Justice: What's The Right Thing To Do? Quotes
"The storm claimed twenty-two lives and caused $11 billion in damage."
"It is astounding to me, the level of greed that someone must have in their soul to be willing to take advantage of someone suffering in the wake of a hurricane."
"Florida has a law against price gouging, and in the aftermath of the hurricane, the attorney general’s office received more than two thousand complaints."
"There is no such thing as a 'just price.'"
"Higher prices for ice, bottled water, roof repairs, generators, and motel rooms have the advantage, Sowell argued, of limiting the use of such things by consumers and increasing incentives for suppliers in far-off places to provide the goods and services most needed in the hurricane’s aftermath."
"It isn’t gouging to charge what the market will bear. It isn’t greedy or brazen. It’s how goods and services get allocated in a free society."
"In times of emergency, government cannot remain on the sidelines while people are charged unconscionable prices as they flee for their lives or seek the basic commodities for their families after a hurricane."
"If you look closely at the price-gouging debate, you’ll notice that the arguments for and against price-gouging laws revolve around three ideas: maximizing welfare, respecting freedom, and promoting virtue."
"The Purple Heart honors sacrifice, not bravery. It requires no heroic act, only an injury inflicted by the enemy."
"The dispute over the Purple Heart is more than a medical or clinical dispute about how to determine the veracity of injury. At the heart of the disagreement are rival conceptions of moral character and military valor."
"The reckoning came when the housing bubble burst. Wall Street banks and financial institutions had made billions of dollars on complex investments backed by mortgages whose value now plunged."
"The bonuses are not the reason they don’t deserve the money now, on what basis can it be said they deserved the money then?"
"To ask whether a society is just is to ask how it distributes the things we prize—income and wealth, duties and rights, powers and opportunities, offices and honors."
"In fact, it exerts a powerful hold on the thinking of policy-makers, economists, business executives, and ordinary citizens to this day."
"If the majority persecutes adherents of an unpopular faith, doesn’t it do an injustice to them, as individuals, regardless of any bad effects such intolerance may produce for society as a whole over time?"
"As soon as public service ceases to be the chief business of the citizens, and they would rather serve with their money than with their persons, the state is not far from its fall."
"For people who have college as an option, those incentives—at the risk to one’s life—don’t mean a thing."
"There are, in a civilized society, some things that money cannot buy."
"The refusal to distinguish higher from lower pleasures is connected to Bentham’s belief that all values can be measured and compared on a single scale."
"But if you’re going to let people hire substitutes, why draft anyone in the first place?"
"It is said that the Puritans banned bearbaiting, not because of the pain it caused the bears but because of the pleasure it gave the onlookers."
"The existence of the draft fueled opposition to the Vietnam War, especially on college campuses."
"Of the two great proponents of utilitarianism, Mill was the more humane philosopher, Bentham the more consistent one."
"But such laws may also reflect a moral judgment that deriving pleasure from dogfights is abhorrent, something a civilized society should discourage."
"Wouldn’t it be better to change those preferences than to satisfy them?"
"The fact that she had delivered her own three children at home and never visited a doctor adds poignancy to her role as a surrogate."
"How free are the choices we make in the free market?"
"To regulate the market is unjust, they maintain, because it violates the individual’s freedom of choice."
"The utilitarian’s happiness principle 'contributes nothing whatever toward establishing morality, since making a man happy is quite different from making him good'."
"What matters is the motive, and the motive must be of a certain kind."
"Even if… this will is entirely lacking in power to carry out its intentions; if by its utmost effort it still accomplishes nothing… even then it would still shine like a jewel for its own sake as something which has its full value in itself."
"Only the motive of duty confers moral worth on an action."
"To be independent of determination by causes in the sensible world...is to be free."
"Human beings are not exempt from the laws of nature."
"Morality and freedom are not empirical concepts. We can’t prove that they exist, but neither can we make sense of our moral lives without presupposing them."
"The way to think about justice is to ask what principles we would choose in an original position of equality, behind a veil of ignorance."
"Once the veil of ignorance rises and real life begins, we don’t want to find ourselves as victims of religious persecution or racial discrimination."
"Only those social and economic inequalities are permitted that work to the benefit of the least advantaged members of society."
"In order to protect against these dangers, we would reject utilitarianism and agree to a principle of equal basic liberties for all citizens."
"We would insist that this principle take priority over attempts to maximize the general welfare."
"The Argument from Moral Arbitrariness: The natural distribution is neither just nor unjust; nor is it unjust that persons are born into society at some particular position."
