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Enlightenment

Natural Law Roots

Political

if natural law timeless universal, that’d bind God
- Unable to change mind
John Cocke
- Choose omnipotent
  - Will
- Struggled wit hit
Central Theories
- Individual Rights
- Science as basis for politics
  - Tension with individual rights
17th Century Roots
- John Locke
  - Natural Law Realist
  - Quintessential trust of Early Enlightenment
  - Member of radical group of English politics
    - Shaffebury’s Circle
  - Underachieving Academic early
  - Three Roles
    - Early Enlightenment view of science
    - Classical social contract theorist
    - First modern defense of majority rule

Early

Conception of Knowledge
- Preoccupation with Certainty
  - Science
  - - Product of Human Reasoning > Natural World
Workmanship Ideal
- John Locke
  - Miniture Gods
  - Natural Law
    - God = Will
    - Can’t create state that violates law of nature
    - How to know Natural Law breached?
      - Scripture
        
        Individual
        
        Only God
        
        Not pope
        
        Not State
      - Obligation to Resist
        
        Always a right
      - “All views should be tolerated except for atheists (lie), Muhanmaditins, Catholics” -John Locke
- Science
  - We know what we make
    - Cartesian certainty
- Rights
  - We own what we make
    - Theory of property
    - Common + Labor = Value
      - Theory of commonwealth
        
        Social Construct
- Limits within the law of nature
  - God’s natural fight
- Locke’s 1+2 Treatise was arguing Filmer who thought absolute authority goes to those that are heretical closet to Adam.

Comprehensive Theory
- Explains everything
Naturalistic theory
- How would humans exist if not guided by pleasure/pain
Egoistic
- Individual self-interest
  - Sticks & Carrots
- Not Subjective
  - Happens if you want or not
    - Invisible forces
Elements
- Principle of Utility
  - Moral rights maximize happiness
- Consequentialism
  - Morality
    - Outcome
    - Consequence
- Hedoism
  - good/bad — pleasure/pain

Jeremy Bentham

Obsessed with efficiency
- Prison
Value of Pain & Pleasure (quantify)
- Intensity
- Duration
- Certainty, Uncertainty
- Propinquity Remoteness
Extreme
- Useful
Interpersonal judgements, comparisons
Pushed ideas to their end to test them
Would write country constitutions
- Upset when not accepted
Government
- Market Failure Theory
  - Free-Rider problem
    - Gov. necessary for this
    - Public Goods
    - Selfish Utility maximizes
    - Force to pay taxes
    - Security adversaries
Wrote 70 years before Darwin
Distribution
- Diminishing Marginal Utility + Interpersonal comparisons utility = Redistribution to equality
- Income Redistribution
  - Rich will use much less utility compared to gains for the poor
- The richer you are the more you need to get an increment in happiness
Eccentric
“Sovereign masters” that govern mankind = Pain + Pleasure
Principle of Utility
Rights
- Practical Equality
  - Consequentialism
- Enter through back door
- Workmanship substrature by theory of value
- Governments have to protect whats created
Equality and Rights
- Absolute Equality vs. Practical Equality
  - Distraction, not realistic
  - - Loss aversion
    - Pie shrinks
    - Rich would destroy their wealth
    - Trickle down theory
    - Hard to know where the limit is

Problems

Utility monster
- Types of people
  - Normal
  - Depressed
  - Handicapped
    - Waste of resources
      - Nazi’s
- Diminishing Marginal Utility
- Doesn’t take seriously the difference between people
Altruism
- Charity
- Self-sacrifice
- Where people are starting from?
  - Loss aversion

Neo-Classical

Removes economics from Utilitarianism
Defangs the redistribution radicalism
No way to tell how interpersonal utility will be lost

Charles Stevenson

Emotivism
- Moral Arguments
  - Persuasive definition
- Ethical sentences
  - emotional attitudes
    - not propositions
- Moral philosophy = “Hurray/Boo”
How do you know?
Can’t derive “ought” from an “is”
- Makes morality shakey
- Good/Bad same for everyone
- What ‘ought’ to be the case
- Fast / Value Problem
- David Hume
  - Utilitarian
Logical Postivism
- Freddie Ayer
  - Three Kinds of Assertions
    - Analytic truths
      - (Math) Definitions
    - Empirical truths
      - (science) Observe
    - Everything else = meaningless nonsense
      - Oughts
      - Morals
      - Metaphysics
One of the most important moral philosophers in 20th Century

