Political
This is a course in political philosophy, starts from scratch.
Political philosopy initiated by Plato. You do political philosophy when you think of the question of how we ought to live together. Most stand within that tradition at least. What is the proper way of standing together? When you think about what should be in the constitution, this is what you think about. Most of the contemporary political philosophy orients itself around what justice means for the nation-state. Many of the names of paradigms we find on the slides have contemporary representatives, and they are generally the central paradigms in question. Successively we’ll go through the list of political theories.
Next week we start with Hobbes. We start with modern political philosophy, and the first half of the figures are from the modern period of philosophy. The second half are mainly contemporary figures.
Utilitarianism. We will be discussing Jeremy Bentham. In a basic way can be summarised as the idea that we need to bring the greatest happiness to the greatest numbers. If the question is what we ought to do – then a utilitarian will answer that we should that thing that makes most people happy. The increase in well-being, or happiness, utility, is the right thing to do. Many of the other figures on this list will disagree, arguing that there are things way more important than happiness. We break with social convention and plead in favour with engaging with many taboo acts to become happy. We should do things despite social conventions and cultural norms. We have to go against convention in order to promote happiness. Homosexual acts should be perfectly fine for him, even if many people back then didn’t agree. Utilitarians are always very controversial. One of the most famous is Peter Singer. Singer has been a utilitarian all along and is famous of the animal liberation movement, and for the idea that global justice is to be a concern. In his most recent writings, Singer spearheaded the paradigm of effective altruism. It is a utilitarian understanding of what you should do if you want to do good things for the world, like engaging in charity work. Most people who engage in charity work do so for good reasons, but are not efficient or effective in the way they invest that money. You should think that every euro and minute you put into improving a world must be the most efficient. It is bad to give money to a cause if there is another one that is better. This has spearheaded a movement to rank charity movements for what they do. giftwell.org does this for example.You could choose to donate towards helping someone to get a blindness dog. That seems like a good thing to do, but it really isn’t. A contemporary american dog trained towards helping a blind person is very expensive. It costs about 40 000 to cure someone of glaucoma in the global south. Ie. you can prevent someone from becoming blind. The right thing to do is to give it to the prevention of glaucoma. This gives you a flavour of what utilitarianism stands for.
Happiness is not in the aristotelian understanding, but as the pure subjective feeling of pleasure, ie. the absence of pain. The strongest opponent to utilitarians are libertarians.
Libertarians, like John Locke, became very prevalent with people like Robert Nozick. Nozick wrote a book in 1974 entitled Anarchy, State, and Utopia. He wanted to reply to John Rawls’ Theory of Justice from 1971. Both disagree with utilitarianism, but Nozick thinks Rawls is too much of a welfare utilitarian. He is kind of a right-liberal or a neoliberal. Taxation is a deeply problematic idea to Nozick. There are things no person or group may do without violating their rights. How much room do individuals give to the state? The individuals limit what the state can do. The state depends on individuals and their rights. In utilitarianism this doesn’t really make sense, because rights are ignored – we should take away from the give to those who are less fortunate. Nozick says that no there are rights that individuals carry with them, and there are limits to what others, like the state, can do. Therefore we need a minimal state which is limited to the narrow functions of protection, everything else is violation and unjustified. Nozick argues that taxation is theft. That should be a crime says Nozick. Most of you are probably in some way motivated by an idea that we should redistribute the wealth from the rich. You should all consider this famous example by Nozick: Wilt Chamberlain example. Imagine we start in a society with a distribution of resources according to your liking. Let’s take the equality of everyone view as an assumption. For Nozick it doesn’t matter. Everyone is equally wealthy. Chamberlain is someone who has a talent to play basketball. Every friday he plays his game, and all of us are invited to come, but if we come we need to pay something to see the game. We started with perfect equality, but now many of us have come every day out of our volition to the game, and now all of us are a little bit poorer, whilst Wilt Chamberlain has millions of euros. We enjoyed doing so, and none of us were forced. Nozick says why on earth would we think it fine to tax Chamberlain and take that money that we voluntarily gave to him from him. You start with something, and we always have more inequality. Liberty upsets patterns. Patterns are things socialists and rawlsians love, but liberty always destroys it. Any pattern is that someone gets money while someone else looses, and if there is a liberty to spend, then the pattern cannot remain. Much of the intellectual effort of the people on this list is to try to explain why Nozick is wrong. Nozick is a libertarian who thinks that there is self-ownership of your body and what it produces. Picture for a moment the idea that some people here have 2 eyes with which they can see, and some people only have 1. This is completely unfair. WE SHOULD REDISTRIBUTE THROUGH LOTTERY. Most of us would be against that, the state should stay out of our bodies. There are limits to what the state can do given certain private ownership. If we don’t want the state to touch our bodies, it shouldn’t be allowed to touch our money either.
