35 ideas
21021 | Keep premises as weak as possible, to avoid controversial difficulties [Nussbaum] |
Full Idea: One should always choose the weakest premises from which one's conclusion follows, rather than saddling the theory with thicker or more controversial premises. | |
From: Martha Nussbaum (Creating Capabilities [2011], 8) | |
A reaction: I like this because it connects the rather vague Ockham's Razor to the logical concept of Thinning. The key point is that a thinner set of premises that prove something will be more persuasive, because critics may reject premises instead of conclusion. |
21007 | Storytelling is never neutral; some features of the world must be emphasised [Nussbaum] |
Full Idea: Storytelling is never neutral; the narrator always directs attention to some features of the world rather than others. | |
From: Martha Nussbaum (Creating Capabilities [2011], 1) | |
A reaction: The audience would be a bit stupid if it insisted on neutrality. |
23110 | Human injustice is not a permanent feature of communities [Rawls] |
Full Idea: Men's propensity to injustice is not a permanent aspect of community life. | |
From: John Rawls (A Theory of Justice [1972], p.245), quoted by John Kekes - Against Liberalism | |
A reaction: This attitude is dismissed by Kekes, with some justification, as naïve optimism. What could be Rawls's grounds for making such a claim? It couldn't be the facts of human history. |
15676 | Rawls defends the priority of right over good [Rawls, by Finlayson] |
Full Idea: Rawls defends the thesis of the priority of the right over the good. | |
From: report of John Rawls (A Theory of Justice [1972]) by James Gordon Finlayson - Habermas Ch.7:100 | |
A reaction: It depends whether you are talking about actions, or about states of affairs. I don't see how any state of affairs can be preferred to the good one. It may be that the highest duty of action is to do what is right, rather than to achieve what is good. |
4123 | A fair arrangement is one that parties can agree to without knowing how it will benefit them personally [Rawls, by Williams,B] |
Full Idea: Rawls's theory is an elaboration of a simple idea: a fair system of arrangements is one that the parties can agree to without knowing how it will benefit them personally. | |
From: report of John Rawls (A Theory of Justice [1972]) by Bernard Williams - Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy Ch.5 | |
A reaction: The essence of modern Kantian contractualism. It is an appealing principle for building a rational world, but I hear Nietzsche turning in his grave. |
21025 | Particularism gives no guidance for the future [Nussbaum] |
Full Idea: Situation ethics offers no guidance for the future. | |
From: Martha Nussbaum (Creating Capabilities [2011], 8) | |
A reaction: Not sure if Situation Ethics is the same as Particularism. Jonathan Danby famously champions the latter. |
21026 | Compassion is unreliable, because it favours people close to us [Nussbaum] |
Full Idea: Daniel Batson's important research has shown us that compassion is not reliable on its own, because it can easily give priority to people close to the self. | |
From: Martha Nussbaum (Creating Capabilities [2011], 8) | |
A reaction: In Britain animal charities receive vastly more money than children's charities, presumably for this very reason. Kittens - you've got to hate them. |
3279 | Utilitarianism inappropriately scales up the individual willingness to make sacrifices [Rawls, by Nagel] |
Full Idea: Rawls claims that utilitarianism applies to the problem of many interests a method appropriate for one individual. A single person may accept disadvantages in exchange for benefits, but in society other people get the benefits. | |
From: report of John Rawls (A Theory of Justice [1972], p.74,104) by Thomas Nagel - Equality §7 |
3280 | Why does the rational agreement of the 'Original Position' in Rawls make it right? [Nagel on Rawls] |
Full Idea: Why does what it is rational to agree to in Rawls' 'Original Position' determine what is right? | |
From: comment on John Rawls (A Theory of Justice [1972]) by Thomas Nagel - Equality §7 |
20552 | The original position models the idea that citizens start as free and equal [Rawls, by Swift] |
Full Idea: The original position is presented by Rawls as modelling the sense in which citizens are to be understood as free and equal. | |
From: report of John Rawls (A Theory of Justice [1972]) by Adam Swift - Political Philosophy (3rd ed) 3 'Strikes' | |
A reaction: In other words, Rawls's philosophy is not a demonstration of why we should be liberals, but a guidebook for how liberals should go about organising society. |
18636 | Choose justice principles in ignorance of your own social situation [Rawls] |