Economics

Pareto
- 1848-1923
- Use little information how markets behavior
  - Rank/Order
  - Not using interpersonal units of utility
- Science of Market Dynamics
  - How prices behave
  - Indifference curves
    - Choice between A/B make no difference
  - No science that justifies redistribution
- Pareto Problem
  - No individual can be make better off without making someone else worse off
  - Doesn’t address Justice & Fairness
Edgeworth
- 1845-1926
- Box Diagram

Synthesis of Rights and Utility

John Stuart Mill

1806-1873
Wife
- Harriet
- Major role writing On Liberty
Father
- Utilitarian
- Son raised as one
  - Home School
  - Genius but nervous breakdown
    - No social
Freedom of Speech
- Fallibilist conception of truth
  - Science begins thinking everything is fallible
- Karl Popper
  - We never know if we have the truth
  - Cant verify only falsify
Commonality
- One sentence/explanation
  - Harm Principle

Harm Principle

Protected
- self-regarded
  - Exceptions
    - Price Gouging
    - Extreme coercion
- If you harm others, government steps in
- other-regarding
- self-regarding
- In practice
  - Free Trade
  - - Giving out any scarce resource is harming
      - Do it by merit
Examples
- Marital Rape
- Racial discrimination
Conservative?
- Yes
- Harm principle procedural
- Bias towards status quo
Action
- self-regarding
  - market
- other regarding
  - gov. constrained by harm principle
- Can’t find scientific answer what to do in political questions
Ambiguity
Invisible Hand Argument
- Freedom leads to utility by truth
  - Science
Difference with Bentham
- Long run appeal
- No single category of pleasure
- Richer view of freedom
  - Positive vs. Negative
    - resources
    - to do
    - not to do (negative)
- nuanced ICU

Robert Nozick

Combining individual freedom and science of politics
Rights as side-constraints
- Deontialogical
- Genuinely Kantian
Invisible Hand account
Empirical and Normative
Hypothetical contract theory
- If the state wasn’t there
1938-2002
Brilliant
Extreme Libertarian
- Individual rights
Pushed ideas to extreme
Kantian
Markets and Power
- Not a theory of power relations
- Power shapes voluntary transactions
- Nozick doesn’t take power into account
Compensation vs Redistribution
- Can’t compensate everyone for their every fear
Justice
Liberty upsets Patterns
- inequality from volunteering choices
  - Wilt Chamberlin example
  - Just Distribution
    - voluntary transaction literally erode it
- Complaining about status-quo useless
  - You pick the status quo
  - Let the market run
- Polish privatization in 1989 (gave citizens ownership)
  - Some people sold them
  - Some people bought them
    - millionaires
Invisible-Hand evolution of state
- - National standing army
    - Revolutionary War
      - Constitution debate
Incorporating Independents
- Compensations
  - defacto state dejure
    - state legitimate
- - Consent is important to Noziak so he’s going to account for ICU’s
  - - Kant
      - ought entails can
- Natural monopoly of force puts constrait
  - Constraint
    - Can’t be obliged to tolerate if possible
      - ought entails can

John Rawls

1912-2000
Hypothetical contract
Grand tradition of Pol. Phil out of favor
- Utilitarianism, Marxism
  - Social contract seemed hopeless
- More interested in meta-analysis
- Back water philosophy at time
Utilitarianism
- Doesn’t account for difference in persons
- Neoclassical
  - Too much difference between people
Marxism
- Labor theory of value
  - Shit
- Failed at every question
Social contract
- No agreement
- Never happened
Overlapping Consensus
- Common Good
- None on justice
Most important philosopher in the second half of 20th Century
- Citations
  - Law
- Revived pol. phil.
Innovations
- Moral arbitrariness
  - More radical than Marx
  - Nature & nurture are unimportant
    - Both luck
    - Rawls himself tries to weasal out of implication
  - Workmanship has to be affirmed
    - People want to feel they made themselves
- Resourcism
  - v. welfarism
  - Stop talking about welfare utility
  - Primary Goods
    - income
    - Political freedoms
  - Focus on basis resources
- Deontological Theory
  - v. teleological
  - Distribute rights that doesn’t presuppose the good
    - Thin as possible presupposed
  - We have diff values
    - like mill
  - Kantian
Veil of Ignorance
- Principles to affirm if you didn’t know who you’d be
  - not state of nature
    - here, now
- Kantian universal liability
- Advanced Countries Applicable
  - General Conception of Justice
    - Principles
      - Non neutral
      - Catelogical imperative
      - Difference Principle
        
