Word: rawlsian
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THIS crude effort to discredit Rawlsian justice is only laughable. More worrisome is the fact that Ec 10 purports to present Rawls' view without mentioning that it has conveniently omitted important parts of the argument. By using only a choice few of Rawls' basic suppositions, Ec 10 arrives at policy choices that Rawls and most other thinking people would...
Implicit in the Ec 10 presentation is that Rawlsian justice means measures that would unjustly punish the most advantaged members of society. By presenting the possibility of all members of society getting equal parts of a tiny pie, Ec 10 evokes images of inefficiency and communism...
...Theory of Justice was created specifically for democratic society. "The difference principle recognizes the need for inequalities in the social and economic order," writes Rawls. The theory fully accepts the inequalities necessary to drive capitalism. It is irresponsible of Ec 10 to insinuate that Rawlsian justice would accept a system of levelling equality so foreign to its own presuppositions...
Section leaders encourage students to object to Rawls' scheme on the grounds that it unwisely compromises efficiency for the sake of equity. It is true that a Rawlsian society does focus on the least well-off and contends that income differentials must be justified. But all the Difference Principle asks is that the inequalities in society be harnessed to provide some benefit to the poor. Rawls' "Justice as Fairness" is not about levelling equality. A more truly Rawlsian policy might be adjusting marginal tax rates on high incomes and channeling the revenue to the less well...
Exaggeration is a useful educational tool. However Ec 10's presentation of Rawlsian distributive justice is not just a case of using an extreme example to illustrate a point. The selective witholding of inconvenient parts of Rawls' assumptions is careless at best and dishonest at worst. If Rawls' ideas are only useful to Ec 10 in a severely mutated form, they should not be used...