Searching For What Others Have Said

A while back, I decided to deviate from the things I usually do, and read what some intellectuals written on justice, and its derivatives. I was pointed towards Rawls, Nozick, Sen, and Pogge. There's a very short comment on each below.

Nozick and Rawls swim in theory, each from their own base. Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia concludes with the ideas that

A minimal state, limited to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on, is justified; that any more extensive state will violate persons' rights not to be forced to do certain things, and is unjustified; and that the minimal state is inspiring as well as right. Two noteworth implications are that the state may not use its coercive apparatus for the purpose of getting some citizens to aid others, or in order to prohibit activities to people for their own good or protection.

Rawls' A Theory of Justice has its virtues ... and its vices ... and something that has always been on the critical end of my view on it is its applicability, and how in "touch with reality" it actually is.

This is where Sen comes in with his Development as Freedom, and challenges the idea that "development" is judged with economic factors. He argues that development is "a process of expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy", and on a more practical level than the above two authors, specifies that the types of freedoms can be categorized into political freedoms, economic facilities, social opportunities, trasparency guarantees, and protective security. In his chapter on "Freedom and the Foundations of Justice", he, among other things, takes on Rawls and Nozick.

And finally, Pogge - a dependancy theorist. Although he is not against free trade, in his book World Poverty and Human Rights, he attacks the differential bargaining power that globalization brings, and the effect it has on poverty. Fifty percent of the world live with less than the World Bank 2$/day line, and a quarter of the world with less than 1$/day. He sees the deaths caused by poverty as one of humanity's worst crimes, and his comparisons are on the level of the Holocaust.

These are interesting reads, each in their own way, but ... I feel I'm back to square one ... the questions I had are still left unanswered. Maybe I was looking in the wrong places. Maybe not.

I guess for now, I'll just go back and do what I usually did.

posted by Lazarus, 4:25 PM