Justice Course

Courses

Lecture 1

Trolley Cars, Doctor and healthy patients

Moral Reasoning

• Consequentialist

  locates morality in the consequence of an act, leads to utilitarian moral theory

• Categorical

  locates morality in certain duties and rights

Utilitarian moral theory

• Jeremy Bentham: “The greatest good for the greatest number”
• Case: Queen versus Dudley and Stevens
  1. Do we have certain fundamental rights
  2. Dose a fair procedure justify any result
  3. What is the moral work of consent

Lecture 2

Phillip Morris Study

Smoking benefits Czech government.

• COSTS

  • Increased Health Care Costs

• BENEFITS

  • Tax Revenue from Cigarette sales
  • Health Care Savings (from early deaths)
  • Pension Saving
  • Savings in Housing Costs

• Problems

  • how can measure value of life

Ford Pinto Case

Small, subcompact car with fuel tank in back of car. When in accidents, it exploded. Ford had long since known the problem, but the cost-benefit analysis points out that the cost of improving safety is lower than benefits. When this was found out in the court, Ford needed to pay a huge settlement.

• Is cost-benefit analysis countable or necessary / Can lives be measured?
  • Needed, the value of life is measured low in Ford case
  • Needed, otherwise companies can not profit, many people lost jobs

Utilitarian approach to law and the common good

• Wrong, can’t say minority’s needs are less important
  • value of minority person is same with majority, so number wins
    • some certain rights individual have cannot be traded off for majority’s needs

Objections to Utilitarian

1. Fails to respect individual rights
2. Not possible to aggregate all values into money
   • Using a single measure like money
   • Isn’t there a distinction between higher and lower pleasures? (should have different measurement for different values) “The quantity of pleasure being equal, pushpin is as good as poetry” - Jeremy Bentham

John Stuart Mill

• Profile

  • Try to humanize utilitarian accommodate humanitarian concerns: individual rights, address distinction between higher and lower pleasures
  • “": Importance of defending individual rights and minority rights
  • “Utilitarianism”: utility is the only standard of morality
    • Justice and rights are important, when thinking in human’s long-run

• Test of whether a pleasure is higher or lower

  Higher: whether someone who has experienced both would prefer it

  “Of two pleasures, if there be one to which all or almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference, irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, then that is the more desirable pleasure.”

Lecture 3

• Questions from Mill’s theories

  1. In the case of higher or worthier pleasures, are there theories of the good life that can provide independent moral standard for the worth of pleasure?
  2. In the case of justice and rights, a more powerful theory that proves the intuition that the reason for respecting individuals rather than using them, goes beyond even utility in long run.

• Libertarianism

  Because we are individually separate human beings, we have a fundamental rights to liberty, and that means the right to choose freely, to live our lives as we please provided we respect other people’s rights to do the same.

• Libertarian view of government

  1. No Paternalist Legislation e.g., motorcycle helmet laws; seat belts
  2. No Morals Legislation e.g., prevent sexual intimacy between gays
  3. No Redistribution of Income from Rich to Poor Nozick: taxation = taking of earnings = the same the right of the state to claim a portion of my labor -> forced labor = the government is a part owner in me -> slavery

  We are owners of our own. (A problem to utilitarian: people’s things aren’t belong to them)

  • John Locke

    Private property arises because when we mix our labor with things, unowned things, we come to acquire property rights in those things. The reason is that we own our own labor, which is because we are the owners of our own person.

  • From Nozick: What Makes Income Distribution Just?

    1. Justice in acquisition (initial holdings)
    2. Justice in Transfer (free market)

• Minimal State

  • Milton Friedman

    Many of the functions we take for granted as properly belonging to government don’t, they are paternalist. e.g., social security, good idea but it’s wrong when government to force everyone to do it e.g., some public service, like fireman

• Objections to Libertarianism

  1. The poor need money Redistribution maybe good, but it’s still wrong to coerce the rich.

  2. Taxation by consent of the governed is not coerced, it’s legitimate. The governed are voted. Some fundamental rights can not be decided by democracy and people’s right to protect their assets is the same kind of right of free speech and religious choices.

     • The rich can make so much money due to the stability of the society. If no taxation, more money will be spent to prevent crimes, and other necessaries things. It’s different from the religious, which is a personal thing.

  3. The successful owe a debt to society. We don’t own ourselves. The rich provide service to the society, make money from free exchange.

Notes

Points from lectures above:

1. How to measure levels of pleasure, should we treat them all the same?
2. The relationship between individuals and the society. From where do they separate?
   • how to define fundamental rights

Lecture 4

John Locke

• There are some fundamental individual rights that are so important that no government, even a elected govern, can override them

• Fundamental rights include a natural right to life, liberty and property

• Right of property is not just the creation of government or law. It’s a natural right attaches to individuals

  • people own his own body, so the labor of the body are properly theirs -> whatever we mix our labor with that is un-owned, becomes our property

• State of nature

  • state of liberty, human beings are free and equal
  • exist a law of nature constraining what we can do: we can not give up our rights nor can take them from others
    • e.g., no suicides allowed
    • why?
      • rights are not strictly ours, they are God’s, God owns us all
      • if reflect what means to be free -> freedom can’t just be a matter of doing whatever we want
  • A Paradox: rights are unalienable, can not transfer or give up -> not fully mine, which makes the rights more mine

• With libertarian

  • Unalienable makes Locker differ from the libertarian
  • View on property is the same

Excerpts

• Philosophy estranges us from the familiar, not by supplying new information, but by inviting and provoking a new way of seeing. But here is the risk, once the familiar turns strange, it’s never quite the same again. Self knowledge is like lost innocence, however unsettling you find it; it can never be un-thought or un-known.