Chapter 9 Flashcards
refer to moral rights that belong to all human beings by virtue of their humanity, which override or generally outweigh other moral considerations; they correlate with the duties of all human beings – and especially all governments – to respect, protect, and promote the interests identified by these rights.
Human Rights:
pertains when an individual can rationally choose his or her acts and omissions in accord with his or her own judgment and inclinations-where “rationality” implies at least a minimal capacity to understand and foresee the probable consequences of those acts and omissions.
Autonomy:
adherents see themselves as citizens of the world – as members of a global community of human beings, with robust responsibilities to others in the global community; also that all individual human beings have equal moral worth and that the strength of our moral obligations to others is not diminished by national borders; has its roots in the Stoicism of Ancient Greece.
Cosmopolitanism:
ancient Greek school of philosophy that emphasized the will as the source of virtue and taught the development of self-control as the route to happiness; also rejected the idea that one should be importantly defined by one’s city of origin, insisting instead that we were “citizens of the world.”
Stoicism:
hypothetical situation employed by Rawls to compare competing principles of social justice by asking which would be chosen by rational individuals were they to be situated behind a veil of ignorance that deprives them of knowledge of their fortunes in the social and natural lottery, as well as of their conception of well-being.
Original Position:
principle of social justice advocated by Rawls that grants individuals certain basic civil liberties, such as equality before the law and free speech, as well as rights to participate in the democratic process on a fair basis. It is also known as the First Principle, because Rawls grants it the highest priority or as the Basic Liberties Principle.
Principle of Equal Basic Liberties (Basic Liberties Principle; First Principle):
principle of social justice advocated by Rawls that prohibits inequalities in income and wealth that are detrimental to the least advantaged.
Difference Principle:
principle of social justice-advocated, inter alia, by Rawls-requires that governments ensure that similarly motivated and talented individuals enjoy the same prospects of success in the competition for jobs and political offices.
Principle of Fair Equality of Opportunity:
agreement between persons in a state of nature that establishes the terms for a common society and/or government.
Social Contract:
law to govern relations between liberal and non-liberal peoples of the world. In Rawls’ version, this law consists of principles acknowledging peoples’ independence, their equality, their right to self-defense, and their duties of non-intervention, to observe treaties, to honor a limited set of rights, to conduct themselves appropriately in war, and to provide limited assistance for peoples living in certain kinds of unfavorable conditions.
Law of Peoples:
technical term employed by John Rawls to refer to a set of major social institutions that distribute rights and duties between individuals, and which exert profound influence on motivations and life prospects.
Basic Structure:
phrase coined by Rawls to refer to the limited knowledge of characteristics for example, sex, race, and class-that can be (dis) advantaging in the real world, but which ought not to be (dis)advantaging in the just society.
Veil of Ignorance:
non-liberal societies, the basic institutions of which meet certain conditions of justice, including the right to play a role in making political decisions through a consultation process or hierarchy.
Decent Peoples:
another name for an individual’s civil and political liberty, where political liberty is conceived broadly to include living under a constitutional government that has no authority to violate basic rights, and which is suitably constrained by a system of checks and balances to prevent abuses of authority; arguably maximized under some form of constitutional democracy, which recognizes a basic right to absolute liberty of self-regarding conduct.
Security:
an individual has liberty in a purely descriptive sense in relation to a give domain of acts and omissions if, and only if, he or she can do as he or she wishes within that domain. If the individual chooses whatever act or omission he or she likes, then it follows that other people are not preventing that individual from acting, or omitting to act, as he or she chooses. The domain of conduct in relation to which an individual has liberty may be extensive or narrow, depending on the context. As long as he or she can choose even a single act or omission, however, that individual is at liberty in relation ot that particular act or omission. It is a separate question whether the individual’s liberty has value in a given context.
Liberty:
