This Document Contains Chapters 11 to 12 CHAPTER 11: POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY Main Points 1. Political philosophy seeks to find the best form of political existence. It is concerned with determining the state’s right to exist, its ethically legitimate functions and scope, and its proper organization. Plato and Aristotle 2. Plato. Plato’s Republic: the ideal state, analogously to the virtuous person, has three elements (classes—the craftsmen; the police-soldiers; the governing class), each of which fulfills its unique function in accordance with the dictates of reason. Rule and leadership is by an elite subgroup of the guardians, the “philosopher kings.” 3. The guardians have neither private property nor private families, and reproduction is controlled so as to improve the bloodline in intelligence, courage, and other leadership qualities. 4. Plato’s fivefold classification of the forms of government, each of which after the first is a degeneration of the preceding form, is: aristocracy, timocracy, plutocracy, democracy, and tyranny. 5. For Plato the state is a living organism whose well-being must be sought by its subjects: A state is good to the extent that it is well ordered. 6. Aristotle. For Aristotle to the state is a living organism, one that exists to promote the good life for humans: a state is good to the extent that it enables its citizens to have the good life. 7. Aristotle: The form of the ideal state depends on the circumstances. Proper rule can be by one (monarchy) or by a few (aristocracy) or by the many (polity); improper rule can be by one (tyranny) or by a few (oligarchy) or by the many (democracy). Good forms tend to generate into bad. 8. Aristotle: Inequality among humans is a fact of nature. Aristotle and Plato were not egalitarian. Natural Law Theory and Contractarian Theory 9. Aristotle is sometimes regarded as the source of natural law political theory, but the clearest conception of natural law is found in Stoic philosophy. Cicero gave us the classic expression of Stoic natural law as applied to political philosophy: there is only one valid basis for human law, the natural law of reason, and it holds eternally and universally. 10. Augustine and Aquinas. Both thinkers Christianized natural law as the eternal moral law of God as it is apprehended by humans through the dictates of conscience and reason. 11. Aquinas: Aquinas posited four kinds of law: (1) eternal law (the divine reason of God), (2) divine law (God’s gift by revelation to humanity), (3) natural law (apprehended by conscience), (4) human law (the laws and statutes of a society). 12. Two vital questions raised by Augustine and Aquinas are: (1) the relationship of secular to natural law; (2) the relationship of state to church. 13. Augustine: the purpose of the state is to take the power to do hurt from the wicked. Aquinas: the purpose of the state is to promote the common good. 14. Thomas Hobbes. Natural laws (not law) are rational principles of preservation of life. The first law of nature: seek peace as far as you can and then use any means of defense. The second law: be content, for the sake of peace and self-preservation, with only so much of liberty against others as you would allow them against you. The third law: perform the covenants or agreements one has made. 15. Applying the foregoing laws of nature to practical affairs leads to the Leviathan, the central sovereign power to which people will transfer their power and rights if they are smart enough to see that it is in their own self-interest to do so. This in effect creates a social contract. 16. There is and can be no contract between the Leviathan and its subjects. This entails that: it is impossible for the Leviathan to be unjust; it has the right to lay down any laws it can enforce, although it cannot require suicide; it has no legal or moral obligation to its subjects. 17. If the Leviathan fails to provide security, subjects may transfer power to another sovereign. 18. When Hobbes used the phrase “natural right” in asserting that when peace cannot be obtained persons have a natural right to use all means to defend themselves, he meant there are no moral restrictions. One’s natural right to life does not prohibit any activity. 19. Hobbes was the first philosopher to enunciate systematically the concept that justice and the state are created through a social contract (a philosophy called contractualism or contractarian theory). Two Other Contractarian Theorists 20. John Locke. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government were regarded as the philosophical justification of the Glorious Revolution. 21. Locke: There is a natural moral law that is more than a set of practical principles for survival. Because we are God’s each person has inalienable natural rights. We must seek to preserve ourselves and others: no person can take another’s life or impair his life, liberty, health, limbs, or goods except for just punishment. 22. Locke: The legitimacy of a state rests on the prior consent of the governed. If one accepts the advantages of citizenship one has given tacit consent to the state to make and enforce laws. 23. Locke and the right to property. The state is created to protect property and to ensure peace, safety, and the public good. It acquires its legitimacy by an explicit or implicit social contract on the part of its subjects, who entrust their rights to the state for safeguarding. 24. Locke’s theory of property implies that all people equally have a right to property but do not all have a right to equal property. 25. Separation of power. Locke: Only through law are people assured of equal, fair, and impartial treatment and protected from the arbitrary exercise of power by the government. Although the lawmaking power is the central power of government, there are two other essential powers: to execute the laws and to make war and peace. Locke recommended the separation of these powers in three branches of government. 26. Though Locke believed it essential that there be a judiciary to settle disputes, the idea that the judiciary should be a separate branch of government belonged to the influential French jurist Montesquieu. 27. Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His earliest views notwithstanding, Rousseau came to think that through a social contract people give up individual liberty for a superior collective liberty. Through the social contract they create a collective whole or “sovereign,” a nonbiological organism that functions according to the general will, which manifests itself by a majority vote and which expresses itself in law. 28. Rousseau: The citizens have the right at any time to terminate the social contract and to depose the official of the state. 