When do governments deserve our allegiance, and when should they be denied it? This course explores the main answers that have been given to this question in the modern West. We start with a survey of the major political theories of the Enlightenment: Utilitarianism, Marxism, and the social contract tradition. In each case, we begin with a look at classical formulations, locating them in historical context, but then shift to the contemporary debates as they relate to politics today. Next, we turn to the rejection of Enlightenment political thinking, again exploring both classical and contemporary formulations. The last part of the course deals with the nature of, and justifications for, democratic politics, and their relations to Enlightenment and Anti-Enlightenment political thinking. In addition to exploring theoretical differences among the various authors discussed, considerable attention is devoted to the practical implications of their competing arguments. To this end, we discuss a variety of concrete problems, including debates about economic inequality, affirmative action and the distribution of health care, the limits of state power in the regulation of speech and religion, and difficulties raised by the emerging threat of global environmental decay.
Immanuel Kant's Ethics
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Del curso dictado por Yale University
Moral Foundations of Politics
1118 calificaciones
De la lección
The Social Contract Tradition I
This module looks at classical formulations of the Social Contract Tradition, locating them in historical context, but then shifts to the contemporary debates as they relate to politics today.
Conoce a los instructores
Ian ShapiroSterling Professor of Political Science and Henry R. Luce Director
The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale
Today we're going to start talking about modern social contract theory, and
this is really a, a living branch of political philosophy,
you'll see that has many active contributors to it.
But we're going to start with what I left you with last time,
when I said there were two long identified problems with
this classical social contract theory, and that we needed to
pay some attention to them to see how modern theories would deal with them.
So what were the problems?
What was the, what would I leave you with there?
>> Well, one is that they sort of revolve around natural laws, and the problem
with that is, people either don't believe in them or don't agree with them.
>> Right, so nobody agrees upon natural law, and
so this idea that we have certain natural rights that are grounded in natural law,
that we come together in order to protect through a social contract, sort of trips
up on the idea that nobody really agrees on what those natural rights are and
what the natural law origins of them might be.
And so one of the most important innovations that,
that shapes the whole of the modern social contract theory is to
solve that problem of secularizing natural law with a version of,
of Immanuel Kant's ethics, the 18th century German philosopher, Immanuel Kant.
And, and when I say Immanuel Kant, what comes to mind?
Does anything come to mind?
>> yes.
He's moral ethics and categorical imperative.
>> Okay so that's, those are long words.
Categorical imperative.
So we need to just get a little we need to
translate them into words of one syllable that'll make sense to everybody.
So before he talks about categorical imperatives,
he talks about hypothetical imperatives.
What do you think a hypothetical imperative might be?
>> I know what a hypothetical is.
>> What's a hypothetical?
>> A hypothetical is sort of bringing up a scenario or
some sort of dynamic for a particular kind of consideration.
>> Okay.
So that's a very good answer.
And we're going to talk later about hypothetical contract theory,
which is exactly that meaning of the term hypothetical,
but it's not actually what Kant had in mind.
So we're going to have two different senses of hypothetical going today, and
it's going to be important to keep them separate.
Yours is coming up later, so just sit on it for right now.
What else comes to mind when we say hypothetical?
>> Conditional?
>> Conditional.
Yes, in many ways, it would've been better if, instead of hypotheci,
thetical imperatives, Kant had talked about conditional imperatives.
It would've been less confusing.
But so the idea of a hypothetical imperative is exactly that,
an if-then statement.
If you want to be happy, then obey the utilitarian calculus.
If you want to have economic growth, don't have too much regulation.
If something, then something else.
This is the notion of a hypothetical imperative.
And the, the imperative is always conditional on your wanting to
achieve the particular goal that you're taking about.
Right? So that's the notion of
a hypothetical imperative.
And it's, it's sort of like a, a conditional judgment, a prudential
judgment if you want to get to some place you want to go, then you need to do this.
Kant didn't think that that rose to the level of a moral law,
because by definition, we think that laws are true regardless of particular context.
Right? Laws must be true.
That's just the notion, right?
So when he talks about categorical imperatives,
what do you think he might have in mind?
>> It, basically, is a must that we should act mm,
in the same way regardless of the circumstances.
>> So it's an, it's like an unconditional must.
Right?
You act only according to the maxim, as he put it,
if that at the same time, you would will that it becomes a universal law.
And the, the way to translate this into, into common sense language that we can all
understand, it's, it's if you were to affirm some principle in every conceivable
circumstance, then it rises to the level of a law, a rational law.
Can you think of something that might be an example of that?
That you would affirm regardless of the, of the circumstances.
>> Don't kill.
>> Don't kill.
>> Mm-hm.
>> But it's, it's nar, it's nearing the the, the religious law, right?
>> Yeah, and I, I don't think Kant would affirm that because he
would think Kant believed in, in a version of, of just war.
So you would think there's some circumstances in which it might be
legitimate to kill.
But it's a good guess.
And he certainly wouldn't want to reach for any religious maxim for
its being, because of its being religious.
Right? He might think that that some
maxims like the Golden Rule which is,
you know, treat others as you want them to treat you, that's an arguable candidate.
