Philosophy quiz #3 study guide

Freedom

Where does political philosophy begin?

• Just like ethics, political philosophy asks normative questions

• Political philosophy is different because of: 

  • The scope of the question

  • The focus on the form and justification for political institutions

  • The focus on justice - a particular kind of ethical concern  regarding structural relationships, institutions and the distribution of benefits and burdens

• Because of this, major concerns in political philosophy are: 

  • The limits of the claims we can make on others 

  • The justification of the control and power of institutions 

  • The role of social structures 

  • The values that should underpin the political organisation of society

    • Answer: Freedom

Liberalism: core ideas

• Liberty/freedom

  • Negative liberty as non-interference

  • Positive liberty as capability/effective freedom

  • Republican liberty as non-domination

• Political philosophy begins with a presumption in favour of liberty and how it ought to be protected

  • Governance and law are inherently burdensome and thus must be justified

  • To think about this, imagine if there was no state

What if there was no state?

• The state of nature is an imagined scenario where there are no laws, governments or political institutions

  • What would such a scenario look like

  • How and why does a state improve the scenario for everyone?

Two very different responses

• Thomas Hobbes

  • Like would be ‘nasty brutish and short’ with a war of all against all

  • Requires a dictator to impose order and secure the liberty of the weak

• John Locke

  • Life would be mostly peaceful

  • But we would consent to a democratic state to protect and provide our rights to life, liberty and prosperity

• Both think that the state ultimately protects liberty in some forms

Liberalism: core ideas

• Liberals vary as to what kind of laws and policies can be justified

  • National defense/security

  • Market system

  • Social investment, welfare protection and insurance

  • Classical liberals vs social liberals/liberal-egalitarians

    • As we will see, these disagreements track:

    • The kind of conception of liberty endorsed

    • The importance of other values and considerations e.g. equality (we’ll study these later in the course)

Negative Liberty

• What is a negative liberty?

  • Freedom of interference

• What examples of violations of negative liberty are there

  • Freedom of speech

  • Freedom of sexuality

  • Stopping someone from entering a building

Negative liberty and the state (consequentialist)

• When (if ever) is interference permitted under a theory of negative freedom? 

• One approach: John Stuart Mill’s harm principle: 

  • Liberty ought to be respected unless someone is under (a threat of) harm.

• Self-regarding acts vs acts harmful to others 

• Only harmful acts are the business of government

• Problems with Mill’s harm principle: 

  • There aren’t many truly self-regarding acts!

  • What counts as “harm”?

    • Threshold

  • The principle is under-determinate

    • The fact an act is harmful to others makes it government’s business, but doesn’t determine what government should do

Negative liberty and the state (deontological) 

• ‘Natural’ rights approach (following Locke): 

  • Liberty ought to be protected unless it is to secure someone’s rights

• The basic liberty of one constrains the liberty of all

• Rights have priority over ‘the good’ (Rawls)

• People have rights. Government should secure people’s rights. 

• But government should also be neutral and not promote conceptions of how people should live their lives

• Why not?

  • Each person should be free to choose what is a ‘good’ life

• So how should we justify liberal principles?

  • Hypothetical social contract (Locke)

  • “Overlapping consensus” (Rawls)

• Problems with the ‘natural rights’ approach: 

  • Not clear where our ‘natural rights’ come from and what justifies them

  • Sometimes we need to violate rights

  • It may be impossible for the state to be neutral and promote some form of ‘the good’

  • It is also under-determinate (thought to a lesser extent)

Summary

• A presumption in favour of liberty – and specifically, of protecting individuals from interference – has played a big role in the history of political philosophy 

• State interference can be justified via (i) Mill’s harm principle or (ii) to secure individual’s basic rights. 

• Both of these theories have problems that they either inherit from their deontological/utilitarian foundations, or from the underlying idea of protection from ‘interference’ –we’ll examine on Wednesday two alternative approaches to defining freedom!

Recap

• Political philosophy has focused heavily on the idea of liberty

• The state is thought to promote liberty

• But how should we understand what liberty is?

• Negative liberty is freedom from interference

• Two views

Positive freedom

• What is positive freedom

  • Freedom to do a particular thing

  • Focuses more directly on the value of autonomy/available options

• Is a violation of freedom possible on this conception?

