Private Gain vs. Public Good

1. Private Gain vs. Public Good The Procedural Republic Atomism Justice as a Virtue

2. Private Gain vs. Public Good • Sandel: • Three observations regarding the minimalist Liberal state: • There is a philosophical attractiveness to this paradigm • The priority given to rights over the public good ultimately fails • It is the prevalent concept in western culture • Why does the Liberal paradigm fail? • Two competing paradigms of justice: • Justice as a concept dependent on specific purposes and ends • Justice as a concept of mediating between various, competing, particular purposes and ends

3. Private Gain vs. Public Good • Justice as a concept of mediating between various, competing, particular purposes and ends: • Kant maintains that justice entails a principle that does not presuppose any particular ends, thereby allowing individuals to pursue their own ends “consistent with a similar freedom for all” • This practically means that there can be no basis upon which rights are established because the moral law underpinning those rights must be free from and unencumbered by particular ends • The moral law, according to Kant, must be founded on the subject (i.e. the individual) not the objective concept of reason • As the subject is prior to its ends, so the right is prior to the good (in a social context)

4. Private Gain vs. Public Good • Justice as a concept dependent on specific purposes and ends: • Society must objectively imagine the principles by which it is to be governed in advance, without knowing what kind of subjects will be involved • The only thing that can be maintained about the subject is a theoretical “snapshot” of the prototypical individual; namely that the individual is unencumbered • What is significant about the individual is not so much the ends he/she chooses, rather, it is the capacity to choose them at all

5. Private Gain vs. Public Good • What is important, then, is that unencumbered individuals enter into voluntary association with one another but not into communities bound by moral ties antecedent to choice • Problem: what is religion then? • Problems with this Liberal paradigm: • Utilitarianism does not account for the distinctiveness of persons • Libertarianism does not account for the abritrariness of fortune • As unencumbered individuals seek liberty as a social good, it more and more becomes contingent upon the establishment of unaccountable, centralized power, rather than local decentralized democratic institutions

6. Private Gain vs. Public Good • Why does this theoretical discussion of public good always begin with “rights” (a private gain)? • Atomism: • Subjects lay claim to rights on moral grounds, thereby predicating the injunction that no one may interfere with his/her enjoying of those rights • Subjects possess essential properties that make the injunction “inescapable” (i.e. they are rational agents therefore they possess a natural right to life • The moral claim that individual makes upon these rights can be said to be the only public good, particularly as it applies to others in society. The right becomes a moral end in and of itself.

7. Private Gain vs. Public Good • Problem: developed freedom requires an understanding of the self (replete with autonomy and self-direction) but self-identity is always defined socially • Therefore, it is absurd to place an individual with all of the preconditions for his autonomy (stemming from an idealized notion of the individual’s self identity) in a “state of nature” without accounting for the creation of that self-identity that has been socially reinforced by the powers of liberal republican culture that surround him/her.

8. Private Gain vs. Public Good • Justice: • Competing claims to justice based upon two competing sets of principles: • Freedom to……...(liberties, equality of opportunity) • Freedom from…..(rights, equality of outcome) • The first predicates its conception of justice upon the principle of rights belonging to those who have earned things by their wise usage of opportunities • The second predicates its conception of justice on a principle of rights belonging to those who have basic needs common to all humans

9. Private Gain vs. Public Good • Justice, therefore, cannot be based on a single set of moral principals that bind the nation • Justice is served by institutions that “keep the peace” between individuals with contending sets of moral values