In addition, the notion of desert defended is pre-institutional and, as most but not all conceptions of desert, backward-looking.Īt the level of distributive principle, Mulligan translates this core intuition into two steps. These merits depend on context, and thus the perfectionism of Mulligan's theory is formal rather than substantive: 'meritocracy remains agnostic about what is good and instead establishes a framework under which the good - no matter what it be - can best be pursued.' (p.37) The only obvious constraints that Mulligan puts on this framework are the aboutness and fitness principles: I only deserve something if the desert basis is about me in the relevant sense, for instance if I wrote this essay rather than copying it from a friend and the social advantage I receive must fit, or be proportional to, the achievement or contribution in question. We welcome submissions from graduate students.At the core of Thomas Mulligan's theory of justice lies the idea that one deserves social advantages - jobs and income in particular - on the basis of one's merits. Notification of acceptance will be sent by 7 September 2022. The deadline for abstract submissions has been extended to 5 September. We welcome submissions of abstracts of at most 500 words. The aim of this workshop is to explore the complex relationship Rawls develops between the right and the good in his theory of justice and the various implications of this relation for Rawlsian scholarship in particular, and liberal theory in general. In Political Liberalism Rawls in response to critics, unpacks this priority relation, and places emphasis on the complementary nature of the right and the good. The priority of the right is a position that Rawls defended throughout his work. The structure of an ethical theory is, then, largely determined by how it defines and connects these two basic notions”.

Rawls in A Theory of Justice (1999, 21) states: “The two main concepts of ethics are those of the right and the good the concept of a morally worthy person is, I believe, derived from them. This workshop event is a hybrid event held on Zoom, and in-person at Future Africa by the Department of Philosophy at the University of Pretoria in South Africa on 4 October 2022.

Rawls 1999 a theory of justice