What is another word for original position?

Pronunciation: [əɹˈɪd͡ʒɪnə͡l pəzˈɪʃən] (IPA)

The term "original position" refers to a philosophical concept introduced by John Rawls that describes a hypothetical state in which individuals are stripped of their social roles and identities, providing a baseline from which moral and political principles can be established. Synonyms for the original position include "the state of nature," "the hypothetical veil of ignorance," and "the moral equivalent of the position of savages in Rousseau's thought." Each of these phrases underscores the idea that in the original position, individuals are free from the trappings of society and able to construct a fair and just social contract based on shared values and principles.

What are the hypernyms for Original position?

A hypernym is a word with a broad meaning that encompasses more specific words called hyponyms.

Famous quotes with Original position

  • Saturn Return is just the return of your planets to their original position.
    Billy Corgan
  • What agents would choose in certain well- defined conditions of ignorance (in the “original position”) is, for Rawls, an important criterion for determining which conception of “justice” is normatively acceptable. Why should we agree that choice under conditions of ignorance is a good criterion for deciding what kind of society we would wish to have? William Morris in the late nineteenth century claimed to prefer a society of more or less equal grinding poverty for all (e.g., the society he directly experienced in Iceland) to Britain with its extreme discrepancies of wealth and welfare, even though the least well-off in Britain were in absolute terms better off than the peasants and fishermen of Iceland.” This choice seems to have been based not on any absolute preference for equality (or on a commitment to any conception of fairness), but on a belief about the specific social (and other) evils that flowed from the ways in which extreme wealth could be used in an industrial capitalist society.” Would no one in the original position entertain views like these? Is Morris’s vote simply to be discounted? On what grounds? The “veil of ignorance” is artificially defined so as to allow certain bits of knowledge “in” and to exclude other bits. No doubt it would be possible to rig the veil of ignorance so that it blanks out knowledge of the particular experiences Morris had and the theories he developed, and renders them inaccessible in the original position, but one would then have to be convinced that this was not simply a case of modifying the conditions of the thought experiment and the procedure until one got the result one antecedently wanted.
    Raymond Geuss
  • The historical Jesus will be to our time a stranger and an enigma. The study of the Life of Jesus has had a curious history. It set out in quest of the historical Jesus, believing that when it had found Him it could bring Him straight into our time as a Teacher and Savior. It loosed the bands by which He had been riveted for centuries to the stony rocks of ecclesiastical doctrine, and rejoiced to see life and movement coming into the figure once more, and the historical Jesus advancing, as it seemed, to meet it. But He does not stay; He passes by our time and returns to His own. What surprised and dismayed the theology of the last forty years was that, despite all forced and arbitrary interpretations, it could not keep Him in our time, but had to let Him go. He returned to his own time, not owing to the application of any historical ingenuity, but by the same inevitable necessity by which the liberated pendulum returns to its original position.
    Albert Schweitzer

Related words: original position, original point

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