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.
Principles of Justice
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Del curso dictado por Yale University
Moral Foundations of Politics
1173 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
So, we began talking about modern social contract theories last time.
What I wanna do today is really dig into the theory itself.
And we had just begun to do that right at the end of last time,
when I described to you Rawls's General Conception of Distributive Justice.
And let me say a little bit about how he thinks about this from behind
the veil of ignorance.
This imaginary condition when you don't know your status in the actual world.
And so his idea is, that he, convinced you to play this
thought experiment game with him where he will say behind the veil of ignorance,
I'm gonna ask you to think about comparisons.
The whole enterprise is comparative.
And what I'm gonna do is say think about some principle.
And ask yourself, whether you would embrace it behind the veil ignorance as
distinct from some other principle.
And if you would choose it behind the veil of ignorance,
then it does better than the other principle.
This is important to state at the outset, because sometimes people accuse roles
of a very abstract theory that's supposed to apply at all times and places.
To be a kind of transcendental theory that's sometimes referred to and
that actually misrepresents his enterprise.
First of all it's not meant to apply in all times and places.
He doesn't think it applies to very poor countries for example.
He's talking about countries which he's as he's says have
reached the level of moderate scarcity.
Which is pretty much the advanced industrial countries.
That's what he's thinking of.
Countries like the ones that we're living in now in the United States or
in western Europe for that matter.
So that's one sense.
But then in which it's not intended to be perfectly comprehensive.
And then another one as I just started to say is
his mode of reasoning is always comparative.
So he'll persuade you that some principle is better than another principle,
but that always leaves open the possibility that somebody would
come up with a new principle that would do better than the one before.
So in that sense it's not trying to give transcendental
answers that are valid for all time and by any stretch of the imagination, okay.
So right at the end of last time I put up his General Conception of Justice.
And what he's gonna wanna do is to convince you that this is worth embracing,
and then much more specific applications of it.
And we'll get into some of those.
But let's just focus on the General Conception.
He says all social values.
Now when he talks about social values, this is a reference to his resourcism.
Do you remember when I was talking the last time?
I said when he focuses on utilitarianism and
subjective versus the objective, and he says, let's just change the subject.
What was I saying there?
>> You were pointing out that Rawls wanted us to concentrate on
instead of welfare resources.
>> Right, so when he says social values that's his code word for resources.
When you see all social values, those are resources he's talking about.
And then he lists them.
Liberties and opportunities, income and wealth, and
the social basis of self respect but those are her basic resources,
his primary good says he's gonna call them.
We're not gonna talk about the social basis of self-respect in this
course because it's just out of limitations of time.
And the most important ones are the others that we're gonna focus on, liberties,
opportunities, income and wealth.
He says, all these primary goods should be distributed equally, unless
an unequal distribution of any or all of them works to everybody's advantage.
Now, is it obvious to you what he means by that?
Not really.
>> No, it looks pretty opaque right?
And, there's no reason it should be obvious to you right off the bat.
So, what we're gonna do is dig in and I'm gonna give you an example.
So, lets think about he's got his
three categories of primary goods hes going to talk about.
Liberties.
Which are pretty much the sorts of things you see in the Bill of Rights to the U.S.
Constitution.
Freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of association, the sorts of
things bills of rights generally guarantee any constitutional system.
Those are the most important primary goods for him.
Second in importance come opportunities.
The access to advantage in society.
And we'll talk separately about them.
And then third in this list, is income and wealth.
He calls this a lexical ranking.
Short for Lexicographical.
Political philosophers never saying words
of one syllable what they can say in words of five syllables.
Basically what it means is,
what he wants to say is you would rather have more than fewer liberties.
You would rather have more than fewer opportunities,
and you would rather have more than less income and wealth.
No matter whether you turn out to be intelligent or stupid, male or female,
white or black, musical or an athlete.
You'd still want more rather than fewer of all of those things.
That's the sense in which they're all primary goods.
And then the ranking is that if there were a conflict,
if the only way in which you could get opportunities was by
compromising liberties, then liberties would trump.
And, if the only way you could get as much income and
wealth as possible was by compromising opportunities, opportunities would trump.
Okay, we'll come back to the rankings later.
But does this strike you as intuitively plausible, apart from the rankings matter?
That no matter who you turn out to be,
you'd run more rather than less, in the way of liberties.
More rather than less, in the way of opportunities.
And more rather than less, in the way of income and wealth.
Other things being kept, everything else about you and
yours futures behind the veil of ignorance.
>> I think for the most part- >> You think of any case
where it wouldn't?
