Dr Anne Cormack

BA Hons Politics and BA Hons Political Communications Programme Leader

Tel: 020 8331 8802
E-mail: a.m.cormack@gre.ac.uk
Office: King William 335

Office Hours 

Tuesday 4:30-5:30pm
Wednesday 3:30-4:30pm 

In A Theory of Justice (1971) John Rawls attempted to solve the problem of distributive justice by combining self-interest, ignorance and risk-aversion. He argued that if self-interested persons in a situation of uncertainty imposed by a veil of ignorance were choosing principles for the basic structure of society, then they would be risk-adverse and choose two principles 'The Principle of Equal Liberty and the Difference Principle.  Critics have argued against this risk-adverse element of Rawls' theory but those critics as well as Rawls made certain presuppositions about risk-aversion, risk-taking and gambling. My thesis also examined the risk-aversion in Rawls' theory but addressed the previous shortfall by exploring the issue of risk and gambling in two interrelated ways. It applied a Foucauldian approach to the history of risk and gambling in order to contextualize the current views and then investigated the contemporary meaning by drawing on research leading up to the UK Gambling Act 2005. Drawing on these findings it argued that not only might risk-taking occur in the original position but that different types of participants could show different degrees of risk-taking behaviour. By exploring the theoretical debates between essentialism and anti-essentialism, it further argued that it is unlikely that the veil of ignorance would be able to screen out those differences. It then employed theories of identity and difference in the work of Heidegger, Deleuze and Lyotard in an attempt to overcome that weakness in Rawls' theory but found that this may not be possible. After highlighting a connection between impartiality and gambling, it concluded, in contrast to Rawls, that risk-taking rather than risk-aversion lies at the heart of social justice. The implication of this reversal is that it may have an impact on policy-decisions in other areas of the justice system.

The title of my thesis is 'Evidence Being Disseminated'. It explored racism in relation to theories of identity and difference. It drew on the work of Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Adorno, Foucault, Saussure and Derrida. (Awarded October 2000)

The title of my dissertation is 'Can the sanction of celibacy, which has been placed on the Church of England's homosexual clergy, be justified in the contemporary world?' The taught component of the degree included a number of modules in Theology, Ethics and Philosophy (Awarded by the University of Greenwich September 1995)