This summary is for the course 'sociale en politieke filosofie', as first-year course of the bachelor Philosophy and part of the university minor philosophy. It contains the needed information from the readings and lectures, plus extra answers to quiz questions and templates.
Week 1
Introduction text; chapter 2
- Political anarchism: denies that governmental power has any legitimate role to play
In political philosophy: term “anarchism” usually used to denote a whole range of
views, with the thing in common: rejecting the idea of political obligation or
political legitimacy, that is, the idea that the state has any special authority over
the life of citizens
Negative view: a view that only denies a claim; the claim that we have political
obligations or that some governments are legitimate
- Weber’s conditions for state/government: a administrative structure that:
Claims the monopoly of violence
Aims at appearing legitimate in the eyes of the population
Aims at subordinating the people living in a certain territory to its domination
all governments regularly issue laws or decrees, setting forth requirements to
which people have to conform (rules) such rules are important because
you face punishment if you do not comply to them most people will
comply with these rules, purely as a matter of self-interest
- Just because people in a state comply with the laws, doesn’t mean the laws are just,
or that the government is morally entitles to their compliance or that it has a right to
it
VB: North-Korea, it is not a legitimate state, but people comply with the laws in
order to avoid persecution
- Are you doing something wrong if you break the law? in the case of an unjust law
or unjust regime, the answer is “no”
In some cases someone is doing something against the law, but they are not
morally wrong
People have no moral obligation to follow the laws
- Some regimes fail to generate any obligations for its citizens, because it is not a
legitimate regime connection between obligation – legitimacy
- Political legitimacy = a government is legitimate if and only if its citizens have a moral
obligation to follow its laws, rules, and commands
This definition is wrong:
It does not tell us why particular governments might be legitimate
Most philosophers: legitimate governments realize or protect some
important value, and the legitimacy of these governments derives
from their contribution to the realization of these values (such as: self-
government, democracy, equality, justice, freedom)
It is unsatisfactory: just because an illegitimate regime manages to make some
laws that prescribe its citizens to do things that they morally ought to do
anyway, independently of whether there is a law to that effect or not, this
does not make these governments legitimate
, The distinguishing feature of a legitimate government is not that it can make laws
that we are obligated to obey, but that it can create new obligations that have not
been there before
If the law was made democratically, many people will think that such a law is
legitimate and that thus people are morally obligated to obey it
- Reasons why people have to follow the law, even if it doesn’t have a moral obligation
Not all laws have a moral obligation (for ex. taxes), but people might have a moral
obligation to follow a law, because it is a (legitimately passed) law
Sometimes is it that foreseeable regularity of the behavior of other that creates
the obligation rather than the law itself
For ex. driving on the right side of the road. Driving on the other side might
lead to accidents; we are morally obligated to avoid killing/hurting people
We should always ask whether the fact that something is law really adds an
obligation to a world which is otherwise exactly the same
The fact that you have a moral obligation to follow the law, because you have a
moral obligation to avoid being sanctioned, can also not be sufficient to make the
law legitimate
Relationship between political obligations – sanctions: it is not only often
rational to conform to the law in order to avoid sanctions, you may also have a
moral obligation to do so (for ex. if family members depend on your income,
you could violate a duty of care towards them, if you risk being jailed for
violating a law that you could have also conformed to without issue)
- In some situations, you have an overriding moral obligation over another one
Think about the example with the car taxes and the hostages
Prima facie obligations: you have the moral obligation as long as there are no other.
