I am not so sure that you can get out of your military service simply by saying that you wish to preserve your liberty and don't wish to harm other people. You may know the present situation better than I do, but I know of a number of young Israelis who ended up in jail for refusing to serve in the IDF. I see your justice point: The IDF is protecting the physical security of Israeli citizens (or at least of a large majority of the Israeli population to which you belong), and so it seems unjust for you to enjoy this protection but then also to refuse to contribute to it. You say that there is nothing you can do to avoid being protected by the IDF. If this were true, then this would weaken your reasons to serve. To illustrate, suppose you have a fan who, unprompted by you, greatly improves your reputation by posting admiring stories about you on Facebook, by very effectively singing your praises to important people in your social environment whose support will greatly help your career, etc....

By "ability to procure exchange" you mean, I assume, money. So you are saying that the fact that some people have less money does not make them less entitled to stuff. Now this is often true, for instance in cases where those who have less have less on account of wrongs or injustices they suffered. But it's not always and certainly not necessarily true. Thus imagine two able-bodied and otherwise similar persons running a farm together. Suppose they agree to share the net proceeds (sales revenue minus expenses) in proportion to the work each puts in. And suppose one of them does 2/3 of the work and the other 1/3. So the latter has less money to spend than the former -- but isn't she also entitled to less? A similar story could be told about two otherwise similar people who do equal work and have equal income. One has spent little and thus has a lot left. The other has spent a lot and thus has little left. The latter now has less money that the former -- but isn't he also entitled to less? Perhaps you...

There are two weak spots in the reasoning you sketch. First, the expression "more ethical" is a bit slippery. If one does not pause to reflect, one may be fooled into thinking that, if something is more ethical, then it's ethical or permissible or (as you say at the end) morally justified. But this is not so. It's presumably more ethical (more acceptable, morally) to snatch a woman's purse than to take it while threatening her with a knife. But this does not mean that it is morally justified to snatch her purse. All it means is that it is less wrong to do so. (Some would say that wrongness, like pregnancy, does not admit of degrees; but here I agree with you that it does.) This first weak spot can be avoided by saying instead that stealing money that was formerly stolen from you can be ethical or morally justified. And this seems correct in cases where (a) the money was justly owned by you at the time it was first stolen and (b) it was not stolen to meet some urgent needs of the thief or of others...

People have adduced something like the original position in support of rule utilitarianism. But Rawls believes that this is not the rational agreement to make behind the veil of ignorance. To see why, consider that an agreement to justify the society's institutional arrangements by reference to some standard of utility maximization does not guarantee that utility will actually be maximized. It is notoriously difficult to show in a publicly convincing way which proposed institutional design or which candidate piece of legislation would produce the most utility. So the agreement to make this the common public standard of justice would lead to a lot of division, and people with power would often deceive themselves or try to deceive others that what is best for their own will also maximize utility. Moreover, utilitarianism can notoriously justify very bad outcomes for small groups, who are likely then to lack allegiance to the society's justice standard and social institutions. All these things would be a...

In first approximation, the fair price is the one that would emerge in a well-structured open market if the existing distribution of socio-economic positions were replaced by the one that would exist in the absence of historical wrongs under just social institutions (leaving all else -- and especially the current stage of technological and economic development -- constant). This answer accepts the libertarian position for the special case of just social institutions but rejects it for conditions of injustice. Stated in this way, most libertarians would agree. They would agree, for example, that transactions in a feudal society (which leaves landless persons no choice but to subject themselves to the authority of a landlord) do not establish fair prices even when buyer and seller agree. Still, libertarians, Rawlsians, socialists, etc., have quite diverse views about what just social institutions would be like. So, while they can all formally accept the answer I have given, they will not thereby be...

The justification goes something like this. The United States is under various current and potential threats from foreign sources. It is the government's responsibility, as a matter of national security, to keep these threats at bay and perhaps to neutralize them. This task can be made easier or much harder by public attitudes within the US itself. The US failed to prevail in the Vietnam War, for example, because many of its citizens were no longer willing to accept the aerial bombardment of villages with napalm and cluster bombs. To effectively safeguard the national security of the United States and to protect its citizens, it is necessary, then, to establish and maintain a widespread willingness among the American people to support US foreign and military policy. This in turn makes it necessary to withhold from the American people, or to sanitize, any information that might adversely affect their support. Concealing war crimes committed by US soldiers, US contractors or US allies is often as...

Here are a few things you might want to look at. In 1997, the InterAction Council drafted a UniversalDeclaration of Human Responsibilities, see www.interactioncouncil.org/ In 2002 the Fundacion Valencia Tercer Milenio published a Declaration of Responsibilities and Human Duties, available at http://globalization.icaap.org/content/v2.2/declare.html Somewhat more detailed and useful are some of the General Comments produced under the auspices of the United Nations (see http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/gencomm/econ.htm). As one example, see General Comment 14 on the human right to the highest attainable standard of health. Onora O'Neill has long written about the need to achieve greater clarity on who is required by human rights to do what for whom. See her books Towards Justice and Virtue and Bounds of Justice . And, if it's permissible, I'd also mention my own book World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms.

I don't think there's a named fallacy here, but I do think the principle proposed by Person 2 is unsound. If this principle were sound, then it would be impermissible to remain childless even in a world as overpopulated as ours. The principle can be revised to be more plausible. When many people in some group are making a morally motivated effort to achieve a certain good that would not exist (or to avert a certain harm that would not be averted) without their effort, then one has moral reason to do one's fair share if one is a member of this group. This sort of principle against free-riding on the moral efforts of others can explain why one should generally vote and do so conscientiously -- at least unless one has conclusive reason to judge that enough others are already acting and that one's own effort will therefore add nothing to the outcome. But there is also a more direct explanation of why one ought to vote. As philosopher Derek Parfit has argued, the extremely low probability of one...

There are several classical attempts to do just that. The two most influential, perhaps, are those Plato makes in his Republic and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's in Of the Social Contract . I have tried a somewhat different tack in regard to international politics in T. Pogge World Poverty and Human Rights (Polity 2008), ch. 5: "The Bounds of Nationalism," esp. pp. 126-30.

In terms of income, the panelists on this site by and large belong to humanity's top ventile (5%) -- where the average income is 9 times the global average. This is roughly 300 times more than what is available to people in the bottom quarter, where average income is about 1/32 of the global average. (The difference is still about 100:1 if one adjusts for purchasing power parities.) Moreover, people in the bottom quarter typically work longer hours in more exhausting jobs, and have about 20 to 30 fewer years of life. So, yes, those among whom you live do not enjoy anything like our opportunities to live a full human life, anything like our freedom to learn, think, enjoy, and be creative. These huge discrepancies are profoundly unjust, and it would be good if many people in the more affluent countries used their much greater powers to change the world toward overcoming such injustice. Unfortunately, this is not happening, though some are trying. Those who have most power to contribute to change also...