Rawlsian Affirmative Action Essay -- Philosophy Philosophical Papers

Rawlsian Affirmative Action Compensatory Justice as Seen from the Original put down *ABSTRACT In A speculation of Justice, John Rawls presents a mode of determining how a just society would allocate its first goods-that is, those things whatsoever rational person would desire, such as opportunities, liberties, rights, wealth, and the bases of self-respect. (1) Rawls method of adopting the original role is supposed to yield a neat way of distributing such goods. A just society would as well as have the need (unmet in the higher up work) to determine how the victims of injustice ought to be compensated, since history suggests that social contracts are belike to be violated. This paper is an attempt to determine the remedial measures that would be selected exploitation Rawls method. I contend that only two of the three most wide used affirmative attain at law policies would be selected from the original position. I also sketch a nonher compensatory policy that would pass R awls fairness test.I.Affirmative action is public policy designed to compensate the victims of injustice. (2) To be thus disadvantaged, in Rawls scheme of things, is to have suffered in some way from having had less than virtuosos fair share of the primary goods (62). This measure, according to Rawls, ought to be determined by the two principles that would be selected in the original position (17-22). The first principle, which is lexically anterior to the second, dictates that each member of society be granted every shareable ad hominem liberty, a liberty being shareable just in case ones example of it would not prevent others from doing so (60-1, 250). The second principle states that the other primary goods are to be distributed in an egalitarian fashion unless... ...with compensating the victims of injustice. (3) Having done my silk hat here to defend what follows as a reasonable extension of Rawls system, I would add that I am not wed to the idea that it be taken as such. If the connection between ideal and nonideal theory is not as I have portrayed it, if the latter is not to be circumscribed by the former, then the ensuing views on affirmative action may simply be understood as those that would follow if one were apply Rawls method, against his own stricture, to the issue of compensatory justice.(4) In correspondence and in A Puzzle About Economic Justice In Rawls Theory, Social Theory and Practice, vol. 4 1, pp. 1-27. (5) A Puzzle About ..., p. 3.(6) Ibid., p. 7.(7) Ibid., pp. 12-13.(8) Thomas Nagel, The Policy of Preference, in Mortal Questions (London Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979) pp.91-105.