Dear all, Next week, Professor Thomas Pogge (Yale) will give a talk entitled "Political Inequality" a the Moral Sciences Club. An abstract is included below.
The meeting will be held at 5:15pm on Tuesday, 26 November, in the *Boys Smith Room* (found in the Fisher Building), St. John's College. For more information, including details about our fees, and our 2013-2014 programme, please visit our website at http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc. Best wishes, Kyle and Shyane ABSTRACT: "It is widely thought that, to sustain the reflective allegiance of its citizens, a society must treat them with equal concern and respect. But what does this mean? Rawls’s answer envisions an overlapping consensus on a shared political conception of justice which is to prevent the losers in political battles from feeling that their specific values have been set aside for the sake of the values of some other groups. This feeling is avoided because the controversial decision is justified not by appeal to any group-specific values but by appeal to the shared conception of social justice. Rawls presents an analogue to this solution also at the supranational level, sketching how a society of peoples – governed by his proposed “Law of Peoples” – can treat all its members with equal concern and respect. At both levels, however, Rawls’s solution fails because the choice and application of the supposedly sharable moral core is still (inexplicitly but manifestly) driven by partisan values. An alternative to Rawls’s answer postulates an impartiality requirement which demands that, insofar as citizens partake in the formulation or application of social rules, they must give strictly equal weight to the needs and interests of all affected persons. I will begin to spell out this requirement and formulate its analogue at the supranational level." -- Kyle Mitchell and Shyane Siriwardena Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge [email protected] http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc
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