Rawls combined liberty and equality. To take something from the libertarian position but also to think about what Nozick calls patterning. Many of the ideas or resources I get in life are not really fairly allocated. So he sets up a famous argument in which we think in the social contract tradition of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. Picture a society with no rules, there is no state, and we all decide to do a state, we are making a social contract between each other. We need a sort of contract between us in which we discuss what sort of powers we should give to the state. Rawls thinks that contract should be hypothetical. Then those of you who are multimillionaires will have a strong reason not to want the state to engage in redistribution. And those who are very poor become marxists. Rawls says that’s unfair. Those with money will agree with Nozick, and those who don’t won’t. We should forget about the money we have, and put it behind a veil of ignorance. It’s a hypothetical idea in which we forget particular features about ourselves like how rich we are because then we can have real arguments. Rawls ends up with a situation ultimately in which we combine liberty with equality. Rawls says we need boidly integrity and so on but we also need to supplement that with an equality premise. We are going to engage in projects in which we help those who are unfortunate. This is liberal egalitarianism. Equal resources through Max-min principle. Once the veil of ignorance is lifted you may end up as the poorest person in the room. But this is for equal reasons, and because everyone has in their self-interest to maximise their own position, they will make sure to enlist those things that give everyone an equal opportunity. It shouldn’t be the case that some group in society should for that reason remain underprivileged. Inequalities are fine if they benefit the least advantaged. So the worst situation should still be as well-off as possible.
Bernard Shaw argued for proper equality in society.
Many people in the 20th century have become forms of critics of Rawls. People who try to correct Rawls. Many Rawlsian positions were behind Clinton and so on in the 90s. The Belgian minister of healthcare Van den Brucke is a Rawlsian. Rawls is a liberal in the anglo-saxon understanding of the term, and Van den Brucke is called a socialist/social-democrat. He wrote his PHD-thesis on Rawls. That liberal position is translated for many people into social-democrats. Not like the liberals in Belgium. Many people have elements of corrections to Rawls while they stay in a liberal-egalitarian camp. One central figure is Ronald Dworkin and Elizabeth Andersen. They completely disagree on what Rawls says. The least advantaged in the rawlsian system must be brought up as much as possible. But how you got into the box of being in a class in society is not part of the discussion. Dworkin says that it depends. Some people are in their box for good reasons, and some for bad reasons. Imagine you were born with a physical disability and it leads you to being born in a very poor family, and then you are in the box of the least advantaged. Dworkin says that it is completely unfair that the wheelchair person has to pay for the wheelchair themselves because they are not responsible for having to live that life. If these people are worse off because of a factor that lies outside their moral responsibility they should be compensated. If you are in the poor box because you are lazy, then Rawls says we should help you, Dworkin argues that they are morally different. The same is true of the fortunate box. Dworkin argues that if you are rich because you work extremely hard, then you deserve it. But if you are rich because your parents are rich, it is completely unfair, you don’t deserve it. For Rawls it doesn’t matter. Dworkin says we should apply a criterion Rawls doesn’t apply: moral deserts. Endowments are things that you earned by brute luck. This is something we need to filter out of the system. Ambition needs to be taken into the system and endowments brought out. It all depends on moral responsibility. If you are in the box because of ambition-reasons, like being poor or lazy, then you should stay there, and if you are rich because of ambition you can be there. Same goes for disabilities and inheritance. Dworkin says that insurance is a way of transforming bad luck into option-luck. To understand this we need to understand there are two things in the egalitarian world: brute-luck and option-luck. An example of option-luck is going skiing and breaking a leg or investing in a stock. Insurance allows us to make something into a choice. I could insure against certain things that might happen to me, like unemployment. If I take an insurance against something like that, then you took a choice. Your bad situation of not picking the insurance is then a choice. Insurance allows us to change a circumstance into a choice. If you’re in the poorest box in the rawlsian system because of a condition outside of your control needs compensation, Dworkin wants to imagine an insurance market of souls that are not born yet, to see what is a reasonable proposal for those. Should smokers be treated with public funds? Dworkin says that we should not. Choices matter morally.
