SİYASAL DÜŞÜNCE - Deneme Sınavı - 4

Individual responsibility and entitlement

Capability approach

Justice's aggregative

Re-conceptualisation of the issue of power

I, II

The correct answer is B.

The correct answer is C.

The correct answer is B, Plato.

The correct answer is D.

The correct answer is A.

The correct answer is E.

The correct answer is C.

The correct answer is B.

The correct answer is A.

The correct answer is D.

The idea of justice that can be traced back to the ancient world is seen as a virtue of man and society in ancient Greek philosophy. Such an understanding of justice can easily be observed in the Republic, a well-known work of Plato, in which the central issue is “justice” discussed in relation to the concept of “virtue”.

It is important to be aware of that “neither Plato nor Aristotle held that justice was a matter of individual rights” (Ryan, 1993, p. 3). The introduction of the concept “rights” to the issue of justice took seven centuries after Aristotle. In the corpus of Roman Law, it is the first time in the history of political thought that justice was defined in relation to individual’s rights.

Scottish philosopher David Hume paved the way toward the idea of utilitarianism. In his famous work, An Enquiry Concerning the Principle of Morals, he defended the idea of public utility, claiming that “public utility is the sole origin of justice”. Briefly saying, together with Hume, we started to consider the concept of fairness and public utility as the essence of justice.

Adam Smith has written in his eminent work, An Inquiry into the Nature and the Causes of the Wealth of Nations, around the well-quoted concept of “invisible hand”. Smith pointed out that by pursuing their own interests, everyone could consistently contribute to the overall utility of the society more effectually than when they only intend to promote that of themselves.

The libertarian view puts forward its own conceptualization on social justice around individual responsibility and entitlement towards acquiring, transferring and holding private property, which all of them illustrate an approach of social justice in terms of individual’s merit and desert. It rejects the intervention to the spontaneous order of market that is assumed to work so as to distribute all desired and undesired goods perfectly just on its own. The main characteristic of just society is considered as the one in which everyone is equally entitled to the rights of acquisition, transfer and holding private properties. If a person earns much more than others through drawing on such equal rights, this is a legitimate inequality since all of them were equal at the beginning of the process in being entitled to these rights.