Welcome to the 46th Annual Graduate Conference at UIUC!
March 7 & 8, 2025
The Department of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) would like to invite you to our 46th Annual Graduate Philosophy Conference. The conference will be held at Gregory Hall in Urbana, Illinois from March 7-8, 2025.
Submissions for the conference are due January 1st, 2025.
Keynote
Michael Otsuka
Michael Otsuka is Professor of Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, Rutgers University-New Brunswick
To whom must we justify priority for the least advantaged: rigidly or non-rigidly designated individuals?
Rawls maintains that only the difference principle – which calls for the maximization of the position of the least advantaged – is reasonably acceptable to all because it uniquely “meets the following reciprocity condition: those who are better off … are not better off to the detriment of those who are worse off….” I consider a counterexample to this claim, in which the difference principle is to the detriment of the worse off in the following respect: those rigidly designated individuals who are members of the least advantaged group would be much better off under an alternative to the difference principle. Drawing inspiration from Scanlon and Nagel, according to whom justification is owed to beings with a point of view who are capable of being harmed and benefitted in morally significant respects, I argue that the difference principle, along with other principles of justice, must be justifiable to rigidly designated individuals on a contractualist approach. I then show how the difference principle can nevertheless be justified to rigidly designated individuals via a pairwise comparison of their claims in the example under consideration.
Sponsors:
-
-
- Department of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- The Graduate Philosophy Organization at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
-