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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
This 3 page paper considers three political philosophies: Utilitarianism, Libertarianism and Rawlsianism, and argues that all of them are badly flawed, but that Libertarianism probably makes somewhat more sense than the other two. Bibliography lists 3 sources.
Page Count:
3 pages (~225 words per page)
File: D0_HVUtLiRa.rtf
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
the philosophy that whatever benefits the greatest number is the correct action. It was founded by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill (Income inequality and poverty, 2007). More formally, utilitarianism
is described as the "political philosophy according to which the government should choose policies to maximize the total utility of everyone in society" (Income inequality and poverty, 2007). There are
several kinds of utilitarianism including act utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism; a moments reflection points up the greatest weakness of this line of thought. That is, if there are 100 people
and 51 will benefit if 49 are killed, does that justify the action? Perhaps they should kill only 25, or ten, or one. Its easy to see that this theory
can be twisted to provide an excuse for truly perverse actions. Rawlsianism was developed by John Rawls, and says that the government "should choose policies deemed to be just, as
evaluated by an impartial observer behind a veil of ignorance" (Income inequality and poverty, 2007). Rawls considered how people might construct a just society, considering that most of us act
from self-interest; his solution was the "veil of ignorance" (Jedicke, 1996). He argued that if a person set out to devise a just society, he would most likely act simply
to benefit himself, but if he worked from behind a "veil of ignorance," in which he did not know who he was in reality (his status in society, his abilities,
intelligence, strength or natural talent), he would tend to create a society that would work for everyone, since he would not know how he fit into it (Jedicke, 1996). The
weakness here is obvious: people dont live behind a veil of ignorance, and are extremely conscious of such things as how much money they make, their social position, race, creed
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