As promised, here are my initial reflections (or intellectual masturbation, as PLuk would say… works for me too!) on the conception of social justice that I think PB2.0 should promote and apply to whatever structure it ends up having.

A quick response to Paul on the intellectual masturbation:

"In ‘why I write’, George Orwell claimed that all writers were motivated by some mixture of four motives. The first was ‘sheer egoism’, which must to some be present if (as Orwell assumed) a ‘writer’ is not someone who is not content to write but wants to publish. The second was ‘aesthetic enthusiasm’, which Orwell took to be some concern for the form of one’s work. The third was ‘historical impulse’, or, more broadly, ‘the desire to see things as they are.’ The last was ‘political purpose’ — using the word "political" in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter people’s idea of the kind of society they should strive after."

That’s a quote from Brian Barry’s book, Why Social Justice Matters, which inspired some (but not all) of the reflections below.

Again, my thanks to Lambert for offering me this opportunity.

I am one of the people who thinks that PB2.0 should be both about substance and structure. Both topics deserve posts of their own but in this post, I focus more on substance: a basic conceptualization of social justice.

What should PB2.0 stand for ?  Read more