issue of whether it can benefit (or harm) a person to come into existence and what the implications are for our theory of self-interest. A 'prudential view' is defended, according to which a person has a present self-interest in a future benefit if and only if she stands in a relation of continuous physical realization of (appropriate) psychology to the beneficiary, where the strength of the self-interest depends both on the size of the benefit and on the strength of this relation. The second part of the book concerns distributive justice and so how to distribute welfare or self-interest fulfilment over individuals. It includes discussions of welfarism, egalitarianism and prioritarianism, population ethics, the importance of personal identity and what matters for distributive justice, and the importance of all these issues for various topics in applied ethics, including the badness of death. Here, a version of prioritarianism is defended, according to which, roughly, the moral value of a benefit to an individual at a time depends on both the size of the benefit and on the individual's self-interest, at that time, in the other benefits that accrue to her at this and other times.

In our lives, we aim to achieve welfare for ourselves, that is, to live good lives. But we also have another, more impartial perspective, where we aim to balance our concern for our own welfare against a concern for the welfare of others. This is a perspective of justice. Nils Holtug examines these two perspectives and the relations between them.

Though the revised edition of A Theory of Justice, published in 1999, is the definitive statement of Rawls's view, so much of the extensive literature on Rawls's theory refers to the first edition. This reissue makes the first edition once again available for scholars and serious students of Rawls's work.

This publication is the latest in a series of steps to assist judges in carrying out their onerous responsibilities, and represents a concise yet comprehensive set of principles addressing the many difficult ethical issues that confront judges as they work and live in their communities. It also provides a sound basis to promote a more complete understanding of the role of the judge in society and of the ethical dilemmas they so often encounter. Sections of the publication cover the following: the purpose of the publication; judicial independence; integrity; diligence; equality; and impartiality, including judicial demeanour, civic and charitable activity, political activity, and conflicts of interest.

A renowned Harvard professor's brilliant, sweeping, inspiring account of the role of justice in our society--and of the moral dilemmas we face as citizens What are our obligations to others as people in a free society? Should government tax the rich to help the poor? Is the free market fair? Is it sometimes wrong to tell the truth? Is killing sometimes morally required? Is it possible, or desirable, to legislate morality? Do individual rights and the common good conflict? Michael J. Sandel's "Justice" course is one of the most popular and influential at Harvard. Up to a thousand students pack the campus theater to hear Sandel relate the big questions of political philosophy to the most vexing issues of the day, and this fall, public television will air a series based on the course. Justice offers readers the same exhilarating journey that captivates Harvard students. This book is a searching, lyrical exploration of the meaning of justice, one that invites readers of all political persuasions to consider familiar controversies in fresh and illuminating ways. Affirmative action, same-sex marriage, physician-assisted suicide, abortion, national service, patriotism and dissent, the moral limits of markets—Sandel dramatizes the challenge of thinking through these con?icts, and shows how a surer grasp of philosophy can help us make sense of politics, morality, and our own convictions as well. Justice is lively, thought-provoking, and wise—an essential new addition to the small shelf of books that speak convincingly to the hard questions of our civic life.

Hailed by philosopher Sidney Hook as "a landmark in the history of American philosophy," the International Philosophy Year in 1967-68 brought seventy of the Western world's most distinguished philosophers to the State University College at Brockport for a series of fourteen conferences devoted to different areas of philosophic inquiry. Contemporary Philosophic Thought, which records the original papers of these conferences in four volumes, stands not only as a major contribution to philosophy, but also as a wide survey of the range of conceptual problems that philosophers are working to solve. Vol. 1, Language, Belief, and Metaphysics, is addressed to problems of logic and language. Contributors discuss the nature of belief and present theories on the concept of the world and on identity through time. Vol. 2, Mind, Science, and History, focuses on the mind and related issues. Scientists and historians join philosophers in considering problems that bear upon their disciplines. Vol. 3, Perspectives in Education, Religion, and the Arts, discusses philosophy as related to cultural change, the changing aims of education, and religion. The philosophy of art is explored from varying viewpoints of genre, style, poetics, aesthetics, rhetoric, and communication. Vol. 4, Ethics and Social Justice, takes up moral and legal issues with essays on human rights and on philosophy as applied to practice.

In Strategic Justice, Peter Vanderschraaf argues that justice can be properly understood as a body of special social conventions. The idea that justice is at bottom conventional has ancient roots, but has never been central in philosophy because convention itself has historically been so poorly understood. Vanderschraaf gives a new defense of this idea that integrates insights and arguments of past masters of moral and political philosophy together with recent analytical and empirical concepts and results from the social sciences. One of the substantial contributions of this work is a new account of convention that is sufficiently general for summarizing problems of justice, the social interactions where the interests of the agents involved diverge. Conventions are defined as equilibrium solutions to the games that summarize social interactions having a variety of possible stable resolutions and a corresponding plurality of equilibria. The basic idea that justice consists of a system of rules for mutual advantage is explored in depth using this game-theoretic analysis of convention. Justice is analyzed as a system of conventions that are stable with respect to renegotiation in the face of societal changes such as resource depletion, technological innovation and population decline or growth. This new account of justice-as-convention explains in a cogent and natural way what justice is and why individuals have good reason to obey its requirements. Contrary to what many have thought, this new account shows how the justice-as-convention view can give a good account of why justice requires that the most vulnerable members of society receive protections and benefits from the cooperative surplus created by general compliance with justice.

A vindication of the belief in global or universal justice, which explores both liberal and Marxist grounds for such belief. The book also looks at the obligation to cancel Third World debt.