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Justice: A Funeral Oration

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2009

Wallace Matson
Wallace Matson
Affiliation:
Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley
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Extract

1. THRENODY

Is it any longer possible to talk seriously about justice and rights? Are these words corrupted and debased beyond redemption? There is no need to multiply examples of how anything that any pressure group has the chutzpah to lay claim to forthwith becomes a right, nemine contradicente. Nor is this Newspeak restricted to the vulgar. The President of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association has granted permission to misuse words like rights and justice if you do so in the service of desirable political ends. Our most universally acclaimed theoretician of justice has shown at length that justice is a will perpetual and constant to forcibly take goods from those who have earned them and give them to those who have not; and the leading light of Anglo-American jurisprudence has constructed a “straightforward” argument proving that a citizen's right to equal protection of the laws is fully satisfied if only the bureaucrat denying him or her a public benefit on racial grounds shows “respect and concern” while processing the forms.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , Autumn 1983 , pp. 94 - 113
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 1983

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References

1 Feinberg, Joel, Rights, Justice, and the Bounds of Liberty (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 141CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 153.I am indebted to Max Hocutt for this reference.

2 Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 277–280Google Scholaret passim.

3 Dworkin, Ronald, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 227–229.Google Scholar

4 Wasserstrom, Richard, “A Defense of Programs of Preferential Treatment,” in Vincent, Barry (ed.), Applying Ethics (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1982), 332 f.Google Scholar

5 Nagel, Thomas, Mortal Questions (New Rochelle, N.Y: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 99 f.Google Scholar

6 See Nozick, Robert, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 185.Google Scholar

7 Leviathan Chapter 13.

8 The Goebbels Diaries, ed. and trans. Lochner, Louis P. (Westport, CT.: Greenwood, 1971), 135Google Scholar (March 7, 1942).

9 Irresponsible speculation might suggest that Plato, hating his stepfather Pyrilampes, made Socrates his omnipotent surrogate father.