Workshop 2
From Studyplace
| Teachers College • Columbia University Class Meetings, Thursdays, 3:00-4:40
|
[edit] Eric's comments on REP Online
The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy is organized conveniently enough, with subject headings for many different topics. Unfortunately for our purposes, Justice isn't one of them. However, under the Ethics subject field the Justice article was easy enough to find in the alphabetical listing of articles. The short introductory entry is very general and gives a literal definition, based on its latin etymological roots, of justice as `suum cuique tribuere' or allocating to each his own. It also includes brief statements about the sub-articles listed below, whose topics are bulleted below. After further exploration, this organization in succesive layers of detail characterizes all the entries I've seen. The authors of the article are Brian Barry (a CU political philosophy professor who is listed in the Justice Bibliography on the course page) and Matt Matravers (a political philosophy professor at the University of York) - i "googled" them.
- Retributive Justice
- this article is two paragraphs long and jargon-laden. For example, the article states that one criteria for just punishment is that "the quantum of suffering should satisfy the principle of ordinal proportionality." Right. The rest of the discussion concerns crime and punishment, and a link is supplied to another article with that very title.
- Conventionalism
- this article cites Cephalus and Polemarchus from Book I of The Republic as the first extant source of a conventionalist theory of justice, which claims that justice is every man getting his due and that his due is determined by the society of which he is a member. It explicates that definition through a summary of an argument concerning health care.
- Teleology
- this type of justice posits that human life is the pursuit of some purpose - usually the good. Justice then assures that each person can pursue that purpose uninhibited. The article mentions the criticism that this account of justice relies on an external source/determinant of the purpose of human life. It summarizes David Hume's arguments on this point and discusses John Stuart Mill's idea that collective utility can serve as this external source.
- Mutual Advantage
- theories of justice as mutual advantage began with Thrasymachus' argument in the Republic, but are expressed fully by Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan according to the article. The remainder discusses ways in which this account breaks down, including unequal power relations and non-compliance (agents pursuing greater advantage for themselves alone and at the expense of others).
- Egalitarian
- this article is longer than the others (which are all quite short), and states that egalitarian theories of justice put equality prior to the establishment of justice. It discusses several different types of the equality that should precede justice (opportunity, capital, etc) and the ramifications for the realization of justice given the different equality types.
- Critics
- whereas any theory of justice places it as a primary value to which others must submit, critics of justice contend that society might be based upon other values, or that the pursuit of justice can at times impede human endeavor. People might be able to lead better lives if they were freed from the constraints of justice and able to form communities organized around other ideas. The article does not list any alternate bases for organization, but presumably notions like harmony, love or respect qualify. Links are provided to community and communitarianism, and feminist political philosophy.
As far as what areas of Justice I'd like to pursue in reading/discussion, I am interested in how considerations of Justice might resolve or mitigate the competing claims many constituents of the public education system have on other members of that system. From my exposure to educational history I can't help feeling that there is a tension between the rhetoric employed to establish and perpetuate the public education system and the historical reality/achievements of that system's administration. The system has more often achieved the uncritical reproduction of the socioeconomic order instead of the informed polity capable of the artful transformation of society promised by rhetoric. More blunty, I feel that fiscal accountability (which seems to dominate policy discourse) is achieved at the expense of humanistic ideals (which seems to dominate pedagogical theory) and vice versa. Yet it was those very ideals that originally sold the polity on the need to fund the public education system. Part of this project has little to do with this class. That is that I need to research and analyze the historical disparity between the promises/aims of the education system and its delivery on those promises/aims. Justice fits in to this picture in the following way: If there is a robust tension between fiscal accountability and humanistic development as promises/responsibilities of the ed system, how can considerations of justice find a satisfactory/useful permutation of the obligations between all the constituents of the polity capable of approaching these rhetorical humanistic ideas? I realize this is all very general, or even obvious, but i'm hoping that I might find worthwhile stuff through working this out more specifically.
As far as reading goes, I think the Republic is definitely a candidate to begin things, but here are some readings i think look interesting. Cited in the egalitarian article (besides the Rawls already cited on the course site) was:
- Thomas Scanlon What We Owe to Each Other -
- (this title, at least, seems directly relevant to what i'm interested in)
- John Roemer Equality of Opportunity
From the Justice Bibliography:
- Alasdair MacIntyre Whose Justice? Which Rationality?
- Michael Walzter Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (cited in the conventionalism article)
