PHILOSOPHY 167 FINAL EXAM SHORT-ANSWER QUESTIONS SPRING, 2005 YOUR NAME__________________________________________________ Time allowed: 90 minutes. This section of the exam counts for one-half of your exam grade. No use of books or notes is permitted during this exam. Answer FOURTEEN of the EIGHTEEN questions on these pages. (If you need more space, please use the back sides of these sheets.) 1. State the difference principle affirmed by John Rawls. What exactly does the difference principle require? 2. In her essay “What Is the Point of Equality?” Elizabeth Anderson argues against a doctrine she calls luck egalitarianism or equality of fortune. She states that the luck egalitarian will tend to be unfair to (fail to treat with the equal concern and respect that is owed to all) those who suffer from bad option luck, but will also be unfair in treating those who suffer from bad brute luck and hence are (on the luck egalitarian view) owed compensation. How according to Anderson will the luck egalitarian go wrong in responding to the plight of those who suffer bad brute luck? 3. (a) Suppose that by violating one person’s Lockean rights myself I can minimize the weighted sum of rights violations. For example, if I kill one innocent nonthreatening person I can prevent someone from committing two similar murders. According to Nozick’s side constraint view of rights, ought I to commit one murder if I know that I can thereby prevent two other murders? Why or why not? (b) Suppose that by violating one person’s Lockean rights myself now I can minimize the weighted sum of rights violations committed by me. For example, suppose I have already put poison in the water canteen of two persons who are talking a hike in the desert. I have deliberately tried to kill them, and if I do nothing now, they will die, and I will have murdered two. I can prevent these deaths, but only by now shooting and killing the innocent nonthreatening friend of the two hikers, who is playfully tossing the canteen in the air just above a gorge, and who will drop the canteen into the gorge (where no one can get to it) if I shoot him dead, but who otherwise will leave the canteen where the thirsty hikers will certainly drink from it and die. So [Continued on next page]Page 2 of 7 according to Nozick’s side constraint view of rights, ought I to commit one murder myself now if that will thereby prevent two other murders that would be done be me? Why or why not? 4. In section 82 of chapter 9 of A Theory of Justice, Rawls proposes the “grounds for the priority of liberty.” Here his question is, why should we accord the equal basic liberty principle strict lexical priority over the other principle of justice. One important consideration turns on the importance of self-respect. What does Rawls mean by “self-respect” and what is the argument from self-respect to the priority of liberty? 5. In the course reading with the title “Representative Government” John Stuart Mill considers the likely effects of the operation of one or another type of government, democracy (government by the many) or despotism (government by one or a few) on human character. What effects on the development of human character does Mill expect from putting in place democracy rather than despotism? What effects on character does Mill find to be superior, those induced by democracy or those induced by despotism?Page 3 of 7 6. Suppose that a long time ago Sally appropriated unowned ocean front land in Southern California and left the land untended. Sally bequeathed this ownership claim to her children and it passed down the generations to Sally Jr., the current owner. Liker the previous owners, Sally Jr. continues to leave the land in its original wild state. Does this appropriation and continued claim to ownership satisfy the Lockean Proviso as Robert Nozick interprets it? Why or why not? (If you need more information to determine whether the Proviso is satisfied in this case, explain what further information you would need.) 7. Suppose you live in a society committed to Ronald Dworkin’s ideal of equality of resources (as outlined in chapter 2 of Sovereign Virtue). At adulthood you get a bundle of resources that satisfies the equality of resources ideal. You then choose to live in a lowland valley, close to a river that periodically floods, rather than on higher ground, and you choose to work as a firefighter after surveying various career options. You then lose your home in a flood and become seriously burned in the course of fulfilling your firefighting duties. Are you then owed further compensation according to the equality of resources standard of distributive justice? Why or why not? 8. In “Where the Action Is: On the Site of Distributive Justice,” G. A. Cohen argues that a talented better off person committed to the Rawlsian difference principle would not make career choices that would maximize her own income when she could instead make other choices that would bring it about that some worst off members of society are significantly better off. He then introduces a significant objection to this argument that a follower of John Rawls might make. What’s the significant objection?Page 4 of 7 9. In “Dualist Democracy” Bruce Ackerman contrasts two views on the nature of the democratic political process. One sees democracy as “monistic,” the other sees democracy as “dualistic.” What is the difference between these two views? 10. Suppose we accept Dworkin’s challenge model of critical interests—a good life has the quality of a skillful performance, a skillful response to the basic challenge posed for each of us by the fact that we have a life to live. Dworkin goes on to consider whether we should conceive of the achievements that constitute a good life on the challenge view as indexed or transcendent. Someone might respond: Take the achievements in physics that Einstein made in the first decades of the twentieth century, developing general and special relativity. It is very difficult for anyone who comes later to replicate exactly that achievement, since any student of physics today will be taught Einstein’s ideas. But we can imagine a German farm girl in the year 2020 who is quite isolated but has access to a good public library in her community,