Abstract

This paper reads like – because it is – a meditation. Its ‘moments’ are these: That like cases are to be treated alike seems to be the core axiom behind all our moral and political reasoning. And yet this ‘like-alike’ axiom falls apart in the face of our need to honour our own partialities. So if morality amounts to transcending such partiality, asking after Rawls’ circumstances of justice amounts to asking under what condition we can and cannot afford such transcendence. The upshot is a theory of moral health.

Categories: Papers My Wife Said I Should Have Published Long Ago, Social and Political Philosophy

Tags: arbitrary, Auschwitz, axiom, carve up the world, categorically, categories, culpability, deliberate, free association, Hobbes, indexicals, instrumental, instrumentally, judge, justice, Kant, kinds, Leviathan, like-alike, mind-dependent, mind-independent, moral, natural kinds, needs, partiality, philosophy, political, priviledged, purposes, Quine, radically contingent, Rawls, self-efface, Strom Thurmond, transcendence, Yugoslavia