| Term Paper Title |
Political Sciences |
| # of Words |
772 |
| # of Pages (250 words per page double spaced) |
3.09 |
Political Sciences
"Justice as Goodness." WHAT? What does good have to do with it? It would
occur to me, nothing. I mean, was it good for the slave trade when the emancipation
proclamation was signed? Was it good for the Bush Administration when Clinton won
the '92 election? The answer to both these questions is no, no matter how much one may
have disliked either the slave trade, or President Bush, these outcomes occurred as a
result of fair procedure, though however "ungood" to the losers. Fairness was
implemented for the very reason that some people do think the end of slavery was a bad
thing. Fairness was implemented as the decision maker because goodness can only take
you so far. There are very few, if any things that the majority, none the less all of the
people in a society can agree on as being fundamentally good. Luckily procedures are a
lot easier to agree on than opinions, hence making "justice as fairness" the current frame
of mind for the treatment and implementing of justice in our daily lives.
As I see it, Kann's vehicle for explaining "justice as goodness" is the marketplace
and its cruelties; for example
Today's winners can reinvest their profits to expand, take advantage of
economies of scale and technological improvements, engage in research and
development, and ultimately capture a larger share of the marketplace. The rich
have broad opportunities for becoming richer. But today's losers lack investment
capital. They must work for someone else to secure their subsistence and to save
for investment. This is extremely difficult, for employers pay the lowest wages
possible. And, in time, it becomes more expensive to invest in a new enterprise
because one must be able to purchase machines and skilled labor. Even if today's
loser can save and reinvest tomorrow, the first recession is likely to wipe him out,
but the richer more powerful firms can afford to ride out the storm. According to
the critics, there is a natural tendency for the free marketplace to become
dominated by a few, monopolistic firms.
While it seems to me that all of the aforementioned "casualties of war" in a
capitalist marketplace economy are true, it doesn't seem that it could be any other way.
What would have been "good" in this market place? Would it have been good if the
winners worked harder and made more than the losers while the losers put in only two-
thirds of the effort and ended up with the same compensat...Read entire document
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