National Healthcare Insurance Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

National Healthcare Insurance - Essay Example John Stuart Mill conception of liberty correlates liberty of discussion and thought, individuality as an element of well-being, and limits to societal authority over individuals. Mill develops harm theory by establishing a principle, which isolates an area within which individuals are free from interference in developing their individuality through experiments and free choices in their livelihoods. Mill emphasis the point that individual liberty is by right absolute with concern on matters regarded as harmless to other people and that individual enjoys absolute liberty of choice among purely self-regarding acts. Mill’s concept of liberty revolves around the idea that liberty is essential in ensuring subsequent progress of the society and the individual, especially in the case where the society is more important than the state. This scenario is only possible in circumstances where the rulers only represent the interests of the ruled, or a perfect representative democracy withou t any opposition between the ruler and the ruled (McKenna and Feingold 61). In such a surrounding, the liberty of an individual is attainable, but not guaranteed. Mill’s concept of liberty digs into moral theories, highlighting the happiness of the individual as the only important thing. Such happiness is only achievable in a civilized society where people freely engage in their own interests, with their skills and capabilities developed through a good education system. In this regard therefore, Mill advocates for the fundamental importance of individuality and personal development, both for the development of the society and the individual for progress in the future. Michael Walzer’s theory of distributive justice presents a pluralistic and particularistic approach to equality. He argues that the principles of a society should follow the historical and cultural setting of that society, that is, universal principles of justice does not exist, that distribution of diffe rent social goods should follow different principles, and that these different principles display different meanings of social goods that are products of cultural and historical particularistic approach. Walzer further argues that each social good constitutes its own distributive sphere, with every sphere being autonomous. This is to say that social goods from one sphere should not intrude another sphere. Walzer’s major concern on progression to complex equality emphasizes on dominance in a particular sphere of justice and not (principally) on the basis of the monopoly in that given sphere. Walzer’s arrangement of human affairs in establishing equality imposes the condition that the distribution of a social good in one sphere must not lead to conversion of that particular social good into another sphere. An example is the possession of power in the political sphere, which for the purpose of equality, should not enable the politician to convert the power to wealth, whic h is in a different sphere. As long as the conversion is impossible, equality is achievable despite the distribution of a social good in any one sphere (McKenna and Feingold 132). Walzer views the human society as a distributive community where the multiplicity of goods meets the multiplicity of distributive processes and procedures. Therefore, to create a just distributive procedure or principle requires complex equality rather than simple equality. This forms what he calls a complex egalitarian society. The reduction of dominance has preference over the breakdown of monopoly in his concept. His critique on