Justice as Human Flourishing
If enlightenment values of the seventeenth century gave us progress and modernity gassed it away in Auschwitz and blew it up in Nagasaki, then the postmodern condition leaves us fractured at best, despairing at worst. The twentieth century is a fragmented painting of the center falling out with nothing holding it together. From cubism to impressionism objects lost their form, language and phenomenon were reduced to text; ideas were broken apart and heterogeneously put back together anew. The signs and images in the current era no longer bear any correspondence to the real world “but create their own hyperreality – an order of representation that is not the unreal, but has replaced ‘reality’ and is more real than real. Nations fight for information the way they used to fight for territory, technology mediates knowledge, and we are only avatars of our former selves.
In her book The Great Transformation, Karen Armstrong states that in our age we seem to have lost the “sacred inviolability of every single human being.” The global race for profit, the narcissistic and monologic quest to be known, and the chasing of text messages, emails, …show more content…
Furthermore, Rawls describes his project as “intuitionist,” as intuitively balancing equality and distribution. Synthesized, I think the kind of objective distance Rawls requires from his arbiters in the original position is what could ultimate help to cultivate empathy and foster connection in social and political engagement. And empathic connection is the first movement toward human flourishing I propose as a method for social engagement, which I shall elaborate later in this
If enlightenment values of the seventeenth century gave us progress and modernity gassed it away in Auschwitz and blew it up in Nagasaki, then the postmodern condition leaves us fractured at best, despairing at worst. The twentieth century is a fragmented painting of the center falling out with nothing holding it together. From cubism to impressionism objects lost their form, language and phenomenon were reduced to text; ideas were broken apart and heterogeneously put back together anew. The signs and images in the current era no longer bear any correspondence to the real world “but create their own hyperreality – an order of representation that is not the unreal, but has replaced ‘reality’ and is more real than real. Nations fight for information the way they used to fight for territory, technology mediates knowledge, and we are only avatars of our former selves.
In her book The Great Transformation, Karen Armstrong states that in our age we seem to have lost the “sacred inviolability of every single human being.” The global race for profit, the narcissistic and monologic quest to be known, and the chasing of text messages, emails, …show more content…
Furthermore, Rawls describes his project as “intuitionist,” as intuitively balancing equality and distribution. Synthesized, I think the kind of objective distance Rawls requires from his arbiters in the original position is what could ultimate help to cultivate empathy and foster connection in social and political engagement. And empathic connection is the first movement toward human flourishing I propose as a method for social engagement, which I shall elaborate later in this