Next Friday we will have the first reading seminar on Hobbes.
The differences between Hobbes’, Locke’s, and Rousseau’s views on the social contract.
Main question on exam will be comparative, something akin to “compare hobbes, and locke on rousseau,” for instance.
Political obedience: why should one follow the law?
Justin Sandel wrote a book called Justice, he’s a critic of John Rawls and a communitarian. The subtitle is “the right thing to do.”
To which extent can we rely on background assumptions? F.e. if we want to argue that violent resistance is bad because X, and X requires recognizing that killing is bad, do we have to make a full argument towards it, or can we simply delegate this to another author?
Libertarian egalitarianism, Republicanism, and Communitarism differ primarily in their definition of freedom/liberty (same thing).
Current liberals take utilitarians as their enemy to go against.
Liberalism: non-interference, individual liberty, negative liberty.
Republicanism: non-domination, involves collective liberty (self-government).
Communitarianism: positive liberty, realization of an ideal.
Locke is a great example of someone arguing for negative liberty.
Negative freedom is the lack of obstruction towards something. One is free when there is nothing stopping them.
Liberals don’t want obstacles. If I’m in a room and someone locks (ha) the door, then I am less free. Thus, the goal is maximizing zones of liberty, remove obstacles to liberty, expand negative liberty.
Isaiah Berlin is a theorist who fled Eastern Europe in the 20th century and went to England, who gave it this name. He gave a famous lecture called Two Concepts of Liberty, one was positive, the other was negative.
Having crossed the Iron Curtain, Berlin had very much identified the Western conception of freedom with negative freedom. There was positive liberty in the Soviet Bloc, and the West was negative liberty.
The Communitarians reproached Liberalism for endorsing an excess atomism. The former believe that freedom takes place in a communal sense.
Charles Taylor wrote two arguments against negative liberty, very smart arguments in the Liberalism/Communitarianism debate. Taylor is a communitarian, and is opposed to the negative liberty that Berlin adored so much.
His argument goes, not all external obstacles imperil freedom, (B) There are also internal obstacles.
Not all obstacles are bad. Being locked up in a room is bad. Traffic lights are also an obstacle to freedom. But they are good. [Wowza!]
If liberals follow traffic law, then they are not exactly that pro- negative liberty.
Freedom from vs. freedom to ← negative freedom vs. positive freedom
Imagine some friends ask you to join them on an expedition to Kilimanjaro. Money is not an issue, but you have a certain inclination to say no, because no showers or luxurious restaurants.
Imagine your friends don’t take no for an answer. Maybe they say “what a bizarre objection. We have a bucket list, this’ll be a story for life!”
If they succeed to persuade you, and you go there begrudgingly, then come back and realize that you actully did enjoy this, and are glad they convinced you. You realize you were unnecessarily anxious.
If this were the case, you ultimately became more free despite them technically forcing you. Your anxiety was an internal obstacle to freedom.
The logical extension of this view is brainwashing kinda.
Maybe it’s the duty of the state to help you overcome internal obstacles.
“In Leuven you can do many things.” [i would not be so sure]
Say you’re 18 and you don’t know what to do. The door is open, but you don’t do anything. Then you’re less free than you could be.
Taylor says that there are things which are not morally relevant by nature, but we attach moral stickers to them. We see a parent slapping their child, and we say “wrong.”
Taylor says we need constant collective discussion; if you know you have Alzheimer’s, and know that you will eventually reach a stage where you can’t recognize your children anymore, and sign up for euthanasia while still of healthy mind. can you discuss this in a system of purely negative liberty?
Berlin: Intolerance. People have been forced to realize the ideals of some.
Rousseau was a positive freedom guy. He didn’t say “we just need to do a revolution,” instead, he said they needed to create a new kind of man. We need to force people to be free ← said Rousseau.
Berlin says we should not do that, and march towards a liberal constitution instead.
John Rawls talks about the Comprehensive Doctrine - how to lead a good life. There are a lot of different CDs in society. The point today is no longer to seek to ground society in one of those CDs.
The tendency of every revolutionary has been to ground the constitution in one Comprehensive Doctrine, to the detriment of all others.
Taylor proposes a conversation in the public sphere based on Comprehensive Doctrines in such a way so as to reach a consensus. Rawls and Berlin say we don’t do this.
Veil of ignorance bro.
Voters should not approach the vote as a way to exercise their private beliefs, but the public reason.
Republicanism: a lot of people think this is the same as liberalism. But some argue liberalism cannot accomodate what republicans want.
As a liberal you want a zone of non-interference. “You are not to invade me, beat me, stand in my way, etc.”
As a republican, you need something else. It’s not non-interference, but non-domination: “We could have a benign monarch. An absolute ruler (with absolute power), who is kind, benign.”
Let’s imagine a really kind dictator (hehe), who will not send the cops to your house…
Philippe Pettit argues that you are not free in that situation.
The americans wanted to break away from the brits because they believed all they did was subjected to the king, even if the king was usually okay, they did not want the oversight. ← previous thing basically
You need to understand collective liberty to understand post-colonial struggles.
If the Dean knows that there is someone with the power to obliterate him standing outside the door, even if they are actually there with kind intentions, he is still not free.
Annelien De Dijn wrote an intellectual history of the idea of liberty that is interesting (fol. Dean), everyone up until the modern revolutions (US rev., French rev., Haiti…) were endorsed by people who had a republican understanding of freedom.
Tyranny of the Majority
Marxism and Critical Theory
Marxists are a minority nowadays [honestly surprising], in the 70s it was much more prevalent;
Exploitation is something exercised by the bourgeois on the proletariat. The bourgeois sells the product for more than the proletariat is paid. Surplus value.
Spindle and cotton yurrrrrp
Alienation: as a result of exploitation you are alienated from yourself as a human being. You don’t know the worth of your work.
Communism is the end of history and inevitable (fol. Marx)
Shoshanna Zuboff sees it that the point of surveillance capitalism is to remove the surplus value of our data from the users, and send it to the companies (FAANG my beloved).
Critical Theory is a continental tradition with a lot of Germans, they stem from Marxism and develop something new. Critical Theory is supposed to refer to what happened in Frankfurt group.
Small, seemingly fine actions can lead to mass injustices on a large scale ← Young, structural injustice.