Читать книгу Political Theory - Pete Woodcock - Страница 19

In this chapter, we will examine different notions of justice in society. We will commence with Plato’s assertion that justice involves a harmonious state when each does that which best suits them; everyone in society has a role, but these roles are not equal. This will be contrasted to Aristotle’s notion of justice as balance. We will then examine justice more in terms of the distribution of goods, and outline John Locke’s famous defence of a natural right to private property, and show how this was critiqued by David Hume and Thomas Paine. Next, we will move on to the debate between John Rawls and Robert Nozick, two Harvard colleagues, about the nature of justice. We will see that Rawls argues that justice is arrived at via a mind game in which the participants do not know how they will be affected as individuals, which ends up as a defence of the social democratic state. Nozick, on the other hand, will argue that justice means that the only permissible state is that which defends individual property rights.