  • Freedom is not so much something to be violated on this account as it is something to be promoted. Anything that limits the range of things we can do reduces our freedom but it does not violate it

• What might a state promoting positive freedom look like

The (Neo-) Republican Ideal of Freedom

• "Someone dominates or subjugates another, to the extent that

  • They have the capacity to interfere

  • On an arbitrary basis

  • In certain choices that the others is in a position to make

Nationalism

A claim about identity and community

• Berlin “ Every revolution and upheaval… contained a nationalist component” following the communist revolution

  • Can look here to anti-colonial movements, the Arab Spring, etc.

• Passionate

What is Nationalism?

• Nationalism - A movement to identify with and support the interests of one’s nation

  • Begins to appear in Middle ages across Europe → Treaty of Versailles → On the decline: The ‘National question’ was solved On the rise: the key to any future revolutions

  • ‘Nationalism was, by and large, regarded in Europe as a passing phase (Berlin 1991)

What is a nation? 

• An ‘imagined community’ (B. Anderson) united by a set of features (Miller): 

  • Belief in the existence by its members

  • Historical continuity (formation, context and values)

  • Active identity/culture

  • Connection to a geographical place

  • Shared traits (may be cultural, linguistic, etc.). 

• Which features are most important?

• When does a nation become a nation? E.G. Canada is only 157 years old based on the confederation of 1867?

• Are there any features missing

Nationalism as belonging? 

• An ‘imagined community’ that helps to constitute our personal identity

• A nation is not a state: possible to have a nation without a state and a state with multiple nations (try to think of some examples!)

A claim about ethical duties

Cosmopolitanism

• The theories of ethics (utilitarianism, Kantianism) that we have looked at focus on general duties

• Directly applied to the state, these general global duties to all persons (and potentially animals!) worldwide. 

• The perspective on the extent of justice is called cosmopolitanism

• But it is not how states normally organize the support services they provide

Associative and General Duties

• “The duties we owe to our fellow nationals are different from, and more extensive than, the duties we owe to human beings as such.” 

  • General duties are those duties we owe to any individual independent of our having special relations with them. 

  • Associative duties are those duties we owe to others with whom we have a special relationship. They may be more demanding, more extensive and/or different in kind from general duties. 

    • Concentric Circle Analogy

Thought Experiment

• There are two people in the burning house. 

• The person in the right window is a co-national

• The person in the left window is clearly foreign

• You only have time to save one of the two people. 

Implications of Accepting Associative Duties to Co-Nationals?

• Depends on exactly how strong you think those associative duties are.

  • Do they entirely outweigh the strength of duties to non-nationals?

  • Or do they simply weaken them?

Associative Duties Affect: 

• Social welfare

• Budget for international aid

• Immigrants’ claims

• Trade duties

• Duties to support other states

A claim about political self-determination

National Self-determination

• The Principle of National Self-determination states that every nation should determine its own direction

• In general, this will require nations and states to overlap, so that each nation has its own state

• So why should we have national self-determination?

  • Protecting national culture

  • Political stability

  • Collective autonomy

  • Anti-colonial

  • Trust and solidarity

Secession

• If a nation exists within an already existing nation-state when should the nation be able to secede and create its own state?

• Examples

  • Anti-colonial movements

  • Scottish Referendum

  • Kurdish

  • Palestinians

  • Indigenous Nations

  • Progressive Nationalist party of British Columbia

Summary

• Nationalism involves a claim about identity, ethical duties, and political self-determination

  • Identity: sense of belonging to a community united by certain features

  • Ethical duties: stronger to our co-nationals

  • Political SD: nations should determine their own futures

Immigration

• In general, the principle of national self-determination is also thought to justify a state’s rights to control its borders through immigration restrictions

• Philosopher call this a ‘a right to exclude’ would be immigrants because it gives states an entitlement to determine who can and cannot enter their border

The Right to Exclude

• If there is no right to exclude, then there would be no justification for closed borders. 

• There are various possible justifications for the right to exclude. For instance, 

  • Economic

  • Practical

  • (Potentially) Ethical

  • … and of course, nationalist!

