Precognition of Episode 85: John Rawl's Theory of Justice - Partially Examined Life

On the evening of 11/10, we’re discussing John Rawls. What is justice? Rawls interpreted this question as asking what basic social rules and structures would result in a society that we’d consider fair. Justice is fairness, on a social level.

Fairness, of course, is an intuitive notion, and begs for a philosophical definition, but instead of doing some sort of old fashioned search for a definition (as in Plato’s Republic) which we can then use to deductively ground this general social framework, he wants to translate our intuitions straight into these social rules. Rawls came up the the name “reflective equilibrium” to talk about the considered opinion we reach on something when we carefully evaluate and make consistent our current set of beliefs.

This is an important element of modern philosophical method to understand, way beyond the context of Rawls: it signals an abandonment of any pretense at a foundationalist picture of knowledge, where a la Descartes we we’re supposed to start with unassailable foundations and build on them. Instead, acknowledging that there are no such foundations, you start where you are, with the complex network of beliefs that you’ve inherited from history, and tweak those only insofar as you need to to make them consistent (so it’s also called “methodological conservatism”). If you find that one of your theories implies something deeply intuitively unacceptable like that murder is great, you modify that theory. #Philosophy #Rawls #Justice #Fairness Read more at the blog: http://www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/2013/11/10/topic85-rawls/