Introduction to Political Philosophy

The Limits of Justice

As you read the material for the next class, keep the questions below in mind. To answer these questions you will have to reflect critically on what you have read and possibly re-read important passages. Keep in mind that there are two basic kinds of information that you need to look for in the readings.

1. What are the main points or conclusions that an author accepts with respect to a particular issue?
2. What are the reasons or important considerations that lead the author to accept that conclusion?

For our purposes, it is information of the latter sort (2) that will be our primary concern since our most basic task is to evaluate the reasons that are offered to support accepting one possible conclusion about an issue, rather than another. Although I strongly suggest that you write out brief answers to these questions, you do not have to turn in written responses. You do, however, need to be prepared to speak intelligently to these issues in the next class meeting.

Reading:

• Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, pp. 1-24, 165-183 (handout).
• Michael Sandel, Public Philosophy, “Morality and the Liberal Ideal”, pp. 147-155 (handout).

Questions:

1. How does Sandel characterize the different approaches to justice by Mill and Kant? Why does the Kantian approach reject the Utilitarian one? How does Kant conceive of the subject and what are the two arguments to justify this? What is the sociological objection to this and why does it fail? What is the Rawlsian objection?
2. According to Sandel, what are the moral and epistemological claims in Rawls’ assertion of the primacy of justice? Why does the latter require an “Archimedean point” from which to assess the basic structure of society? What are the moral and meta-ethical claims in Rawls’ assertion of the priority of the right? How does this lead to a claim of the priority of the self and why does this require its own Archimedean point account of the self that is neither “radically situated” nor “radically disembodied”? What are these two extremes and why are they problematic? How is the unity of the self related to these last considerations?
3. What epistemological need for justice does Rawls apparently assume? How does the shared understanding by members of a community circumvent this need?
4. What problems does Sandel identify with the deontological project and how does he defend the claim that it “fails to account for certain indispensable aspects of our moral experience”? What aspects are these and why are they unaccounted for in deontology?
5. How does the debate between liberals and so-called communitarians reflect two different conceptions of the self?

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