Sunday, June 23, 2013

Paper on Conceptual Analysis & Justice

Matthew H. Kramer has posted a new paper at SSRN:

"Conceptual Analysis and Distributive Justice"

Abstract:    
"This paper, written for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Distributive Justice, ponders several understandings of conceptual analysis in the context of debates over distributive justice. The paper's first two main sections consider the concept/conception distinction in its multi-layered complexity in a couple of prominent recent accounts of justice. It explores how those theories of justice unfold over several levels of increasing specificity. Thereafter, the paper takes up the vexed question whether expositions of the concept of justice can ever be austerely analytical or formal rather than morally value-laden. A negative answer to that question emerges from an investigation of a major contemporary theory of justice. In a prelude to the substantiation of that negative answer, the paper distinguishes between value-independence and value-neutrality. Though some possible accounts of justice are at least partly value-neutral, no accounts are ever value-independent."

Contents

1. Concepts versus Conceptions: Rawls
2. Concepts versus Conceptions: Dworkin
3. Value-Independence versus Value-Neutrality
4. Justice from the Formal Constraint of Consistency?
5. Conflicts versus Contradictions
6. An Example of Conflicting Duties
7. From Formality to Substance

Matthew H. Kramer is Professor of Legal and Political Philosophy at Churchill College, Cambridge University.

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