• Nationalism is therefore only one such justification. We’ll focus on just this one here. 

• Important! Even if a state has a right to exclude, this might admit of plausible exceptions

  • E.g. there may be rights to exclude anyone except refugees

Nationalism and the RIght to Exclude

• Nationalist justifications for the right to exclude rely on the idea of collective self-determination (Fine, 2013): 

  • Freedom of association applied to the nation-state

  • Protection of national culture (especially for minorities, or languages)

  • Associative ownership over ‘collective accomplishments’

Nationalism or Patriotism?

• Nationalism is a sense of superiority - violates the idea that all nations have an equal right to self-determination

Vs 

• Duties of ‘Civic Patriotism’ as love of one’s country which can help to make justice possible

Democracy

Background

• What does the state do?

  • Individual level: protect freedom (or another political value)

  • Collective: protect and promote national self-determination

• How should a state function?

  • What form should its institutions have?

  • How should it make decisions?

How should a state function and why?

• Autocracy

  • Ruled by one person

    • Monarchy

• Oligarchy

  • Ruled by a smaller set of people

    • Aristocracy

    • Theocracy

    • Plutocracy

• Democracy

  • Churchill: ‘Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all of the others

What is democracy and why is it valuable?

• Democracy: An association of people who enjoy equal rights of participation in their decision procedure and vote directly upon issues. 

• Instrumental value

  • A valuable instrumentally if A is valuable because of the ends it brings about. 

  • What makes democracy valuable is the results that it produces including the protection of interests

• Non-instrumental value

  • A is valuable non-instrumentally (sometimes ‘intrinsically’) if A is valuable in and of itself

  • What makes democracy valuable is the qua;otoes that are inherent in the method (fairness, freedom and equality)

Instrumental value

• Democracy is valuable because of the things it brings

• John Stuart Mill argued that a democratic method of making legislation is better than non-democratic methods in three ways: 

  • Strategically, 

  • Epistemically and

  • Via the improvement of the characters of democratic citizens

Instrumental value: Strategie

• Democracy forces decision-makers to take into account the interests, rights and opinions of most people in society

• E.g. Amartya Sen: “no substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent country with a democratic form of government and a relatively free press”

Instrumental value: epistemic

• Democracy brings a lot of people into the process of decision making

• There is a voice inside us all. Democracy allows us to take advantage of many sources of information to critically assess laws and policies

• Democratic decision-making tends to be more informed and enhances critical assessment of the different moral ideas that guide decision-makers

Instrumental value: character

• Democracy has beneficial effects on character

  • Enhances the moral qualities of citizens

  • Enhances sympathy and solidarity between citizens

  • Enhances the quality of legislation

  • Encourage political engagement

The challenge from Epistocracy

• Instrumental justification of democracy are particularly vulnerable to a challenge because they focus on outcomes

• If the focus is on outcomes then we should adopt a method that would directly try to achieve the best outcome: rule by the knowledgeable

Epistocracy

• Rule by those who know best

• Important! Epistocracy is relative

• The more power over public decisions is granted based on knowledge*, the more epistocratic is a political system

Plato’s and Aristotle's version

• Plato

  • Philosopher King

• Aristotle

  • Larger group of knowers

John Stuart Mill

• Everybody gets a vote

• BUT:

  • Those who are more educated should get more votes

Jason Brennan

• “Elitist Electoral System”

  • Citizens should have to possess sufficient moral and epistemic competence in order to have right to vote

  • Excluding epistemically, inferior voters from elections less unjust than unconditional (equal) universal suffrage

  • The competence requirement

Generalizing to a premise form argument

• Those who hold power over others should be justified in doing so

• Having a right to vote is a form of power over others

• You lack justification to exercise power over others when you act ignorantly, irrationally, or viciously. 

• Some people exercise their right to vote ignorantly, irrationally, or viciously. 

Conclusion: 

• Those who exercise their right ignorantly, irrationally, or viciously are not justified to hold such power

Intrinsic value: Liberty and Equality

Liberty: 

• Democracy extends the idea that each ought to be master of their life to the domain of collective decision making

• Each person’s life is deeply affected by the social environment in which he or she lives. Only when each person has an equal voice and vote in the process of collective decision making will each have control over their larger environment

Equality: 

• Democracy is intrinsically just, because it “is a publicly clear way of recognizing and affirming the equality of citizens.” Cristiano 2008, 96.  

