Ethics

Ethics Study Guide

Chapter 7: Justice, Rights, and Liberty

Objectives After reading this chapter, you should be able to: 1. Compare and contrast various principles of justice. 2. Explain the correlativity thesis. 3. Describe types of rights and their relationship to obligations. 4. Explain the conditions required for autonomy. 5. Describe the principles that can justifiably limit liberty.

©2018 Achieve Page 51 of 116 7.2 Types of Justice Distributive justice is concerned with society functioning effectively, engaging in efficient and effective production, keeping its members, and sustaining their well-being. Equal distribution is thought to give people a sense of true membership. It also creates the motivation to produce and to be rewarded for one’s productivity. Distribution according to need also ensures that everyone’s basic needs are met. 7.1 Justice The foundations of justice are based on the ideas of social stability, equal dignity, and interdependence. Ethicist John Rawls felt the stability of a society depended upon the extent to which the members of that society feel they are being treated justly. If some of a society’s members come to feel they are subject to unequal treatment, there will be social unrest. Rawls held that the members of a community depend on each other, and they will remain intact only to the extent that their institutions are just. Immanuel Kant, and others, asserted that human beings are all equal in this respect. All humans have the same dignity, and by virtue of this dignity, they deserve to be equal. Human dignity is violated when individuals are treated unequally on the basis of arbitrary or irrelevant characteristics. Justice is a pivotal part of ethics and key to moral decision-making. In evaluating any moral decision, we must ask whether our actions treat all persons equally. When conflicts arise, society needs principles of justice that we can all accept as reasonable and fair standards for determining what people deserve. However, saying that justice is giving each person what he or she deserves is not enough. To determine what people deserve, guiding principles have been created. The formal principl of justice treats equals cases equally and cases that are not alike, unalike. This is the most fundamental principle of justice and has been widely accepted since it was first defined by Aristotle more than two thousand years ago. Universalizability describes the idea that actions should be judged similarly, unless they have morally relevant differences.