Exam 8: Justice

Mill proposes that individual liberty is to be considered inviolable except when other people are threatened with __________.

Thoreau argued that a person in an unjust society ought to __________.

One might be surprised to hear philosophers speak of ethics, justice, and care as different issues, in particular that theorists in the justice tradition have had little to say about care issues at all. Feminists point out that it is hard to shift orientations from justice ethics to care ethics and vice versa. An action that is just, fair, and right may be the opposite of an action that is compassionate, sympathetic, and merciful. Think of real-life examples where it would be better to be merciful and other examples where it would be better to be just. To use an example from Christian literature, if the wages of sin is death and everyone sins, then justice is served by having everyone die. However, the sending of a savior supplants justice in favor of mercy. On the other hand, an example of when justice trumps mercy might be, in particular, child-rearing situations, where, if the child does not learn the natural negative consequences of his or her actions, he or she might repeat behavior that would be detrimental to his or her development.

According to Plato and Aristotle, different people have different roles, and to treat unequals ___________ is as unjust as it is to treat equals ___________.

In the Republic, Aristotle argued that justice in the state is precisely the same as justice in the individual, that is, a harmony between the various parts for the good of the whole.

Distributive justice calls for the fair distribution of penalties to criminals.

Our best-known list of such freedoms and rights is the American Bill of Rights, appended to the main body of the U.S. Constitution as a kind of contractual guarantee of _________.

Hobbes begins his argument with the perhaps surprising observation that people are basically __________.

Discuss Aristotle's approach to justice in The Nicomachean Ethics. What are some vital distinctions between justice in the restricted sense of righting certain wrongs and justice as the more general concern for a well-balanced and reasonable society. What is the role of the unjust man in the argument?

Egalitarianism is the view that all people ought to live and work according their station in life, that is, behave according to the code of justice appropriate to their own social class.

Which civil rights activist claimed that disobeying the law was his moral-and Christian-obligation.

Henry David Thoreau truly believed in the american government's right to tax its citizens.

Rawls admits that a society in which everyone had exactly equal shares of social goods is ____________________.

__________ dismisses the view that people are fundamentally rational, and his sense of human nature emphasizes the passions, particularly the passion for self-preservation.

For Rousseau, the first model of political society was based on the most ancient of all societies, which is __________.

Rousseau and Hobbes had very similar social contract theories.

The major reason for the worldwide lack of food is a problem with __________.

Locke argued that what gave a person the right to a piece of property was the fact that he "has mixed his labor with it."

Nozick argued that any attempt to set "patterns" of distribution of wealth must necessarily __________.

The social contract is __________.