        Serve least well-off always
        
        Maximize the minimum
- Hobbes > Locke
  - Reflective Equilibrium
    - rational over agreement
- Political not metaphysical
- Political Disagreement
  - Agree on general principles, devil in details
    - Descartes
    - Kant
    - Early Rawls
  - Many paths to agreement, don’t ask why
    - Amarty a sen
    - Cass Sunstein
    - Mature Rawls
  - Lawyer Reasoning
    - Persuasive
    - Anything that works
    - to win
    - Authoritative argument
      - settled > settled right
  - Different reasons for agreement
- Problems
  - Risk
    - Have to assume you’ll be worst
  - Kantian argument
  - Chain connection
  - Keynesian backdoor
  - Moral arbitrary argument proves too much
    - if luck

Immanual Kant

1724-1804
Hypothetical Imperative
- conditional
  - if-then
- not moral law to Kant
Categorical Imperative
- unconditional must
- Every circumstance
- Example
  - Never trust people as a means to an end
All modern social contract theorists are Kantians
Kant was skeptical it could be used in politics
- Skeptical of social contract theory

Thomas Hobbes

1588-1679
Leviathan
- Greatest work of political theory
- 1651
- Response to Aristotle
Consent
- John Locke
  - Theory of Politics
    - Workmanship
    - Obedience to gov is conditional
    - Consent
      - Irrevocable
        
        Even tacitly consent
        
        radical during Locke’s time
      - Bound to the majority
        
        not gov.
      - Trust relationship
        
        Residual right against gov.
        
        High stakes
        
        Can’t selectively resist one law
    - Welfare State
      - Everyone has right of what they could dare with land
    - Part of Enclosure Movement
      - Private Property
    - Common property from the land
      - Earth is for humans
      - Cant stop others
        
        Except by labor
    - Stronger sense of consent
    - Actual agreement not metaphor / feature of rationality

Marxism

Cultural Marxism
- Karl Mannheim
- Literacy Criticism
- Humanities
  - ideologies
  - Power relations
- Raymond Williams
- Frankfurt School
- University faculty
  - 1980s
    - Conservative think tanks
      - Heritage
      - AEI
- By-product of Marxism failure
- WWI Shock
  - Nationalism more powerful
    - why?
      - Wanted to understand
Core
- Idea of Freedom
- Not egalitarian at core
Continues to exist in other ideologies in the West

Karl Marx

1818-1883
Enlightenment thinker
- Freedom
  - Workmanship
  - Alienation + Division of Labor
  - Equality vs.
  - If freedom is depended on exploitation, no one has freedom
  - Capitalism productive to bring in communism highest good
    - Organizing production
      - Tension -> Falls apart -> repeat
    - Thesis / antithesis / synthesis
- Science
  - Dialectical method
    - Hegel
      - Marx reacting against
  - Materialist conception of history
- Das Capital
  - Rivaled Bible for Sales
- Base (economy) -> Superstructure (politics)
- German Marx (Younger)
  - Utopian politics
- English Marx
  - Sober to reality
- Challenge to Classical Political Economy
  - Trying to answer: where does value come from?
  - Commodity exchange
    - Commodity -> money -> commodity
      - Money -> commodity -> money
        
        M > m (profit)
        
        How does money seem to grow?
        
        Labor
        
        use value
        
        utility
        
        Exchange Value
        
        Price
        
        Determined by labor
        
        Socially necessary labor time (SNCT)
        
        Average skill to make product
        
        Waste of time to perfect
        
        Supply and demand
        
        Short run: prices
        
        long; output
        
        Labor theory of value explains long-run equilibrium price
        
        Labor Theory of Surplus Value
        
        Labor Power
        
        Commonity
        
        Takes more time to specialize
        
        Unique: Leads to fresh exchange value
        
        buying time (dinner) vs Investment
        
        Living human labor power is that its consumption as a use value leads to the creation of fresh exchange value = Value / Profit
        
