Posts tagged justice

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Posted 1 year ago
There are other ways in which, if people understand and think about object-given value-based reasons, things would go better. As Keynes remarked, many politicians act in ways that show them to be slaves of some dead economist. Many economists, we can add, think in ways that show them to be the slaves of some dead philosopher. Like most of the sciences, economics grew out of philosophy. When welfare economics began in the late nineteenth century, economists knew that wealth is only imperfectly correlated with happiness, and that, of these two, it is happiness that matters. For much of the twentieth century, economists forgot these truths. Many economists even believed that interpersonal comparisons of well-being make no sense. Many also believed that, in their professional work, they should be concerned only with facts, not values. Remember the remark: ‘That’s not a value judgment. Everyone accepts it.’ Economists are not chiefly to blame for having these beliefs, since it was philosophers who first claimed that reasons are given only by desires, that all rationality is instrumental, and that no values are facts, because there are no normative truths. Given our increasing powers to destroy or damage the conditions of life on earth, we need to lose these beliefs. It is not wealth that matters, or mere preference-fulfillment, but happiness, justice, and the other things that make our lives worth living.
Derek Parfit, On What Matters, p. 462-463
Quote 78
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Posted 1 year ago
What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.
Martin Luther King Jr, “Where Do We Go from Here?”
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Posted 1 year ago

Erik Olin Wright | The Tasks of Emancipatory Social Science

Emancipatory social science seeks to generate scientific knowledge relevant to the collective project of challenging various forms of human oppression. To call this a form of social science, rather than simply social criticism or social philosophy, recognizes the importance for this task of systematic scientific knowledge about how the world works. The word emancipatory identifies a central moral purpose in the production of knowledge– the elimination of oppression and the creation of the conditions for human flourishing. And the word social implies the belief that human emancipation depends upon the transformation of the social world, not just the inner life of persons.  

 To fulfill this mission, any emancipatory social science faces three basic tasks: elaborating a systematic diagnosis and critique of the world as it exists; envisioning viable alternatives; and understanding the obstacles, possibilities, and dilemmas of transformation. In different times and places one or another of these may be more pressing than others, but all are necessary for a comprehensive emancipatory theory. 

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Posted 1 year ago
To employ the coercive apparatus of the state in order to maintain manifestly unjust institutions is itself a form of illegitimate force that men in due course have a right to resist.
John Rawls
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Posted 1 year ago

Some thoughts on thanksgiving.

Human culture has always adapted and changed holiday observances around to suit local preferences and changing circumstances. This is what enabled the creation of the holiday of Thanksgiving in the first place, as it allowed Americans to overlook the horrific past underlying its whole history, and turned it into a day of feasting (the Pilgrims were more likely to fast during the observance of a holiday). We must certainly acknowledge the history of the holiday, and also be mindful of the ways in which racism and violence has affected and continues to affect American Indians today if we are to have any understanding of the holiday at all. 

I don’t think this necessarily precludes us from observing it. Given that holidays change over time, it’s not outside the scope of possibility that we can re-appropriate the holiday for more just ends. Naturally, reminding ourselves of the wrongdoings in America’s past and present should not happen only one day a year, but the fact that the holiday exists already and brings people together can be useful in promoting a more honest and socially just view of its history. I know the joke is that the mashed potatoes always go flying across the room when politics come up at the thanksgiving table, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to help our friends and family understand the holiday better. Sharing meals is an extremely important component of human culture everywhere in the world, and I think coming together over good food can be a powerful way of reaching people.

However, the practice of saying ‘I’m thankful for…’ needs a bit more critical examination. Obviously, I personally have an awful lot to be thankful for, but I can’t help but think that when I list these things at gatherings with friends and family I’m just reading a laundry list of the privilege I enjoy (and that I got merely through circumstances of my birth, much of it at the expense of others in the past). It’s not that I’m uncomfortable acknowledging and confronting that privilege, but rather that reciting it at the thanksgiving table makes it seem like I’m glad that I have it while others are hurt by it. We should all obviously acknowledge the good in our lives and be grateful for it, but I can’t help but hope there’s a better way of framing this gratitude that acknowledges the systemic injustices that prevent others from having an equal right and access to many of the things that I am grateful for and should be a right (food, shelter, education, to name a few). Outrage might have a role to play: we mustn’t merely be thankful for what we have, but also mad that the same things are actively, unnecessarily, and wrongly being denied to others.

If we are to continue observe the holiday at all, it ought to be in a more collectively self-critical way and in the service of more just ends. Otherwise, I fear, it’s just promoting the same ignorance that (in part) allowed its horrible history to happen in the first place.

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Posted 1 year ago
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Posted 1 year ago

The Controversy About Marx and Justice

The question is the more specific one: does Marx condemn capitalism in the light of any principle of justice?

I shall survey the case for thinking he does not and the case for thinking that he does; the textual evidence adduced and supporting argument put forth on behalf of each. Given the extent of the literature being surveyed — some three dozen items (all but one of which have appeared since 1970; and incidentally, of largely, indeed overwhelmingly, North American provenance, twenty-one of the twenty-four authors cited here either writing or hailing from that continent) — each case as I present it is a kind of composite. No one of its proponents necessarily makes use of all the texts and arguments I shall enumerate and they sometimes emphasize or formulate differently those that they do use in common. Still, I give what I hope is an accurate overall map of this dispute, before going on to venture my own judgement on it. The main body of the essay falls, therefore, into three parts. First, I review the texts and arguments put forward by those who deny that Marx condemned capitalism as unjust. Second, I review the texts and arguments put forward by those who claim he did so condemn it. I try in these two sections to present each case broadly as made, with a minimum of critical comment. Third, I then offer some conclusions, and argument in support of them.