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Journal ArticleDOI

Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality

01 Jan 1985-The Philosophical Review (Basil Blackwell)-Vol. 83, Iss: 1, pp 142
TL;DR: Lawler as mentioned in this paper argued that being for the freeze means that one is not for disarmament, which is hardly a rational position in the sense that it is suspect if not immoral, in the eyes of some.
Abstract: that a plurality of the American Catholic bishops endorse a nuclear freeze (p. 4), saying that they are thus "taking their stance with Moscow,55 which is for a freeze, and not with the Vatican, which "is still in favor of disarmament?not a freeze.55 To make any sense at all, Mr. Lawler must mean that being for the freeze means that one is not for disarmament? hardly a rational position. One recalls here the arguments, during the 19305s and 19405s, that being for racial justice in the United States was suspect if not immoral, in the eyes of some, because the communists also favored it.
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In 1998, a study by the National Commission on Small Farms as mentioned in this paper showed that although 94 percent of America's farms were still small in 1998, they received only 41 percent of all farm receipts.
Abstract: If my land has cried out against me, and its furrows have wept together; if I have eaten its yield without payment, and caused the death of its owners; let thorns grow instead of wheat, and foul weeds instead of barley. - Job 31: 38-40 When farm bills came up for ritual debate in the U.S. Congress every five years, much rhetoric urged that funding be continued, in order to shore up the struggling family farm. The family farm was called the wellspring of American individualism, independence, and general goodness. For almost two centuries this article of faith has risen out of the mists of rural America. Over the last sixty years in particular, since the devastation of the 1930s Depression and Dust Bowl, Americans have legislated financial and institutional support to protect these iconic farmers. Federal action is only one response to farm problems, but it deserves special attention because it has the most far-ranging effects. Nowhere have federal safeguards been more visible than on the High, or Great, Plains. Comprehensive programs of federal price supports, low-cost loans, crop insurance, and agricultural extension directed billions of dollars to Plains people. President Franklin D. Roosevelt reflected popular opinion when he was said to have "a romantic faith in the Jeffersonian ideal of the independent yeoman living in bucolic abundance" (Fite 1981, 52). The same sentiments would be repeated in the Family Farm Income Act of 1960: "[T]he system of independent family farms was the beginning and foundation of free enterprise in America. . . . [I]t is an ever-present source of strength for democratic processes and the American ideal" (Fite 1981, 133; see also Fite 1977). In 1998 A Time to Act, a study by the National Commission on Small Farms, reaffirmed that "small farms have been the foundation of our Nation" and spoke of "our nation's historical commitment to small farms" (USDA 1998). The commission pulled on national heartstrings by concluding that "the greatest thing that agriculture furnished this country is not food or fiber, but a set of children with a work ethic and a good set of values." However, the report also noted that "[a]t present, USDA does not emphasize the needs of small farms in its strategic plan." Its data showed that although 94 percent of America's farms were still small in 1998, they received only 41 percent of all farm receipts. A small farm was one with less than $250,000 gross annual receipts and that averaged a net cash income of $23,000. Of the nation's 2 million farms, only 122,810, all superlarge, received the majority of farm receipts. Two years earlier, in April 1996, President Bill Clinton had reluctantly signed a farm bill that effectively reversed a long history of financial aid for farms. The president spoke of farmers' vulnerability, the need for an adequate safety net, and continued investment in the historic infrastructure of rural America. A CONDITIONAL MORAL GEOGRAPHY This essay is not a tract on moral geography, if such a concept truly exists. Nor does it elaborate a version of environmental ethics. Instead, it examines the shifts and turns of American values, how they shaped public policy, and their various impacts on the Plains (Webb 1931; Gabriel 1956; Thompson 1995). The agricultural philosopher Gary Comstock describes the decision-making process as a "sense of direction we call practical wisdom." This involved pragmatic action, "knowing how to proceed" rather than "knowing that this is the only right answer" (Comstock 1987a, xxi). To this expediency we must add the detail of location. The philosopher David M. Smith has concluded that justice and sustainability are geographically and historically specific, "grounded in the lived experience of particular people in time and place as well as in the abstractions of philosophical debate" (Smith 1996, 20). As Americans we have historically designated some places, such as Yosemite (Solnit, Friedman, and Beardsley 1994), as good or heroic and other places, such as Love Canal (Colten and Skinner 1996), as evil or tragic. …