29. Did Rousseau establish a philosophical basis for totalitarianism? U.S. Constitutional Theory – Applied Philosophy 30. In world history, the first significant use of a written constitution was the U.S. Constitution, a continuing experiment in applied philosophy. 31. Natural law and rights in the Declaration of Independence. In 1776 the Declaration of Independence proclaimed the doctrines of natural, or divine, law and of natural, or God-given, rights, declaring that there are “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” The Declaration also asserted that it is “self-evident” that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that amongst these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The framers also stated that “it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish” any form of government whenever it becomes destructive of “its ends to secure” these unalienable rights. 32. Natural law and rights in the U. S. Constitution. The original Constitution refers to natural law and rights only implicitly, but its framers regarded the rights of the Bill of Rights as the unalienable rights referred to in the Declaration. 33. Beginning with Marbury v. Madison, decided by the Supreme Court in 1803, it became firmly established that, under the Constitution, the Supreme Court has the power to declare void federal and state laws that violate it. The relationship of the authority of the states to the authority of the federal government has always been a central issue in American constitutional philosophy. 34. The right to privacy. What specific rights are explicit and implicit in the Bill of Rights and other clauses of the Constitution is a matter of continuing debate. An important question today is whether or not the Constitution guarantees a right to privacy and what is included in that right if it does. 35. In the landmark Roe v. Wade decision (1973) the Supreme Court upheld a woman’s right to abortion as included within the right to privacy. 36. In Lawrence v. Texas (2003) the Court ruled that a Texas law prohibiting homosexual sodomy was unconstitutional. The majority opinion was based, however, not on a right to privacy but on the grounds that the anti-sodomy law was a violation of rights “implicit in ordered liberty,” emphasizing constitutional guarantees of liberty rather than privacy. Classic Liberalism and Marxism 37. The nineteenth century saw the development of liberalism and Marxism. 38. Liberalism: Expressed by John Stuart Mill, liberalism maintains that “the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.” 39. Adam Smith: In a laissez-faire economy (one in which the government remains on the sidelines), each individual, in seeking his own gain, is led “by an invisible hand” to promote the common good (though doing so is not his intention). 40. Smith was an exponent of capitalism (a system of private ownership of property and the means of production and distribution) and a free-market economy (in which individuals may pursue their own economic interests without governmental restrictions on their freedom). 41. Utilitarianism and natural rights. The utilitarian Jeremy Bentham denied the existence of natural rights. Utilitarianism seems to require violating any so-called natural right if doing so increases the total happiness. 42. Harriet Taylor. Taylor and John Stuart Mill shared a long personal and professional intimacy, but even after they began writing together Taylor’s writings were published under Mill’s name, partly because a man’s name gave more legitimacy in a sexist culture. 43. She wrote in defense of minority viewpoints, writing that “the opinion of society—majority opinion—is the root of all intolerance.” 44. John Stuart Mill. Mill followed Bentham and Hume in rejecting Locke’s theory that people have God-given natural rights. 45. Mill, a utilitarian, said that the general happiness—the sum total of happiness of individuals in a group—requires that all enjoy personal liberty to the fullest extent possible consistent with like enjoyment by others. Personal liberty, including freedom of thought and speech, he held, is essential to the general happiness. 46. Mill stated the fundamental principle of liberalism: you cannot interfere with another’s liberty for that person’s own good but only to prevent harm to others, and the burden of proof lies on the person who claims another’s liberty will harm others. 47. Mill: The best form of government is that which among all realistic, practical alternatives produces the greatest benefit. And that, he said, is representative democracy. 48. Mill was sensitive to the threat to liberty in democracies by tyranny of public opinion, as well as by suppression of minority points of view. 49. He held that government should not do anything that more effectively can be done privately; nor should government do it, even if it can do it more effectively, if doing it deprives individuals of the opportunity for development or education. 50. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Master and Slave. “The human,” he wrote, “is nothing other than the series of his acts.” With consciousness and speech, humans constitute the becoming that (in Hegel’s metaphysics) is time and history. Human being is an active process of becoming whose actions are driven by desires. 51. Liberation to one’s true self begins with desire for what is not yet and is thus a desire for nonbeing. All becoming, all time and history, arise out of an ongoing annihilation of the present (immediate being). 52. Hegel: The self is “transcended” in both fighting and working. 53. Hegel: The deepest human desire is the need for (universal) recognition, so humans are in continuous “life and death fights” with each other. Personal immortality is fame. 54. The victor in war is lord and master because the victor would rather die than submit and be dominated. The victor is fighting for a non-biological goal: prestige and recognition. The master’s keenest pleasure is the recognition of his superiority by his slaves. 55. But the lord and master is frustrated because he is recognized by his slaves but not by his equals and his is a static, non-evolving status. The master cannot grow and eventually will be outstripped by the slaves he exploits. 56. Hegel: The slaves begin in a subordinate position having chosen subservience rather than annihilation. But the slave’s suffering and coerced work lead to an intuition of the ideal or free self and how that self might be achieved. 57. Just as the master attained freedom and domination by overcoming the instinct to live, so the slave comes to an idea that Nature can be dominated. This form of domination is creative, modifying and shaping Nature to thought and ideals and giving rise to science. 