1.The traditional view of society is that its members are beholden to it because they entirely depend on it. Therefore, justice is primarily conceived in terms of social duties to the political system. By contrast, the dominant model of modern justice is social contract theory. It may involve actual constitutions that function as social contracts. For philosophers, however, the idea is to imagine a society so just that all its members would agree to its terms. Its justice would earn the consent of all. In this view, the basis of justice is the right of members to be well served by government, thus ruling out exploitation by the government.
The primary logistical problem of achieving consent, however, is that of representating the will of the people: our government says it serves the people, but does it really? Today, there is much evidence of discontent with our government, its representatives being accused of serving “special interests” and lobbies rather than the welfare of society as a whole. Some more skeptical people think that there really is nothing but competing interest groups, and that the idea of a politician serving “the welfare of society as a whole” is obsolete. Do you think there is any alternative to letting special interests compete for influence in Washington? Or is it still possible to identify those policies that are truly in the public interest?
2.18th century Liberalism in the Lockean tradition preferred governments to be small (limited mainly to defense against theft, fraud, and invasion) suspecting that the larger a government is, the more likely it would abuse its power. That small government ideal took hold just when Adam Smith’s free market theory argued that economies are better off organized by markets rather than by politicians. But the 19th century challenged both of those views. Economies industrialized on a massive scale, eliminating much of the competition that kept markets “free” in Adam Smith’s sense. Major industries became so powerful that they overwhelmed their competition and became “states within states” that threatened the welfare of their workers (by lowering wages) and the communities they lived in (by polluting, corrupting politicians, and fixing prices).
In the early 20th century, the idea gained traction that democratic governments needed to be big and active enough to (a) to tame large corporations (i.e., regulate them) and (b) to fix some of the damage they do (e.g., provide unemployment benefits when recessions and depressions are caused by corporate policies). This larger scale government is often referred to as the “welfare” state because it engages in a variety of activities designed to promote public welfare. In your view, is it possible or desirable to try to reduce government power and services to nothing but police and military functions as in the 18th century, or is big government a “necessary evil” of life in modern complex economies?