Full Idea: The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance. ...Since all are similarly situated and no one is able to design principles to favor his particular condition, the principles of justice are the rest of a fair agreement or bargain. | |
From: John Rawls (A Theory of Justice [1972], §03) | |
A reaction: A famous idea. It tries to impose a Kantian impartiality onto the assessment of political principles. It is a beautifully simple idea, and saying that such impartiality never occurs is no objection to it. Think of a planet far far away. |
18631 | All desirable social features should be equal, unless inequality favours the disadvantaged [Rawls] |
Full Idea: All social primary goods - liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self-respect - are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any or all of these goods is to the advantage of the least favoured. | |
From: John Rawls (A Theory of Justice [1972], §46) | |
A reaction: In the wholehearted capitalism of the 21st century this sounds like cloud-cuckoo land. As an 'initial position' (just as in the 'Republic') the clean slate brings out some interesting principles. Actual politics takes vested interests as axiomatic. |
21019 | Social contracts assume equal powers among the participants [Nussbaum] |
Full Idea: All contract theories, including Rawls's, assume a rough equality of physical and mental power among the participants. | |
From: Martha Nussbaum (Creating Capabilities [2011], 4) |
20538 | Utilitarians lump persons together; Rawls somewhat separates them; Nozick wholly separates them [Swift on Rawls] |
Full Idea: Rawls objects to utilitarianism because it fails to take seriously the separateness of persons (because there is no overall person to enjoy the overall happiness). But Nozick thinks Rawls does not take the separateness of persons seriously enough. | |
From: comment on John Rawls (A Theory of Justice [1972]) by Adam Swift - Political Philosophy (3rd ed) 1 'Nozick' | |
A reaction: In this sense, Nozick seems to fit our picture of a liberal more closely than Rawls does. I think they both exaggerate the separateness of persons, based on a false concept of human nature. |
21011 | We shouldn't focus on actual preferences, which may be distorted by injustices [Nussbaum] |
Full Idea: When society puts things out of reach for people, they typically learn not to want those things. ..By defining the social goal in terms of satisfaction of actual preferences, utilitarian approaches often reinforce the status quo, which may be very unjust. | |
From: Martha Nussbaum (Creating Capabilities [2011], 3) | |
A reaction: Maximising happiness is potentially very paternalistic, whereas preference satisfaction is not, which aligns utilitarianism better with liberalism. It is notorious that slaves can be contented with their slavery, and battered wives can remain loyal. |
21008 | Liberalism does not need a comprehensive account of value [Nussbaum] |
Full Idea: The role of political liberalism in my theory requires me to prescind from offering any comprehensive account of value. | |
From: Martha Nussbaum (Creating Capabilities [2011], 2) | |
A reaction: Obviously liberalism has values, but they are the minimum ones of freedom and respect. Liberals have to tolerate some fairly ugly and miserable societies. Can liberals intervene in family life? |
9277 | Rawls's account of justice relies on conventional fairness, avoiding all moral controversy [Gray on Rawls] |
Full Idea: Rawls's account of justice works only with widely accepted intuitions of fairness and relies at no point on controversial positions in ethics. The fruit of this modesty is a pious commentary on conventional moral beliefs. | |
From: comment on John Rawls (A Theory of Justice [1972]) by John Gray - Straw Dogs 3.6 | |
A reaction: Presumably this is the thought which provoked Nozick to lob his grenade on the subject. It resembles the charges of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche against Kant, that he was just dressing up conventional morality. Are 'controversial' ethics good? |
21012 | Women are often treated like children, and not respected for their choices [Nussbaum] |
Full Idea: Women are often treated as passive dependents, creatures to be cared for (or not), rather than as independent human beings deserving respect for their choices. In other words they are often infantilized. | |
From: Martha Nussbaum (Creating Capabilities [2011], 3) | |
A reaction: Her prime example is from India, but you see the same thing in more subtle forms in the UK, especially among older people, and especially in art galleries. |
20527 | Liberty Principle: everyone has an equal right to liberties, if compatible with others' liberties [Rawls] |
Full Idea: First Principle [Liberty]: Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all. | |