23 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors focus on the diversity argument, the claim that value pluralism implies a commitment to a diversity of values that is best made possible, within a given society, by liberalism.
Abstract: Fewwould disagree that contemporary society is characterized by ‘pluralism’, but what this means is widely disputed. Among the many senses of pluralism current in contemporary political theory, ‘value pluralism’ is one of the most keenly contested. The classic account is found in Isaiah Berlin, who sees basic human values as irreducibly multiple, often conflicting, and sometimes incommensurable with one another. Berlin seems in general to have believed that the pluralist outlook has an affinity of some sort with liberalism, although he does not make it clear what this affinity is. Other value pluralists, such as John Gray and John Kekes, have tried to sever pluralism from liberalism, instead proposing connections between pluralism and forms of conservatism or modus vivendi. In Kekes’s view, the true message of pluralism is that choice among rival incommensurable goods can be resolved rationally only by appeal to the relevant society’s established traditions (Kekes 1993, 1997). A problem here is that traditions often conflict. Consequently, John Gray believes, we need to replace or supplement tradition with modus vivendi: the adherents of competing conventions will have to compromise in order to achieve the peaceful resolution that is in everyone’s interests (Gray 2000). Such a compromise will not necessarily be liberal. This too has its problems, since modus vivendi seems to privilege the goal of peace, which for the pluralist can be only one consideration among others. Liberal pluralists have proposed various ways of re-establishing the link between pluralism and liberalism. In this paper I focus on what I call ‘the diversity argument’, the claim that value pluralism implies a commitment to a diversity of values that is best made possible, within a given society, by liberalism. This, too, has met with several objections, but I argue that these can be resisted. I begin by setting out the basic terms of Berlinian value pluralism, emphasizing the Ethic Theory Moral Prac (2015) 18:549–564 DOI 10.1007/s10677-014-9539-3

23 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Zutshi, Chitralekha, and Stewart as mentioned in this paper discuss the loyalty of the Borderlands and the boundary problem in the context of liberal democracy and Islam in the Middle East and North Africa.
Abstract: Centripetalism and Communalism Compared.” European Political Science 11(2):259–70. Stewart, Rory. 2012. “Loyalty of the Borderlands.” Prospect, March:16–17. Whelan, Frederick. 1983. “Prologue: Democratic Theory and the Boundary Problem.” InNomos XXV: Liberal Democracy, edited by John Chapman and J. Roland Pennock, 13–47. New York and London: New York University Press. Zutshi, Chitralekha. 2004. Languages of Belonging: Islam, Regional Identity, and the Making of Kashmir. London: Hurst.

23 citations


Cites background from "Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pl..."

  • ...In this paper I do not discuss at length the moral right of residence, in part because there is convergence by all the competing theories of territory on the idea that rights attach to individuals who live on and are settled on land (Walzer 1983, 43; Moore 2001; Stilz 2011a; Lefkowitz unpublished)....

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Dissertation
25 Feb 2014
TL;DR: Wang et al. as mentioned in this paper examined the patterns of popular attitudes and beliefs about economic inequality and distributive justice in contemporary China using an interdisciplinary theoretical framework on social cognition and employing novel quantitative approaches.
Abstract: This dissertation examines the patterns of popular attitudes and beliefs about economic inequality and distributive justice in contemporary China. Using an interdisciplinary theoretical framework on social cognition and employing novel quantitative approaches, this dissertation challenges the widely held view that regards distributive injustice as one of the most critical sources of sociopolitical instability in today’s China, and presents new empirical findings on how beliefs and opinions about distributive justice are structured in people’s minds. Empirical analyses present following results. First, it is found that for the majority of ordinary people, their belief system concerning various faces of distributive justice is constructed in a way featuring weak association, lack of coherence, and dimensionality. The results suggests that most people, even relatively ideological individuals, do not possess well-organized attitudes toward the problem of distributive injustice. Second, there are psychosocial dispositions of conservative orientations strengthened among individuals with lower socioeconomic status. My study shows how the distribution of such dispositions among people is shaped by regional educational inequality. By examining individuals’ authoritarianism and social dominance orientation, it shows how the lower level of education among low socioeconomic groups increases conservative psychological tendencies that suppress critical attitudes toward inequality, justify the system, and legitimize the hierarchical order of society.

23 citations


Cites background from "Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pl..."

  • ...30 contingency are manifested in people’s conceptions and perceptions of social justice (Deutsch 1975, 1985; Miller 1999; Walzer 1983; Wegener and Liebig 1995a, 1995b; Aalberg 2003; Törnblom 1992; Folger 1986; Reis 1986)....

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  • ...Likewise, Walzer (1983) proposed three distributive principles of free exchange, desert, and need, rejecting universal or external claims for principles of justice, and argued that the meaning of justice is always shaped by local accounts and shared understandings of meaning of social goods....

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01 Jan 2008

23 citations