Moved from D1 forum

[kandrathe]

Your use of Rawls is practically trivial. You don't quote him, you don't try and apply his ideas in any careful way, but instead just glance in his direction during pauses in your ranting, and claim his support. John Rawls is not a Marxist, but you don't make any relevant use of this distinction between equality of opportunity and distributional equality, or deal with the Pareto criterion for acceptable inequalities. Rawls' ideas have interesting implications for liberal egalitarianism - but you don't get there.

This is where I was hung up. The paper was ostensibly written as an exploration of Rawls, and how to apply him to modern society.

As promised, here is my research paper on John Rawls and his theory of "Justice As Fairness". For this paper, we were required to pick a political thinker we covered in the course, discuss one or two of his theories, and then apply them to modern society.

In any Bachelors level paper for social sciences, (e.g. economics, psychology, philosophy, etc.) it is expected that one provide references to support their arguments. A research paper should be all the more expository and cite multiple sources, including the Utilitarian philosophers (David Hume, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill) to whom Rawls was challenging. Throughout this paper there are unsupported claims, and unreferenced sources.

Many economists (e.g. Arrow, Harsany, Buchanan), noted that Rawls has neglected to consider the market forces unleashed in a capitalist society where seeking one’s self-interest is arguably the primary motivating principle. They argue that even the least advantaged, if motivated, can take advantage of the benefits of our society by virtue of citizenship. Through education, dedication, and hard work, the disadvantaged will participate more fully in the benefits as well as bearing the burdens of membership in society. He references this vaguely, but offers zero evidence of social mobility or the lack of it. This would have been the perfect place to introduce the critique of Rawls by these economists, and then defend Rawls with evidence. Rather, there is more hand waving and unsubstantiated claims.

He attempts to take on capitalism, but again does a bunch of hand waving, generalizations, and vague references, such as "In short, capitalism manifests its own demise through a multitude of paradoxical elements, as Marx observed." In short, citation needed. What are the multitude of paradoxical elements? In essence, the argument against capitalism is the economic downturn of 2008, wealth disparity, and whatever other kitchen sink tossed at it without any exploration to root causes. If man were meant to fly, he'd have been born with wings. Or, in context, if capitalism were meant to be we'd never have downturns or inequity.

So fundamentally I would ask, how well did FIT compare Rawls theories of Justice to our society?

If we consider a constitution as the expression of our social contract, Rawls’ two principles of justice describe what such a constitution can and cannot expect from us. Rawls’ theory of justice suggests the Kantian limits upon the forms of political and social organization that are acceptable within a just society. This paper didn't even touch on social contracts, the original intention of "Life Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness", nor the shortcomings of that social contract over the past 200 years.

I think he bites off too much, and leaves too much of the elephant undigested. He should at least reference the giants on which Rawls theories are built, like Kant. It would have been better to focus on the two principles, and then examine them narrowly. But instead we are taken on a fly by of politics, economics, social justice, Marxism, the American Dream, etc. It is laced with buzzwords, such as the use the word "paradox" or "paradoxical" nine times. Paradigm is used four different times. Often he is introducing complicated ideas without context, such as "This problem is a result of laissez-faire racism (as opposed to traditional Jim Crowe racism), a contour of our society today." And, again this is a complicated claim without any clear linkage to Rawls, or how our modern society's social contracts have allowed such a situation to exist.

So, my critique would be that the thesis is unclear, most of the claims are unsupported, and since there is no clear thesis the papers purpose is unmet. I would have graded it lower for readability alone.