Ariadne's Thread on Justice
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Vera Speaking
You're still searching for a nice tight theory that will make sense of everything. I doubt that you will find anything very useful.

The fact is that the foundations of every moral system, including systems based in part on rights, express the preferences of some group of people. What happens is that we are not satisfied to simply accept our preferences. We must give them some greater solidity to make them unquestionable. So we build them into the nature of the universe, or say that they follow from our basic concepts, or claim that they are based on science. None of this is true. We are afraid to face the truth of the human condition.

If you feel the need for a pluralistic theory, it is probably because in a democracy it is difficult for one group to make its ideas completely dominant. So you go looking for a mixture. But at bottom, you only have the preferences of various groups. Pluralism may be appealing to some people, but that doesn't mean its foundations are any more solid than those of the other theories.


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