Political Philosophy
Pay attention to subtle differences of the three social contract theories.
Political obediance: why should I follow the law?
Michael Sandell: Justice. A critique of John Rawls. It is a coursebook, subtitled: the right thing to do. Think of a question related to justice and the right thing to do in society.
Questions for the exam can also focus on a general topic. It should include some philosopher of my choice, but the topic itself can be general rather than specifically related to a philosopher as such.
There is no interesting difference between liberty and freedom. But communitarianism, republicanism and liberalism differ on what liberty means. These are three paradigms of political philosophy.
Liberalism in contemporary philosophy have two main enemies. Ie the above.
To understand these, we need to understand their interpretation of liberty.
Traditionally, when the liberal talks about freedom, they mean negative liberty. Locke is a good example of this. Negative doesn’t mean bad. But rather the absence of something hindering freedom. On a tradtional liberal understanding of the term, I am free when there is nothing blocking me. So liberty is hindered when someone hinders me from doing something I want to do. A police officer and a trafic light would then be bad. It would threaten or harm my liberty. If I am in a room and I lock the door I am less free than when the door is open. Liberalism is trying to maximise zones of liberty, taking away hinderances. In the negative understanding of the term I am perfectly free when I have no obstacles. Isaiah Berlin is a theorist who fled eastern Europe in the 20th century and went to Europe. He gave a famous lecture entitled two concepts of liberty, one was positive and the other negative. For Berlin, who fled the iron curtain, wanting to be in the safe west he adored, was identifying the western conception of freedom with this negative understanding. He believed at the time there was a dangerous positive liberty at work in Eastern Europe, and in the west was a beacon of negative liberty. To understand positive liberty: we are going to have to arrive at communitarianism, or positive liberty. Much of the discussion after Berlin has been around whether negative liberty is bad. The distinction is really a distinction between liberalism on the one hand and communitarianism. Communitarians dislike liberals for thinking that liberty is individualised, whilst communitarians consider it to be general, open and accessible.
Charles Taylor: wrote two arguments against negative liberty. Taylor is a communitarian, ie. a positive liberalist. Not all external obstacles imperil freedom. There are also internal obstacles. Not all external obstacles are bad. Think of all the things that hinder freedom that are obstacles to my liberty, and some of them are really bad, and some of them are really good. If someone is locked into a room for no reason and is never allowed to get out, that’s really bad. And if someone doesn’t allow you to go to a church of your choosing this would be a disaster for freedom of religion. But traffic lights are clearly good. They harm my simple liberty, but they organise society so that I don’t die. Ie. we need a theory which explains to us which obstacles are good and which are bad. Safety and efficiency are important reasons to have traffic lights. If it’s really true that this kind of liberty is needed, then traffic lights are fascist. So there must be a problem with the negative concept of liberty. So which hindrances to liberty are good, and which are bad? As such we need an account of positive liberty. Positive liberty is a story about the things we need to be free, whilst negative liberty is about removing the stuff that infringes on my personal space. Positive liberty wants to raise people in such a way that they are maximally free. He gives an analysis of climbing Kilimanjaro. Imagine that some friends ask you to come do this. You have a certain inclination to say no. And they ask why no and you present some reasons like uncomfortability and so on. Imagine that your friends don’t take no for an answer. Imagine that they succeed in persuading you. And you do it, and afterwards you return home and you feel like this was a fantastic achievement. It is possible in this example that afterwards, thinking back to your first no to your friends, you may think of yourself as having some kind of unnecessary anxiety that your friends helped you overcome. And now you think of yourselves as your friends having made you more free than before they asked you to go. You may have said no for the wrong reasons. Doing something major is a great thing to do, even if you have to overcome certain anxieties. So it’s quite possible that you actually had an internal obstacle to freedom. This is how it is for Taylor, there are external obstacles that attack our freedom, which we need to decide on which are good and bad, and there are internal obstacles that I may make me not do things I will actually appreciate. There should be things like anti-anxiety training which makes life bigger for you. The same is true for us here in Leuven. If we don’t go out and experience life, we are actually less free than a person who tries to do stuff and experience life. Their liberty would be greater if they are actually able to know all the options available to them properly, which requires having tried the options available out. From a positive understanding of liberty, you are not particularly free if you sit in your kot all day and don’t do anything. It may be a task of society to invite people into society, and to do things together. Taylor talks about the social world as a world in which we apply imaginary labels. We all go through the world, and there are things that from the point of view of nature are morally irrelevant, but for us are not. If someone murders someone we say wrong. And this is inescapable. The point is that we walk through a world like this. We as a community collectively agree on certain things being bad and certain being good. This world is central to our liberty. Liberals says Taylor act as if the social world doesn’t exist, as if there is an absolute criteria for when happiness is reached. But liberty and the mind are connected. The account of liberty is itself an account of cultural labels. We need to have a theory of what in society is relevant. So Taylor wants to go through all the moral discussions in our countries, like euthanasia, which we need to have constant collective discussions about. If I know that I will at some point have alzheimers, I want to be able to know that I can sign a contract asking to kill me when I am old and vegetable-like. You cannot begin to discuss this question through the negative liberty understanding, you need a story of when life itself is worth living, and when it is fine to end it. There is no neutral solution.
