Justice: What's The Right Thing To Do? Episode 07: QUESTIONS
Immanuel Kant
1. How can duty
and autonomy go together?
2. How
many moral laws are there?
3. How
is a Categorical Imperative possible? I.e., How is morality possible?
4. If I were
wholly an empirical being, as the utilitarians assume, only subject to the
deliverances of my senses – to pain, pleasure, hunger and thirst and appetite –
would we be capable of freedom (why? Why not?)
5. How
is it that there is always POTENTIALLY a gap between what we do, and what we
ought to do (between IS and OUGHT)?
6. According
to Sandel’s interpretation of Kant, is there a way that you could avoid telling
a lie, without selling out your friend?
7. a. How do just
laws arise, according to Kant?
b. And why
would he not approve of an actual Constitutional Convention?
8.
How is it that a “contract
that generates principles of right is merely an idea of reason, but it has
undoubted practical reality, because it can oblige every
legislator to frame his laws in such a way that they could have been produced
by the united will of the whole nation”?
I.e., What is the moral force of a hypothetical contract – a contract
that never happened (for Kant)?
John
Rawls
9. What are two
ways that Rawls’ theory of justice, in broad
outline, is parallel to Kant’s?
10. What is a “veil
of Ignorance” and why is it important for Rawls’ theory of justice?
11. What is the moral force behind actual (hypothetical) contracts? Two
questions involved here:
a. To what extent do they bind or obligate us?
b. How do
hypothetical contracts justify the terms they produce?
Sandel’s Conjecture about the Moral Limits of
actual contracts:
12. Concerning
actual contracts, can there be an obligation – even without an act of
consent? (Give examples to
explain your answer…)
13. Give
examples of consent-based aspect of obligations and the benefit-based aspect and discuss how
they sometimes run together.
Conclusion
14. Discuss how
Rawls’ conditions for a theory of justice are different from Kant’s…