>> Right. I think for me it certainly would be.
But I think for someone- >> But
you don't know that it can't be you.
>> Right okay.
But I think that maybe for some sort of religious ascetic, who believes
that wealth and income are detrimental to their chi, or something like that.
>> Okay.
So that's a good point.
Wealth and income might be thought, they think it's bad.
Further than that, they might think it's not just bad for them, but
that its corrupting of society.
Having a materialist society where everybody's rat on
a wheel trying to get more and more.
That that's actually bad for people.
So, Rawls doesn't discount such possibilities.
But he's, I think the way he'll think about that,
is he'll say well, if you turn out to be
the religious ascetic, you could always give away your wealth.
>> Right.
>> But if we've designed a society for religious ascetics,
everybody else who's not a religious ascetic is gonna be in a much
worse off position and thereby hangs his basic comparative device.
He always wants to say in evaluating any principal, in making any comparison,
always imagine yourself to be the most disadvantaged person.
So when he says the standpoint of the worst off is the standpoint
of justice, he's not being a bleeding heart liberal.
He's not saying, oh, we should feel sorry for the people at the bottom.
He's saying, instead, it's a self-interest argument.
He's saying, you imagine, you're gonna be the most adversely
affected by the principle and then see whether you would choose it.
This harkens back to the idea that if you can choose it in every conceivable
circumstance, then it's sort of like a categorical imperative.
And this is why Rawls calls these principles that we're gonna go through in
a minute, procedural expressions of the categorical imperative.
So, it's very important to see that when Rawls says always look at things
from the standpoint of the worst off, this is not bleeding heart liberalism,
as I said, but rather this contient, universalizability.
The idea is if you'll choose it even when you're the most adversely affected,
you'll choose it in every other circumstance as well.
So it's just shorthand for the universality idea, the contient idea.
So let's give an example, let's start with some liberties and
this is my example not Rawls's, but I think he would have agreed with it.
His principle for the distribution of liberties is each person
must have an equal right to the most extensive total system
of liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all.
That also seems pretty opaque.
Let's us an example though.
Think about the distribution of religious freedoms.
We, in the United States have something called the establishment and
free exercise clauses of the first amendment.
Which says that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,
we're not going to have an established church, no official religion or
prohibiting the free exercise of.
That's the free exercise clause.
Nobody is gonna be prevented from exercising any religion.
This is the separation of church and state,
put into the Bill of Rights by James Madison and it's an important
part of the First Amendment, the United States Constitution.
Now Rawls can't ask the question is this a good principle,
because he always thinks comparatively.
So you have to have it to compare it to something else.
So as I said, this is my example not his, but it's a very different principle.
So, it's good from the point of view of fixing our intuitions here.
Think about article four of the 1979 Iranian Constitution
that was put in after the Islamic revolution.
It says all civil, penal, financial, economic, administrative,
cultural, military, political and other laws and
regulations must be based on Islamic criteria.
This principle applies absolutely and generally to all articles of
the Constitution, as well as to all other laws and regulations and
the fuqaha of the Guardian Council are judges in this matter.
This is about as extreme a form of established religion as you can have.
So here, you have an established religion and you have no free exercise clause.
So everybody has to obey the Islamic religion and
it's got to be enforced by the state couldn't be a sharper contrast.
Now from a rolls in perspective, if you wanna look at these
two principles, the question you ask yourself is if I
turn out to not be a non-Muslim in an Iranian society or
a non-fundamentalist in an Iranian society, am I better or
worse off than a fundamentalist in the First Amendment, US type of arrangement.
That is to say, does the religious fundamentalist in the US system have
less or more religious freedom than the non-fundamentalist in the Iranian system.
So that's the comparison and so what's the answer?
>> The fundamentalist is going to be more free,
enjoying more religious freedoms in the American system.
>> In the American system?
>> Yeah.
>> Exactly right.
So if we might list the comparison,
we would say the American free exercise clause and
anti-establishment clause wins.
That isn't to say, it's the best principle.
Somebody might come along with something else, as I indicated, but
just as between these two, it would win.
Now does that mean that the American Free Exercise
clause is neutral among religions?
>> I think that it tries to be, but in practice it probably isn't.
>> Why?
What's not neutral about it?
>> Well, they're so different.
I think such a broad sweeping rule, there are gonna be holes in it somewhere.
I think that it tries to be neutral, but it's It's not necessarily going to be.
>> So it sounds neutral, but if you go and talk to Christian
fundamentalists in the US, they say it's not neutral.
Cuz from their point of view, they say, look.