58. Hegel: The slave develops weapons to overcome the fear of death and escape the yoke of the master and through this struggle provides the changes that determine the evolution of history. The slave has ultimate prestige, freedom, and autonomy. The slave has risen above the master and Nature alike. 59. The kind of labor that frees is Bildung, self-building education, which shapes and humanizes the slave and shapes and transforms the world. This dual process yields the “world historical individual,” one who shapes the course of history. 60. Hegel: The struggle between master and slaves has many stages. One is Christian ideology in which the slave ceases to struggle for freedom and instead commits to absolute slavehood under an absolute master. This is enslavement to the fear of death. 61. Hegel: The final stage of human development occurs when the fear of death is overcome and one comes to accept one’s finitude and learns to live in this world as an autonomous and free individual. This represents for Hegel the actualization of the idea of the god-man, immanent as Absolute Self-consciousness (very much in line with Spinoza’s equating of Nature and God). 62. Hegel saw this final development of the human spirit in the person of Napoleon as infused with Hegelian self-consciousness. The idea of a transcendental god having evolved into an immanent Universal existing in the world is the Ideal State realized in history in which a person can find ultimate satisfaction and total autonomy. 63. Marxism. Karl Marx said that philosophers have tried only to understand the world, whereas the real point is to change it. He did not regard his work as philosophy. 64. Means of production versus productive relations. Marx: The ideal society will lack economic classes, wages, money, private property, and exploitation. 65. It will arise as the result of the dialectical process of productive activity and social relationships (productive relations), which interplay accounts for man’s socioeconomic-political situation and also for his morality, law, religion, philosophy, and art. 66. Class struggle. According to Marx, the critical social relationships involve property, and with the advent of private property, society divided into two classes, those with and those without it. 67. Capitalism and its consequences. In modern capitalist societies, according to Marx, production is socialized, but ownership of property is not. An inevitable consequence: concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands. 68. Alienation. The second consequence of continued capitalism is the increasing alienation of workers, who become mere commodities. 69. Capitalism is self-liquidating. A further inevitable consequence is the self-liquidation of capitalism: overproduction leading to economic crises and increasingly intolerable conditions for the working class, together with increased class self-consciousness, will generate a revolution of the working class, leading to a dictatorship of the proletariat, eventually resulting in a classless society. 70. Marxism and Communism. By the end of the nineteenth century most European socialist parties were committed to Marxism, but a split developed between the revolutionists and the revisionists or evolutionary socialists. 71. Evolutionary socialism became strong in Great Britain and in socialist parties of many nations, the revolutionists gained ascendancy in the Second International; under Lenin the revolutionist Bolsheviks seized control of Russia in the Revolution of 1917 becoming a year later the Communist Party of the USSR. 72. The term “Communism” today still denotes the Marxist–Leninist ideology of the parties founded under the banner of the Comintern in 1919. This is distinguished from “communism,” which denotes any form of society in which property or other important goods are held in common by the community. 73. Anarchism. Anarchists deny that the state is necessary for peace, justice, or equality. Anarchism in the nineteenth century was the main philosophical alternative to liberalism and Marxism. 74. Anarchists include Pierre Joseph Proudhon (the so-called father of the movement), and Mikhail Bakunin and Prince Piotr Kropotkin, the latter much influenced by Charles Darwin. The slogan “From each according to his means, to each according to his needs,” came from the anarchist Communists. Boxes Aristotle, the Political Scientist (He was not a neutral describer of political systems) Power Politics: Niccolò Machiavelli (Thoughts on The Prince and Discourses on Livy) Profile: Thomas Hobbes (The man who met Gassendi, Galileo, and Bacon) Profile: John Locke (In his last years he devoted himself to religious contemplation) Catharine Trotter Cockburn and John Locke (A stalwart defender of John Locke’s philosophy) Profile: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (He loved many women and became paranoid to the point of madness) Profile: John Stuart Mill (The person with the highest IQ?) Profile: Karl Marx (He and Friedrich Engles wrote The Communist Manifesto) Marxism and Liberalism Compared (Ten doctrines that many orthodox Marxists accept, together with possible classical liberal responses to them) Readings 11.1 Plato, from Crito Socrates explains why it is wrong for him to try to escape his execution: doing so would violate an implicit agreement with the state. 11.2 Plato, from Republic Plato, through “Socrates,” explains the relation between the male and the female guardians of society, as well as other features of the ideal state. 11.3 Thomas Hobbes, from Leviathan This contains the meat of Hobbes’s political theory, including his treatment of the state of nature, the first and second natural laws and the right of nature, and his discussion of the causes of commonwealth. 11.4 John Stuart Mill, from On Liberty The famous and stirring “Chapter 1. Introductory” segment of On Liberty, in which Mill sets forth the guiding principle of classic liberalism. 11.5 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, from The Communist Manifesto One of the most famous political documents of all time. This selection includes the most important aspects of the Marxist analysis of economic history. In Marxist theory the bourgeoisie (the middle class) is in opposition to the proletariat (the class of industrial wage-earners) who earn their living by selling their labor. Lecture and Discussion Ideas Is the well-being of the state desirable in its own right, apart from what it contributes to the welfare of its citizens? If this question were put to them directly, most people would be inclined to answer it negatively, we’d bet. Most probably would have trouble understanding it. And for good reason: it is difficult to attach any precise meaning to the thesis that the well-being of the state is desirable for its own sake and apart from what it contributes to the welfare of its citizens. Yet the view of the state as an organic entity, the preservation of whose life and health is a desideratum, is implicit in nationalism and imperialism, as well as in such stirringly patriotic slogans as John F. Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” It is doubtful whether modern wars ever could have been fought in the absence of widespread acceptance of it. It is also evident in the political philosophies of Plato, Rousseau, and Mussolini, but pretty much absent from those of the liberal tradition (Locke, Mill, and so on). The clearest exposition of the view is in Plato’s Republic, and also, of course, in Hegel. The following passages should serve to communicate the Hegelian concept to interested students. “The state is the actuality of the ethical Idea. It is the ethical mind qua the substantial will manifest and revealed to itself, knowing and thinking itself, accomplishing what it knows and in so far as it knows it.... “The state is absolutely rational inasmuch as it is the actuality of the substantial will which it possesses in the particular self-consciousness once that consciousness has been raised to consciousness of its universality. This substantial unity is an absolute unmoved end in itself, in which freedom comes into its supreme right. On the other hand this final end has supreme right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of the state. “If the state is confused with civil society, and if its specific end is laid down as the security and protection of property and personal freedom, then the interest of the individual as such becomes the ultimate end of their association, and it follows that membership of the state is something optional. But the state’s relation to the individual is quite different from this. Since the state is mind objectified, it is only as one of its members that the individual himself has objectivity, genuine individuality, and an ethical life.” (Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 257–258.) “The rational end of man is life in the state, and if there is no state there, reason at once demands that one be founded. Permission to enter a state or leave it must be given by the state; this then is not a matter which depends on an individual’s arbitrary will and therefore the state does not rest on contract, for contract presupposes arbitrariness. “It is false to maintain that the foundation of the state is something at the option of all its members. It is nearer the truth to say that it is absolutely necessary for every individual to be a citizen.” (Hegel, Philosophy of Right, Additions, Par. 75.) “We should desire to have in the state nothing except what is an expression of rationality. The state is the world which mind has made for itself; its march, therefore, is on lines that are fixed and absolute. How often we talk of the wisdom of God in nature! But we are not to assume for that reason that the physical world of nature is a loftier thing than the world of mind. “As high as mind stands above nature, so high does the state stand above physical life. Man must therefore venerate the state as a secular deity, and observe that if it is difficult to comprehend nature, it is infinitely harder to understand the state.” (Hegel, Philosophy of Right, Additions, Par. 272.) Evaluate Aristotle’s idea that people who do not have the aptitude or time to participate in governance should not be citizens. Here is Aristotle’s analysis of “citizen”: “Who is the citizen, and what is the meaning of the term?... We may say, first, that a citizen is not a citizen because he lives in a certain place, for resident aliens and slaves share in the place; nor is he a citizen who has no legal right except that of suing and being sued; for this right may be enjoyed under the provisions of a treaty.... The citizen whom we are seeking to define is a citizen in the strictest sense, against whom no such exception can be taken, and his special characteristic is that he shares in the administration of justice, and in offices.... He who has the power to take part in the deliberative or judicial administration of any state is said by us to be a citizen of that state; and, speaking generally, a state is a body of citizens sufficing for the purposes of life.” (Politics, 1274b38.) So, roughly, Aristotle defined a citizen as one who shares in the administration of justice, from which definition it follows analytically that those who, for whatever reasons, do not or cannot do so cannot be citizens. Aristotle also thought that mechanics and tradesmen lead lives inimical to virtue and that husbandmen do not have the time either to develop virtue or to perform political duties; and that consequently members of these three classes are not fit for citizenship in the well-governed state: “[T]he citizens must not lead the life of mechanics or tradesmen, for such a life is ignoble and inimical to virtue. Neither must they be husbandmen, since leisure is necessary for the development of virtue and the performance of political duties.... Besides, the ruling class should be the owners of property, for they are citizens, and the citizens of a state should be in good circumstances; whereas mechanics or any other class which is not a producer of virtue have no share in the state. This follows from our first principle, for happiness cannot exist without virtue, and a city is not to be termed happy in regard to a portion of the citizens, but in regard to them all. And clearly property should be in their hands, since the husbandmen will of necessity be slaves or barbarian Perioeci.” (Politics, 1328b33.) Philosophers’ Principal Works Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.) Republic Theaetetus Symposium Parmenides Timaeus Apology Crito Phaedo Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) Physics Metaphysics On the Soul (De Anima) Nicomachean Ethics Politics The Organon of logical works Cicero (106–43 B.C.) On Oratory On Duties On Fate De Re Publica De Legibus Augustine (354–430) Confessions De Genesi ad Litteram De Trinitate The City of God Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) On Being and Essence (1253) Truth (Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate [1256–1259]) Summa Contra Gentiles (1258–1260) On the Power of God (1265) Summa Theologica (1265–1269) In Librum de Causis (1271) Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) De Cive (1642) De Corpore Politico (1650) Leviathan (1651) The Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance (1656) De Corpore (1665) Behemoth (1682) Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) The Art of War (1521) Discourses on Livy (1531) The Prince (1532) History of Florence (1532) John Locke (1632–1704) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) Two Treatises of Government (1690) Catharine Trotter