This collection critically engages with a number of recurrent themes from the work of G.A. Cohen, and most especially with arguments and positions advanced in his Rescuing Justice and Equality. A critical discussion of the work of the contemporary political theorist G.A. Cohen, an egalitarian and a critic of John Rawls Offers a critical perspective on his significant work on equality and constructivism, including his eagerly anticipated new book Rescuing Justice and Equality The contributors to this volume are noted for their own work on these topics Challenges Cohen’s view of the centrality of equality to justice, of the scope for free choice of occupation and economic incentives, as well as his view that fundamental principles of justice are insensitive to facts

Unless considered on a practical level, where a precise distribution of social goods is chosen, John Rawls’s and Gerald Cohen’s approaches to social justice cannot be complementary. Their disagreement about justice and its principles calls for a choice, which opts either for the Rawlsian theory or for the Cohenian one. What is the more plausible approach to social justice? This work compares both approaches and aims to defend Cohen’s position in the light of two considerations. It answers the philosophical question about the analysis of the idea of justice, which puts the virtue of justice in its philosophical context. It, however, presents a method everyone can apply in order to arrive at the fundamental principles of justice by employing the power of reason. An analysis of the concept of justice based on the power of reason should seek to uncover the ultimate nature of justice, which is independent of facts and of other virtues. Once exposed, the understanding of justice arrived at should inform social institutions and determine people’s daily decisions. A just society is therefore a society where just persons and just institutions exhibit the virtue of justice.

In this stimulating work of political philosophy, acclaimed philosopher G. A. Cohen sets out to rescue the egalitarian thesis that in a society in which distributive justice prevails, people’s material prospects are roughly equal. Arguing against the Rawlsian version of a just society, Cohen demonstrates that distributive justice does not tolerate deep inequality. In the course of providing a deep and sophisticated critique of Rawls’s theory of justice, Cohen demonstrates that questions of distributive justice arise not only for the state but also for people in their daily lives. The right rules for the macro scale of public institutions and policies also apply, with suitable adjustments, to the micro level of individual decision-making. Cohen also charges Rawls’s constructivism with systematically conflating the concept of justice with other concepts. Within the Rawlsian architectonic, justice is not distinguished either from other values or from optimal rules of social regulation. The elimination of those conflations brings justice closer to equality.

Major scholars assess G. A. Cohen's contribution to the debate on the nature of egalitarian justice.

The fox knows many things, the Greeks said, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. In his most comprehensive work, Ronald Dworkin argues that value in all its forms is one big thing: that what truth is, life means, morality requires, and justice demands are different aspects of the same large question. He develops original theories on a great variety of issues very rarely considered in the same book: moral skepticism, literary, artistic, and historical interpretation, free will, ancient moral theory, being good and living well, liberty, equality, and law among many other topics. What we think about any one of these must stand up, eventually, to any argument we find compelling about the rest. Skepticism in all its forms—philosophical, cynical, or post-modern—threatens that unity. The Galilean revolution once made the theological world of value safe for science. But the new republic gradually became a new empire: the modern philosophers inflated the methods of physics into a totalitarian theory of everything. They invaded and occupied all the honorifics—reality, truth, fact, ground, meaning, knowledge, and being—and dictated the terms on which other bodies of thought might aspire to them, and skepticism has been the inevitable result. We need a new revolution. We must make the world of science safe for value.

Table of contents

This book presents an edited collection of critical discourse situated in the fields of diversity and inclusion broadly, and more specifically, within the discipline of education. Each chapter articulates the importance of educational diversity in achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4. The edited collection presents a grounding narrative of equitable learning opportunities and experiences via interpretivist theoretical frameworks and student-centered methodologies. The combination of these approaches, combined within the strong and scholarly-informed social justice lens, reminds us, that the onus of education is to acknowledge, recognise, respect, and engage with the diverse student cohorts, learning needs, and multiple knowledges and cultures that exist in educational contexts. This edited collection creates a holistic discourse around the experiences, interrogations, and innovations occurring within education communities to foreground deeper and more holistic understanding of the intersectionality of diversity and inclusion existing within the contemporary educational settings.

Conceptual analysis has fallen out of favor in political philosophy. The influence of figures like John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin has led political philosophy to focus on questions about what should be done, and to ignore questions about the usage of words. In this book, Kyle Johannsen calls for renewed attention to the manner in which the word ‘justice’ is and should be used. Focusing on the late work of G.A. Cohen, Johannsen argues that debates over both the content and scope of egalitarian justice are, to a large extent, really just conceptual. Whereas some philosophers have been using the term ‘justice’ to refer to one among a plurality of values, others have been using it to refer to institutional rightness. Though the latter use of ‘justice’ is presently more dominant, he argues that much is to be gained from thinking of justice as one value among many. Doing so sheds light on the nature of both democracy and legitimacy, and, paradoxically, makes better sense of the idea that justice is ‘the first virtue of institutions’.

"Compares the theories of John Rawls and Emmanuel Kant, and offers an internal critique and reconstruction of justice as fairness, reconceiving it as a comprehensive, universalistic Kantian liberalism"--Provided by publisher.

This book aims to answer the question: 'why, and by what right do some people punish others?' The author argues that the justification of punishment must be embedded in a substantive political and moral theory. Matravers questions why it is that recent theories of distributive justice have had so little to say about the punishment and retributive justice. His answer is that contemporary theories of justice cannot explain the relationship of justice and morality more broadly conceived. As this is also the relationship that a theory of punishment needs to explain, it is in examining the problem of punishment that the limitations of contemporary theories of justice are most starkly exposed. Moreover, the limitations are such as to undermine these accounts of justice. The claim is that it is through the discussion of punishment that the inadequacies of contemporary theories of justice is demonstrated and it is therefore through the discussion of punishment that those inadequacies can be rectified. Matravers argues for a genuinely constructivist account of morality-constructivist in that it rejects any idea of objective, mind-independent moral values, and seeks instead to construct morality from non-moral human concerns and human wills, and genuinely constructivist in that, in contrast to the faux constructivisim of Rawls and cognate approaches, it does not take as a premise the equal moral worth of persons. He argues that a genuine constructivism will show the need for and justification of punishment as intrinsic to morality itself.