Berlin says two things: first intolerance. So many people have been forced in the name of positive freedom to change their lives, in order to realise the ideals of some, like revolutionaries. They want to force everyone to live in accordance with their beliefs. But they don’t realise their own beliefs.
Rousseau believes we need a new human being to get out of this situation. Rousseau doesn’t think we should commit a revolution. Rousseau would literally argue that we need to force people to be free. Berlin uses this as an example against positive liberty. Rousseau argues that the reason we need to force people to be free, they will resaon in the wrong way. They will go for personal excellence at the expense of other because society has corrupted us. And the only way out is to change human beings fundamentally. The revolution could be a way to bring that about. Rousseau thinks we need a liberal constitution where everything is settled, where property rights are central, and stability and peace can rule. He would love the 20th century.
The danger of intolerance surrounding revolution, Berlin wants to say that on a more fundamental level, we must understand that there are pluralistic societies in which there are different views on what a good life is. There are different religious affiliations and so on. Different philosophical approaches and so on. In such a setting we have pluralists, and on all these fundamental questions, these different groups may have different views. Berlin then asks why we should talk about these complex moral questions as a society, when there are different groups in society which fundamentally disagree with each other. We shouldn’t overload the public sphere.
John Rawls has the comprehensive doctrines, which are a view on how to live the good life. The point is, says Rawls, is to no longer seek to ground society in one of the types of people in it. Think of the constitution, the tendency has been for every liberal and revolutionary to ground the constitution in one comprehensive doctrines, but there are multiple doctrines in society. We should give this up. We need to draw a fire wall between the comprehensive doctrines and the constitution as free standing. They cannot be from a comprehensive doctrine as such. The ground rules of society should be detached from the comprehensive doctrine. He says we can do this from the implicit public ideas in public political culture of a society. He distinguishes between the culture of churches and universities and the public political culture. One public idea is civility. I should not say something like I want to ban same-sex marriage, because I know it’s a bad thing to argue for. The arguments that are prevalent in the public sphere, like freedom and equality are not part of any comprehensive doctrne of for example the christians.
Christianity is central to Locke, but he is a christian liberal. He is really something that Rawls rejects, because he thinks we should ground the constitution in one comprehensive doctrine.
Berlin is someone that says that given pluralism we don’t want to ground the rules of society, the basic structure of it, in any one doctrine much like Rawls.
Taylor says we need a discussion in the public sphere based on comprehensive doctrines. Exactly what Rawls and Berlin seek to avoid. Rawls would say we need to leave these comprehensive doctrines at home with their private questions. This will only serve to divide society. Taylor says this is impossible because there is no neutral solution.
For Rawls you should just be an individual without properties. Though this is always only a thought experiment. We want a good solution for everyone. We need to imagine how we would react if we didn’t have all these capital profits. We need to step into another person’s shoes. Communitarians criticise this beceause it’s not possible.
How can we get away from this without just formulating a new doctrine.
Rawls says there are things which we all share which is propagated throughout the centuries that we all can agree on. Supreme courts, justice and ways of reasoning for example. This is the kind of discourse we can have publicly. Rawls will say that the public sphere is a very small part of your life. Think of what a president or king can say, and what a voter can do in the voting both. A voter should not vote on the basis of their private catholic beliefs, but from public reason.
