Dr.+James+E.+Hoard

Potential Presenter Cover Page

=Dr. James E. Hoard=

Location (traveling from): Local Contact Information: Availability: Confirmed Format: Audience: Countries traveled or worked in: Conference Topic Emphasis: Social Justice & More Program Description: **Social Justice and the Three Isms** Background Information:

Providing a compelling and defensible theory of social justice is an endeavor that has kept philosophers occupied since antiquity. Since the Enlightenment and Romantic eras the arguments have centered on the relative merits of three major isms—Conservatism, Liberalism, and Socialism. In this talk, I characterize the three isms and compare the thoughts and positions of a number of representative “founding” figures—including Conservatives Edmund Burke and Alexander Hamilton; Liberals Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and J. S. Mill; and Socialists Karl Marx, Eugene Debs, and Michael Harrington. Examples of policies advocated (and laws enacted) from Washington’s administration to the present day illustrate how a belief in particular basic values drawn from, and, indeed, inherent to, one or more of the three isms, lead to differing views of social justice. I then consider how these views are (or are not) reflected in the most celebrated recent theory of social justice, that of the late Harvard philosopher John Rawls. I briefly present the case that Rawls’ theory, as stated in //A Theory of Justice// (1971) and //Political Liberalism// (1993), is incomplete in significant ways and suggest how, given a different synthesis of the basic tenets of the three isms, the deficiencies can be remedied.