What is the point of justice?

Conflicting answers to the question of what principles of justice are for may generate very different ways of theorizing about justice. Indeed divergent answers to it are at the heart of G. A. Cohen's disagreement with John Rawls. Cohen thinks that the roots of this disagreement lie in the constructivist method that Rawls employs, which mistakenly treats the principles that emerge from a procedure that involves factual assumptions as ultimate principles of justice. But I argue that even if Rawls were to abandon his constructivism, and to accept Cohen's argument that ultimate principles of justice are not grounded directly in any facts, their divergent views concerning the proper role of principles of justice would lead them to different conclusions. I contend that even if ultimate principles of justice are not directly grounded in any facts, the role that principles of justice are needed to play may mean that their justification depends upon facts about what is feasible and facts about what is burdensome to people. Contrary to what Cohen maintains, being dependent on the facts in this manner does not preclude a principle from being ultimate; nor do principles which have this sort of dependence on the facts necessarily combine justice with other values in a way that must lead to conflation

The films of Peter Weir by Jonathan Rayner [Book review]

Book revie

Loop Quantum Corrected Einstein Yang-Mills Black Holes

In this paper we study the homogeneous interiors of black holes possessing SU(2) Yang-Mills fields subject to corrections inspired by loop quantum gravity. The systems studied possess both magnetic and induced electric Yang-Mills fields. We consider the system of equations both with and without Wilson loop corrections to the Yang-Mills potential. The structure of the Yang-Mills Hamiltonian along with the restriction to homogeneity allows for an anomaly free effective quantization. In particular we study the bounce which replaces the classical singularity and the behavior of the Yang-Mills fields in the quantum corrected interior, which possesses topology $R\times S^{2}$. Beyond the bounce the magnitude of the Yang-Mills electric field asymptotically grows monotonically. This results in an ever expanding $R$ sector even though the two-sphere volume is asymptotically constant. The results are similar with and without Wilson loop corrections on the Yang-Mills potential.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures. Updated version contains clarifications and several new references. Accepted for publication in Physical Review