Such a society, he argues, need not be democratic, but it must be non-aggressive towards other communities, and internally it must have a 'common good conception of justice', a 'reasonable consultation hierarchy', and it must secure basic human rights.
This background conception of a good human life (a conception Ronald Dworkin refers to as "the challenge model") has been subject to telling criticism (Arneson 2003); but its availability nicely illustrates how an ethical concern for promoting good human lives can ground resistance to perfectionist state policies designed to promote such lives.
Jonathan Steele's account of the defeat of western intervention in Iraq must have seemed a good idea in conception.
Further, given the diversity of preferences for different combinations of traits and beliefs about how they relate to the likelihood of a good life given differing conceptions of the good life it is difficult to envision how rationality could point us to only one best possible child.
This defense of the endorsement constraint grounds it in a background conception of a good human life, one that holds that the goodness of a human life lies in "the inherent value of a skilled performance of living" (Dworkin 1995, 244).
Johnson and Blair's emphasis is on arming students to defend themselves against fallacies in everyday discourse, and a fundamental innovation is in their conception of a good argument.
A permissible conception of the good, for the purposes of the principle, is a conception of a good that is consistent with the requirements of justice for a modern democratic society, where the requirements of justice are not themselves founded on or tied to any disputed conception of the good.
Her conception of a good life requires striving for a difficult goal, and, if she notices herself feeling too satisfied, she begins to feel discontent.
Rather than appealing to a background conception of a good human life, indirect arguments more frequently appeal to more mundane facts about the competence of modern governments.
