Question

. Elaborate the conflict between liberty and Government

Answer 1

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• In A Theory Of Justice, John Rawls advances two fundamental principles as being constitutive of any reasonable interpretation of justice as fairness. Rawls’ first principle of justice demands that each person is to have an equal right to the most widespread liberty compatible with a like liberty for all.

• The second principle—the celebrated Difference Principle—emphasizes the primacy of maximizing the advantage (in terms of an index of primary goods) of the worst-off person: specifically, “social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both

• (a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged and
• (b) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity". In this perspective then, equality and liberty are the cornerstones of any foundational conception of justice, or more generally, of any inclusive view of political morality.

• Given this, it should be cause for concern if the principles of liberty and equality were found to be in mutual conflict.

• Indeed, it turns out that there are seemingly reasonable ways of interpreting these principles such that they end up being mutually incompatible.

• Specifically, the potential for such a conflict always exists if we were to defer to the dictates of equality in terms of a version of Amartya Sen’s Weak Equity Axiom, and to the dictates of liberty in terms of his principle of Minimal Liberty (ML).