John Rawls is dead

Harvard press release ^

[aberaussie]

I don't mind colleges requiring reading like this. The problem comes when they do not balance it with other views. And I mean sound thinkers, not the idiot representatives of conservativism they sometimes throw in just to discredit it.

If you (anyone on this forum, please) could choose just one book to recommend to a young person to read to really understand liberty and freedom in the classical liberal sense(not modern liberal), what book would you recommend?

[beckett]

I'm just instead incessesantly asking you to explain why Reagan's Solicitor General has such complimentary things to say about a man you broadly label an evil socialist?

I have not read Fried's commentary on Rawls, which is understandable since I didn't know that he had commented on Rawls until tonight. Now that I have been made aware, by virtue of your felicitous and engaging missives, of his no doubt illuminating and sonorous pronouncements, at the earliest opportunity I will see what the venerable and sage Mr. Fried has to say on the matter.

[FastCoyote]

I spent two years of my life fighting professional "Rawlsian Ethicists" who studied directly under your hero. Marxist thought/ethics by any other name still stinks. Just because he threw a bone in class don't underestimate the evil done in his name. And don't be naive to think he couldn't have stopped the abuses performed in his name if he had wanted to.

I don't buy that Marx was really a good man, I don't buy that Rawls was a good man. May the devil welcome him with open arms.

[FreeTheHostages]

?? If you spent 2 years of your life fighting Marxists who relied upon Rawls!!!!!! you should have WON because they should have been completely unarmed. With all due respect, I question your fighting abilities if it took you two years to do THAT.

[FreeTheHostages]

"at the earliest opportunity I will see what the venerable and sage Mr. Fried has to say on the matter"

THANK YOU. At least we agree Mr. Fried is a "sage." Someone earlier in this thread suggested Mr. Fried must have been drunk when he said it. The idea of Solicitor General Fried being drunk is itself upsurd.

[Inkie]

Adam Smith's THE WEALTH OF NATIONS.

[Inkie]

Also THE FEDERALIST PAPERS.

[beckett]

At least we agree Mr. Fried is a "sage."

My remarks about Fried were meant to be sarcastic, albeit only gently so. Did you take me seriously when I wrote that your missives were "felicitous and engaging," too?

For one of Rawls' most prized students, it sure seems like a lot gets passed you. Maybe that explains why you think the "difference principle" makes up for Rawls' blatant and radical redistributionist nostrums.

[Paleo Conservative]

Here's a link from last year. What do you think about the article?

Dangerous Egalitarian Dreams (Rawls, Dworkin and the Egalitarian Fantasy

[FreeTheHostages]

Interesting article.

Here's what I think.

(1) "they provide the rationale for the domestic agenda of the left wing of the Democratic party" People may use a famous philosopher like Rawls and say he supports their position, but that doesn't mean he DOES. Like I've said 100 times in this thread, the Difference Principle, if you believe in trickle-down (which I do), permits large inequalities of wealth. As I've also said it seems like a score of times in this thread, others on the left have attacked him as an apologist for capitalism. In reality, he's actually neither: the two principles of justice -- respect for individual liberties (think natural rights) and the Difference Principle (for me, I think tricle down) -- are just as compatible with market-based libertarianism.

(2) I completely disagree with the article's precept that Rawls' endorses a radical denial of individual responsibility. ??? That makes no sense. Remember, in the Original Position (OP), every individual, while not knowing their place in the society due the veil of ignorance, is self-interested. They are interested in their welfare -- not some utopian idealism for the group. Rawls responds to the critiques of socialists, who would have these individuals be less self-interested, by saying: you don't understand what I'm trying to do here. I'm trying to define what justice is where there's NOT limitless resources in a society to allocate and we have the luxury of everyone getting everything they want. At some point in a Theory of Justice, he even writes something along the lines of: The very idea of justice presupposes that individuals act in self-interested fashion and that further individuals do not always conduct themselves in a fashion that is moral. Among a society of angels, there would be no need to have recourse to language such as "justice."

Individual responsibility: the more advantaged can have more because their contributions to the society benefit the whole. We can spend more on the brilliant or hard-working scientist under the difference principle. To me, that's the contrapositive of the socialist equation. I just don't get where you say Rawls, who is trying to extend Kant (the ultimate moral theoretician for individual responsibility) into the social sphere, is downplaying individual responsibility.

I agree many leftists have claimed Rawls as their own. Just as many have argued against them. I'm discussion what Rawls' work says, not what people who want to traffic on his academic prestige say when they try to use his reputation to further a leftist cause.

I say again, Rawls in writing and Rawls in person has repeatedly complained about being misunderstood on this front.

[FreeTheHostages]

P.S. Nice Freeper name!

