College of Arts & Humanities
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Item Global Justice as Fairness: Non-domination, Human Rights & the Global Basic Structure(2013) Hoitink, Aaron Philip; Morris, Christopher W.; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Most Rawlsian approaches to global justice fall into one of two main types—cosmopolitanisms that expand the scope of Rawls's domestic theory to the entire world, and those that, following Rawls's The Law of Peoples, develop a liberal foreign policy rooted in the toleration of “decent” but nonliberal peoples. Global Justice as Fairness offers an alternative to these by incorporating some aspects of each, as well as some unique features, into a coherent whole that avoids their more significant drawbacks. Employing a distinctive understanding of the global original position and a republican view of freedom, the theory generates two principles that aim to ensure the agency and non-domination of peoples. These principles provide the broad outlines of a just global basic structure for states that is both realistic and utopian. The most basic parameters of Rawlsian theories of global justice are the subject of and parties to the original position(s). Global Justice as Fairness is unique among such theories by identifying the global basic structure as subject (as cosmopolitans do) while also taking peoples, not persons, as the parties (following Rawls's law of peoples). It is also alone in severing the tie between domestic and global justice and recognizing the fact of reasonable global pluralism, according to which it is unreasonable to expect all peoples to hold liberal conceptions of domestic justice. Global Justice as Fairness excludes the parties’ knowledge of their domestic conceptions behind the veil of ignorance, forcing them to rely on their generic interests as peoples. This picture of peoples’ rationality is developed with an account of global primary goods rooted in their agency and a global analog of citizenship. Thus situated, the parties are led to select two principles of justice for a global basic structure formulated in terms of the republican vision of freedom. The first principle specifies a human rights regime that ensures the minimal conditions needed for peoples to maintain their distinctly political form of group agency. The second provides guidelines for minimizing the domination of peoples through a just global political and economic order within which they can freely exercise that agency.Item Disability in Utopian and Dystopian Fiction: A Care and Justice Perspective(2011) Schotland, Sara Deutch; Cartwright, Kent; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study addresses a neglected question: how are the ill, the deformed, and the disabled treated in utopian and dystopian fiction? It might seem obvious that those with disabilities will fare better in an ideal society where they receive adequate if not generous care. However, from the beginning of utopian thought, there has been ambivalence about how to treat those who are impaired and can no longer contribute productively to the state. How can such care be justified in a society with limited resources? This is the first study that examines in detail the representation of individuals with disabilities in utopian and dystopian fiction. I apply a capacious definition to "disability" that includes not only physical or mental impairments but also significant illness and bodily deformity. I argue that in utopian and dystopian fiction, we are invited to appraise societies (in part) by the extent to which those who have physical or functional impairments are respected, and treated or neglected. I further argue that the perspectives of "justice theory" and "the Ethics of Care" can illuminate our readings of texts which utilize the trope of disability in utopia and dystopia to critique or reform social institutions. In utopian texts, generous care is provided to those who can no longer work productively. We see approaches that resemble today's Ethics of Care. In contrast, in dystopian texts, human beings are used as means to ends; their bodies literally disabled and sacrificed to achieve ulterior societal objectives. The concept of medical care is subverted--hospitals are slaughter houses, and medicines are spiked to increase the profits of the pharmaceutical industry. In dystopian worlds, vulnerable human beings are used as means to ends in violation of Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative. These dystopian texts send a warning about the dangers of applying utilitarian approaches to medical care and skewing the allocation of scarce resources and therapies to those who are, or seem, most valuable and productive.