Reviews for Analytical political philosophy

The average rating for Analytical political philosophy based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-07-26 00:00:00 Betarice Sutton This book possesses a virtue I greatly appreciate in non-fiction that purports to teach me something; it is written in a measured and qualified style. Wolff introduces the key points of political philosophy from Locke, Rousseau, Hobbes, and so on whilst also recognising the lack of conclusive answers within the discipline. The book is structured around simple yet impossible questions like who should rule and are there such things as natural rights. It provides a useful, accessible, and brief introduction to key thinkers, including a much-appreciated chapter on feminist political theory. The book avoids getting bogged down in the many side-questions that occur whilst reading it, such as whether one conclusive model of human nature can ever exist, to what extent happiness can ever be measured, and whether liberty, equality, and fraternity can ever be reconciled. I enjoyed this book and found that it did what I'd hoped, which was to systematise, formalise, and flesh-out the bits and pieces of political philosophy I'd picked up here and there. It reminded me, for example, of being taught about Bentham and utilitarianism when I was 17. At the time such concepts bored me rigid, which I blame on the tedium of the AS General Studies curriculum. It seems odd in retrospect that at 17 I was fascinated by political abstractions in the context of the French Revolution, but in no way connected this to the dull lessons on broader political philosophy. Likewise, I remember Hobbes being mentioned in my first year of undergraduate studies, during lectures about the British constitution. Apparently it's only now, much later, that I feel there is a gap in my understanding because I ignored previous efforts to introduce me to political philosophy. This book was helpful in filling this gap, as it was introductory but not patronising or overly simplistic. The sections dealing with the intersection between political philosophy and economics were perhaps where I felt I already knew the most, and thus read less passively. They reminded me of the difficulty there is in drawing a boundary between politics and economics. The latter purports to be a much more empirical, objective discipline, but in my view it is just as ideological and biased by context as any other social science, just less willing to be honest about it. Wolff's points about Stewart Mills were an illustration of this, given Mills support for laissez-faire market economics characteristic of a Victorian industrialist. I am also continually intrigued by the idea, apparently espoused by several political thinkers across the ideological spectrum, that socialism is only suited to a better, more perfect breed of humanity that doesn't exist yet, whilst in our current debased state we must rely on markets to allocate resources. In the 21st century the view of human nature as perfectible seems to have retreated (perhaps mired in associations with eugenics and other horrors?). Anyway, this book provides a helpful guide to the most important contributions to political philosophy made by great thinkers with indigestibly huge oeuvres of work, such as Rousseau, Locke, Hobbes, and Rawls. It is intended to be a broad overview and as such has a focus on work from the 17th, 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. It provides a useful background to reading, for example, Fukuyama. I rather wish I'd read it before tackling 'End of History and the Last Man', but never mind. There is plenty to be picked at in that book without also considering that, it would seem, his conception of human nature is less convincing than what Hobbes wrote some 350 years before.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-04-17 00:00:00 Tom Keeshan Ok, second reading. What follows is more of a synopsis than a review - for the review, scroll down to my first reading! -- - The State of Nature - The contemporary state claims the right to command its citizens in a variety of ways. What would life be like in a society without such a state? Hobbes idea was that an absence of government would inevitably result in civil war. Human beings are constantly strifing for felicity. In order to achieve felicity, they have to gain power: But power can only be gained in competition. If you add his premises that there is a scarcity of goods, that every men has about the same strength and that there is always the possibility that you could be attacked, war is the inevitable conclusion: People fight out of pure self-defence. Hobbes says that morality can only be present where there is a sovereign to enforce laws. There are, however, the „Laws of Nature“: These are conclusions of reasoning: If everybody would follow them, they would offer the best chances of survival for each individual. In total, there are 19 such laws and they all boil down to „Do not that to another, which you would not have done to yourself“. These laws are collectively rational, but for them to be individually rational Hobbes suggests that everyone only applies them when other people are present of whom it is known that they generally obey these laws, too. But the general level of suspicion in the state of nature is so high that one cannot expect anyone to obey these laws: This is why, according to Hobbes, a sovereign is needed: He would have the power to enforce the laws of nature and make what previously was only collectively rational individually rational by punishing those who do not act accordingly. Locke, however, supposes that all human beings have the moral duty to preserve their kind: Everyone is only given the liberty to do what the moral laws state as allowed. But this would still need to be enforced by someone. So each person has a natural right to punish those who disobey the Laws of Nature. Locke also substitutes Hobbes' assumption of scarcity with abundance. War is still inevitable, however: People will disagree about whether offenses have taken place. Also, with the creation of money, abundance would turn into scarcity (hoarding incentive). Rousseau starts out with the premise that people are not only motivated by self-preservation, but also by pity. He also assumes that savage man has only few desires and does