Pluralism and Natural Justice

Distinguish between major domains of justice: distributive, corrective, retributive, and procedural.

Explain the difference between consequentialist and deontological approaches to justice.

Describe the is-ought problem and its implications for deriving justice principles.

Frame the core tension between 'natural justice' (based on desert, entitlement, or natural law) and 'social justice' (based on fairness, equality, or social goals).

Identify monist versus pluralist approaches to value (single supreme value vs multiple incommensurable values).

Analyze the relationship between justice and other primary values like liberty, equality, and welfare.

Explain Plato's theory of justice as psychic harmony and right ordering of the state.

Describe Aristotle's conception of justice, distinguishing between distributive justice (proportional to merit) and corrective justice.

Explain the core tenets of natural law theory, where justice is derived from reason and human nature (telos).

Analyze Locke's derivation of property rights from self-ownership and labor, as a foundation for natural justice.

Compare religious natural law (grounded in divine order) with secular natural law (grounded in rational human nature).

Apply natural law reasoning to evaluate conflicts between positive law and moral law.

Analyze Hobbes's state of nature as a collective action problem and the social contract as an equilibrium solution.

Describe Rousseau's concept of the 'general will' and its complex relationship to individual liberty and collective sovereignty.

Distinguish hypothetical consent (Rawls) from tacit/actual consent (Locke) as foundations for political legitimacy.

Analyze the function of the original position and the veil of ignorance in Rawls's 'A Theory of Justice'.

Explain Rawls's two principles of justice, with a focus on the justification for the 'difference principle'.

Critique the assumptions of Rawls's model from both libertarian and communitarian perspectives.

Distinguish act, rule, and preference utilitarianism and their differing implications for justice.

Analyze the 'separateness of persons' objection against utilitarian aggregation.

Explain how prioritarianism modifies utilitarianism to give greater weight to the worse-off.

Compare utilitarian and prioritarian approaches to a policy problem, such as healthcare allocation.

Analyze the implications of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem for the philosophical project of aggregating preferences into a social welfare function.

Explain Nozick's entitlement theory based on just acquisition, transfer, and rectification.

Distinguish historical principles (process-based) from end-state or patterned principles (outcome-based) of justice.

Analyze the Wilt Chamberlain argument against patterned theories of distributive justice.

Distinguish negative rights from positive rights and their different implications for the scope and function of the state.

Apply libertarian principles to evaluate the legitimacy of state functions like taxation and regulation.

Compare minimal state libertarianism (minarchism) with anarcho-capitalism and classical liberalism.

Explain Montesquieu's separation of powers as a mechanism for preventing tyranny through institutional competition.

Describe Tocqueville's analysis of intermediate associations as buffers between the individual and the state.

Analyze medieval constitutionalism and the pluralism of competing jurisdictions (e.g., church, crown, guilds) as a historical model for liberty.

Explain the principle of subsidiarity and its allocation of authority to the most local competent level.

Describe polycentric governance and the potential benefits of overlapping, competing authorities.

Apply institutional pluralism to analyze how the balance between state, market, and civil society affects individual liberty.

Explain the republican conception of freedom as 'non-domination' and distinguish it from 'non-interference' (negative liberty).

Analyze how the mere capacity for arbitrary power creates unfreedom, even without actual interference.

Describe the republican emphasis on the rule of law, constitutional safeguards, and civic virtue as remedies for domination.

Apply republican principles to evaluate sources of domination in modern society, such as in market relations or administrative states.

Compare republican non-domination with positive liberty, negative liberty, and relational equality.

Explain Isaiah Berlin's value pluralism and the thesis that fundamental human values can genuinely and irreconcilably conflict.

Distinguish incommensurability from incomparability and from mere difficulty of comparison.

Analyze 'tragic choice' situations where any course of action involves sacrificing a core value.

Evaluate how value pluralism challenges monistic theories of justice (e.g., strict utilitarianism, libertarianism).

Explain why value pluralism can provide a justification for liberal institutions that tolerate diverse conceptions of the good life.

Explain the communitarian critique of liberal individualism and the 'unencumbered self'.

Describe Alasdair MacIntyre's argument that justice is a tradition-dependent concept, internal to specific practices and communities.

Analyze perfectionist theories that ground justice in the state's role in promoting human excellence or a specific conception of the good life.

Distinguish the liberal ideal of state neutrality from state perfectionism.

Use the communitarian critique to re-evaluate the universalist claims of liberal and libertarian theories.

Explain procedural justice as the fairness of decision-making processes, sometimes independent of outcomes.

Distinguish consent-based, fairness-based, and epistemic justifications for democratic authority.

Describe epistemic proceduralism and its attempt to combine the instrumental and intrinsic value of democratic procedures.

Apply principles of procedural justice to evaluate different voting systems (e.g., majority rule, supermajority, consensus).

Analyze the role of procedural legitimacy in justifying political authority when citizens disagree on substantive justice.

Analyze the trade-off between universal liberal principles and the value of particularist community bonds.

Compare how different constitutional structures (e.g., majoritarian vs. consensus-based) balance popular sovereignty with minority rights.

Evaluate how the relative power of market institutions versus political and civil society institutions affects liberty, equality, and community.

Assess how the relative strength of state, church, market, and family creates different 'value equilibria' in a society.

Synthesize concepts from the course to model how different societal architectures systematically prioritize or sacrifice fundamental values like liberty, security, truth, and cohesion.

Formulate a reasoned argument about the 'least bad' institutional arrangements for a society of free and diverse individuals.