From: John Rawls (A Theory of Justice [1972], 46) | |
A reaction: This is the result of consensus after the initial ignorant position of assessment. It is characteristic of liberalism. I'm struggling to think of a disagreement. |
21015 | Negative liberty is incoherent; all liberties, to do and to be, require the prevention of interference [Nussbaum] |
Full Idea: The very idea of 'negative liberty' ...is an incoherent idea: all liberties are positive, meaning liberties to do or to be something, which all require the inhibition of interference by others. | |
From: Martha Nussbaum (Creating Capabilities [2011], 3) | |
A reaction: This rejects Isaiah Berlin's well-known claim that negative liberties are good, but positive liberties are far too dangerous. |
21017 | Political freedom is an incoherent project, because some freedoms limit other freedoms [Nussbaum] |
Full Idea: It is unclear whether the idea of promoting freedom is even a coherent political project. Some freedoms limit others. The freedom of rich people to make large donations to political campaigns can limit the equal worth of the right to vote. | |
From: Martha Nussbaum (Creating Capabilities [2011], 4) | |
A reaction: It is not just American right-wingers who over-emphasise 'freedom'. French philosophy seems to be riddled with the same thing. |
21016 | Political and civil rights are not separate from economic and social rights [Nussbaum] |
Full Idea: My approach rejects the distinction, common in the human rights movement, between 'first-generation rights' (political and civil) and 'second-generation rights' (economic and social). The second group are preconditions of the first group. | |
From: Martha Nussbaum (Creating Capabilities [2011], 3) | |
A reaction: [last sentence compressed] This sounds like the sort of point Marx argued for. Nowadays it is feminists who make this point most strongly. |
21018 | The social contract has problems with future generations, national boundaries, disabilities and animals [Rawls, by Nussbaum] |
Full Idea: Rawls saw four difficulties for justice in the social contract approach: future generations; justice across national boundaries; fair treatment of people with disabilities; and moral issues involving non-human animals. | |
From: report of John Rawls (A Theory of Justice [1972]) by Martha Nussbaum - Creating Capabilities 4 | |
A reaction: These are all classic examples of groups who do not have sufficient power to negotiate contracts. |
21041 | Justice concerns not natural distributions, or our born location, but what we do about them [Rawls] |
Full Idea: The natural distribution is neither just nor unjust; nor is it unjust that persons are born into society at some particular position. These are simply natural facts. What is just and unjust is the way that institutions deal with these facts. | |
From: John Rawls (A Theory of Justice [1972], 17) | |
A reaction: Lovely quotation. There is no point in railing against the given, and that includes what is given by history, as well as what is given by nature. It comes down to intervening, in history and in nature. How much intervention will individuals tolerate? |
21009 | Capabilities: Life, Health, Safety, Mental life, Love, Planning, Joining in, Nature, Play, Control [Nussbaum, by PG] |
Full Idea: Ten Capabilities: Life (decent), Health (reproduction, shelter), Safety, Mental life (with education), Love (relationships), Planning (with free beliefs), Joining in (and non-discrimination), Nature (relations to), Play, Control (politics and property). | |
From: report of Martha Nussbaum (Creating Capabilities [2011], 2) by PG - Db (ideas) | |
A reaction: She gives her crucial list in rather wordy form. To have impact it needs to be reduced to brief simple slogans. |
21010 | Justice requires that the ten main capabilities of people are reasonably enabled [Nussbaum] |
Full Idea: The basic claim of my account of social justice is this: respect for human dignity requires that citizens be placed above an ample (specified) threshold of capability in all ten of the areas. | |
From: Martha Nussbaum (Creating Capabilities [2011], 2) | |
A reaction: [The capabilities are given, briefly, in Idea 21009] The one word that bothers me here is 'dignity'. It is very vague, and can, I think, be reduced to much clearer and more obvious concepts. A person lacks dignity when they vomit, in ordinary usage. |
21013 | Capabilities are grounded in bare humanity and agency; qualifying as rational is not needed [Nussbaum] |
Full Idea: The capabilities approach grounds rights claims in bare human birth and minimal agency, not in rationality or any other specific property, something that permits it to recognise the equal human rights of people with cognitive disabilities. | |
