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Contemporary Political Philosophy Lecture notes
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Summary/all lecture notes from the course Contemporary Political Philosophy. Using these notes to study for the final exam, I was able to achieve a 9.
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L1 – INTROEICHMANN REVISITED
Arendt: Eichmann in Jerusalem, A Report on the Banality of Evil
A report of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in the Beth Hamishpath (house of justice)
Eichmann was an SS-Obersturmbannführer responsible for deportations and extermination
camps during the Holocaust
Captured by Israeli Mossad in Argentina in 1960 and was hanged in 1962
Interesting detail of the trial: justification of what he did was uncomfortably ‘reasonable’
o “This was the way things were, this was the new law of the land, based on the
Führer’s orders; whatever Eichmann did he did, as far as he could see, as a law-
abiding citizen. He did his duty, as he told the police and court over and over; he not
only obeyed orders, but also the law”
informs us of a problem: the law itself is not meaningful, for it to be meaningful we
need a preceding theory of justice to be able to evaluate its rightness/wrongness = this
is also the point of the class
WHAT IS POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY?
It is a philosophy because it seeks truth—i.e. attempts to determine values and principles through the
use of rational argumentation
It is political because it pertains to state institutions and people insofar as that they are citizens.
Swift: “Political philosophy asks how the state should act, what moral principles should govern how it
treats citizens and the kind of social order it should seek to create. It asks what we should do as
individuals, when the state isn’t doing what it should be. It also includes the crucial question of what
should/shouldn’t be subject to political control and what is/isn’t the proper business of the state. As the
shoulds suggest, it is a branch of moral philosophy, interested in justification, in what the state ought
(and ought not) to do. The state, as political philosophers think about it isn’t—or shouldn’t be—
something separate from and in charge of those subject to its laws, it is the collective agent of citizens
who decide its laws. The state is a coercive instrument with means of getting people to do what it says
whether or not they like it and whether or not they approve of its decisions. Political philosophy is a
specific subset of moral philosophy and one with high stakes. It’s not just about what people ought to
do, its about what people are morally permitted and sometimes morally required to make each other
do.”
Fabre: “one of the most important question in CPP is that of which principles ought to regulate major
social and political institutions, so as to ensure, as much as feasible, that we are given what we’re due.
An answer to this question provides a theory of social justice: of social justice, in that it addresses the
issue of what we owe each other and of social justice that it attends to the organisation of societies…a
theory of justice sets our what is owed to whom—in other words, it sets out the content of justice and
delineates its scope”
Basic questions of PP
When is a society just?
What does it mean for its members to be free?
When is one distribution of goods socially preferable to another?
What makes political authority legitimate?
How should we trade off different values, such as liberty, prosperity and security against one
another?
What do we owe, not just to fellow citizens, but to people in the world at large?
Can war ever be just?
,What is the relationship between political philosophy and polysci?
Polysci – describes and explains political phenomena
Political theory – addresses conceptual and normative questions
Valentine and List: “Political theory and polysci complement each other. Normative recommendations
and evaluations of policies/institutional arrangements often rest on empirical premises. Its hard to
arrive at a blueprint for a just society, for example, without understanding how society works, since
normative recommendations may have to respect feasibility constraints…thus political theory requires
polysci..similarly, when political scientists investigate whether democracy promotes econ
development or if free societies are more politically stable and less corrupt than un-free ones, they
need to know what counts as a democracy of how to define freedom. These questions require the
conceptual input of political theorists.”
WHY POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY?
Rawls:
To uncover deep moral understanding and compatibility, even at the root of warring peoples
and ideologies. It is through digging deeper into the core of our beliefs that we discover core
similarities at their root.
o NB: the roots of modern debates over liberty comes from Locke
It is to reconsider our own institutions, as well as our purpose in participating in these
institutions
By looking at our own institutions rationally, we understand their own rational fabric
It is to help create the terms for a reasonable utopia. This is partially borne of accepting the
world as it presents itself to us and partially to help us structure a better world to our liking
o NB: Roussseau: the aim of political philosophy is to ‘take men as they are and laws as
they should be’
THINKING LIKE A POLITICAL PHILOSOPHER
Social justice
Focus on social justice following Rawls’ proclamation that justice is the first virtue of social
institutions.
So what is it?
How can society be considered just or unjust?
Can society act?
What we mean by social justice is a set of things (phrased as questions)
What can the state legitimately coerce us to do?
How can and should the state constrain individual action?
