Abstract:Among the more noteworthy initial lines of criticism provoked by John Rawls's theory of justice is a challenge to his claim that the advantages and disadvantages of social cooperation should be reckon...Among the more noteworthy initial lines of criticism provoked by John Rawls's theory of justice is a challenge to his claim that the advantages and disadvantages of social cooperation should be reckoned in terms of shares of primary goods. The challengers assert that using primary goods shares to compare individual situations is unfair to those individuals for whom primary goods will not be particularly useful for the successful pursuit of their life plans. In A Theory ofJustice Rawls stipulates that primary goods are those that any rational person prefers more rather than less of, whatever her final aims.' Rawls's challengers assert that it is nonetheless the case that primary goods can be expected to be differentially useful to people depending on their final aims, and in particular that a primary goods standard of distributive justice will be biassed in favor of people with individualistic goals and against those whose fundamental goals are communal in nature. I call this line of criticism the Nagel-Schwartz objection, after Thomas Nagel and Adina Schwartz, who in separate articles first vigorously stated it (Nagel, p. 228; Schwartz, pp. 298-304). The present article reconsiders the objection, examines to what extent Rawls's more recent writings successfully respond to it, and concludes that a principle of distributive justice in a liberal theory ought to use individual opportunities for preference satisfaction rather than primary goods as the basis of interpersonal comparisons.2 The root issue at stake here is in what sense, if any, a theory of distributive justice could be and ought to be neutral with respect to the conceptions of the good upheld and pursued by its citizens. Nagel and Schwartz formulate their objections as doubts about the viability of the project of justifying conceptions of justice byRead More
Publication Year: 1990
Publication Date: 1990-06-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 80
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