If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich?This book presents G. A. Cohen's Gifford Lectures, delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1996. Focusing on Marxism and Rawlsian liberalism, Cohen draws a connection between these thought systems and the choices that shape a person's life. In the case of Marxism, the relevant life is his own: a communist upbringing in the 1940s in Montreal, which induced a belief in a strongly socialist egalitarian doctrine. The narrative of Cohen's reckoning with that inheritance develops through a series of sophisticated engagements with the central questions of social and political philosophy. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 77
... of Evil 116 8 Justice, Incentives, and Selfishness 117 9 Where the Action Is: On the Site of Distributive Justice 10 Political Philosophy and Personal Behavior 134 148 Envoi Notes Bibliography Credits Index 180 183 221 227 229 Contents.
... philosophy as much as they should inform it, and I try to bring them to the fore in Lectures 8–10. When Rosa Luxemburg wrote that “history . . . has the fine habit of al- ways producing along with any real social need the means to its ...
... philosophy.2 I shall argue in Lectures 8–10 that this Rawlsian and, more generally, liberal view represents an evasion— an evasion of the burden of respecting distributive justice in the choices of everyday life, an evasion which may ...
... ” Here is a counterexample to that policy of selective credal disburdenment. In 1961 I was on the eve of doing graduate work in philosophy, and I was able to choose between going to Harvard and going 16 Paradoxes of Conviction.
... philosophy before I arrived in Oxford , and I spent my first year there absorbing what I could . One thing I learned to do was to ask questions about the status of truths , and of supposed truths . If someone said “ p , ” you'd then ...
Contents
1 | |
7 | |
20 | |
3 The Development of Socialism from Utopia to Science | 42 |
The Obstetric Motif in the Marxist Conception of Revolution | 58 |
God in Hegel Feuerbach and Marx | 79 |
From Fact to Norm | 101 |
A Lighter Look at the Problem of Evil | 116 |
On the Site of Distributive Justice | 134 |
10 Political Philosophy and Personal Behavior | 148 |
Envoi | 180 |
Notes | 183 |
Bibliography | 221 |
Credits | 227 |
Index | 229 |
8 Justice Incentives and Selfishness | 117 |