On the question of what “justice” means, I think Rawls makes an important point when he says that cancer isn’t just or unjust while a distribution of finite cancer medicines might be. In other words, for a state of affairs to be appropriately evaluated in terms of justice (as opposed to badness), it has to be the kind of thing that is the subject of social choice.
Rawls assumes that the basic structure of society is the subject of social choice. Hayek, for example, would deny that completely. Marx would agree, but he would say that social choice is constrained by the actually-available historical possibilities. One problem with Rawls from a Marxist perspective is that he is uninterested in suturing social choice in the immanent possibilities of the historical moment. So is a “property owning democracy” even a possible outcome of the present? If it isn’t, then saying it is what justice requires is like saying justice requires no one develop cancer.
What is peculiar about Cohen is that in his early career he is deeply interested in the question of historical possibilities but as he got older and neoliberalism appeared more dominant, he embraced a view of justice that is even more radically uninterested in historical possibility than Rawls
On the question of what “justice” means, I think Rawls makes an important point when he says that cancer isn’t just or unjust while a distribution of finite cancer medicines might be. In other words, for a state of affairs to be appropriately evaluated in terms of justice (as opposed to badness), it has to be the kind of thing that is the subject of social choice.
Rawls assumes that the basic structure of society is the subject of social choice. Hayek, for example, would deny that completely. Marx would agree, but he would say that social choice is constrained by the actually-available historical possibilities. One problem with Rawls from a Marxist perspective is that he is uninterested in suturing social choice in the immanent possibilities of the historical moment. So is a “property owning democracy” even a possible outcome of the present? If it isn’t, then saying it is what justice requires is like saying justice requires no one develop cancer.
What is peculiar about Cohen is that in his early career he is deeply interested in the question of historical possibilities but as he got older and neoliberalism appeared more dominant, he embraced a view of justice that is even more radically uninterested in historical possibility than Rawls