[FreeTheHostages]

My remarks about Fried were meant to be sarcastic

Forgive my naiviete: I just kinda assumed that any reasonable person would HAVE to concede the conservative bona fides of such a well-established conservative scholar as Reagan's Solicitor General.

Well, we've reached outer edges of the universe now, haven't we? You're just being sarcastic about Fried being an esteemed conservative. Who knows what weird space aliens we may meet in this place you've taken us to . . . . :::whistling in disbelief::: [remark about chutzpah deleted]

[FreeTheHostages]

Afterthought: "[T]he initial endowment of natural assets and the contingencies of their growth and nurture in early life are arbitrary from the moral point of view." . . . . [T]he second principle of justice overcomes this arbitrariness by not allowing people to benefit from their good fortune or suffer from their misfortune.

?? No one is "better" morally because they are better endowed or blessed with better math abilities at birth. Surely Rawls, as sayeth Kant and others, is correct there. This article's assumption that the "second principle" -- the Difference Principle -- would not allow people to benefit from their good fortune is wrong. For the exact same reason that many leftist scholars critique Rawls: because if trickle-down economics is correct, we can and should provide greater benefit (education opportunity as well as greater wealth) to the more advantaged to the extent that doing so benefits society as a whole. WHICH IT PLAINLY DOES, WE CONSERVATIVES BELIEVE, RIGHT? Private property rules and these institutions of higher education where kids have to compete to get in -- we all benefit from the striving that encourages. Trickle-down economics means that paying a CEO more than the janitor makes sense: the CEO can grow the company and the economy in a way that helps the janitor.

I think people like us, who presumptively like and believe in capitalism, have nothing to fear from the Difference Principle. We have much to fear from leftwing academicians who would bastardize it.

I note you highlighted the Dworkin stuff. As I mentioned somewhere in a post above, I was just annoying Beckett back with those references. Dworkin's a total commie. Oh -- and by the way -- he's written in critique of Rawls, several articles explaining why Rawls is wrong.

[FreeTheHostages]

Some fun bibliographical facts.

Fried wrote "Arguing the Reagan Revolution." In support of Reagan's legal initiatives as President.

Florida’s Republican-led legislature hired Harvard law professor Charles Fried to represent it before the Supreme Court.

Fried recently engaged in a publicly written debate with Dworkin re the 2000 election, arguing for the right.

Fried has recently been analyzed by a law professor as one of Bush's possible picks for the Supreme Court. A leading constitutional scholar describes him thusly:

"Professor Charles Fried. Fried, who also came to America as a child from Eastern Europe (his family fled from the Nazis), has been a professor at Harvard Law School and a leading conservative and libertarian scholar since the early 1960s. He served for four years as solicitor general -- the person in charge of the federal government’s Supreme Court litigation -- and then for five years as a justice of Massachusetts’ highest state court. Fried, alongside Posner, is undoubtedly one of the top conservative legal intellectuals of his generation."

But of course you would know better. </sarcasm>

[FreeTheHostages]

Here's what CNN has to say about Charles Fried. They just hate 'em. They think he's a big conservative (as does the New Yorker writer Lincoln Caplan, whose book The Tenth Justice is referenced in this quote -- a book complaining about how conservative Fried is.)

The last conservative activist Fried had no qualms about being a mouthpiece for the president when so requested. He sought to advance conservative political efforts by urging the Supreme Court to outlaw affirmative action and overturn Roe v. Wade -- to cite just a few of the more blatant examples.

Most memorable, however, was his willingness to argue a case that most all his predecessors (at least since the Civil War) and successors would have resigned before presenting to the court.

In Bob Jones University v. United States, Fried argued that schools that discriminate against blacks should still be accorded tax breaks. The racism of this position is patent. The fact that it departed from established practice by the IRS did not trouble Fried, nor did the fact that his argument was contrary to his certiorari papers.

Fried's palpably partisan and extreme positions failed. Although he may have pleased conservatives, he did not please the Supreme Court. Lincoln Caplan of Yale Law School has studied Fried's tenure and those of others who have held the post. Caplan interviewed many of the justices sitting during Fried's arguments. They were outspoken in their criticism.

One justice found Fried's work was "hardly the mark of a reasoned approach to the law. It's ideology, pure and simple. It's an assault on settled practices."

Caplan observes that although Fried's arguments attracted great attention, they had little effect on the Supreme Court. Caplan is not the only critic of such political advocacy by a solicitor general.

Fried says Rawls was a great philosopher. You respond with a challenge to Fried's intellect and bona fides as a conservative. You, sir, are wrong. If you can't see how upset CNN and New Yorker writer Caplan are about Fried as evidence, nothing will help you. http://www.cnn.com/2001/LAW/05/columns/fl.dean.olson.05.28/

[cornelis]

Fried, alongside Posner

LOL!

[FreeTheHostages]

? We can agree Judge Posner of the 7th Circuit is an esteemed conservate too, can we not?