Suppose you're kind of a milquetoast protestant who thinks
religion belongs in private life, this is great for you.
You get exactly what you want out of the First Amendment.
We don't, because we think there should be an established church.
So, it's not neutral and it's important to make that point, cuz Rawls sometimes,
in his early formulations referred to his principles as neutral
among different conceptions of the good life and it's not neutral.
The key phrase in that principle is not, it doesn't say,
each person is to have an equal right to a neutral system of liberties,
but rather to the most extensive total system of liberties.
So the idea is that you wanna give people as much religious
freedom compatible with giving the same amount of freedom
to everybody as you can, but it's not neutral.
And when the religious fundamentalist says, in America,
this system is biased against us and they're right.
It's biased against them, but it's less biased against them,
then a fundamentalist system would be against non-fundamentalist believe us.
That's the claim.
So that's, as I said, these phrases when you first read them might seem to
be just a lot of abstract words that don't say very much, but that's the idea.
Give people as much freedom as is possible to give compatible with giving
the same freedom to everybody.
Not a neutral idea, but this most extensiveness idea.
So that's how he reasons and when we talked,
it's just basically the same Intuition as behind our
earlier discussion of the religious ascetic, right?
It is the case that the system loads the dice against the religious ascetic.
But it's better to do that than to load the dice against everybody else,
from the point of view of giving people as much freedom,
as much of the primary good as you can,
consistent with giving the same to everybody.
So let's just run through his second principle.
And now for some odd reason known only to John Rawls,
I'm afraid, his second principle, first of all, it's really two principles.
So he's famous for having two principles of justice, but
he really has three principles because we have one, two a and two b.
And then even more confusingly, for
some reason he puts the a and b in the wrong order.
So I'm putting them in the analytical order.
So as I said earlier, opportunities are subordinate to liberties,
and income and wealth are subordinate to opportunities.
So the principal governing opportunities is principle two b,
which we're gonna talk about now.
And then the principle governing income and wealth is principle two a,
which is actually lower in his lexical ranking.
Go figure.
I don't know why he did it that way, but that's how he did it.
So opportunities are open.
Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so
that they are attached to offices and
positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity.
May seem pretty straightforward, but let's make it concrete again.
This means no apartheid, right?
No apartheid.
Why no apartheid?
Apartheid was a system which, among other things,
reserved certain jobs for white people.
That same thing happened in the American South.
Certain jobs were reserved for white people.
Why would you say no to that behind the veil of ignorance?
>> Discrimination.
>> Hm? >> Discrimination.
>> But why would you be afraid of discrimination?
>> You don't know what race you're going to turn out to be.
>> You don't know what you're gonna turn out to be,
and therefore what is it rational to assume?
>> That you're not going to choose this because you have just as much of
a possibility of being black than white.
>> Okay, so you're gonna assume.
Yeah, Rawls makes a stronger statement than that.
He says if there's gonna be discrimination against blacks,
assume you're gonna be black and ask yourself, would I choose it?
That's, again, the idea that if you could affirm a principle from
the standpoint of being the most disadvantaged by it,
you'll affirm it from every other point of view as well.
The standpoint of the worse off is just shorthand for
the standpoint of everybody, right?
So no apartheid.
Now here's another example.
We know that in all of the modern economic systems there's a gender wage gap.
Women earn somewhere between 70 and 80% on the dollar that men earn.
There also, it goes for different races.
It's pretty persistent.
What would Rawls say about that?
Do you wanna live in a world, in which women earn 89% of what men earn?
How are you going to evaluate that?
>> Not if you're going to be a woman.
>> Okay, but his point is, well, you better assume you are gonna be a woman.
And then he's going to say, yes, so you're gonna want a system which will eliminate
gender-based inequalities of opportunity and do whatever it takes to achieve that.
Now you wouldn't do anything,
because equality of opportunity is lower in the lexical ranking than liberty.
So you wouldn't do anything, but certainly you'd be willing to interfere with
the distribution of income and wealth, so you might spend money on programs to
subsidize firms to achieve gender equality, or programs for
affirmative action or additional training or child care.
Whatever it is that the social scientists finally figure out is
the cores of the gender wage gap, you would favor addressing that.
So system of equality of opportunity.
You wouldn't ever accept apartheid or gender-based discrimination or
any other form of discrimination.
You'd always ask yourself the question,
assuming I'm gonna be the worst affected by this, would I chose it?
And his answer is about the distribution of opportunities, No.
And since you don't know your race, your gender, your anything else,
it's going to be a blanket affirmation of equality of opportunity.
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