Whatever you're describing, it's not philosophy. Philosophy is about questions, not answers. Debates about justice are thousands of years old and there are no answers in sight. The account of Thrasymachus is every bit as relevant today as it ever was.
> Whatever you're describing, it's not philosophy. Philosophy is about questions, not answers.
What are you talking about? I'm sorry but you don't understand basic Philosophy. Plenty of philosophers give answers. You're saying John Rawls dedicated his life to thinking about justice and came up with no 'answers'? Ridiculous.
This has been the case for the entire history of philosophy. Any time a philosophical question received a definitive answer, it became a separate field unto itself. So it was with mathematics, science, and law. Philosophers continue to debate these fields (I’m studying philosophy of mathematics right now) but it has little bearing on actual practice. I happen to be partial to the Wittgensteinian view that philosophy is primarily therapeutic, but I won’t rule out the possibility of philosophers creating new disciplines in the future.
John Rawls had some very nice ideas about justice but by no means did he settle the debate. For one thing, he was a utopian, opposed to property rights. That is unrealistic, unless you’re talking about some hypothetical post-human society.
To create any workable theory of justice, I think you should start with the basic assumption that you’re dealing with human beings who naturally incline towards competition and status-seeking. Envisioning a society without some of the traits of human nature is the epitome of Utopianism. You might be able to engineer these traits out of human beings but then you’re dealing with a post-human world.
Although you're abosolutely correct, there were philosophers who thought that we must go beyond philosophy, seeing philosophy as limited - the big three here are Marx, Nietzche and Freud (considered as a philosopher, anyway) - best put by Marx: "Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it." - unfortunately, from at least of what I've seen, this kind of thinking has run out of steam in contemporary (especially "analytic") philosophy, and it's a shame.
