Political Philosophy, Clearly [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION Political Philosophy, Clearly: Essays on Freedom and Fairness, Property and Equalities is part of the series The Collected Works of Anthony de Jasay. Political Philosophy, Clearly is a collection of essays dominated by a unifying theme: the role that conventions and the rules arising from them play in the social order. Jasay ranks them in a hierarchy of importance within society: rules against torts (protecting life and limb, property, reciprocal promises, and all peaceful pursuits) followed by rules against nuisances and incivilities. Because these rules have the immense merit of emerging spontaneously and being instinctively understood in virtually all civilizations, they are able to coordinate behavior in a mutually satisfying, though not necessarily optimal, manner. Conventional, spontaneously generated, and enforced rules are free of the taint borne by politically created laws under which a master rule (constitution) permits some people to impose their will on others. As the essays in this volume illustrate, consistent reliance on what conventions forbid and what they allow enables Jasay to make a sharp distinction between what are ascertainable facts and what are normative desiderata. For him, no theory of justice can make one act just and another unjust. He has little time for "justice as fairness" (Rawls) or for "fairness as justice" (Binmore), which would fit just conduct to normative rules; and still less for "social justice," which he finds alien to the very concept of justice. Despite its normative garb, Jasay holds that justice, a matter of just and unjust acts, can be identified only by reference to the system of conventionally adopted rules that actually underlie coexistence and cooperation. For him, as for David Hume, "right and wrong" are inventions that human societies make in the course of social evolution. The underlying conventions are facts, and describing them has truth value, whereas normative statements as such have not. Being conventional, the basic rules of the game of life could logically or conceivably have evolved into something other than what they are. The otherwise useful example of driving on the left or the right side of the road should not suggest that all conventions are arbitrary.