Blue Sky

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Good vs. Right

A person's good is that which is needed for the successful execution of a rational long-term plan of life given reasonably favorable circumstances.

Liberty

Opportunity

Income

Wealth

Self-respect

"The good is the satisfaction of rational desire." (Section 15)

Each person has his or her own plan of life - what is good may vary. Right is set down in the social contract, the same for everyone, influenced by the "veil of ignorance." Rawls specializes the concept of something's being right as it being fair. (Section 18)

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Darwin’s great contribution was the complete destruction of Locke’s argument and the nearly universal blockade of imagination that it both reflected and fostered. An early critic of Darwinian thinking put his finger on it:   In the theory with which we have to deal, Absolute Ignorance is the artificer; so that we may enunciate as the fundamental principle of the whole system, that, IN ORDER TO MAKE A PERFECT AND BEAUTFIUL MACHINE, IT IS NOT REQUISITE TO KNOW HOW TO MAKE IT. This proposition will be found, on careful examination, to express, in condensed form, the essential purport of the Theory, and to express in a few words all Mr. Darwin’s meaning; who, by a strange inversion of reasoning, seems to think Absolute Ignorance fully qualified to take the place of Absolute Wisdom in all the achievements of creative skill.     (from an anonymous review of a work on evolution, Atheneum, 2102, 8 February, 1867, p. 217.)       Exactly!

-Daniel C. Dennett in The Mind, the Brain and Complex Adaptive Systems

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“The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but that the relation relates itself to its own self.”

― Søren Kierkegaard