not strife for glory or power: All of Hobbe's drives to war have been disarmed. Rousseau, however, goes on to examine the transition from the state of nature: Innovation (as response to growing scarcity) would lead to artificial needs. Also, the idea of private property will emerge and war is the result (because of jealousy and inequality). There are three ways to maintain that life without government would be bearable even in the long run: One could argue that co-operation will emerge even in a society of selfish beings (and could even be an evolutionary factor). One could argue that all humans are perfectly good and moral (but how did the state come into existence then?). Or one could say that social structures and rules have to take the place that otherwise would be taken by a state: Then, however, the conclusion comes very close to the modern concept of a libertarian democracy. - Justifying the State - The state is generally defined as having two essential features: offering to protect everyone within its territory and maintaining a monopoly of legitimate violence. But do we have a moral duty to accept that monopoly? The voluntaristic tradition argues that everyone has to explicitly offer consent to the state. Another idea is that people may tacitly consent to the state by enjoying its benefits and not leaving it – this is highly controversial. The third approach is the concept of 'hypothetical consent': If we had been in the state of nature, we would all have consented to create a state. This can either be seen as utilitarian argument (the state would have maximized well-being for all people) or as an argument about beliefs never brought to consciousness: Everybody would consent to the state, if only they paid enough consideration to the question. But there might be people who have paid the question enormous amounts of consideration and still believe to be better off in a state of nature. So we come to the utilitarian arguments in favour of the state. As there are only two forms to consider (state vs. State of Nature), and as the state would bring about more happiness, and as the morally best society is that in which happiness is maximized, we have a moral duty to obey the state. The core of this argument is the principle of utility. This is also the most vulnerable part of the argument: Applied directly, it would allow for slavery or punishment of innocent in the name of the greater good. The only defense is an indirect theory of utilitarianism. There is also the argument from the principle of fairness: Consider buying rounds in a bar. Don't you have a moral duty to buy a round, too, when other people have done so before? Nozick does not think so: When did you consent to taking up burdens in exchange for benefit? All in all, there is no satisfactory argument that implies a moral duty of every citizen to obey the state: There are, however, several smaller arguments that add up to a moral duty for the large majority of contemporary societies to obey the laws. - Who should rule? - How can you judge who should rule? There are two factors to consider. Firstly, one form of government may be better at detecting and steering towards the common good: It would be instrumentally justifiable to prefer this government. Secondly, some other government may have an intrinsic value (generally equated to being an expression of equality and freedom). Plato's famous argument against democracy (the craft analogy) says that democracy is not instrumentally justifiable: Some people are simply better rulers than others and so ruling must be learned and should only be taught to those who have a talent for it. But how should such a ruler know what the people want? Democracy would be better at that. Then again, what the people want may not be the best for them (think chocolate). Would a dictator be better at deciding what is best for a people? Condorcet has shown that democracy is probably the better method of detecting the common good, as long as the average voter is steered by this motivation and has a more than even chance of voting correct. Rousseau designed a democratic system in such a way that these two conditions would be met. His system is based on the education of the citizens, an eradication of inequalities, censorship and a civic religion. This involves an abolishment of all political factions. Rousseau argues that too much debate over political issues will make detection of the general will (the common good) harder. Rousseau's system is instrumentally justifiable on the grounds that it is very likely to achieve the common good. But while Rousseau's system is a perfect expression of the value of equality, it lacks freedom. To avoid this conclusion, Rousseau would have argued that doing what one prefers (and not what the general will dictates) is simple slavery to one's impulses. In his society the people are free because they are free to live the life a rational person would choose. One can say that it is exactly the tight social net – necessary in order to achieve the common good – that makes his model intrinsically undesirable. An alternative model of democracy is the idea of representation. It is more efficient but also more prone to usurpation: To protect it from the latter, Mill offers several remedies like the separation of powers, the limitation of money spend on election campaigns as well as an open vote. He also argues that the uneducated should be excluded from voting, while some others should be given more than one vote. In conclusion, it might be said that neither Rousseau's nor Mill's model democracies are able to combine instrumental justification with intrinsic value: Both are instrumentally justifiable, but Rousseau lacks expression of freedom and Mill lacks expression of equality. The Place of Liberty The danger of a democracy is that it may turn out to be more of a 'tyranny of the majority' than a good way of ruling a country. Mill was worried about this and therefore proposed his Liberty Principle: the state may only limit any person's freedom if that person is threatening to harm another person. Children and 'barbarians' are excluded from the application of the principle. The principle can be illustrated by applying it to freedom of thought: Mill says that society will profit from each voicing of a view, be it a false one or be it a true one. The idea is that only when