Facing Up to Scarcity

The Logic and Limits of Nonconsequentialist Thought

Barbara H. Fried (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

286 Seiten

2020
Oxford University Press (Verlag)
978-0-19-884787-8 (ISBN)

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Barbara H. Fried presents a powerful critique of the nonconsequentialist approaches that have been dominant in recent Anglophone moral and political thought. She argues that nonconsequentialist theories have disastrous consequences in the political domain and are inadequate at dealing with conflicts of individual interests in the moral domain.

Facing Up to Scarcity offers a powerful critique of the nonconsequentialist approaches that have been dominant in Anglophone moral and political thought over the last fifty years. In these essays Barbara H. Fried examines the leading schools of contemporary nonconsequentialist thought, including Rawlsianism, Kantianism, libertarianism, and social contractarianism. In the realm of moral philosophy, she argues that nonconsequentialist theories grounded in the sanctity of "individual reasons" cannot solve the most important problems taken to be within their domain. Those problems, which arise from irreducible conflicts among legitimate (and often identical) individual interests, can be resolved only through large-scale interpersonal trade-offs of the sort that nonconsequentialism foundationally rejects. In addition to scrutinizing the internal logic of nonconsequentialist thought, Fried considers the disastrous social consequences when nonconsequentialist intuitions are allowed to drive public policy. In the realm of political philosophy, she looks at the treatment of distributive justice in leading nonconsequentialist theories. Here one can design distributive schemes roughly along the lines of the outcomes favoured--but those outcomes are not logically entailed by the normative premises from which they are ostensibly derived, and some are extraordinarily strained interpretations of those premises. Fried concludes, as a result, that contemporary nonconsequentialist political philosophy has to date relied on weak justifications for some very strong conclusions.

Barbara Fried is the William W. and Gertrude H. Saunders Professor of Law at Stanford University. Her scholarly interests lie at the intersection of law, economics, and philosophy. She has written extensively on questions of distributive justice in the areas of tax policy, property theory, and political theory. She is also the author of a path-breaking intellectual history of the Progressive-era law and economics movement.

1: Introduction
2: Facing Up to Risk
3: What Does Matter? The Case for Killing the Trolley Problem (or Letting it Die)
4: Can Scanlonian Contractualism Save Us From Aggregation?
5: Tortious Harms
6: Can Contractualism Be Saved?
7: Is Nozick a Libertarian?
8: Rawls, Risk, and the Maximin Principle
9: The Unwritten Theory of Justice: Rawlsian Liberalism versus Libertarianism
10: Left-Libertarianism
11: Wilt Chamberlain Revisited: Nozick's Justice in Transfer and the Problem of Market-Based Distribution
12: "If You Don't Like It, Leave It": The Problem of Exit in Social Contractarian Arguments
13: The Case for a Progressive Benefits Tax

Erscheinungsdatum	03.01.2020
Verlagsort	Oxford
Sprache	englisch
Maße	159 x 242 mm
Gewicht	558 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Ethik
ISBN-10	0-19-884787-4 / 0198847874
ISBN-13	978-0-19-884787-8 / 9780198847878
Zustand	Neuware