>
>
> John Thornton wrote:
> >
> > Tayssir John Gabbour wrote:
> > > On 7/15/07, John Thornton
> <jthorn65 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> > >
> > >> To directly answer Doug's question as posed to
> Bill: "do you think a
> > >> just society should allow some people to coast
> by on the labor of others?"
> > >> Of course! When my work allows others the
> freedom to not work it
> > >> maximizes my own freedom.
> > >> I actually have more freedom under such a
> system than I would under any
> > >> other system. Anything less is a less just
> societal arrangement.
> > >>
>
> I haven't been following this thread, but reading
> this I would say the
> question is wrong. "Just society" is a phrase to
> play with in a seminar
> in metaphysics.
>
> As a matter of fact, however, a society which
> organized itself as to
> prevent all freeloading would be intolerable to live
> in for anyone. An
> attempt to construct in the mind a blueprint for
> such a society is a
> gross misuse of human power to think. The key phrase
> which must figure
> in this discussion if it is to make any sense at all
> is "revolutionizing
> practice," i.e. practice aimed at the transformation
> of human relations
> which transforms the agents of that practice
> themselves. Within that
> framework, and assuming that the practice achieved
> in a preliminary way
> its general aims, a rough and ready sense of what
> "justice" -- within
> those circumstances -- meant, and they would attempt
> to work out ways of
> achieving, roughly, social practices which satisfied
> that rough and
> ready shared sense of justice. (There is no such
> thing as Justice; there
> are only historically generated shared conceptions
> of social relations
> which come to be called just.)
>
> Within that context we can indulge ins some
> speculation as to the
> occurrence of freeloading within those social
> relations, and it seems
> pretty obvious to me that those practices would NOT
> make any effort to
> avoid some significant but barely significant
> proportion of freeloaders
> within the society, in order to avoid a tremendous
> waste of human energy
> in preventing such freeloading, a waste of energy
> which would generate
> activities and feelings that would tear the society
> apart. Some
> freeloading is the price of avoiding a plunge into
> barbarianism. How
> much must be tolerated or even encouraged can only
> be decided by
> immediate practice, not dreamt up in advance.
>
> Carrol
>
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