Values and Justice A New Perspective

Author(s): Hemant Shah
Publisher: Z_Philosophical_Writings_001802.pdf

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Values and Justice - A new lerspective
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"Each person has an equal right to the most extensive scheme of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for all. Social and economic inequalities are to meet two conditions; they must be (a) to the greatest expected benefit of the least advantaged; and (b) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of
fair opportunity." Here we find the principles of 'equal liberty' and 'fair opportunity are natural expression of this equality contained in Rawls' principles of justice. He has described it as 'Kantian' though it is not Kant's conception, but 'sufficiently similar to essential parts of his (Kant's) doctrine to make the adjective appropriate'. Kant's view is marked by a number of dualism, in particular, the dualism between the necessary and the contingent, form and content, reason and desire, and noumena and phenomena. Kant's moral conception has a characteristic structure. The conception of justice suitable for a well ordered society would be fair between individuals conceived as free and equal moral persons
As late as in 1985, John Rawls in his paper on 'Justice as Fairness: Political and Metaphysical begins: “I shall first discuss what I regard as the task of political philosophy at the present time and then briefly survey how the basic intuitive ideas drawn upon in justice as faimess are combined into a political conception of justice for a constitutional democracy. Doing this will bring out how and why this conception of justice avoids certain philosophical and metaphysical claims. Briefly , the idea is that in a constitutional democracy the public conception of justice should be, so far as possible, independent of controversial, philosophical and religious doctrines ..... The public conception of justice is to be political, not metaphysical.'21
In the same paper, John Rawls, as late as 15 years after the first paper, in 1985, clears and writes: "One thing 1 failed to say in 'A Theory of Justice' (1971), or failed to stress sufficiently, is that