A questão do indivíduo e da sociedade em John Rawls

Abstract

This dissertation is on the issue of justice which is an open and controversial theme since the earliest times of the philosophical questions about the topic. Our time is marked by contradictions about the own vision of man and society, mainly after we have experienced both the wonders of the technical scientific and cultural development of the last two centuries and also carried out the atrocities against man, hurting his most fundamental rights, specially the historical facts of the twentieth century, as the two world wars. This paradox between the enhancement of the human potential and the very utilitarian reduction of the human condition lead us to a search of a new theory of the justice that is able to rethink the value of the human and its natural condition and that it is not only an instrumental condition grounded upon the principles of greater satisfaction for the greatest number of individuals, typical of the utilitarianism that was imposed so far. The proposed debate aims to locate the vision of man within the context of justice focusing specifically on the issue of the individual’ social atomism that is present in the theory of justice as John Ralws fairness that means it as an autonomous part within a contractual doctrine, thus atomized , and which gives, as a privilege in his theory, in the a-historical “moment” of the original position and, on the other hand, the Charles Taylor’s opposed vision that, introducing concepts as the one of interiority, of recognition and of no decomposition of the goods, which are genuinely social, tends to locate his vision of man in an human being located within a broader context than himself. Here the focus is going to be given to Rawls’ justice theory and one intend to consider the criticism to the atomism issue elaborated by Taylor within the context of the current debate between liberalism and communitarians.