Give an example of a negative right and a positive right, consistent with the terminology used in our text.

Justice

Plato thought much about the concept of justice as it relates to society. In his most famous and lengthy dialogue, The Republic, he reviews several accounts of justice and finds them less than satisfying. One person, Cephalus, suggests that justice is telling the truth and paying your debts. Another speaker, Polemarchus, argues that justice means helping your friends and harming your enemies. Yet another, a young man called Thrasymachus, who was a rising star among paid teachers – or sophists – of the day, argued that ‘might makes right’. The first two views are not very strong, so we will leave them to the side. However, let’s take up the argument of Thrasymachus, since this view is quite popular in these times.

Argue for or against the position of Thrasymachus.

Inter-relation between inner and external harmony

Consider Plato’s notion of justice, as summarized on page 221, where justice is the result of inner (personal) and outward (social) harmony. Consider Hinman’s statement in the same segment: Without just individuals, a just society is impossible; without a just society, the life of the just individual may not be a happy one.” (page 221). Plato contends that the just individual will have a very difficult time in an unjust society.

Does Plato have a point? Can you be a fully functioning just person, when the society around you is out of synch, out or harmony, that is, chaotic and violent? Inversely, can the society overall achieve harmony if its individual members are unhappy, undeveloped, less than fully functional individuals?

More recently, American Philosopher John Rawls, whose views are described on pages 218 to 225. Consider his idea about how we are the recipients of a “natural lottery” in which we benefit or suffer from chance situations, such as being born in a certain time and place, a certain gender with a set of genetic dispositions that will, depending on the environment, benefit us or cause us much limitation, pain, and suffering, at least absence of abilities others take for granted.

This idea can be expanded and applied to nation states and regions. Some nation states are quite well off, such as Sweden and Norway; others are quite the opposite, such as Burma and Sudan. As well, forces that go far beyond nation states, such as environmental deterioration, loss of bio-diversity, loss of species at a rate much faster than in previous periods, except for cataclysmic events – large asteroid colliding with the planet.