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 Ayesha |
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| Foundations |
| Professor
Sidgwick
Speaking
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 Let me suggest something to all of you. I want to carry what John and Vera have said one step further and suggest that all of the theories of justice that are built around a single value -- whether it be liberty or happiness or need or salvation or moral perfection -- are incomplete. I want to suggest this as a hypothesis -- not a final dogma or conclusion. I want you to leave here and think about it.We must recognize that all of the theories we have are highly selective. The full moral experience of humanity suggests that there is no single ultimate value i.e., one that is always more important than anything else. The reality may be that there is always more than one great value for human beings. Libertarians, utilitarians, Christians, and others are all grasping one element in the more complex whole of our moral experience and moral intuition. I want to suggest that our understanding of justice must therefore be pluralistic. It cannot be based on a single ultimate value. It must recognize several. Perhaps another way to put this is to say that justice is multi-dimensional. What might that mean? I can think of many dimensions: Need, achievement, ownership, effort, desert, and welfare to name a few. Perhaps a theory of justice must place value on all of these and concede a place to each in its determinations? And furthermore, there is no one value that can always trump the others. If we are to use strongly felt human moral intuitions as evidence for a theory, then pluralism may have a good claim to our consideration. All other theories seem to run into problems because they always stress one factor (e.g., protecting individual rights or maximizing happiness or utility). There are always counter-examples that seem to reduce the theory to absurdity. The advantage of pluralism is that it may be able to avoid these problems by conforming more closely to our intuitions. |
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