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Liberal View of Human Nature

Decent Essays

Assumptions about human nature in order to create social justice. According to Mill, social justice is “the idea that we can put in place a set of political institutions that will ensure the just distribution of benefits and costs throughout society.” In other words, social justice is in the hands of the government to create certain institutions that will greatly benefit everyone, and equally so. In order to do that, one must have an idea of the way human nature works so as to institute programs and such appropriately and properly. While there are several different theories and thoughts on the way human nature simply is, and how that effects our equality amongst each other, the bulk of it falls into two main categories, that is, …show more content…

Two limiting provisos: -take no more than one can use without spoilage: “whatever is beyond this, is more than his share, and belongs to others” leave “enough, and as good for the others” -Money overcomes spoilage constraint, allows for inequality limited inequality justified because God gave the world “to the use of the industrious and the rational” Rosseau: “Moral inequality, authorized only by positive right, is contrary to natural right, whenever it is not combined in the same proportion with physical inequality, a distinction which determines sufficiently what we should think in this regard of the sort of inequality which reigns among all civilized peoples, since it is manifestly against natural law, no matter how it is defined, that a child gives orders to an old man, that an imbecile leads a wise man, and that a handful of men stuff themselves with superfluities while the starving crowds lack necessities -Two kinds of inequality: natural and moral/political Are they related? - “if those who command are

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