• Citizens can see themselves as treated equally in the democratic process - the equal vote, equality of opportunities to run for office, and equal opportunities to participate in negotiation and discussion. 

Does democracy protect the values of liberty and equality?

Majority rule

The intrinsic value of democracy is therefore commonly associated with majority rule

Political Equality → Majority rule

• Majority rule: a proposal should be adopted if it receives the support of at least 50% + 1 of the votes cast

• To allow the will of the minority to prevail would be to give greater weight to the vote of each member of the minority than to the vote of each member of the majority, thus violating political equality

Problems with Majority Rule

• The challenge from epistocracy

  • The unease with the instrumental justification led us to look at intrinsic justifications… but outcomes might still matter!

  • Majorities can easily vote for the ‘worse’ outcome (rejoinder: who are we to judge what the ‘worse’ outcome is?)

• The problem of intense preferences

  • Suppose that a majority of the population are generally quite apathetic when it comes to a particular issue, but another apportion of the public have very intense preferences

  • E.g., legalizing queer marriage. Cis amd heterosexual couples might be apathetic while queer couples wishing to marry may have very intense preferences

  • Is it wrong that this is not taken into account? How can democratic theory be adjusted?

• The problem of persistent minorities

  • Think of the green party, they never get to have any real influence, they are a minority who is never elected

Alternatives…?

• Lottocracy

• Open democracy

• Democratic authority

• Proportional elections

Summary

• Democratic power (like any power) requires justification. There are two routes to reaching that justification: 

  • Instrumental value: democracy is justified because of the outcomes it produces 

  • Non-instrumental (intrinsic) value: democracy is justified because of the values it embodies 

• But each of these justifications is vulnerable to objections. 

• The one we have focused on closely is the challenge from epistocracy which argues that states should be ruled by experts. 

• There are also independent problems for principles of majority rule, though: 

  • Persistent minorities

  • Intense preferences

  • Epistocracy

Gender & Race

Context

• Feminism has a long history, normally organised into three ‘waves’

  • First wave: 1800s-1920s: focus on universal suffrage

  • Second wave: 1960s-80s: focus on greater liberties and legal reforms

  • Third wave: 1990=present many forms and target more underlying social norms and issues of gender

• Similarly, anti racism (or black liberation) has a long history, too. 

  • Abolition of slavery (Frederick Douglass)

  • Civil rights movement and apartheid (W.E.B. Du bois, MLK, etc)

  • Modern anti-racism e.g., black lives matter

• Importantly, feminists and anti-racists have always disagreed, and they still do!

• We will focus on contemporary analytical approaches to feminism and anti-racism, although these tend to draw on the literature in other areas, e.g., Critical Theory. 

• Tackle these topics together because both focus on the wider social structures that generate the unique forms of oppression that target gender and race.

The case of Sandy

‘Sandy is a single mother of two, who works in a mall and is facing eviction because a developer bought the building she lives in and wants to convert it into condominiums. 

Sandy finds few options for housing: the apartments close to work are too expensive, she worries that the inner‐city neighbourhoods are dangerous for her kids, and the apartments further away necessitate buying a car. 

She decides to buy a car, but then discovers she needs a three‐month deposit for an apartment and can’t pay. She finds herself on the brink of homelessness, through no fault of her own, nor through any obviously blameworthy or illegal actions of anyone else.’

Is this unfair? What is the cause of Sandy’s situation? Who is responsible?

Structural Injustice…?

• One explanation is Structural Injustice

• The concept comes from Iris Marion Young. 

  • A structural injustice exists when certain individuals, likely as members of social groups, are vulnerable to oppression as a result of social structures. 

• Frequently, there may be no obvious agent who is responsible for this oppression (just like in the case of Sandy), though there may also be many cases in which agents clearly are responsible.

• Let's break that down:

  • Social group → One social group is distinguished from another by particular social characteristics or practices the members are perceived to share (e.g. ‘cyclists’)

  • Injustice → A wrongdoing at a collective level that generally concerns institutions or the distribution of benefits and burdens

  • Social structure → A system of social norms, practices or institutions. E.g., the law, or driving cars

  • Oppression → Oppression occurs when there are systemic constraints on the actions and freedoms of individuals. 