true thoughts are regularly challenged will they be able to defend themselves against such challenges. Other people may argue that the utility of somebody not voicing a view could be higher than the utility of him voicing that view: According to Mill's own theory of utilitarianism, this person should then stay quiet. Mill, however, avoids this by saying that the usefulness of an opinion is an opinion by itself: As it can not be objectively decided whether it is better to voice that view or not, the best rule of thumb is to generally allow its voicing. To be able to measure which kinds of harm fall under the Liberty Principle and from which persons therefore are to be protected even if it involves limiting the liberty of another human, Mill introduces the notion of 'rights-based interests'. The rights, however, are not simply stated as axioms as they traditionally have been (natural or human rights), but they are chosen in that way which best maximizes the general happiness. Now that we have seen that a theory of rights can be deduced from the theory of utilitarianism, still the question remains: Why should a person's liberty be such a sacred right that intervention is only permitted in serious situations? Mill's argument says that liberty is a pre-condition of so-called 'experiments in living': These are essential to progress, however. - The Distribution of Property - There are several approaches that aim at establishing a theory of property rights. According to Nozick, such a theory must explain how justice comes about in three stages: in initial acquisition, in transfer and in rectification. Locke sees four ways to explain justice in intitial acquisition: There are the argument from survival (encompassing non-wastage and you-have-to-leave-enough-provisos), the labour-mixing argument (refuted by Nozick's ocean analogy), the value-added argument and the fruits-of-my-work argument. None of the arguments explain the majority of property acquisitions in contemporary society, so it might be the better way to aim at a morally justifiable system of distributive justice. Mill advocates welfare-state capitalism because of its utility: There have been objections by Marxist thinkers. John Rawls uses the method of a hypothetical contract to analyze what persons placed under a veil of ignorance would agree on as rules for society. He first defines the conditions of the original position, then argues that his principles would be chosen in such a situation and finally claims that this shows that they are just. In the original position, a thin theory of the good replaces people's own conception of it. This theory is based on the idea that rational people want certain primary goods (liberties, opportunities, wealth, income) and only care about themselves. They don't know in which situation their society is to be found, but they know that it is within the circumstances of justice (between scarcity and abundance). Rawls then argues that his Liberty, Fair-Opportunity and Difference Principles would be chosen by persons if placed in such a situation. He gives them priority in the order stated above. While the Libery and Fair-Opportunity Principles are easily shown to be a rational choice, this is harder to do with the broadly egalitarian Difference Principle. Arguing for the Difference Principle boils down to an argument for the maximin theory of rational choice. Most people would use 'maximize average' as rational choice strategy in normal situations (its rationality in economics), but Rawls convincingly argues that this would be different in a position that will only occur once and where the impacts will be so profound. So the only other rational choice theory that remains is 'constrained maximization': Rawls claims that it fails because it is impossible to set the social minimum in a non-arbitrary way. Apart from the idea that Rawl's theory of justice is highly biased towards a individualized and commercialized notion of society, the main attack is the claim that Liberty and Difference Principle are not consistent with each other: Either because, to equalize liberty, you would have to equalize property. Or because giving people liberty makes wealth distribution impossible. Nozick says that, if you imagine a society with an income distribution patterned to your liking, and you imagine a normal exchange of goods and services in that society, the pattern can only be withheld if the state intervenes. Also, if pattern A is just, and people moved from pattern A to patter B volunatrily, why should pattern B be unjust? - Individulism, Justice and Feminism - Some might say that the selection of topics in the book has been biased from what may be called a 'liberal individualist' perspective. A 'extreme liberal individualist' would assume that the task of political philosophy is to devise principles of justice, that freedom and equality are of paramount importance, that justice is a or even the priority and that any rights we have only arise out of actions of individuals. Objections to this view generally come down to the idea that „liberal individualism offers a false picture of human nature and social relations, and with it a misleading and damaging vision of what it is possible for human beings to achieve politically“ (p.182). One example of opposition to the liberal individualist perspective that can be examined as a case-study is feminist political thinking. The opposition centers around the idea that justice is a gender-biased concept: Women would generally appreciate more of a care perspective, deciding on a case-by-case basis. The reason for this has been argued to be the separation of a boy from his mother in early child-hood (necessary to be identified as male) and the opposite event happening to female babies. The author's perspective on this is that justice could offer a safety-net: rights as an insurance policy. --------- (first reading) --------- This book is a great introduction to the subject of political philsophy. The simple style allows for an easy read while still mentioning all the important factors and arguments relevant. It is especially the separation into several chapters that I enjoyed, each chapter dealing with a different topic and the different views on that topic. This made it easy to understand the connections between the opinions, making the reader understand the bigger picture.