SEEU Review vol. 5 Nr. 2 (pdf) - South East European University

Dr. Ercan Gündoğan
practice should be rejected at the outset and any enjoyment of the benefits
should be avoided (Rawls, 1999, 60).
Fairness requires reciprocity and community and hence a just practice
requires more than the effective realization of wants and interests. For this
reason, Rawls builds his notion of justice as fairness through direct and
indirect references to utilitarianism (together with intuitionism).
Utilitarianism assimilates the conception of justice into benevolence and its
modern representative, welfare economics, into the question of efficient
organization of institutions to increase the general welfare (Rawls, 1999, 64).
Practically, the principle of justice here is a product of administrative
decisions in relation to maximization of utility in terms of marginal values.
Utility functions of individuals are accepted as the same and the satisfaction
of desires is considered independently from the interpersonal moral relations
(Rawls, 1999, 65). The ultimate aim is to maximize the general utility
function. Actually, the principles of justice are reduced to public policy
problem of institutions. There is also an extreme individualism in the
utilitarianism, which regards persons moving towards separate directions
(Rawls, 1999, 66). It is assumed that burdens and benefits are impartially
distributed whereas justice as understood as efficiency evaluates a justice
practice in terms of its advantages and disadvantages without concerning any
accepted principle of respective values (Rawls, 1999, 67). The relation
between slaveholder and slave is interpreted from a utilitarian point of view
is seen unjust since it produces advantages for slaveholder without
compensating disadvantages for slave and society because of the inefficient
organization of labour. Slavery can be accepted from many reasons
(advancement according to the previous practices, inherited from past,
satisfaction of desire) and the reasons may be relevant. However, person
thinking so “is guilt of a moral fallacy”. “There is disorder in his conception
of the ranking of moral principles” (Rawls, 1999, 68). Slavery has no
mutually acknowledged principles and no moral claim to the advantages.
Slave meets the existing interests effectively but “the satisfaction of these
claims is without weight and cannot enter into any tabulation of advantages
and disadvantages” (Rawls, 1999, 69).
However, a general moral conception cannot provide public recognition
of a conception of justice in democratic state, observes Rawls. (This state
goes back to the Wars of Religion after Reformation era and follows the
principle of toleration, the growth of the constitutional government and large
market economies). It requires a political conception of justice and refers to
the necessary acknowledgment of the phenomena of diversity and the
principle of pluralism as regards the doctrines and the conceptions of goods
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