Ian Hunt

Gerald Cohen's critique of John Rawls's theory of justice is that it is concerned only with the justice of social institutions, and must thus arbitrarily draw a line between those inequalities excluded and those allowed by the basic structure. Cohen claims that a proper concern with the interests of the least advantaged would rule out 'incentives' for 'talented' individuals. I argue that Rawls's assumption that the subject of justice is the basic structure of society does not arbitrarily restrict the concerns of political justice, as Cohen claims. Further, I argue that it does not allow 'deep' inequalities within a just basic structure. When properly understood, Rawls's theory of justice is strongly egalitarian, taken as a theory of fairness in the way the burdens and benefits of social cooperation are distributed, even if it is not as egalitarian as Cohen wishes

Ian Carter argues against what he calls the ?specific freedom thesis?, which claims that in asking whether our society or any individual is free, all we need or can intelligibly concern ourselves with is their freedom to do this or that specific thing. Carter claims that issues of overall freedom are politically and morally important and that, in valuing freedom as such, liberals should be committed to a measure of freedom overall. This paper argues against Carter?s further claim that rejection of the specific freedom thesis requires rejection of morally based determinations of degrees of overall freedom. Using a concept of freedom as a capacity to pursue one?s interests, it is argued that the value of freedom overall is not reducible to the value of specific freedoms, and that conditions of action can be determined as constraints only within the context of their impact on freedom overall. Taking the case of coercive proposals, it is argued that we must evaluate the morality of the circumstances in which conditional proposals are made if we are to weigh the opportunities and constraints contained in the proposal to determine whether its recipient suffers a loss of overall freedom. We must therefore appeal to values other than that of liberty itself to determine degrees of liberty overall, which we require in turn to determine whether threats or offers are coercive.

This paper assesses Brian Barry's attempt in Why Social Justice Matters to argue the importance of social justice. Barry seeks to dismiss the ideological misunderstandings that have prevented recognition of the importance of social justice. He also suggests that a robust conception of social justice will be needed to guide policies that solve the problems of the modern world. I argue that the issue of social justice has suffered neglect because of the influence of different ideas of social justice than Barry's rather than a misunderstanding among politicians and media pundits of generally shared intuitions of justice. These different ideas of justice must be shown to be wanting. In doing this, I argue that any adequate theory of social justice must address the issue of the fairness of starting points in peoples' lives. I point out that any such theory requires such revolutionary change that it contradicts the presuppositions of public policy and thus cannot serve to guide public policy solutions to the problems that Barry wants addressed. I argue that a 'non-ideal' theory of justice and principles for making unjust societies fairer, with more modest proposals for change, will better serve as a guide to public policy