Facing Up to Scarcity: The Logic and Limits of Nonconsequentialist Thought - Hardcover

Fried, Barbara H.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0198847874 ISBN 13: 9780198847878

Publisher: OUP Oxford, 2020

Synopsis

Facing Up to Scarcity offers a powerful critique of the nonconsequentialist approaches that have been dominant in Anglophone moral and political thought over the last fifty years. In these essays Barbara H. Fried examines the leading schools of contemporary nonconsequentialist thought, including Rawlsianism, Kantianism, libertarianism, and social contractarianism. In the realm of moral philosophy, she argues that nonconsequentialist theories grounded in the sanctity of "individual reasons" cannot solve the most important problems taken to be within their domain. Those problems, which arise from irreducible conflicts among legitimate (and often identical) individual interests, can be resolved only through large-scale interpersonal trade-offs of the sort that nonconsequentialism foundationally rejects. In addition to scrutinizing the internal logic of nonconsequentialist thought, Fried considers the disastrous social consequences when nonconsequentialist intuitions are allowed to drive public policy. In the realm of political philosophy, she looks at the treatment of distributive justice in leading nonconsequentialist theories. Here one can design distributive schemes roughly along the lines of the outcomes favoured--but those outcomes are not logically entailed by the normative premises from which they are ostensibly derived, and some are extraordinarily strained interpretations of those premises. Fried concludes, as a result, that contemporary nonconsequentialist political philosophy has to date relied on weak justifications for some very strong conclusions.

About this title

About the Author

Barbara Fried is the William W. and Gertrude H. Saunders Professor of Law at Stanford University. Her scholarly interests lie at the intersection of law, economics, and philosophy. She has written extensively on questions of distributive justice in the areas of tax policy, property theory, and political theory. She is also the author of a path-breaking intellectual history of the Progressive-era law and economics movement.

Edition details

• Publisher: OUP Oxford
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0198847874
• ISBN 13: 9780198847878
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 286