More important moral obligations that outweigh it
- Political legitimacy (revised) = a government is legitimate if and only if its lawmaking
creates a new prima facie (moral) obligation for citizens to follow the law
- Political obligation = a moral, prima facie obligation which only exists in virtue of the
political relationship we stand in to a government
- Political authority = the right of the state to have its citizens obey the law
- The basic idea of anarchism: there never exists any prima facie reason to obey the
law merely because it is the law; this it true for all governments anarchists deny
that anyone has any political obligations towards any state
- Anarchists reject political legitimacy and political obligation (distinction I):
Those who just don’t see any good argument for why the mere fact that
something is the law in a state should give us a reason for obeying it
Starting from the commitment to some value, such as equality, solidarity,
freedom, and then arguing that governments, by their very nature, violate this
value. And because we can’t be morally obligated to act against the most
important values for human beings, they conclude, governments can’t create
political obligations
- Distinction II:
, A priori anarchism: a position that believes that the very definition of a
government contains some element which precludes legitimacy. Thus any
government that could exist will be illegitimate
A posteriori anarchism: they only deny that all governments that exist today, that
have existed in the past, and that we should expect to exist in the foreseeable
future are illegitimate
- Distinction III:
Weak anarchism: believe that there are no political obligations and that,
therefore, the mere fact of some rule being the law doe not make it wrong to
disobey it
So believing in this form doesn’t mean that you won’t go against the law. For
ex. you might think that resisting the government would cause chaos and
suffering, and so you might think that it is, morally speaking, the best thing to
conform to the law, even if the government has no authority
Strong anarchism: take the fact that a given government is illegitimate, combined
with the fact that this government tries to make us obey its laws, makes it
reasonable or even obligatory to resist it
- Philosophical anarchism: is a claim about the weaker thesis, namely about whether
there are legitimate governments
Wolff
- Politics = the exercise of the power of the state, or the attempt to influence that
exercise
- Political philosophy = the philosophy of the state
- The state = a group pf persons who have and exercise supreme authority within a
given territory. Strictly we would say that a state is a group of persons who have
supreme authority within a given territory or over a certain population
- The distinctive characteristic of the state is supreme authority, or other term
“sovereignty”
“Popular sovereignty”: the doctrine that the people are the state (democracy)
- Authority = the right to command and the right to be obeyed
Distinguish from power = the ability to compel compliance, either through the use
or the threat of force
- The term “authority” is ambiguous (dubbelzinnig), having both a descriptive and a
normative sense
Descriptive sense: refers to norms or obligations, but it does so by describing
what men believe they ought to do rather than by asserting that they ought to do
it
- 2 concepts of the state:
De facto states: the state defined as a group of persons who are acknowledged ti
have supreme authority within a territory, acknowledged by those over whom the
authority is asserted
Prescriptive signification: the state = a group of persons who have the right ot
exercise supreme authority within a territory
, Political philosophy: the discovery, analysis, and demonstrations of forms and
principles of legitimate authority (of the right to rule)
Supreme authority; some philosophers. Speaking of authority in the normative
sense, have held that the true state has ultimate authority over all matters
whatsoever that occurs within its venue
One of the questions of political philosophy: if whether there is any limit to
the range of affairs over which a just state has authority
- Distinction: authoritative command – persuasive argument
- Reasons why men actually acknowledge claims of authority:
1) The prescriptive force of tradition
The fact that something has always been done in a certain way strikes most
men as a perfectly adequate reason for doing it that way again
2) Some men acquire the aura of authority by virtue of their own extraordinary
characteristics, either as great military leaders, as men of saintly character, or as
forceful personalities
The followers believe the leader has a right to command, which is to say,
authority
3) Authority is granted to those who occupy official positions
- Obedience is not a matter of doing what someone tells you to do.
Legitimate, or de jure, authority thus concerns the grounds and sources of moral
obligation
- What can be inferred from the existence of de facto states is that men believe in the
existence of legitimate authority, for of course a de facto state is simply a state whose
subjects believe it to be legitimate
There may be not a single state in the history of mankind which has now or ever has
had a right to be obeyed. It might even be impossible for such a state to exist.
But so long as men believe in the authority of states, we can conclude that they
possess the concept of de jure authority
- The fundamental assumption of moral philosophy is that men are responsible for
their action
Kant: men are metaphysically free, which is to say that in some sense they are
capable of choosing how they shall act. Being able to choose how he acts makes a
man responsible
Taking responsibility involves attempting to determine what one ought to do
- Every man who possesses both free will and reason has an obligation to take
responsibility for his actions, even though he may not be actively engaged in a
continuing process of reflection, investigation, and deliberation about how he ought
to act
When we describe someone as a responsible individual, we do not imply that he
always does what’s right, but only that he does not neglect the duty of attempting
to ascertain what is right
The responsible man does acknowledge himself bound by moral constraints. But
he insists that he alone is the judge of those constraints.
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