"One obvious way to specify what it is that is “due” to someone is to appeal to existing legal codes, but what they will prescribe will vary enormously from one time and place to another. A second account of justice might appeal to some notion of merit or desert. The third approach is Aristotle’s “general” conception, which simply identified “justice” with the sum of all the virtues and excellences. A fourth conception of justice is the idea that justice is in some way to be connected to equality of shares, resources, or outcomes. Finally there is the idea of fairness or impartiality of procedure. One might think that Rawls’s view derives some of its apparent plausibility because of a gradual slide between the various senses of “justice.” People start from a vague intuition that justice as a “general” concept (in the third sense above) is extremely important for the proper functioning of a society; they then find it easy to shift from this to a particular conception that connects “justice” with fairness of procedure and (a certain kind of limited) equality."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Academics from the United StatesPhilosophers from the United StatesNon-fiction authors from the United StatesEducators from the United StatesPeople from Indiana
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
pp. 81-82.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Raymond_Geuss
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Raymond Geuss
39 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Raymond Geuss →
Related Quotes
"One of Nietzsche’s most important legacies to us … is his claim that it is desirable and possible to dismantle the Pl…"
"Nietzsche seems sometimes to replace the “transcendence” which stands at the center of traditional accounts—the exist…"
"The idea that all problems either have a solution or can be shown to be pseudo-problems is not one I share."
"The notion of being an “enlightened” person does not reduce simply to that of being a person who has highly developed…"
"The Kantian philosophy is no more than at best a half-secularized version of such a theocratic ethics, with “Reason” …"
"The pure normative standpoint that Kant’s ethics tries to occupy, a standpoint in which we consider only the normativ…"
"The point of one of Rawls’] main constructions—the introduction of the “veil of ignorance”—is precisely to exclude fr…"
"The actual effect of Rawls’s theory is to undercut theoretically any straightforward appeal to egalitarianism. Egalit…"
"In its origin, liberalism had no ambition to be universal either in the sense of claiming to be valid for everyone an…"
"Either there is or there is not a mechanism for enforcing human rights. If there is not, it would seem that calling t…"