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.
The Veil of Ignorance
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Del curso dictado por Yale University
Moral Foundations of Politics
1172 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
How he wants to get us there is through his conception of the veil of ignorance.
Okay.
Based on what I've said so far what do you think the veil of ignorance might be?
>> Depends how we look at it.
If something positive or negative.
So if it's negative then the veil of ignorance means that
you're basically blinded by some idea or ideology.
>> Okay. >> And you follow through that.
>> So one professor I know made a slip of the tongue and
referred it to, to it as the cloak of invisibility.
>> [LAUGH] >> It's not the cloak of
invisibility, okay?
So, the veil of ignorance, he wants to say,
is exactly what you were just intimating.
That it's, it's what principles you would affirm if you didn't know the answer
to all those moral, morally arbitrary things we were talking about earlier.
If you didn't know whether you were going to be, going to have a high IQ or
a low IQ.
If you didn't know whether you're going to be a jock, or a nerd.
If you didn't know whether you were going to be male or female.
If you didn't know whether you'd be black or white.
If you didn't know any particular facts about your circumstances that,
that we'd think are morally arbitrary.
And given what roles are set about moral arbitrariness that's a lot, right?
That's a lot of stuff you don't know.
And so by saying what principles would you choose if you didn't know any of
those things about yourself?
He's trying to get you to obey the Kantian dictum of universal liability.
'Cause he's saying pick things you would pick regardless of your IQ,
of your gender, of your race,
of your disposition, of your particular conception of the good life.
You just don't know any of those things.
What principles your going to agree to.
So that's choosing behind the veil of ignorance, okay.
And it's not, it's not pre-political people.
It's not people in the state of nature.
It's you, here, now, right,
doing the hypothetical thought experiment to figure that out.
And he thinks that that way can generate principals that
that we can then use as a kind of yardstick for
evaluating existing political institutions.
Yeah? >> Well so, in that sense right there,
it's the sort of intentional aversion to bias that our judicial system should have.
>> That's right.
It's, it's the idea is exactly that you cannot bias things towards your personal
that thinks that you, you're a good athlete judging from the way your built.
So, but
you couldn't bias things to be well, to treat athletes better than others.
Right, okay, so that's exactly why the notion is
an unbiased an unbiased principle is one that,
that doesn't support any particular conception of the good.
He sometimes describes his method as reflective equilibrium.
What do you think that might be?
Reflective equilibrium, what comes to mind when we say reflective equilibrium?
>> Maybe. [LAUGH]
>> Not, not fair.
>> This is a German full metal band.
>> Yeah, so that's, that's not it.
Okay, so what,
what Rawls means by reflective equilibrium is something different.
Remember when I said, when we talked about Hobbes.
I said, Hobbes starts from
the assumption that people are muddled as to what their interests are.
Because they've listened to to much Aristotelian nonsense in the universities.
Or they've been deceived by merchants,
who have their own ideological agendas but if they were thinking really clearly.
They would see that I, Thomas Hobbes, am right.
So in that sense, for Hobbes there was no social contract.
But rather, he's saying what is the rational contract for people to make?
If they weren't, if their heads weren't full of sawdust, and
they were thinking straight, what would they agree to?
So it's not strictly a contract, as you indicate.
There's no legal contract.
And really it's not about agreement at all.
It's about what it's rational to agree to.
So if even though these are all theories of,
that are based on consent, all these social contract theories.
Really it's reason rather than agreement that's doing the heavy lifting here.
Because we're not saying what do people agree to.
But you, he's saying what's a rational for them to agree to?
And in that, and some people would say well if they couldn't choose anything
else, then it's not clear that agreement's doing any work.
Right? It's all being done by this econ, so
it's a very string rash, rationalist enterprise.
And in this sense, though Rawls is often compared to Locke,
he's methodologically, he's more like Hobbes.
Because he wants to convince you this is the idea of reflective equilibrium.
That if you start with your, your priors, your initial believes,
your assumptions about human nature, about justice, about what you
want to do with your life, about everything that's going through your head.
And you then read his book really carefully and understand it and
play the game that he asks you to play, this hypothetical thought experiment.
You will come, through this process of back and forth between this experiment and
your prior judgements, you will come to see that he is right.
So in that sense, it's very as I said, methodologically very similar to Hobbes.
And what he's going to say is I'm going to convince you by reading this book.
First of all, of a general conception of justice and he's, he, this is just the,
I'll just give you the summary statement of it which we'll dig into next time.
But he says, everything of social value, these, you might think of
these as what I was calling primary goods, social values, this means primary goods.
Liberties and opportunities, income and wealth, and what he refers to
as the social bases of self-respect, should be distributed equally unless
an unequal distribution of any, or all of them works to everybody's advantage.
So, that's, probably looks pretty opaque and it should look pretty opaque.
I just wanted to get it out there before we finish for today.
But next time I'm going to unpack that.
And explain how it leads in his estimation to two principles of justice.
Which as I said will pass this kind of Hobbesian methodological test
that after you've gone back and forth in this condition of reflective equilibrium
between Rawls's exposition of these principles and your own assumptions.
You will find that you agree with him.
And we'll start with that next time.
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