Phew! That Was Good

Society cannot be organized under one narrow conception of "the good," argued two of world's mostreknown philosophers yesterday, reaching similar conclusions from radically different standpoints.

But a rising star in political philosophy observed that, in reality, the imposition of values of "the good" cannot be avoided.

John Rawls, Conant University Professor, whose opus "A Theory of Justice" has garnered widespread praise, Robert Nozick, Porter Professor of Philosophy, and Thomas M. Scanlon, professor of philosophy, lightly sparred on the role of government in a symposium titled "The Individual Good and Political Philosophy."

Rawls, reasoning from his widely cited theory that justice requires a set of generally agreed-upon and equitably administered rights and equality of opportunity, said "there is no complete religious or political system that can serve as a basis for the Constitutional ideals."

Commenting on the interpretation, Rawls' younger collegue Scanlon said, "It's quite a question whether a moral argument can be carried out without reference to values."

Then citing the hypothetical case of a film that offends familial values, Scanlon asked how the rights of opposing interests--those whose idea of good requires and those whose idea of the good opposes the dissemination of such a film--can be considered without some scale of comparison.

"How can the relative importance of these rights be assessed without a notion of the good?" he asked.

Meanwhile Nozick, expanding on past arguments that "whatever came out of a just process was just," asked the fundamental question "What is good?" And answered that it is a combination of "positive emotion" coupled with "contact with reality" and "a certain narrative story to our lives."

"It's far more complex than anything the state can deal with," he said, concluding that "there is not that much that an organized society can do to advance people's individual good."