From: Martha Nussbaum (Creating Capabilities [2011], 3) | |
A reaction: She says elsewhere that she also sees animals as included in the capabilities approach. This is a rejection of the Kantian grounds for rights (by a well-known Aristotelian). |
21014 | Rights are not just barriers against state interference; governments must affirm capabilities of citizens [Nussbaum] |
Full Idea: A prominent idea, common in the U.S., sees rights as barriers against interfering state action. ...The Capabilities Approach, by contrast, insists that all entitlements involve an affirmative task for government, to actively support capabilities. | |
From: Martha Nussbaum (Creating Capabilities [2011], 3) | |
A reaction: This makes her approach very left wing, by U.S. standards, because it needs higher taxation and a degree of government paternalism. Her approach strikes me as an excellent agenda for a fairly interventionist European liberal party. |
23583 | If an aggression is unjust, the constraints on how it is fought are much stricter [Rawls] |
Full Idea: When a country's right to war is questionable and uncertain, the constraints on the means it can use are all the more severe. | |
From: John Rawls (A Theory of Justice [1972], p.379), quoted by Michael Walzer - Just and Unjust Wars 14 | |
A reaction: This is Rawls opposing the idea that combatants are moral equals. The restraints are, of course, moral. In practice aggressors are usually the worst behaved. |
21020 | Any establishment belief system is incompatible with full respect for all citizens [Nussbaum] |
Full Idea: The idea of equal respect is difficult or impossible to render compatible with a religious establishment, even one that is benign and noncoercive. Any established church (or government secularism) denigrates nonbelievers, by stating they are an out-group. | |
From: Martha Nussbaum (Creating Capabilities [2011], 4) | |
A reaction: This sort of applies to membership of anything. She is sort of right, but there is no reason in principle why full respect should not be accorded to any out-group. |
13304 | Learned men gain more in one day than others do in a lifetime [Posidonius] |
Full Idea: In a single day there lies open to men of learning more than there ever does to the unenlightened in the longest of lifetimes. | |
From: Posidonius (fragments/reports [c.95 BCE]), quoted by Seneca the Younger - Letters from a Stoic 078 | |
A reaction: These remarks endorsing the infinite superiority of the educated to the uneducated seem to have been popular in late antiquity. It tends to be the religions which discourage great learning, especially in their emphasis on a single book. |
21022 | The Capabilities Approach sees animals as agents, not just as having feelings [Nussbaum] |
Full Idea: The Capabilities Approach sees animals as agents, not as receptacles of pleasure or pain. | |
From: Martha Nussbaum (Creating Capabilities [2011], 8) | |
A reaction: This is in opposition to the utilitarian view. The key consequence is that animals can be victims of injustice, as well as of cruelty. Nice. |
21023 | We should respect animals in the way that we respect the animal nature in humans [Nussbaum] |
Full Idea: If we show respect to our own animal natures, it is simply inconsistent, and a kind of vicious self-promoting of a sort to which Kantians are especially opposed, to refuse the same respect to our fellow creatures. | |
From: Martha Nussbaum (Creating Capabilities [2011], 8) | |
A reaction: Nussbaum says Kant is hopeless on animals, but Christine Korsgaard offers this Kantian approach that demands genuine respect for animals, even though they are not considered rational. Nussbaum says animals are agents. Did Kant respect our animality? |
21024 | It may be no harm to kill an animal which cannot plan for its future [Nussbaum] |
Full Idea: The painless killing of an animal of a species that does not make plans extending into the future may not be a harm: this depends on how we think about the harm of death. | |
From: Martha Nussbaum (Creating Capabilities [2011], 8) | |
A reaction: Very old human beings may have no plans for the future. I, on the other hand, have got lots and lots of plans. Definitely. No one can specify the harm of death. How can it be distinguished from the harm of not being born? |
20820 | Time is an interval of motion, or the measure of speed [Posidonius, by Stobaeus] |
Full Idea: Posidonius defined time thus: it is an interval of motion, or the measure of speed and slowness. | |
From: report of Posidonius (fragments/reports [c.95 BCE]) by John Stobaeus - Anthology 1.08.42 | |
A reaction: Hm. Can we define motion or speed without alluding to time? Looks like we have to define them as a conjoined pair, which means we cannot fully understand either of them. |