Rawls

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Distributive justice

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Distributive justice concerns the nature of a social justice allocation of goods. A society in which inequalities in outcome do not arise would be considered a society guided by the principles of distributive justice.

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Justice as Fairness

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Rawls constructs justice as fairness in a rather narrow framework and explicitly states, “Justice as fairness is not a complete contact theory.”2 Its purpose is to show how we ought to allocate a cooperative surplus of resources to individuals in society.

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Original Position

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the parties select principles that will determine the basic structure of the society they will live in. This choice is made from behind a veil of ignorance, which would deprive participants of information about their particular characteristics: his or her ethnicity, social status, gender and, crucially, Conception of the Good (an individual's idea of how to lead a good life). This forces participants to select principles impartially and rationally.

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Veil of Ignorance

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people making political decisions imagine that they know nothing about the particular talents, abilities, tastes, social class, and positions they will have within a social order. When such parties are selecting the principles for distribution of rights, positions, and resources in the society in which they will live, this "veil of ignorance" prevents them from knowing who will receive a given distribution of rights, positions, and resources in that society

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Principles of Justice

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The principle of justice could be described as the moral obligation to act on the basis of fair adjudication between competing claims. As such, it is linked to fairness, entitlement and equality.

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Principle of Equal Liberty

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In A Theory of Justice, Rawls articulates the Liberty Principle as the most extensive basic liberty compatible with similar liberty for others; he later amended this in Political Liberalism, stating instead that "each person has an equal claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic rights and liberties".

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Difference Principle

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The difference principle is the second part of the second principle of John Rawls's theory of justice. The first principle requires that citizens enjoy equal basic liberties. The first part of the second principle requires fair equality of opportunity.

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Maximin

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A principle about the just design of social systems -- e.g., rights and duties. According to this principle the system should be designed to maximize the position of those who will be worst off in it

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Lexical Priority

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It's like a dictionary (lexicon): A's always come before B's. It doesn't matter if your word is Azzzzzz, it will still come before any B, even Baaaa.So, if A is lexically superior to B, then you will have to totally exhaust A before even moving to B. No matter how dire, great, numerous, etc., B is, it can't take precedence over A. A has to "run its course" first before we can begin considering B.The other way around, it means that B can never override A (even the weakest A) as a consideration. A's always come first.

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Inequality Surplus

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Weighting surplus by the inequality deflator performs a hypothetical equal redistribution of this surplus across the income distribution using modifications to the income tax schedule. ... This suggests surplus to the poor should be valued roughly twice as much as surplus to the rich.

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Primary Goods

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a product consisting of a natural raw material; an unmanufactured product. Many primary products are exported for processing to the developed nations.

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Kantian vs. Rawlsian Constructivism

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Rawls flirted around 1980 with a strong commitment to Kantian autonomy, only to abandon it as unnecessary to the justification of his theory of justice. The chapter argues that this supposed opposition is based on a serious misunderstanding of Rawls's intellectual trajectory, and especially of the way he understands the Kantian elements of his theory. It shows that, against the assumptions of the familiar debates, Rawls in and after KC, consistently held that the practical aims of constructivism and the philosophical goal of a fully rational justification are not in any sort of tension

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Jeremy Bentham

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Bentham's moral theory was founded on the assumption that it is the consequences of human actions that count in evaluating their merit and that the kind of consequence that matters for human happiness is just the achievement of pleasure and avoidance of pain. He argued that the hedonisticvalue of any human action is easily calculated by considering how intensely its pleasure is felt, how long that pleasure lasts, how certainly and how quickly it follows upon the performance of the action, and how likely it is to produce collateral benefits and avoid collateral harms. Taking such matters into account, we arrive at a net value of each action for any human being affected by it.

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Hedonistic Utilitarianism

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"A utilitarian theory which assumes that the rightness of an action depends entirely on the amount of pleasure it tends to produce and the amount of pain it tends to prevent. Bentham's utilitarianism is hedonistic. Although he describes the good not only as pleasure, but also as happiness, benefit, advantage, etc., he treats these concepts as more or less synonymous, and seems to think of them as reducible to pleasure. John Stuart Mill's utilitarianism, also described as hedonistic, differs importantly from Bentham's in taking some pleasures to be higher than other ones, so that when considering the values of the consequences of an action, not only the quantity but also the quality of pleasure has to be considered. This complicates the summing up, or may even make it impossible."

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Hedons

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Hedons are abstract units with no standardized metric: the assignment of hedons to experiences is typically very broad, loose, subjective, and case dependent. Negativehedons can stand for whatever detracts from a pleasurable experience, or for pain -- though sometimes the unit used for pain is the "dolor

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Dolors

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medical Definition of dolor. 1 obsolete : physical pain —used in old medicine as one of five cardinal symptoms of inflammation. 2 : mental suffering or anguish.

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John Stuart Mill’s Eudaimonistic Utilitarianism

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Mill does distinguish between two types of pleasure in Utilitarianism. One type of pleasure is "base" and the other "noble". But at least in my view, there's little argumentation in support of this claim in Mill's account. (Looking at it historically, this is an evolution to fix a problem with Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism where pleasure/pain are not differentiated at all -- so everyone getting drunk every night may be the best way to maximize happiness for the most people).The second issue is that Mill is committed to a calculative approach to morality, "the moral calculus." In contrast, Aristotle is committed to a reasoned approach to morality. It seems doubtful he thinks it can be calculated (even if it involves moderations between extremes and "fit" to one's own natur

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Greatest Happiness Principle

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Utilitarianism is based off of the Greatest Happiness Principle which states that actions are considered moral when they promote utility and immoral when they promote the reverse. Utility itself is defined by Mill as happiness with the absence of pain

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Higher and Lower Pleasures

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Mill distinguishes higher and lower pleasures in his essay on "Utilitarianism." Presumably higher pleasures are generally more intellectual pleasures and lower pleasures are more sensual pleasures. Mill's utilitarianism is an ethics that says the highest good is what produces the most pleasure.

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Individual Psychological Hedonism

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Psychological hedonism. Psychological hedonism, in philosophical psychology, the view that all human action is ultimately motivated by desires for pleasure and the avoidance of pain. ... As an empirical thesis about human motivation, psychological hedonism is logically distinct from claims about the value of desires.

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Universal Ethical Hedonism

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Hedonism. ... Psychological hedonism is the view that humans are psychologically constructed in such a way that we exclusively desire pleasure. Ethical hedonism is the view that our fundamental moral obligation is to maximize pleasure or happiness.

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Sanctions – Internal and External

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An external sanction is any form of physical punishment, coming from an outside source, by society or some authority figure. An internal sanction is coming from the inside, or pain from our conscience. Fear or any form of pain internally, all comes through conscience.