Cockburn (1679–1749) A Defence of Mr. Locke’s Essay of Human Understanding Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755) Persian Letters (1721) The Spirit of the Laws (1748) Considerations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur decadence (1734) Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of the Inequality among Men (1754) Julie, ou la Nouvelle Heloise (1761) Émile (1762) The Social Contract (1762) Confessions (1765–1778) Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) A Fragment of Government (1776) An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789) The Book of Fallacies (1824) Deontology (1834) John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) A System of Logic (1843) On Liberty (1859) Utilitarianism (1863) The Subjection of Women (1869) Autobiography and Literary Essays (1873) Harriet Taylor (1807–1858) The Enfranchisement of Women Adam Smith (1723–1790) Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770– 1831) Phenomenology of Mind (1807) Science of Logic (1812–1816) Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1817) Philosophy of Right (1821) Karl Marx (1818–1883) The German Ideology (trans. 1933) Communist Manifesto (with Friedrich Engels, 1848) Capital (volume 1, 1867; volumes 2 and 3, edited by Friedrich Engels, 1885–1894) History of Economic Theories (edited by Karl Kautsky, 1952) Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (1845) Communist Manifesto (with Karl Marx, 1848) Anti-Dühring (1873) The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884) Socialism, Utopian and Scientific (1883) Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) What Is Property? (1840) System of Economic Contradictions (1846) Justice in the Revolution and in the Church (1858) Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876) God and the State (trans. 1893) Marxism, Freedom, and the State (trans. 1950) Piotr Kropotkin (1842–1921) Memoirs of a Revolutionist (1899) Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902) Modern Science and Anarchism (1912) Ethics (1922) CHAPTER 12: RECENT MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY Main Points 1. Analytic ethical philosophy is often said to begin with G. E. Moore, who believed that the task of the philosopher of ethics is to conduct a “general inquiry into what is good.” G. E. Moore 2. Moore: Good is a noncomplex (simple, undefinable, unanalyzable) and nonnatural property of good things. If Moore is right, then basing one’s values on goodness as a natural property is a mistake. 3. Moore’s opinion about what things are good is of less importance than his metaethical opinions. Normative Ethics and Metaethics 4. Normative ethics: Making, defending, or criticizing moral judgments. Metaethics: The attempt to understand the sources, criteria, meaning, verification, or validation of moral judgments. 5. Is Moore’s antinaturalism doctrine correct? Much contemporary analytic ethical philosophy has been concerned with this and other metaethical issues. Emotivism and Beyond 6. Common ground among the utilitarians, Moore, and Ross: Moral judgments are a type of factual judgment. 7. The emotivists (e.g., C. L. Stevenson) held that moral judgments have no factual meaning but are linguistic acts by which a speaker expresses an attitude about something or other. 8. Many analytic philosophers thought that the emotivist analysis of moral judgments was not correct. R. M. Hare: The function of moral discourse is to guide conduct. A moral judgment is a universalizable prescriptive judgment. 9. The so-called “naturalist fallacy,” adopted by many moral philosophers in the first half of the twentieth century, reflected Hume’s view that one cannot deduce an “ought” from an “is.” But now, many philosophers, including Phillipa Foot and John Searle, no longer accept the idea that moral evaluations are logically independent of the descriptive premises they are based on. 10. The rejection of emotivism and the idea that there are empirical criteria for moral evaluations have spurred a renewed interest in concrete ethical issues, such as sexual morality, affirmative action, biomedical ethics, business ethics, and the environment. 11. Though metaethics is not dead, it is true that many ethics courses focus increasingly on questions of applied ethics. Yet several metaethical issues are currently in controversy. Examples: “What makes a principle a moral principle?” “Is there a legitimate distinction between doing one’s moral duty and going beyond the call of duty? Can moral theories accommodate that distinction if it is legitimate?” “Is ethical relativism true?” “What gives a being moral standing?” John Rawls, A Contemporary Liberal 12. The work of contractarian theorist John Rawls in social and political philosophy heralded a renewed concern in philosophy with justice. 13. The fundamental requirements of the just society. Rawls: If society is to be well ordered, its members must determine by rational reflection what are to be their principles of justice; the principles must be selected by a fair procedure. 14. The veil of ignorance and the original position. In the selection of principles of justice, no one should have insider’s knowledge so that no one is advantaged or disadvantaged in the choice of principles by his or her unique circumstances. The principles are chosen as if from behind a veil of ignorance; this is what Rawls calls the original position or initial situation. 15. The two principles of social justice. These are the principles that would be selected in the original position: (1) Each person has an equal right to “the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others.” (2) Social and economic inequalities must be arranged “so that they are both (a) reasonably expected to be to everyone’s advantage and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all.” 16. The priority of (1) over (2) dictates that a person’s liberty cannot be sacrificed for the common good. 17. The rights of individuals. Rawls in effect attempts to derive social ethics from a basis in rational self-interest rather than from God, natural law, human nature, utility, or other ground. 18. Why should I accept Rawls’s Provisions? Rawls’s theory, if correct, specifies the fundamental principles of social justice that self-interested but rational people would accept on reflection. 19. In Political Liberalism, published in 1993, Rawls considers more closely how “justice as fairness” can be endorsed by the members of a pluralistic democratic society (who hold incompatible religious and philosophical doctrines). He characterizes justice more narrowly than he did earlier, as a freestanding political conception and not as a comprehensive value system. 