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<!-- you can have any number of categories here --> [[Category:Michael Sandel]] [[Category:John Rawls]] [[Category:Chris TerryNelson]] [[Category:Milton Friedman]] [[Category:Free To Choose]] [[Category:Inequality]] <!-- 1 URL must be followed by >= 0 Other URL and Old URL and 1 End URL.--> {{URL | url = http://disruptivegrace.blogspot.com/2011/03/is-life-unfair-milton-friedman-and-john.html}} <!-- {{Other URL | url = }} --> <!-- {{Old URL | url = }} --> {{End URL}} {{DES | des = [[John Rawls]] smacks down [[Milton Friedman]]'s idea of passivity in the face of inequality. | show=}} <!-- insert wiki page text here --> <!-- DPL has problems with categories that have a single quote in them. Use these explicit workarounds. --> <!-- otherwise, we would use {{Links}} and {{Quotes}} --> {{List|title=Is Life Unfair? Milton Friedman and John Rawls|links=true}} {{Quotations|title=Is Life Unfair? Milton Friedman and John Rawls|quotes=true}} {{Text | I am currently burning through a fantastic book called Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? by Michael Sandel, philosophy professor at Harvard University. These chapters are reworkings of his introductory ethics classes, and they are filled with the great philosophical quandaries that make such classes (at least the good ones) so memorable. I found this particular section, entitled "Is Life Unfair?" extremely helpful in articulating two streams of thought that have reared their heads in recent discussion over politics and economics: "In 1980, as Ronald Regan ran for president, the economist Milton Friedman published a bestselling book, co-authored with his wife, Rose, called Free to Choose. It was a spirited, unapologetic defense of the free-market economy, and it became a textbook - even an anthem - for the Reagan years. In defending laissez-faire principles against egalitarian objections, Friedman made a surprising concession. He acknowledged that those who grow up in wealthy families and attend elite schools have an unfair advantage over those from less privileged backgrounds. He also conceded that those who, through no doing of their own, inherit talents and gifts have an unfair advantage over others. Unlike Rawls, however, Friedman insisted that we should not try to remedy this unfairness. Instead, we should learn to live with it, and enjoy the benefits it brings: Life is not fair. It is tempting to believe that government can rectify what nature has spawned. But it is also important to recognize how much we benefit from the very unfairness we deplore. there's nothing fair . . . about Muhammad Ali's having been born with the skill that made him a great fighter . . . It is certainly not fair that Muhammad Ali should be able to earn millions of dollars in one night. But wouldn't it have been even more unfair to the people who enjoyed watching him if, in the pursuit of some abstract ideal of equality, Muhammad Ali had not been permitted to earn more for one night's fight . . . than the lowest man on the totem pole could get for a day's unskilled work on the docks? (Friedman, Free to Choose, 136-7) In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls rejects the counsel of complacence that Friedman's view reflects. In a stirring passage, Rawls states a familiar truth that we often forget: The way things are does not determine the way they ought to be. We should reject the contention that the ordering of institutions is always defective because the distribution of natural talents and the contingencies of social circumstance are unjust, and this injustice must inevitably carry over to human arrangements. Occasionally this reflection is offered as an excuse for ignoring injustice, as if the refusal to acquiesce in injustice is on a par with being unable to accept death. The natural distribution is neither just nor unjust; nor is it unjust that persons are born into society at some particular positions. These are simply natural facts. What is just and unjust is the way that institutions deal with these facts. (Rawls, A Theory of Justice, sec. 17) Rawls proposes that we deal with these facts by agreeing "to share one another's fate, and to avail ourselves of the accidents of nature and social circumstance only when doing so is for the common benefit" (ibid.). Whether or not his theory of justice ultimately succeeds, it represents the most compelling case for a more equal society that American political philosophy has yet produced." [Sandel, Justice, 165-6]. }}
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