"Justice is happiness according to virtue… Now justice as fairness rejects this conception."
"The qualities that a society happens to value at any given time also morally arbitrary."
"Those who have been favored by nature, whoever they are, may gain from their good fortune only on terms that improve the situation of those who have lost out."
"The distribution of natural talents as a common asset and to share in the benefits of this distribution whatever it turns out to be."
"To the extent that there are minorities in important offices in Texas, they are often our graduates."
"Life is not fair. It is tempting to believe that government can rectify what nature has spawned."
"The way things are does not determine the way they ought to be."
"The polis exists by nature and that it is prior to the individual."
"Moral virtue comes about as a result of habit."
"We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts."
"The end and purpose of a polis is the good life, and the institutions of social life are means to that end."
"Justice is teleological. Defining rights requires us to figure out the telos of the social practice in question."
"Justice is honorific. To reason about the telos of a practice is to reason about what virtues it should honor and reward."
"The purpose of politics is nothing less than to enable people to develop their distinctive human capacities and virtues."
"Aristotle’s vision of citizenship is more elevated and strenuous than ours."
"For Aristotle, politics is not economics by other means. Its purpose is higher than maximizing utility or providing fair rules for the pursuit of individual interests."
"To allocate rights is not to fit people to roles that suit their nature; it is to let people choose their roles for themselves."
"Rather than fit people to roles we think will suit their nature, we should enable people to choose their roles for themselves."
"The solution is to reject an ethic of telos and fit in favor of an ethic of choice and consent."
"Aristotle’s own theory of justice provides ample resources for a critique of his views on slavery."
"Slavery is necessary, Aristotle argues, because someone must look after the household chores if citizens are to spend time in the assembly deliberating about the common good."
"For slavery to be just, it must be the case that certain persons are suited by their nature to perform this role."
"Some people are born to be slaves. They differ from ordinary people in the same way that the body differs from the soul."
"For liberal political theory, slavery is unjust because it is coercive."
"Justice requires that the work be reorganized to accord with our nature. Otherwise, the job is unjust in the same way that slavery is."
"The ethic of telos and fit actually sets a more demanding moral standard for justice in the workplace than does the liberal ethic of choice and consent."
"Whether these considerations are strong enough to justify an apology depends on the circumstances."
"To apologize for an injustice is, after all, to take some responsibility for it."
"We are not answerable for the sins of our parents or our grandparents or, for that matter, our compatriots."
"The principled objection to official apologies carries weight because it draws on a powerful and attractive moral idea."
"The doctrine of moral individualism does not assume that people are selfish."
"We should not attempt to give form to our life by first looking to the good independently defined."
"The idea that government should try to be neutral on the meaning of the good life represents a departure from ancient conceptions of politics."
"For Aristotle, the purpose of politics is not only to ease economic exchange and provide for the common defense; it is also to cultivate good character and form good citizens."
"How would our argument strike us presented in the form of a supreme court opinion?"
"The justices cannot, of course, invoke their own personal morality, nor the ideals and virtues of morality generally."
"Like Supreme Court justices, we should set aside our moral and religious convictions, and restrict ourselves to arguments that all citizens can reasonably be expected to accept."
"In the 1990s and early 2000s, liberals argued, somewhat defensively, that they, too, stood for 'values,' by which they typically meant the values of tolerance, fairness, and freedom of choice."
"If we truly hope to speak to people where they’re at—to communicate our hopes and values in a way that’s relevant to their own—then as progressives, we cannot abandon the field of religious discourse."
"Our Gross National Product now is over 800 billion dollars a year. But that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage."
"Our Gross National Product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play."
"It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile."
"If the early embryo is morally equivalent to a person, then the opponents of embryonic stem cell research have a point; even highly promising medical research would not justify dismembering a human person."
"The debate over same-sex marriage is fundamentally a debate about whether gay and lesbian unions are worthy of the honor and recognition that, in our society, state-sanctioned marriage confers."
"Each day, thousands of Americans are going about their daily rounds—dropping off the kids at school, driving to the office, flying to a business meeting, shopping at the mall, trying to stay on their diets—and they’re coming to realize that something is missing."
"They are deciding that their work, their possessions, their diversions, their sheer busyness, is not enough. They want a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives."
"Civil marriage is at once a deeply personal commitment to another human being and a highly public celebration of the ideals of mutuality, companionship, intimacy, fidelity, and family."
"As inequality deepens, rich and poor live increasingly separate lives."
"A politics of moral engagement is not only a more inspiring ideal than a politics of avoidance. It is also a more promising basis for a just society."