20. Political justice becomes the focus of an overlapping consensus of comprehensive value systems and thus can still be embraced by all in a pluralistic democratic society. Robert Nozick’s Libertarianism 21. Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia asked a basic question: Should there even be a political state, and if so, why? 22. A minimal state is justified. Only a minimal state limited to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on is justified. 23. Only the “night-watchman” state does not violate rights. Any state more powerful or extensive than the minimal state that protects its citizens from force and fraud and the like impinges on the individual’s natural rights to his or her holdings and therefore is not legitimate. 24. This is based on Nozick’s entitlement concept of social justice that says that a person is entitled to what he or she has rightfully acquired and that justice consists in each person’s retaining control over his or her rightful acquisitions. 25. Nozick: Taking from the rich without compensation and giving to the poor is never just (assuming the rich did not become rich through force or fraud). 26. The rights of individuals. Nozick’s assertion that individuals have rights (including property rights) may have something to do with the presumed inviolability of individuals that prohibits their being used as means to ends and perhaps also with the necessary conditions for allowing them to give meaning to their lives, but its justification is unclear. Communitarian Responses to Rawls 27. Communitarian critics of Rawls, such as Michael Sandel, Michael Walzer, and Alasdair MacIntyre, hold that the “common good” is defined by one’s society or “community.” Sandel believes the community is an intersubjective or collective “self” and that the Rawlsian principle of equal liberty is subordinate to the good of this social organism. 28. Sandel: The community is an intersubjective or collective self because self-understanding comprehends more than just an individual human being; the Rawlsian principle of equal liberty is subordinate to the good of this social organism. 29. Walzer: Any full account of how social goods ought to be distributed will be “thick,” framed within this or that specific political association or “culture.” Principles of abstract justice are oversimplifications, which themselves reflect particular cultural viewpoints. Alasdair MacIntyre and Vitrue Ethics 30. For virtue ethics, traits of character are in many ways more fundamental than rules for action. 31. In After Virtue, MacIntyre says that “there is no way to possess the virtues except as part of a tradition in which we inherit them and our understanding of them from a series of predecessors.” 32. MacIntyre (and Aristotle): Virtues are traits that promote human flourishing. 33. For MacIntyre, Nietzsche (with his call to “raze to the ground the structures of inherited moral belief and argument”) represents the ultimate alternative to Aristotle. 34. MacIntyre emphasized the “concept of a self whose unity resides in the unity of a narrative which links birth to life to death as narrative beginning to middle to end.” A particular action viewed outside the context of a person’s life is unintelligible; each person’s quest for his or her own good or excellence must be undertaken from within that person’s moral tradition. 35. MacIntyre: A virtue may be analyzed as a quality required to attain a good internal to a practice. To understand the human good we can rank the goods internal to human practices. 36. (Note: MacIntyre himself has disavowed the “communitarian” label because, he says, the attempt to institute communitarian principles in a large nation state may well result in tyranny.) Martha Nussbaum 37. Nussbaum’s scholarly emphases: (1) virtue theory and Greek ethics; (2) international social justice, particularly regarding women’s opportunities and human development; (3) the role of emotions in decision making. Recent work focuses on three unfinished issues relating to social justice: (1) doing justice to people with physical and mental disabilities; (2) extending justice to people of all nations; (3) extending justice beyond the realm of the human to nonhuman animals. 38. Capabilities approach: In contrast with John Rawls, the Nussbaum capabilities approach to justice focuses on specific desirable outcomes rather than on a specific just procedure that may (or may not) yield such outcomes. All nations and governments should provide for the core ingredients of human dignity such as (for example) the ability to live a life of normal length in good health and with the freedom to move about safe from violent assault, to be able to exercise one’s mental, physical, imaginative, and creative powers, and to be able to laugh and play and enjoy recreational opportunities. 39. This approach denies that social justice must secure mutual advantage (which is an important part of contract theories). Her concept that creatures have a natural good and are entitled to pursue it is distinctly Aristotelian. Herbert Marcuse, a Recent Marxist 40. Marcuse: Members of the working class, instead of being disenfranchised, have been integrated into advanced capitalistic society. 41. Their needs have been satisfied, but they have lost their capacity to choose and act for themselves, to refuse, to dissent, to create, to think. 42. And the needs are false needs, whose satisfaction promotes wastefulness and fails to lead to fulfillment of the individual or release from domination. 43. Consequently, the workers have become a force for preserving the status quo. 44. Society has become one-dimensional: labor and capital have been unified against Communism in a welfare and warfare state; art, language, philosophy, and science have lost their original creative and critical power. 45. But in his later thought Marcuse perceived a weakening of the immersion of the working class into capitalist society and a growing awareness of workers, students, and the middle class of the high price of consumer prosperity. Through a revolution born not of privation but of reaction against waste and excess, a society without war, exploitation, poverty, and waste still might come. The Objectivism of Ayn Rand 46. Rand: Pity is a sign of dangerous weakness that has allowed the weak, ignorant, and undeserving to become parasites on those who are strong and productive. 47. Progress is made by the brilliant few who affirm life and pleasure, who think for themselves, and who are the creative artists of life. 48. Rand, following Nietzsche, saw human fulfillment as the struggle of the individual to improve to something higher. But she added the idea that the maximally fulfilled life involved productivity and money making. 49. Rand talked of an ideal society based on a “utopia of greed”; the extreme laissez-faire capitalism she embraced alienated her from conservatives and political libertarians. 