ABOUT US | QUARK PRIZES | DAG-3QD SYMPOSIA | MONDAY MAGAZINE | ARCHIVES | FOLLOW US |

3 Quarks Daily Advertising

 

 

 

 

Please Subscribe to 3QD

Subscription options:

If you would like to make a one time donation in any amount, please do so by clicking the "Pay Now" button below. You may use any credit or debit card and do NOT need to join Paypal.

The editors of 3QD put in hundreds of hours of effort each month into finding the daily links and poem as well as putting out the Monday Magazine and doing all the behind-the-scenes work which goes into running the site.

If you value what we do, please help us to pay our editors very modest salaries for their time and cover our other costs by subscribing above.

We are extremely grateful for the generous support of our loyal readers. Thank you!

3QD on Facebook

3QD on Twitter

3QD by RSS Feed

3QD by Daily Email

Receive all blogposts at the same time every day.

Enter your Email:


Preview 3QD Email

Recent Comments

Powered by Disqus

Miscellany

Design and Photo Credits

The original site was designed by Mikko Hyppönen and deployed by Henrik Rydberg. It was later upgraded extensively by Dan Balis. The current layout was designed by S. Abbas Raza, building upon the earlier look, and coded by Dumky de Wilde.

The banner images have been provided by Terri Amig, Carla Goller, Tom Hilde, Georg Hofer, Sheherbano Husain, Margit Oberrauch, S. Abbas Raza, Sughra Raza, Margaret Scurlock, Shahzia Sikander, Maria Stockner, and Hartwig Thaler.

« Micro-dosing with LSD: The Drug Habit Your Boss Is Gonna Love | Main | The Trouble With Publishing the Trump Dossier »

Wednesday, January 11, 2017

Is perfect justice an unrealizable dream?

Berny Belvedere in Arc:

ScreenHunter_2507 Jan. 11 15.50Political philosophers make a distinction between ideal and non-ideal theory.

Ideal theory, as its name implies, is all about specifying what the perfect society would look like. But the goal isn’t purely academic; the point of ideal theory isn’t simply to satisfy an intellectual curiosity. Rather, conceptualizing the perfect society can supply us with a target to aim for.

If we can draw the outlines of the Good City, we can pattern our society after it. We can set sail for it.

Non-ideal theory sees this approach as hopelessly detached from reality. Since society is characterized by non-ideal circumstances — or, to put it more negatively (and accurately): since society is beset by far-from-ideal realities — and since some of these circumstances appear to be intractable, it makes little sense to discuss social justice within the rarefied air of ideal theory.

According to this view, doing ideal theory is almost like talking about what heaven might be like, which is interesting but not relevant to present concerns. An unbridgeable gap exists between the two worlds, and focusing on the happy afterlife one is an abdication of intellectual responsibility.

More here.


Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 09:50 AM | Permalink

comments powered by Disqus