Daniel Little
Here is a fine recent book that brings together recent thinking about development ethics with some of the specific issues faced in the field of global public health. Madison Powers and Ruth Faden published Social Justice: The Moral Foundations of Public Health and Health Policy in 2008, and it represents a genuinely interesting extended essay on …
Continue reading "Ethical thinking for global public health"
John Rawls's (1971) A Theory of Justice: Original Edition (TJ) had a sizable impact on a number of disciplines, including economics and economic policy thought. (His ideas in this original version of the theory are clarified and further developed in his 2005 Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (JF).) Rawls's influence on economics largely derived from one aspect of his …
The current topic on the UnderstandingSociety blog poll is a proposition about social cohesion: THE INTERNET IS HELPING TO CREATE NEW PATHWAYS OF SOCIAL COHESION IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY. The poll is still open, but as of today 70% of respondents somewhat or strongly agree that the Internet creates a basis for new forms of social …
We often think of Hobbes as being an originator in English philosophy, a strikingly innovative thinker who burst on the scene with the first formulation of a social contract theory of government. And we sometimes think of his justification of absolute sovereignty as a fairly direct reaction to the disorders Britain experienced during its Civil …
The eminent neo-Confucian scholar Tu Weiming argues for the importance of bracketing our Western-centric ideas about society, progress, and justice when we think about our global futures. (Here is an interesting article by Tu titled "Mutual Learning as an Agenda for Social Development"; link.) So for a moment let us put aside the familiar rhetoric …
What did John Rawls know about the history of political economy? In particular, how much did he know about classical political economy, including especially the theories of Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Marx, or Mill? It appears from his writings and lectures that he was generally familiar with the most basic theoretical positions and debates in classical …
A topic of continuing interest to me is the role that serious engagement with economic theory played in the formation and development of John Rawls's thought (link). To what extent were important aspects of the theory of "Justice as Fairness" influenced by elements of economic theory? I'm inclined to think that we can look at …
Political philosophers ask a small number of core questions: for example, what constitutes the moral basis of political authority? How should the values of individual liberty and community wellbeing be balanced? And we might imagine that the most insightful political philosophers work on the basis of an astute understanding of the social world. Political philosophy, …
As noted in an earlier post, John Rawls delivered a fundamentally important course on the history of political philosophy at Harvard throughout much of his career. (See the earlier post for more about the course and for a set of notes on the section on Marx.) The 1973 course followed these main topics: The nature …
Rousseau's political philosophy probably represents the richest and most adequate view of the moral foundations of the state of any of the great figures in the history of political thought. But it is also complex and opaque. Rousseau is usually cast as falling within the social contract tradition, according to which the legitimacy of the …
Understanding Society 