Fellows 2014

Cynthia Stark

Associate Professor of Philosophy in Salt Lake City (USA)

Resident at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften:

June/July 2014

Research topic at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften:

»Dworkin and Rawls on the Benchmark of Equality«

Project outline:

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. (Cynthia Stark)

Funding of the stay:

»Justitia Amplificata. Rethinking Justice − Applied and Global«

Scholarly profile of Cynthia Stark

Main areas of research:

Political Philosophy, Theories of Justice, Philosophy of John Rawls

Selected publications:

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

Cynthia Stark

Scholarly profile of Cynthia Stark

Information cookies