Elizabeth Anderson disagrees strongly with Dworkin. She says that we should not make such moral judgements about our fellow members of society. We should think of everyone in society as being of equal membership. ”Citizens should refrain from making intrusive moralising judgements about how people ought to have used their opportunities and their capabilities.” If you need medical care becaues of reckless living, it would be terrible to deny them that because they cannot pay for it. Society should pay for stupid decisions.
Philippe Van Parijs is the world-wide theorist of universal basic income. He thinks everyone is entitled to universal basic incoming. Everyone 18 years or older should get a monthly sum by the state unconditionally and world-wide. And this can be justified as a result of the amount of gifts that accrue to us that we have not deserved. We can think of many things like being born in a wealthy family, being born with a particular talent, that we should not be responsible for. People have particular talents, scarce jobs, speak different languages that are in high demand. Having had a high-school teacher for example that suddenly inspire you to do well is something you lack a choice over. There are small and arbitrary things that happen which have a big impact on your life. Most crucially is inheritance. If we take all our gifts together and try to put a price on it, we will calculate the universal basic income. Someone who chooses to be lazy in the Dworkinian sense also gets the sum. Van Parijs looks at the Alaska annual endowment or the Swiss one. The rich get it too, but it should mainly be the rich that give for it. Rawls thought this was a crazy idea. He wrote an article against the idea of universal basic income. In this he argues that the Malibu surfers who spend their lifes surfing should not be entitled to public funds to support their lifestyle. These rich kids should get nothing like it. Van Parijs says absolutely. He wrote the article Why Malibu Surfers should be fed. Van Parijs says that there are so many gifts in life and we need to compensate for these. Everyone, whatever their life conditions, get the money.
Something that has become societally important, from Amartya Sen, and Martha Nussbaum, is the capability theory. The capability theory says that many of the people who are on the list before them are resource fetishists. They are fetishistic about resources. They think resources are all that matters, whereas resources for Sen are only instruments. Resources give you food, or happiness, or a shelter or whatever. Sen wants to argue that we should look less on the reasons and allocations of them, we should rather look at what people can do with the resources, or the goals of them. Functionings; the things you can do with resource. This is a normative theory, but it has a very important empirical, descriptive dimension. We can start measuring the functionings that people have. This is the human development index, which incorporates things like GDP. We rank countries according to human developement, like life-expenctancy and so on. This is directly inspired by the capability approach. Nussbaum has become famous for the theory that there are 10 basic capabilities that everyone should have. Everyone argues about what they are, but Nussbaum says her’s are universal. A pregnant woman has different nutritional needs compared to someone who is not pregnant. To the extent that we need to help the pregnant person, we need to give her the nutrition needs, and we are not interested in the resource allocation, only how we can transform the resources into functionings.
Liberalism and republicanism and communitarianism. All have a different understanding of liberty.