In fact, the, the, the candidate that Kant himself gave was,
was the idea that we should never use people exclusively.
So he, people use one another all the time.
He understood that, but
he said, never treat people exclusively as means to your own ends.
Always remember that they are ends in themselves.
So this was a kind of statement that he thought rose to the level of a law
that met his categorical imperative test.
Another way of putting it, it's a long word, but it's less opaque, that,
that Kantian moral philosophers sometimes use, is the notion of universalizability.
Universalizability.
That if you can universalize, that is, affirm it in
every conceivable circumstance, then it has this feature of being a law.
And so what the modern social contracts theorists did was instead of
reaching to Hobbes and Locke and the people who talked about natural law,
they reached instead for a version of this Kantian idea to,
to have Kant, a version of Kant's ethics, do the same heavy lifting in
their theories that natural law had done in the classical theories.
And it's a way, as I, as I said earlier, of trying to secularize the,
the basis of natural law and detach it from all the theological disputes and
considerations that had preoccupied the earlier theorists.
And virtually all of the modern social contract theorists at some level or
other are Kantians.
At some level or other they affirm this idea of categorical imperatives.
We'll see that when we get into the John Rawls' theory later today,
he talks about it by reference to the idea that he calls it
procedural expression of the categorical imperative, but we'll get into that later.
It's worth adding a footnote here that Kant, the historical Kant himself,
was very skeptical that this enterprise could be pursued in politics.
And the reason was that he thought politics always depends on empirical
things, which are never going to rise to the level of universal law.
The way he put it, he said, welfare, which is sort of the good of society,
welfare does not have any ruling principle, because it
depends on the will's material aspect, that's sort of like human psychology,
which is empirical, and thus incapable of becoming a universal rule.
So that's a very, fairly convoluted way of saying that Kant didn't really
believe we were going to ever be able to come up with principles for politics
that met this test, that people could affirm in every conceivable circumstance.
And in that sense, Kant would have been as skeptical of the modern social
contract theories as Marx would have been as skeptical of
the communism that was established in his name in the 20th century.
So Kant would not have been a partisan of this effort.
Okay, what was the other problem with social contract theories?
I mentioned that one was this problem of natural law.
What was the other one?
>> Well the second one is that you just mentioned is basically
the social contract.
>> Yeah. >> Never, never happened, actually.
>> There were, there never has been a social contract.
>> [LAUGH].
>> At the, at the, in the first slide today I had a picture of
the we the people, referring to the American-
>> Yeah.
>> The American Declaration of Independence but
what, what, what does it matter that there never was a social contract?
So what?
>> Well, in, in a legal sense, you know, if, if only in a legal sense,
a contract is only valid if it's really, it's signed by two parties, and
all of the involved parties.
>> Okay.
>> The Constitution was signed by a bunch of powerful men in
a room that represented the people, but weren't all the people themselves.
>> Okay, who did it exclude?
>> Everyone that wasn't in the room.
>> Okay.
You could say that their interests were represented.
There were some people whose interests weren't represented, right?
Who might they have been?
>> when, when you look at the mail, Mayflower ship-
>> Yeah. >> They
signed a contract among themselves, right?
>> Yeah. >> But then they didn't sign with
the Indians.
>> Indians for example, weren't represented at all.
Yeah what we now refer to as Native Americans, but
were, they were called Indians in those days.
Yeah, so that, even in, even in the creation of the United States of America,
which arguably comes as close as any nation has ever
come to founding it on that basis of an explicit contract we didn't.
And in fact, just to make, to go back to your legalistic point at that
time there were, were prevailing the Articles of Confederation, one of which
required that any change to the Articles of Confederation be unanimous.
And they didn't have unanimity, so they said never mind.
[LAUGH] Okay.
So even in that case, it's problematic.
There never has been a social contract.
And so but for, for political philosophy,
the problem that flows from that is that, if you then get political
principles that assume there was a social contract aren't they in going to in
some way be systematically misleading about the human condition?
Because if Aristotle was closer to the, the heart of the matter when he said human
beings are naturally political, they're always political ins, arrangements.
It's just a question of what sort.
That's a very different way of thinking about politics than
imagining a pre-social condition about what life could be
like without political institutions of any sort.
So the answer to that, and this is where John Rawls, who we're going to spend
the rest of today talking about enters, is the notion of a hypothetical contract.
And this, as I said earlier, is a different sense of hypothetical than Kant
used when he was talking about hypothetical imperatives or
conditional imperatives.
Here, Rawls is talking about exactly what you said earlier.
A hypothetical is something it's, it's a,
it's a thought experiment, it's an imaginary exercise you
go through in order to understand something about an actual circumstance.
But he never wants to say there was a social contract or
there could have been even a social contract.
Rather he's going to say,
knowing that there is no such thing as a social contract, and
knowing people have always existed in political institutions of some sort,
we can still ask the question, if we could renegotiate the terms of our association,
not, not pre-political people or primitive peoples or anything like that.
Us, people like us.
What would we choose?
Okay, and he's, that's what Rawls is going to do.
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