Rawls
Article
Rawls is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between March 16, 2022 and March 24, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “it’s got to have something to do with Rawls”; “conflating the sophisticated Rawlsian sense of justice”; “One thing Rawls took a theory of distributive justice”. It most often appears alongside 1984, Apollo Mojave, Charity.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: March 16, 2022
- Last seen: March 24, 2022
Appears In
Related Pages
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- 1984 (2 shared issues)
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- Apollo Mojave (2 shared issues)
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- Charity (2 shared issues)
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- climate justice (2 shared issues)
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- economic justice (2 shared issues)
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- environmental justice (2 shared issues)
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- O’Brien (2 shared issues)
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- Sniper (2 shared issues)
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- Terra Ignota (2 shared issues)
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- Acrolectics (1 shared issues)
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- Adnamanil (1 shared issues)
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- AJPio (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
I can’t find clear evidence on Google Trends that use of these terms is increasing - I just feel like I’ve been hearing them more and more often. Nor can I find a simple story behind why - it’s got to have something to do with Rawls, but I can’t trace any of these back to specific Rawlsian philosophers. Some of it seems to have something to do with Amartya Sen, who I don’t know enough about to have an opinion. But mostly it just seems to be the zeitgeist.
Inline links: on Google Trends
Is that conflating the sophisticated Rawlsian sense of justice with the vulgar criminal sense? Maybe. But do you think the millions of people talking about _____ justice who have never heard of Rawls are somehow avoiding that conflation? I think it’s a motte-and-bailey: justice - as it’s actually used - is catchy exactly because it does draw on criminal justice connotations. I don’t think it’s a coincidence people are talking about “climate justice” at the same time there are 311,000 Google hits for “climate villains”:
Inline links: motte-and-bailey
One thing Rawls took a theory of distributive justice (a theory about how benefits and burdens should be allocated by the basic structure) to be concerned with was ‘the social bases of self-respect’ – some minimal standard of respect with which you can interact with others and pursue your conception of the good life. SJW's have taken this and run with it.