- Table of Contents
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Why Be Fair?
- You are fair and you are concerned that others do well
- People committed to fairness have tied a hand behind their back
- What makes a life go well?
- The point of being fair
- Being committed to fairness and having a reputation for fairness
- Not being fair beats being fair
- Two objections: we are not self-controlled or knowledgeable enough to prosper through being ready to be unfair; the best way to maintain a reputation for fairness is to be committed to fairness
- Being unfair will disturb one’s conscience
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Why Be Fair (2)?
- Valuing something instrumentally and valuing it for its own sake explained
- Fairness as an instrumental value
- No one values fairness for its own sake
- The implicit premise: love is not love which alters when it alteration finds
- Is the implicit premise true?
- Summing up: foolish to be committed to fairness as a tool; loving fairness for its own sake is possible
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Fairness and Friends
- Cheats and manipulators: To lack a commitment to fairness is not in itself to be a cheat or manipulator
- Fairness and personal relationships
- Friends are special
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Good and Right as Reasons for Action
- That fairness is good or right is a reason to be committed to fairness (introduction)
- Understanding the concept of good
- Fairness might be both good and bad
- Its goodness as a reason for acting; practical reasons are belief-desire pairs
- Its being right as a reason for acting
- Good and right as empty
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Ends and Means
- Two ways to honour a value
- Utilitarianism
- Deontology
- Consequences or intrinsic properties?
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Nothing Possesses Value Intrinsically
- Doing things with false sentences
- The evidence argument that values are tastes
- The psychological argument that values are tastes
- The normative-properties argument that values are tastes
- Summing up
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Relativism about Value
- The central thesis of relativism about value
- The thesis of intercultural value difference
- The cultural differences argument for relativism about value
- An inference-to-the-best-explanation argument for relativism about value
- The evaluation-requires-standards argument for relativism about value
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Implications of Relativism
- Reviewing the relativistic conception of value
- We all belong to many cultures
- The culture to which the agent belongs is not the only potentially relevant culture
- Reasons and evaluations
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Relativism about Value and Tolerance
- What relativism about value isn’t
- Cross-cultural judgement
- Relativism and tolerance
- A relativist defence of tolerance
- A critique of the relativist defence of tolerance
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Values Are Real
- Compare and contrast
- Realism about value
- Don’t make of yourself an exception
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Respect
- “Respect” disambiguated
- Respect for personhood or autonomy
- Manipulating, humiliating and burdening
- Burdening others disrespectfully
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Punishment, Freedom and the Golden Rule
- Respect in the context of penalties and punishment
- Respect for autonomy and the civil liberties
- Rules golden, silver and platinum
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Reasoning about What to Do
- Relativism about value
- Why Cultivate Virtue?
- The Wisdom of Loving Fairness
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