Furthermore there is republicanism. Many people believe there is no fundamental difference between republicanism and liberalism. Republicans typically present a different ideal about freedom which is not positive liberty, but which is a non-domination account. As a liberal you want a zone of non-interference in which you are not impeded. When no one beats me, stands in my way, etc. I am free. Republicans will say that we need something else actually. We don’t need non-interference, but rather non-domination. We could have a benign monarch, an absolute ruler, who is great and a kind dictator. Political absolutism. Imagine we live in a hobbesian solution. Someone who respects my private space. Republicans, such as Philippe Pettit, will argue that you are not perfectly free in this case. In the liberal understanding this is perfectly fine. Pettit will argue that the american colonies wanted to break away from Britain because they felt that whatever they did was subject to domination from London. Altough perhaps the king was quite nice, we are still dominated. You could have negative liberty, but we also need to collectively control our own fates. This is behind calls for democracy in Athens. The idea that Xerxes would rule over Athens would be terrible. Athenians need to rule themselves as such. When there was no liberal freedom, there was still collective freedom. There was not a lot of respect for private liberty in Athens, but for collective liberty because we decide together. This is what is needed to understand post-colonial struggles. Pettit does not like the idea that someone controls or dominates me. If someone is listening to me, like the rector, in what I am doing, and they could somehow intervene even if they don’t, they are problematic. This is a threat to liberty for the republican understanding of the term. Domination can occur even when negative liberty is respected. There is Belgian scholar, Annelien De Dijn, who argued that everyone until the great 18th century revolutions, the bourgois revolutions, were endorsed by people who endorsed a republican understanding of the term. Practically everyone endorsed a non-domination account of freedom. You are then free only if you live in a state that is not ruled by a state that isn’t you yourself. The ideal of negative liberty only came after the republican revolutions. Today the liberal understanding is so dominant that it is difficult to understand the other alternatives. Negative liberty is actually counter-revolutionary for the bourgeois. Burke people read as a conservative, but is someone who first puts the understanding of liberal liberty on the map. The modern conception is actually more modern than we may think. Collective liberty matters more, and self-government too.
Pettit develops what he calls the eyeball test. It means that you should be able to look someone in the eyes, an institutional power for example, and you shouldn’t have the inclination to lower your eyes when you speak to them. An employer and an employee should both meet the eyeball test.
Republicans, and we will see this strongly with Arendt, believe that you should be personally politically active. The public sphere is not a thin slice like for Rawls, it is the most important for your entire life. It is up to you as a person. Tocqueville says very much the same. One of the great things about america in the beginning was that there were a lot of unions and professional organisations wanting to overcome their self-interest. Tocqueville loved this about american democracy. If we don’t do this, there will be a dictator. And there is also the danger that the views of a select few becomes common views. Tocqueville argues that people are becoming more and more similar, there is a tyranny of the majority. All these interesting professors we saw two generations ago cannot work anymore because there are so many checks and such. The danger says Tocqueville is that with all the imposed rules, we will have a boring situation. Tyranny on majority is bad.
There are some scholars who are marxists. Liberals or liberal egalitarians is where most action is in contemporary political philosophy. It is still prevalent however as a minority voice. If you look at his understanding of the good life, it comes down to two concepts, exploitation and alienation. Exploitation is something excercised on the proletariat. I have many reasons as a bourgeois to squeeze the proletariat as much as possible. I pay you something small to sell a product for much more, the value goes to me, not to the guy I pay. This is surplus value. I make something as simple as a wooden table, it costs like 100€ to employ and make the table, but I can sell it for 300€ on the market. That surplus value is then 200€, and none of it goes to the guy I pay. I don’t want my guy to die, so I need to keep on the level of being alive, unless I can import indian workers to do it cheaper. Proletarians are exploited for this reason. There is a second reason; alienation. Because of this process of exploitation, you are alienated from who you are as an human being. You are a lesser human being than you could be. Marx says this is something that will happen in society. And this ends history ig. The marxists alive today will also apply this analysis to new things.
Shoshanna Zuboff. She is not marxist btw. These apps, or companies, collect information from you, which is what I pay with when I use an app. What is marxist about this analysis is that this data generates surplus value. This surplus value in part comes back to me because I get better services. There is a reason why I like and use these apps. But most of the surplus value goes to Jeff Bezos.
