Week 12 · Ethics, Justice & the Good Life
How to reason about fair distribution, equal standing, rights, and the conditions of a worthwhile life.
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Justice is a cluster of questions about distribution, recognition, rights, opportunity, and human flourishing. A society can give people goods without equal standing, or protect rights while leaving serious inequalities untouched. I widen the analysis from individual action to social arrangements and use the distribution matrix to keep competing meanings of fairness separate long enough to compare them precisely.
Words like equality and fairness can create false agreement. Always specify what is distributed, among whom, and according to which standard.
Equal in what respect, and what important value would that equality still leave unprotected?
Start with the aims and questions so the readings have a purpose.
Use the prompt under each source to produce notes, not highlights alone.
Test the ideas through observation, analysis, or a small intervention.
Save the deliverables and check your work against the completion criteria.
Define what you are trying to understand before deciding that you have understood it.
Use the readings to fill a distribution matrix: who receives benefits, who carries burdens, who has standing to object, and which institutions decide.
Core material
4 guided readings, in the order shown.
S. Matthew Liao · Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
A survey of justice as a central problem in ethical and political philosophy, including distribution, rights, and fairness.
Read the introduction and sections on distributive justice and equality. Extract four competing standards for distribution.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy contributors · Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
An overview of virtue ethics, character, practical wisdom, flourishing, and major objections to character-based ethics.
Return to the sections on eudaimonia and practical wisdom. Note how a good-life approach differs from distributing goods alone.
Fred D'Agostino, Gerald Gaus, and John Thrasher · Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
How political obligation, legitimacy, cooperation, and mutually acceptable rules are understood through social-contract traditions.
Read the sections on justification and legitimacy. Ask whether the rule in your case could be justified to everyone subject to it.
John Rawls · Harvard University Press
Rawls's account of justice as fairness, the original position, equal basic liberties, and the difference principle.
Read sections 1-4 and 11-17. Draw the original position and explain what Rawls gains by restricting what the parties know.
7 study actions turn the reading into observable work.
Optional resources for going further after the reading plan.
The family of ethical theories that assess actions by their consequences, including strengths and standard objections.
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