Okay, here's a concise answer: Immoral, unless certain predictable consequences are mitigated or corrected. Why? Well, it depends precisely what you mean by capitalism. If one takes a pure form of market capitalism, I'd say it's immoral because it makes no evaluative judgments that take into account the distribution of goods and services or costs and benefits, the suffering of various actors, or considerations of flourishing. Says the radical capitalist: whatever outcome the market produces is okay. I disagree. I think that because of (1) the profound importance in human life of the issues and (2) the intimate connection between (a) economic matters like distribution and (b) moral matters like need, fairness, flourishing, justice etc. the operations of a capitalist economy must be regulated, guided, and directed to produce morally desirable outcomes. In particular moral considerations should guide economic activity to produce outcomes that are fair, moderate and equitable, outcomes that promote...

Dictionaries can be philosophically disappointing, indeed. But of course one has to remember that they provide only very, very, very brief definitions. Moreover, they're aim is often to capture the common and historical usage, rather than the philosophical theory standing behind the concept. A furniture manufacturer (dictionary) is likely to answer the question, "What's my desk made of?", differently from the way a physicist or chemist (philosopher) would answer. So, I think one reason dictionaries disappoint us philosophically is that often when we go to them to answer a philosophical question we go looking with the wrong expectations. Anyway, to answer your question directly. Justice can carry meanings that go a bit beyond fairness, though fairness may still be related to them. For one thing, justice is often related explicitly to lawfulness. While all laws ought to be fair, not all fairness is lawfulness. In this regard courts and the institutions of imprisonment, law enforcement, and civil...

A really excellent question about some especially thorny issues. I'm not an expert in constitutional law, and so I would advise searching US supreme court and federal court decisions relevant to these issues. For myself, I would at present answer thus: Yes, the doctrine of "separation of church and state" does violate the principle of majority-rule. (The phrase was first used by Thomas Jefferson in an 1802 letter to Danbury, CT, Baptists: "I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state.") But that this separation limits majority rule is a good thing and something necessary for the realization of a democratic society. Democracy is not simply a matter of majority rule. If it were, the majority would be able to abuse minorities. Majority rule...

I must honestly say that this question is beyond my capacity and perhaps beyond anyone's. I have my doubts that a clear, enduring point of balance between the two can be formulated--or even that it's meaningful to think about formulating one. Perhaps the best thing to say is that the important thing here is to understand the problem and to acquire some sense empirically about the kinds of abuse and failure that are likely to arise with different ways of addressing it. Having done this, a continuing conversation/argument/struggle/scrutiny of the current state of things should be sustatined. The answer then is not some particular point of balance but rather the establishement of a persistent means of deliberation, review, and revision of the issue. Consult the work of Chantal Mouffe on radical democracy on this score.

This is one of the most important questions of political philosophy today. It's important, however, to distinguish between the way it may be asked as a legal or empirical question and the way it may be asked as a philosophical question. By rights, here, we are talking about what I call "claim rights"--that is, the right to make claims upon others for some good. For example, children have the right to make claims upon their parents for nourishment and support. Citizens have the right to make claims upon their government for protection. Here we're talking about the right of people to make claims upon one another for medical care and education. Claim rights may be opposed to "rights of non-interference"--that is, rights to be free from restrictions or harms imposed by others, either states or other individuals. So, for example, the right to free speech is a right to speak without interference from the state (and in some cases non-state agents). "Basic" rights may be thought of as necessary...