Rousseau, Mill, Wollstonecraft, Burke

State of Nature for Rousseau

• Rousseau thinks humans were originally peaceful, independent, and naturally good—but society corrupts them.

“Rousseau says that as civilization ‘progressed,’ people lost their freedom because they became dependent on others, unequal in wealth and status, and constantly judged themselves by comparing themselves to everyone else.”

Voting for Rousseau

• Votes are judgements or opinions about the common

  good

• way of combining individual choices to produce a social choice.

• expresses an opinion or judgment regarding an independent matter of fact.

• Creates general will

General Will

• we count peoples’ opinions about what the general interest is and the majority gets it right

Why Majority?

• Unanimity is near impossible

• An objective conception of good is elitiest

• general will (derived from the majority) is democratic and entrusts people will vote to preserve

Mills main topic

The subject of this Essay is…the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual.

• Mill seeks a critical standard that can be used judge and regulate the exercise of social and political power

• Mill is interested in both the exercise of power through the law (i.e. the coercive power of the state) and moral coercion of public opinion

Mills Principle

1. Preventing someone from harming others can justify interfering with their liberty (the Principle of Harm to Others or Harm Principle)

2. Principal of harm is the only reason that can justify such interference with liberty. There are no other good justifications.

Mill Rejects

• Legal Paternalism: He rejects limiting a person’s liberty for their own good, whether that good be physical or moral

• Legal Moralism: He rejects limiting a person’s liberty to make them do what is right

These two form the difference between persuasion and coercion: we can try to reason and persuade a person to do that which is good for them or that which is right. But we have no justification for using coercion against them

Mill Clarifications

1. Mill says the harm principle limits interference to conduct that harms other people, not self-regarding actions.

2. People can harm others through inaction or failing to do their duty. Mill clarifies what he has in mind through examples: (1) giving evidence in court; (2) bearing one’s fair share in common defense or any other joint work that society requires; (3) interposing to protect the defenseless (597).

Mill types of Liberties

Negative liberty: Absence of interferance or obstacles in the way of individuals living as they please.

• A free society would thus be one that maximizes such negative freedom. Interference in peoples’ lives is only justified because it is necessary prevent less freedom overall

Positive Liberty: Mill’s notions of individuality, man’s permanent interests as a progressive being, and perfectionism suggest a notion of positive liberty as a kind of autonomy through the development of one’s powers and capacities

Mills Absolute Tolerance Defence

1. Tolerance will lead to the emergence of knowledge and truth, more complete knowledge and truth, and truth held or believed in the appropriate way

2. These knowledge and truth-enhancing consequences serve “utility in the largest sense grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being.”

Mills on Tolerance

• One should silence an opinion or doctrine only if it can be known to be false with certainty.

• An opinion or doctrine can never be known to be false with certainty.

• Therefore: (3) One should never silence an opinion or doctrine.

Wolfstonecraft main points

• National education

  • Cosmopolitan: . She is trying to link the cause of women to rights and virtue and to the cause of humanity. That is, she is trying to bring women’s rights in line with the fundamental republican trajectory of the French Revolution

  • Any alleged defect in women’s rationality is due to the patriarchal educational and social system. Give women better and more equal social system and they would exhibit reason and the corresponding virtues. Women have a rational nature and hence can benefit from education; their virtue is the same as men. Failure in education system

Wolf’s formal argument against Tallyrand

1. If Talleyrand accepts the rights of man, then Talleyrand must accept the rights of women.

2. Talleyrand accepts the rights of man.

Informal Wolf argument against Tallyrand

Talleyrand would need to show that women lack reason, and therefore that the rights of man do not belong to them (the assumption being that it is virtue of possessing reason that men possess the rights of man).

Republicanism in Frenchy Rev

Elements of the republican view:

• - Non-domination

•  Freedom under law

•  Public Spiritedness and patriotism (not nationalism)

•  Civic duties important

Wollstonecraft on Enlightment

Man’s preeminence over other animals is based on reason.

•  Virtue is what raises one being over another. (Not birth, property, or station.)

•  Purpose of the passions: So that human beings can acquire knowledge 1

• We are capable of improvement, or what Wollstonecraft following Rousseau calls perfectibility. Human civilization has an important place in this developmental process in her view.

•  The problem of evil (see her response to Rousseau)

•  Distortions of reason to justify prejudices

•  Problem of partial experience and narrow half-truths (return to this point with Mill)

•  Reason is needed to relax the grip of prescription

•  Shares Rousseau’s views about the corruption of European people, but rejections his views about the state of nature and aspects of his critique of civilization

•  Against kings and concentration of power, including standing armies; against rank and its corrupting effects

• A person’s character is formed by their profession to some extent: we need to keep this in mind always

Burke context

Reacting to the reception of the revolution in England. In the process of commenting on the French Revolution, Burke makes several points that cluster around a distinctive kind of conservative political philosophy.

Main themes for Burke

•  Defense of tradition, the monarchy, nobility, rights of inheritance, and property

•  Criticism of political rationalism

•  Criticism of equality and “leveling”

•  Criticism of radical change

•  Defense of an alternative conception of politics as an art or skill (not an abstract science) that draws on experience and focuses on circumstances, tradition, and social and historical embeddedness

Burke’s Cautions

• large-scale change that is consciously revolutionary or radical in nature

• Emphasis on reforming the sysrem

• Burke’s not optimistic because France is attempting momentous changes to their whole society guided by people who lack experience.

Burke on tradition

• Existing social and political orders—including not only his own in England, but also that in France—are the repositories of wisdom.

• e mere fact that something is traditional means that there must be something good about it

• hubris—to fail to recognize the value of existing customs and practices. The old order has valuable elements that should be retained and built up rather than being swept.

Given the received benefits of the existing order, the attendant risks of a large-scale change, and the general unavailability of the requisite political knowledge and experience, we are led to the conclusion that the revolution will make things worse, rather than better.

Burke on Theory

• Anti-intellectual

  • revolutionary change finds part of its motivation and justification in abstract philosophical theories of rights or liberty, i.e. in “metaphysic rights”

  • Misguided conception

• All liberties and rights are historically and culturally embodied. They don’t exist in the abstract.

Burke: Abstract vs Matierial

experience and instinct are to be valued more than reason and abstract theorizing; and, the particular, local, and historically specific is to be cherished more than the general and universal.

Burke on the Rulers

• We should be ruled by the virtuous and wise property-holders

• stress on property seems to be that it provides for stability and continuity

• Moreover, they have the leisure time to make wise decisions

• . More the idea of inheritance provides Burke with an alternative model to that of abstract theorizing or deduction of first principles and their application to politics and society.

• property that is inherited is passed on from one generation to the next. This established a kind of continuity and provides a kind of natural pattern of change. Thus, we would follow “nature, which is wisdom without reflection, and above it.”