Cynthia Stark

Aufenthalt

Juni/Juli 2014

Forschungsthema

»Dworkin and Rawls on the Benchmark of Equality«

Projektbeschreibung

Egalitarians typically do not endorse strict distributive equality. Rather they invoke a benchmark of equality; departures from equality, they think, face a case to answer. Rawls, for instance, argues that inequalities are just if and only if they conform to the difference principle, which requires that inequalities maximally benefit the worst-off. Luck egalitarians argue that inequalities are just if and only if they conform to the luck/choice principle, which condemns inequalities caused by brute luck and permits those produced by choice. My paper argues, first, that only Dworkin, among luck egalitarians, can legitimately lay claim to a benchmark of equality. It argues, second, that Rawls’s approach is preferable to Dworkin’s if one takes seriously the idea, stressed by both theorists, that a scheme of social cooperation should treat citizens as equal moral persons.

Veröffentlichungen (Auswahl)

• »Luck, Opportunity and Disability«, in: Critical Review of Social and Political Philosophy Bd. 16, 3 (2013), S. 383-402.
• »Rawlsian Self-Respect«, in: Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics Bd. 2, hg. von Mark Timmons, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, S. 238-261.
• »There’s Something About Marla: Fight Club and the Engendering of Self-Respect«, in: Fight Club, hg. von Thomas E. Wartenberg, New York: Routledge 2012, S. 51-77.
• »Abstraction and Justification in Moral Theory«, in: Hypatia Bd. 24, 4 (Herbst 2010), S. 825-833.
• »How to Include the Severely Disabled in a Contractarian Theory of Justice«, in: Journal of Political Philosophy Bd. 15, 2 (Juni 2007), S. 125-147.