There is a tradition called critical theory. It’s a wide tradition with many germans. Habermas, Adorno, who take their cue from the marxist view and develop something new. It refers to what happened in Frankfurt with the post-habermasians. Structural injustice. Small structural things can be really bad. So conventional little decisions can lead to mass problems in the future. Like buying a sweatshirt can be really sexist. The liability paradigm is the idea to have a purely individualistic understanding of justice. I only care about the injustice I caused myself. But in reality I also enfore injustice by enforcing structural sexism and so on. The critical theorists want to connect the search for justice with social science, to ground their ideals of normativity sociologically. Ie. with normative political philosophy. If we take critical theory beyond the marxists that developed something new in Frankfurt, then we can also include figures like Foucault. Foucault is difficult to fit into a jargon around justice, because he didn’t want to utter normative statements. He rather wants to analyse stuff. Prisons come out of a particular way of history happening. He is interested in showing the history of the present. There are alternative options from history which we haven’t explored. There is a kind of critique of the present, but no normative alternative for how society should change.
Habermas believes that the right thing to do is herrschaftsfreie kommunikation. You want communication that is free of domination. When we have a discussion it shouldn’t be the case that anyone says something because they have authority. It should be the force of the best argument that wins. If one of us in this conversation dominates over the other with the wrong kind of arguments, we are being dominatory. This will be the natural result of pluralism. If my life-world has no otherness in it, then it will need to broaden its horizons as new others come into it, and eventually there will be no otherness. Think of why we want to be democratic? Most if not all political philosophers work within the paradigm of democracy.
A democracy is good because it produces better results according to intrinsic ideas. Sen says that the argument in favor of democracy is because no famine ever happened in one. Jon Elster has the argument that democracy makes it harder to appeal to self-interest, because democracy has a civilising force. Hypocracy can be civilising. Politicians may be driven by self-interest, but they will at least try to frame it in such a way that all could endorse it. Hypocracy may be the first step, but because of this you may assign to a more general reason which over time will lead to better results. The politicans may even come to believe in hypocratic arguments, because the argument becomes so general it becomes disattached to why it was made. The idea that the public forces an individual to say something in the wider interest. Many people think democracy is about intrinsic benefit. It gives me a better ability to say something in the public sphere.
Some people say that true democracy is not an instrument for something else. In being democratic we express equality. No one is better than another. At the day of election we make it clear that everyone has 1 vote. So on a daily basis it seems some have more power, whilst in reality, on the day of vote, we can publically say what we want through our vote.
Rawls says that ideally we should only talk about what could in principle be endorsed by everyone.
In political philosophy, we don’t really tackle the fact that these are theories developed in the context of the nation-state. A state held together by either an existing or imagined national identity. We have about 200 of these. Why don’t we have one world-government? And why are these 200 massively undistributed. Why do we have this division. What’s the relevance of the state? This hasn’t really been fully thought through. We don’t really have any philosopher of global justice. Think of two changes that have happened in relation to the nation state. There are suprastates like the EU. And then there are sub-states, like Flanders in Belgium. Why is it like this?
Rawls has nothing to say about this. Locke doesn’t have a theory of this. Arendt doesn’t have a theory of this. There is no theory about multiple sides of power. What happens now in a more interconnected world, where multi-polarity is on the map? In both settings, the result is that there can be more than one nation per polity. 40% of human beings live in a federal country. But there is no Rousseau of federalism. We have the federalist papers to convince the citizens of the US to join the federal entity. But apart from this there is nothing.
David Miller argues that we need to realise basic needs for all human beings, and then on top of that, the nations should realise full justice. Rawls who never tackled this issue came close to this position too. There is a thin layer of universal justice covering basic needs, and beyond that the nations need to do more. The life opportunities of a bulgarian and belgian do not matter, but they should have basic needs met, and then continued specific needs met by their nation-state. There was an implicit assumption that the container in which the theory of Locke and Rousseau was meant for, was specifically their nations.
Therefore we need a world-level of justice. This may not mean we need a world-state. It could be multiple states, but they need to implement cosmopolitan norms. This is Lea Ypis. Statist cosmopolitanism.
What about the EU. Do you believe in terms of justice and morality that what we owe to fellow europeans goes up and beyond what we owe to non-europeans. Where should the world go, what should we work towards, should we have one zone for everything? Or should we have more subzones. Even if we say one, most people will say that our family is still more important. Even Singer says it’s fine to prioritise your family and friends, but beyond that it should be the world as a whole.