        Secular variant of John Locke‘s miniture God’s
Exploitation
- competition = exploitation
- Class in itself vs. Class for itself
  - Identity politics
  - Communist Revolution
    - What people believe about their class identities
    - Members interests
- Working class
  - Necessity
  - in the power of others
- Micro
  - What costs to produce the worker
    - Wage
      - Will always tend toward subsistence
        
        unemployed always around
- Macro
  - 5 Part Theory of Crisis
    - Competition will eventually produce less value
      - Margins narrow
      - Rate of profit falls over time
    - Money
      - Liquidity
    - Monopolies and the elimination of competition
      - competition eliminates competition
    - Under-consumption
      - Pre-curer of Keynes
        
        People at top will save, workers will spend
      - Imperialism create new New Markets
    - - Adding more hours limits on physical
      - Machines
        
        Why capitalism is successful
        
        Find new innovation to make labor more productive
        
        more and more capital intensive
  - Working class consciousness
  - Cause communism
Motivation of people
- other referential
Ideal
- To each according to his ability to each according to his worth
  - Rewarded for the value of what they produce, wont be commonalities of the cost to produce them
Wont be an equal society in socialism
- until communism highest phase
Failure & Legacy
- Failures
  - teleological view of history
    - socialist utopia
  - Revolutions happened in peasant societies
- Wants vs Needs
- Main competitor to Utilitarianism and social contract theory
- Enduring insights about power relations
  - not small
  - other-referential
    - deep insight
    - right people aren’t self-referential
    - wrong who
  - insight of being in the power of others
- Micro
  - Labor Theory of Value
    - Alternative formulations
      - Freedom argument: Class monopoly and domination
    - Exploit might not reward fairly
      - but markets don’t reward fairly either
    - Hidden moral argument
      - Role of workmanship
        
        Why think labor is so special?
      - Corn theory of value and exploitation
        
        Corn no different than labor
    - Power only source of surplus
      - Feminist critique
      - Contributions
        
        capitalists
        
        dead workers
      - False
    - Incorrect
- Under-estimated the state stepping in to save capitalism
- Marco Theory
  - Working class consciousness
    - Compare to similar people
  - under consumption
    - Keynes
      - Counter-cyclical policies
  - Monopoly
    - Anti-trust Laws
  - Rate of Profit
    - New industries fixes it
  - Liquidity
    - 2008
      - Central bank solved it
  - Transcending scarcity

Anti-Enlightenment

Edmend Burke

1729-1797
Conservative
- Outlook
- Deep skepticism to theories of politics
- Disposition
Tradition
Human nature flawed
- Institutions accounting for human imperfections
Liberties
- inherited
  - Customs
  - institutions
  - Practice of society
- Passed down by generations
French Revolution
- Traumatized
Abstract Rights
- “Rights of man”
- dangerous
  - instability
- Should be grounded
  - practical
  - Historical
Rights of Man
- 1791
- Response to Burke
Human Condition
- We’re fumbling in the dark
  - Forces that shape societies and how much we can influence

Patrick Devlin

1905-1992
Conservative
- Burkian
Outraged Homosexuality and prostitution should be legalized
- Christian morality
- Tradition
  - Norms and beliefs of average person
  - People disgusted

Alasdair MacIntyre

Cant escape your roots
- Historical creatures
Revolted against Catholicism
- Marx vs Christianity
- Disappointed
- Careful leaving Enlightenment project
Why after virtue?
- Aristotle
  - Huge mistake Enlightenment left behind
- Disagreed with Hobbes
Justifying Morality
- Raw clay when born
  - - unrealized potential (tetelogical) vs. people are just who they are
- Always unsatisfying
Disagreements within traditions
- Doesn’t answer the questions
- Want it both ways
- No answers or prescriptions
Aristotle vs Nietzche
- Wants to solve the conundrum
- Nihilism
- Everything is meaningless
Enlightenment
- -> Rational Foundation for Morals (Hume, Kant, Bentham)
  - -> Doomed
    - Separated morality from traditional teleological framework
    - Reason Foundation separates moral claims from context
      - both ^: Vastly different approaches to morality (Utilitarianism, Deontology)
        
