Don't fool yourself: It's mostly just about family connections and pure randomness.
#Capitalism#Liberalism#Philosophy#MoralPhilosophy#Inequality#Poverty: "Rawls thinks agents designing a society from behind the veil of ignorance might nevertheless allow some inequality, in exchange for greater economic efficiency. But in navigating such tradeoffs they’d be guided by the principle that inequalities need to earn their keep by (a) making the better-off positions available to every qualified applicant under conditions of meaningful equality of opportunity and (b) only allowing inequalities, even inequalities that satisfy condition (a), when whoever is worst off would still be better off than they would be under a more equal alternative.
The resulting loophole for acceptable inequalities is much narrower than many readers of Rawls over the decades have realized. Rawls himself, who certainly wasn’t a radical firebrand by personal inclination, had reluctantly come to realize by the end of his life that even a form of capitalism modified by a generous welfare state couldn’t meet his demanding standard.
Meanwhile, one of Rawls’s most important critics, the Marxist philosopher G. A. Cohen, argued that even this loophole was too large for it to be appropriate to call any arrangement that passed Rawls’s test “justice.” Cohen acknowledged that economic efficiency matters, for much the same reason Rawls thought it did — the standard of living of even the lower classes — but he thought we should keep a more demanding notion of egalitarian justice as our north star."
Actualizing Human Rights: Global Inequality, Future People, and Motivation by Jos Philips, 2020
Taking a perspective from moral and political philosophy, the book focuses on two challenges to human rights that have until now received little attention, but that need to be addressed if human rights are to remain plausible as a global ideal.
Aristotle and Xunzi on Shame, Moral Education, and the Good Life by Jingyi Jenny Zhao, 2024
The first major work that takes two philosophers from the ancient Greek and early Chinese traditions to stimulate discussion of an interdisciplinary nature on the rich and complex topic of the emotions-in particular, of shame.
An oddly specific #AskFedi, but Mastodon is the kind of place where I feel comfortable making a request like this, so here goes.
My request is for a female ethicist/moral philosopher (not necessarily a current or former professional philosopher, but someone who has at least a PhD in ethics/moral philosophy) who is a trans-inclusive feminist to DM me to advise me on a moral quandary I'm having relating to reproduction (not an urgent one, I should say, not remotely). I'm at the point where I cannot resolve the problem myself, but I don't feel like any of my female friends or family are capable of the kind of perspective or moral clarity that I need here. It's quite a big ask, I know, but for the first time in my life I need the services of a professional.
How to Make Good Decisions and Be Right All the Time: Solving the Riddle of Right and Wrong by Iain King
A compelling guide to ethical thinking for everyday life In How to Make Good Decisions and Be Right All the Time Iain King presents an introduction to moral philosophy from the ancient Greeks to the Enlightenment and beyond.
Alastair Macintyre and Bernard Williams - top notch writers when it comes to ethics
#MoralPhilosophy#Ethics#Liberalism#Morality#Marx#Marxism#Localism: "MacIntyre once believed that Marxism offered a solution, but by the time he wrote After Virtue he thought that it was ‘exhausted as a political tradition’, even if it remained ‘one of the richest sources of ideas about modern society’. The familiar liberal explanations of its failure missed the point, however: the problem with political Marxism isn’t that it is dogmatic, scientistic, authoritarian or economistic, but that it is ‘deeply optimistic’. This is a typical MacIntyre moment: simple, surprising and – when you come to think about it – completely true. If there is a single thread running through the works of Marx, it is that the evils of capitalism, terrible as they are, will soon be outweighed by its double legacy: on the one hand the enormous wealth generated by modern industry, and on the other an international proletariat with the strength and wisdom to put it to good use. But Marx’s optimism proved to be ill-founded. The proletariat did not live up to expectations, leaving latter-day Marxists scrambling to find alternative superheroes. Hence, according to MacIntyre, the multitudes of ‘conflicting ... political allegiances which now carry Marxist banners’, all expressing a well-founded hatred of capitalism but none offering a ‘tolerable alternative’. The resulting ‘exhaustion’ had spread from Marxism to ‘every other political tradition’, plunging the world into a ‘new dark ages’, darker than ever before. (‘This time ... the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers,’ MacIntyre wrote, ‘they have already been governing us for quite some time.’) The only chance of building a better world, he concluded, was to abandon politics and concentrate on ‘the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained’."
To look into the darkness of the human soul is a frightening venture. Here Mary Midgley does so, with her customary brilliance and clarity. In Wickedness she sets out to delineate not so much the nature of wickedness as its actual sources.
Think Least of Death
Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die
In Think Least of Death, Steven Nadler connects Spinoza’s ideas with his life and times to offer a compelling account of how the philosopher can provide a guide to living one’s best life.