How can the law be justified?
How should society be organised?
Ideal theory
This approach to the study of politics pursues the ‘ideal’ principles that should guide society.
Can we really approach society this way?
2 objections: realism and non-ideal theory
Realism, or the claim that the pursuit of the ideal of justice is unmoored from reality
, o Pursuing idealist visions misunderstands the nature of politics, which distils to vicious
and (sometimes) irrational struggles for power
o This suggests a different approach; you don’t begin with moralism and apply it to real
politics, instead begin with real politics and aim for good outcomes
o Geuss: the realist approach is centred on the study of historically instated forms of
collective human action with special attention to the variety of ways in which people
can structure and organise their action so as to limit and control forms of disorder they
might find excessive of intolerable for other reasons
Non-ideal theory, or the claim that ideal theories of justice cannot apply to actual societies
o E.g. problems of noncompliance—how do we approach such conundrums? Idealism
provides no answer—i.e. idealism is unpragmatic
o What is needed are principles for what to do in our actual societies. Since ideal theory
is abstract, this means pursuing it may actually be dangerous, since it is unmoored
from social reality
So why do ideal theory?
Generate principles to guide society toward moral ends—the lighthouse function
The goal isn’t just to design an ideal society, but to figure out why it would be ideal
It determines what values take precedence over others (so we have a way to adjudicate
between them)
Determine what is at stake morally, in decisions we make politically
AIMS OF THE COURSE
Part 1: foundations
5 core subjects: justice, liberty, equality, community, democracy
Part 2: deep dive
Closer look into a particular debate: liberty
o Negative/positive liberty, republicanism, feminism
Part 3: applications
Multiculturalism, global distributive justice, immigration
L2 – JUSTICE
Example: #MeToo & the Harvard disaster
We face questions of ethics everyday.
Question: what are the ethics of sexual discrimination? “Comaroff: we firmly condemn the 2 open
letters signed by senior scholars at Harvard and beyond, which refuse to recognise the guilt of John
Comaroff. Comaroff was found to have engaged in sexual harassment, violating both federal Title IX
law and university”
And what about public health? “NYC’s statewide mask or vaccine mandate to be lifted” is it just to
make citizen X do Y? can they be penalised/fined/imprisoned?
Or free speech (still related to public health)? shirt: “It’s just a Kung Flu/Jew Flu” layers of
antisemitism and racism on top of global health crisis
Or geopolitics? “UN Court orders Uganda to pay DRC $325M war reparations” presentism? Does
this warrant reparations for events in the past?
, Big question here: what counts as an issue of justice? then we ask questions we want to ask: how
do we understand what justice is?
What about harder cases? What are the ethics of non-events? Or bad people? Or hard-to-put-your-
finger-on rights?
FUNDAMENTALS: CONCEPTS AND CONCEPTIONS
What is the difference between a concept and a conception?
Concept – the basic structure of a value or principle, such as justice or liberty. It is broad and
capacious, encapsulating many different meanings
Conception – the particular version of a concept supported by an author, honing it down to a subset of
meanings and characteristics—as in a ‘civic republican conception of liberty’
Here is the distinction: Concepts are less specified that conceptions; different conceptions can be
compatible with the same broad concept.
We want our concepts to match our intuitions
Example: justice
What is the ‘concept’ of justice?
o “The basic concept of justice is that it’s about giving people what’s due to them… this
ties justice to duty—to what is morally required that we, perhaps collectively through
political and social institutions do for one another. Not just to what it would be
morally good to do, but what we have a duty to do, what morality compels us to do”
What are conceptions of justice?
o Rawls: justice as fairness
o Nozick: justice as entitlement
FUNDAMENTALS: THE RIGHT AND THE GOOD
The good:
Utility – ‘ends’
Substance: the good life
Happiness
Rawls’ theory of the good: “a person’s good is determined by what is for him the most
rational long-term plan of life given reasonably favourable circumstances. A man is happy
when he is more or less successful in the way of carrying out this plan. To put it briefly, the
good is the satisfaction of rational desire.”
The right:
De-ontology – ‘means’
Procedure
Rawls’ theory of the right: “a conception of the right is a set of principles, general in form and
universal in application, that is to be publicly recognised as a final court of appeal for ordering
the conflicting claims of moral persons”
FUNDAMENTALS: JUSTICE AND MORALITY
Are justice and morality identical?
Justice is a subset of morality; some things are morally good, but not part of justice
E.g. justice v charity
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