PHIL 103 WKU The Committed Life Political Philosophy by Adam Swift Questions

All answers must come from the book Political Philosophy by Adam Swift.

All answers must be short answer.

1.Analyze Lincoln’s ‘government of, by, and for the people’. Which preposition refers uniquely to democracy (and why not the others)?

2.(In the context of Swift’s ‘four axes’ of democracy) what does Rawls mean by the ‘fair value’ of the primary good of democratic citizenship?

3.In a democracy, why is ‘majority rule’ both necessary and problematic? How can it undermine the very notion of democracy?

4.How – according to the ‘conventional’ point of view – does desert differ from entitlement? What notions of ‘desert’ are there? What sorts of quasi- or pseudo-desert (i.e., ‘misuses’ of the term) are there?

5.Why is Hayek opposed to social justice as an ideal? How does his conception of ‘spontaneous order’ (catallaxy) supposedly make it unnecessary?

6.What is justice? Distinguish commutative, retributive, and distributive (social) justice

7.Why is global distribution often regarded as a matter of charity, and in-country distribution as a matter of justice? Is this a defensible distinction?

8.Distinguish: direct vs indirect democracy, pure vs impure democracy

9.What does Swift mean by the ‘paradox’ of democracy?

10.What are Rawls’s ‘original position’ and curtain of ignorance’, and the function do they have in creating a shared notion of ‘justice as fairness’?

11.What are two ways of ‘representing’ in the context of (indirect) democracy?

12.What are the so-called intrinsic goods of democracy, and which of them do you regard as most important?

13.Why is it important that democracy (or any government) be perceived as legitimate?

14.In democracy, who are ‘the people’ (demos)? Why is this a controversial question? Does it mean that democracy is always deficient?

15.How are Rawls and Nozick coming at the social justice question from different directions? What aspect of justice is most important to each of them?