What is justice - some notes

The answers on my latest video were more based on specific philosophers and ideas than normal, so I thought I'd do a kind of notes/bibliography thing here..

Bunyin - This is based on Peter Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”, I gave it to be Bunyin purely because Singer is Australian and so far being Australian is Bunyin’s defining character trait.

Robot - Again inspired by Peter Singer, this time his idea of “speciesism”. Singer argues that animals are worthy of moral consideration because of their ability to suffer. I gave this thought to a robot because I find the question of what would make non-organic consciousness worthy of moral consideration interesting.

Mother Nature - I don’t really have a specific reference for this as it’s more of a nod to a whole area of discussion, “intergenerational justice” is the search term you need if you want to find a whole bunch of philosophers talking about it.

Father Time - Again a nod to a whole area of discussion, but the debate started by the introduction of affirmative action is a good starting point: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/affirmative-action/ 

Leviathan - The character here is based on the original cover of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, but social contract theory is a pretty common enlightenment approach to the question of how state authority can be legitimised (Rousseau and Locke being two other key figures in this tradition).

Elf - All ideologies basically say that the violence necessary to enforce the institutions they favour is justified violence, but libertarians are kind of unique in how often they appeal to non-aggression to justify their system. It’s essentially circular, “my system is the best because it’s non-aggressive, if you define aggression according to the principles of my system”. Here is a libertarian admitting this (reason number 5): https://www.libertarianism.org/blog/six-reasons-libertarians-should-reject-non-aggression-principle

Nessy: The mixing labour idea is common in theories of justice centred around the idea of private property, but John Locke is probably the classic example. The Irn Bru bit is a play on Nozick’s consideration of labour mixing arguments in “Anarchy, State, and Utopia”.

Beckoning Cat: The tension between the belief that we shouldn’t morally judge people for things that are not in their control and the fact that we regularly do is explored by writings on “Moral Luck”. Thomas Nagel was my first introduction to this topic.

Dragon: The thought experiment is John Rawl’s original position, and the resulting principle is the difference principle. John Rawls is more radical than he gets credit for, he explicitly says free-market capitalism and welfare-state capitalism do not satisfy the difference principle.

Godzilla: This is G. A. Cohen’s criticism of the difference principle, phrased in a way that I hope evokes Marx’s line from Critique of the Gotha Programme - “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”.

King Kong: A basic marxist/materialist interpretation of justice with a nod to the discussion of empty signifiers you find in Laclau and Zizek.