50. Rand: Rights are vested in the individual, never in the group. She opposed feminism and environmentalism and believed men were superior to women, though women should not be dependent or obedient to men. 51. She believed certainty in morality was possible through an objective understanding of human behavior rooted in knowable principles. “Isms” 52. Classical liberalism emphasized the rationality and goodness of humans, human freedom, representative government, individual property rights, social progress through political reform, and laissez-faire economics. Contemporary liberals are not wedded to the laissez-faire idea. 53. Conservatism was originally a reaction to the social and political upheaval of the French Revolution. Edmund Burke, the most influential conservative writer of the eighteenth century, considered “society” as a contract among the dead, the living, and those to be born. But he also advocated many liberal and reform causes. Contemporary American conservatism is largely a defense of private enterprise, laissez-faire economic policies, and a narrow or literal interpretation of the Bill of Rights. 54. Communists (with a capital C) accept the social, political, and economic ideology of the Communist Party; communism (small C) is pretty much identical to socialism, advocating a form of economic organization in which the primary goods are held in common by a community. 55. Capitalism is an economic system in which ownership of the means of production and distribution is maintained primarily by private individuals and corporations. 56. Fascism is the totalitarian political philosophy espoused by the Mussolini government of Italy prior to and during World War II. It emphasized the absolute primacy of the state. Adolph Hitler and the National Socialists (Nazis) of Germany embraced elements of fascism. 57. Democratic socialism denotes a political structure popular in Western Europe in which there is a democratically elected executive and legislature and no state ownership of business, though it permits considerable government intervention in the business sector while guaranteeing individual rights. Boxes Environmental Philosophy (What are the philosophical root causes of ecological crises? What entities have moral standing and intrinsic value?) Self-Respect (The most important good, according to Rawls) Invisible–Hand Explanations (Nozick explains how the state came about) Animals and Morality (Nozick on the status of animals and a brief discussion of animal rights) War! (When is a war just? Views of Augustine, Aquinas, and contemporary philosopher Michael Walzer, with implications for the war in Iraq) Marcuse in Southern California (A brief account of Marcuse’s difficulties in conservative San Diego) Readings 12.1 James Rachels, from “Killing and Starving to Death” Rachels argues that letting people die of starvation is much closer to killing than is normally assumed. The “Equivalance Thesis,” discussed in the essay, is that the first is as bad as the second. 12.2 John Rawls, from A Theory of Justice Here Rawls explains his conception of justice as fairness, the original position, the veil of ignorance, and the two basic principles of social justice. 12.3 Robert Nozick, from Anarchy, State, and Utopia If the members of your society voluntarily limit their liberty for their mutual advantage, then are you obliged to limit your liberty if you benefit from the arrangement? Nozick says “no.” 12.4 Martha Nussbaum, from Frontiers of Justice From the introduction to Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (2006) in which she proposes a “capabilities approach” to deal with three “series unsolved problems of justice.” Lecture and Discussion Ideas Can you think of an ethical principle that would prohibit the killing, hurting, sacrificing, or eating of humans for the sake of other ends that would not equally pertain to animals? Well, one principle that would work is, “It is okay to hurt, sacrifice, and eat animals but not humans.” This, of course, is not the sort of principle we had in mind. When we ask our students to justify medical experimentation on animals, the answers we get are usually these, listed in no particular order: 1. Without medical experimentation on animals, we wouldn’t have vaccines for polio and rabies, treatments for whiplash, and so on. 2. Humans are higher on the evolutionary ladder. 3. Humans can reason. 4. Humans are made in the image of God. 5. God created animals to serve people. 6. Animals don’t have souls. 7. Animals themselves benefit from medical experimentation on animals. 8. Laboratory animals wouldn’t have had the chance to live in the first place if they hadn’t been bred for medical experiments. These answers are easily disposed of, of course. 1 is false, because we could still experiment on other humans, and 1 doesn’t explain why we shouldn’t experiment on humans. 2, the favorite of many medical researchers, doesn’t have any clear meaning and in any case doesn’t by itself justify experimenting on creatures who are “lower” on the ladder. 3 is not true of all humans. 4 is at best only a metaphorical usage of “image” that has no clear meaning. 5: How does this fact, if it is a fact, justify experimentation on animals? If 6 is true, it gives us all the more reason to treat animals carefully in this life, since without souls animals cannot have an afterlife. The reasoning employed in 7 would also justify running medical experiments on humans. 8: So it would be okay to experiment on humans as long as we bred them for that purpose? More sophisticated defenses of medical experimentation on animals usually take one or another of these forms: • Utilitarian defense—the greatest happiness of the greatest number justifies medical experimentation on animals. • Contractarian defense—animals could not be party to a social contract in terms of which alone there can be ethical values. • Natural-rights defense—only humans have rights. The rejoinders to these are that the utilitarian defense would justify experimenting on certain humans; the contractarian defense does not by itself justify experimenting on creatures that could not be party to a social contract, and if it did, it would also justify experimenting on humans who could not be party; and the natural-rights defense leaves the important work unexplained, why humans alone have natural rights. Ultimately, students who defend medical experimentation on animals will state something to the effect that human lives are just inherently worth more than animal lives. This claim, however, even if true, does not by itself justify medical experimentation on animals, though it might justify saving this human over saving that animal, if the hard choice must be made. Human life’s being more valuable than animal