        Loss of shared moral framework
        
        Emotivism
Aristotianism
Emotivist Culture
- Can’t expect to resolve differences
  - Just have to find how to get along
- Seperation of means from ends in politics
  - Business schools
    - Managers
- People uncomfortable with “Horray/Boo” morality issue
- Can’t convince some people of other views
- Emotivism = Moral Judgements = Individual preference/emotions
- right/wrong = personal feelings
- Moral language is fragmented
  - Different assumptions

Failure of the Enlightenment Project

- Overestimates agreements in past
- Bad (Casual account)
- Best/True: Structure of human psychology

Democracy

Democracy and its Critics
- Realizing Enlightenment challenge?
  - Respect for individual rights?
  - Based on science?
- Made famous by its critics
  - Alexis de Tocqueville
    - Majority Tyranny
    - Distilled America
      - More as he got older due to slavery
    - U.S. knew how to tame equality
    - You can’t stop equality
  - Plato
    - Due to putting Socrates to death
  - Older than other ideologies
  - You know it when you see it

- Hamilton & Madison did the most; enemies
- Madison principle author
Essays in NY Newspapers
- to increase federation
  - Almost lost revolution
  - Needed stranger Federal Gov.
  - Constitution needed states to ratify
    - Needed NY
Didn’t use their own name
- “Publius”
  - Roman consul
Single most political theory
“Factions”
Republican Tradition
- Aristotle tradition
  - 1-Monarchy
  - Few
    - Aristotracy
  - Many
    - Democracy
  - Best to have elements of all three
    - Polity
      - US version of that
General Will
- Majority Rule
  - Technical solutions fail
- Paradox of Voting
  - Cyclical majorities
  - Societies seem to be irrational
  - control order of voting + preferences
    - Control voting
    - Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem
      - Three or more options
        
        Doesn’t produce fair decisions
      - “Will of the people”
        
        Voting systems structure
Deliberation in the real world
- Better for group to individually submit guesses or the answer compared to getting it by deliberation
- Wisdom of Crowds
- Fishkin’s alternative
  - Deliberative Polls
    - Adv.
      - Random
      - in depth
        
        3 days
        
        Experts to argue both sides
    - Problem
      - Demo’s?
      - Framing Effects
      - Agenda Control
        
        Gerald Kramer
        
        You can get any result
      - Deliberation can undermine truth
        
        Deliberation between people that agree make them more extreme
Habermas Deliberate Ideal
- Assumes people want to agreement
- Assuming away politics
- Demanding
- Deliberation can undermine agreement
  - Marriage therapy
  - Marx on conscious raising
  - “Gag rules”
    - Stephen Holmes
    - People who believe things too strongly
      - Get them out of politics
      - Religion
- Counter factual
  - ideal
- ‘ideal speech situation’
- Deliberate Democracy
- Get people to agree to what General Will will be
  - Manufacturing then discovering
Westminister System in Practice
- Passionate
- Argumentative
- House of Commons
- All the Power in one place
  - No Judicial
  - No Congress
- Majoritarian Democracy
Majority Rule
- How to Protect Individual Rights?
- Critique
  - Being on side of status que minimizes chance you’ll be on the losing side
- John Locke
  - Defender of Majority Rule

Competition and Democracy

Joseph Schumpeter
- Need competition in politics
- Competition > Power
  - Difference and federalist
    - Not dividing it up
- Market Analogy
  - Democracy is a political analogue to consumer sovereignty in the market
- - Politicians will run to the middle
  - Goldwater - lost
  - Reagan - won
  - What to compete over?
    - Primary
      - Have to get base then pivot in general
    - Personality
    - Personal attacks
    - Polling

Electoral Systems

Plurality
- Most votes get the seal
  - single member districts
- Two big parties
  - Duuverger’s Law
Proportional Representation
- percentage of votes is how many seats you get
- Tiny parties can extract massive amounts of power
  - Israel

Democracy in mature Enlightenment

Science

Mindmap

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Moral Foundations of Politics - Yale Courses

Enlightenment

Political

Early

Jeremy Bentham

Problems

Neo-Classical

Charles Stevenson

Economics

Synthesis of Rights and Utility

John Stuart Mill

Harm Principle

Robert Nozick

John Rawls

Immanual Kant

Thomas Hobbes

Marxism

Karl Marx

Anti-Enlightenment

Edmend Burke

Patrick Devlin

Alasdair MacIntyre

Failure of the Enlightenment Project

Democracy

Competition and Democracy

Electoral Systems

Democracy in mature Enlightenment

Mindmap