life is perhaps a necessary condition of medical experimentation on animals, but it isn’t a sufficient condition. Critically discuss Marcuse’s theory that the needs satisfied by advanced capitalist societies are to a large extent false needs. On the first day of the semester one of us noticed that a girl out in the second row had green hair. That, he was inclined to think, is a false need if there ever was one. But is it? Probably the need for green hair is the result of a rather complicated set of psychological factors, and, really, there is no clear sense in which those factors—or the needs they generate—are false. That’s the difficulty with the idea that some needs are false. There really aren’t any clear criteria for evaluating needs as false or... well, just what is the alternative? True? Genuine? Legitimate? Maybe to say that a need is a false need is just to express your distaste for it. Maybe it is to insinuate that, like a Tchaikovsky symphony, it doesn’t quite measure up, that it is a need that cultured, sensitive people, people like you and us, just don’t have, or at least don’t indulge. Maybe a false need just is one you would be embarrassed to admit to having. It would be one that shows everyone that you have bad taste. All in all we find the idea of false needs obscure. Any definition we might propose for the idea will, in all probability, suffer from the same vagueness as the idea itself. There also aren’t any need experts around that we can turn to for the criteria of legitimacy of need. And it obviously won’t help to attempt to derive such criteria by scrutinizing the needs that society itself recognizes. Followers of Epicurus might try to ground the concept of a false need in human nature. We may suppose that they would classify some needs as natural and necessary (to satisfy), others as natural but not necessary, and still others as neither necessary nor natural, and would regard as false needs all that do not fall into the first group. But it is questionable how far this strategy will carry us. Your need for a second BMW doesn’t seem natural or necessary to me. But to you, given the kind of job you have and the kind of people you must impress, the second BMW is necessary and your need for it is at least as natural as the need for anything else that exceeds the requirements of bare subsistence. On the other hand, advanced capitalist societies do have the reputation of developing new products and then creating a need for those products through clever advertising. Usually, though, the need isn’t developed by advertisers out of whole cloth. Usually the new product arguably will make life more comfortable or pleasant or secure or interesting in some way or other— though it might take some effort to convince people of this—or at the least will respond to people’s needs to be accepted or liked or in style. There are, of course, exceptions. Striped toothpaste, for example, probably responds to no need other than that of the manufacturer to differentiate his product from the other brands. All in all, we are inclined to think that the concept of a false need is not generally a very useful concept. It is better, we think, just to point out that some needs are better left unsatisfied. A need that is injurious to one’s own health, happiness, or long-range well-being, for example, is better left unsatisfied. A need that, if satisfied, tends to promote the destruction of the environment—such as the need to use Styrofoam cups—is better left unsatisfied. So is a need that unnecessarily wastes resources. So is a need that can be satisfied only at the expense of other people or other living things. Any need that is pathological probably ought not be satisfied either, though the need ought to be removed. On the whole we think discussion of this question might do well to focus on what sorts of needs ought not be satisfied, and why; and on which of the needs we have actually fall into that category. Philosophers’ Principal Works G. E. Moore (1873–1958) Principia Ethics (1903) “The Refutation of Idealism” (1903) Ethics (1912) Some Main Problems of Philosophy (1953) Philosophical Papers (1959) C. L. Stevenson (1908–1979) Facts and Values (1963) Values and Morals (1978) R. M. Hare (1919–2002) The Language of Morals (1952) Freedom and Reason (1964) Essays on the Moral Concepts (1972) Phillipa Foot (1920– ) “Moral Arguments” (1958) “Moral Beliefs” (1958) Virtues and Vices (1978) Theories of Ethics (1990) John Searle (1932– ) Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (1983) Minds, Brains, and Science: The 1984 Reith Lectures (1984) The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992) The Construction of Social Reality (1995) The Mystery of Consciousness (1997) James Rachels (1941–2003) The Elements of Moral Philosophy (1986) The End of Life: Euthanasia and Morality (1986) John Rawls (1921–2002) A Theory of Justice (1971) Political Liberalism (1993) The Law of Peoples (1999) Collected Papers (1999) Robert Nozick (1938–2002) Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) Philosophical Explanations (1981) The Nature of Rationality (1993) Socratic Puzzles (1997) Michael Sandel (1953– ) Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982) Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (1996) Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? (2009) Michael Walzer (1935– ) Just and Unjust Wars (1977) Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (1983) Thick and Thin, Moral Arguments at Home and Abroad (1994) On Toleration (1997) Arguing About War (2006) Alasdair MacIntyre (1929– ) After Virtue (1981) Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988) Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990) Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (1999) God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition (2009) Martha Nussbaum (1947– ) The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (1986) Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (2001) Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (2004) Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (2006) From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law (2010) Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) Reason and Revolution (1960) One-Dimensional Man (1964) Eros and Civilization (1966) An Essay on Liberation (1966) Negations (1968) Ayn Rand (1905–1982) We the Living (1936) The Fountainhead (1943) Atlas Shrugged (1957) Edmund Burke (1729–1797) A Vindication of Natural Society (1756) Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas on the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756) Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) Instructor Manual for Philosophy: The Power of Ideas Brooke Noel Moore, Kenneth Bruder 9780078038358
Download
Close
Close