The case of Sandy (condt)

• Sandy faces oppression as a single mum as a result of the social structures that shape her life…

  • Her options are constrained by certain institutional rules/policies/circumstances e.g., she must put a 3-month deposit on her rental, there are on apartments near her work etc. 

  • Her options are constrained by certain social norms e.g., she believes that her children need to live in a ‘safe’ neighbourhood, meaning one that is white and middle-class. 

  • These restrictions partly result from her membership in social groups to which she might belong, ‘women’, ‘black’, ‘worker’, ‘single’, ‘mum’, etc. limit her options.

• No one is obviously acting wrongly, but Sandy is being wronged. 

• The concept of structural injustice allows us to explain this

• In real life, some people are sexist and they are racist

• These things are obviously wrong: they either harm people or undermine rights

• But the problem is that there isn’t always a clear wrongdoer, people are not always aware or intentional in their wrongdoing and/or focusing on individuals seems to miss something more ‘systemic’

• To move beyond the case of Sandy: 

• The social groups ‘women’ and ‘black people’ face injustices in the form of oppression because of social structures.

Gender and Race: Social Groups

Restrictions partly result from membership in social groups

• Social groups are socially constructed

• This means that individuals are perceived to belong to them by others, perhaps due to the social practices they engage in, their features, etc. 

• This does not mean they are not ‘real’. 

• They may or may not be based on natural existing properties (we’ll put that to one side today). 

• Whether they are or not, the social group is relevant and carries meaning

• Individuals may or may not choose to ‘belong’ to a social group

Gender and Race: Institutional Factors

Options are constrained by certain rules/circumstances

• Institutional rules and social circumstances constrain the kings of things we are able to do, and the ways we can live

• They are regulate our collective lives, and, as we have seen, have their justification in the protection of rights and freedoms (and as we will see – economic justice!). 

• But these rules and circumstances can also disproportionately disadvantage individuals within particular social groups. 

• E.g. maternity and paternity leave, school catchment areas, landlord protections, or even urban planning (e.g. roads, transit networks, Options are constrained by certain rules/circumstances etc)

Gender and Race: Social Norms

Options are constrained by certain social norms

• Social norms are informal requirements to behave in a certain way, be a certain way, or believe certain things (dietrick and Speikerman 2024). 

• They are created through explicit and implicit social practices, e.g., being quiet after 10pm in a particular neighbourhood, or man-spreading

• Importantly, social norms can be moral, neutral and immoral. 

• Social norms are often implicit and unacknowledged. 

• When someone breaks a social norm there may be social consequences

• Social norms can be hard to break and hard to change

White supremacy

• One claim is that all these forms of racism are (more or less) influenced and generated by the social structure of white supremacy

• Race has been socially constructed in a way that systematically subordinates black people and privileges white people

• The term ‘white supremacy’ is a way of understanding the social practices of racism that evokes a ‘political world that we all frame ourselves in relationship to’ (hooks). 

• In other words, ‘white supremacy is the actual structure that produces racial oppression. This allows us to think beyond individual actions

Feminist Metaphysics and Social Ontology

• Social metaphysics/ontology

  • What are the “building blocks” of the social world? What makes something social (rather than, say, natural)?

  • What is a social group?

  • What is a social institution?

• Feminist metaphysics

  • What is gender?

  • What is a woman/a man/a genderqueer folk?

  • What is femininity/masculinity

  • What is pregnancy

• Both

  • What is oppression/ideology/social structure/a social explanation/intersectionality/social construction/misogyny?

Social construction: what it is not

• When philosophers say, “X is socially constructed”, it is sometimes mistaken to mean that

  • X is not real/X is imaginary

  • X does not exist

  • X is not important/important for the “wrong” reason (e.g., not real but politicized anyway)

  • How X is solely depends on our arbitrary whim (this is especially common for gender)

• For example, calendars are socially constructed. THey are not imagery, do exist, are important, and are the way they are not solely because of our arbitrary whim. 

• In the social ontology/feminist metaphysics literature, things of multiple ontological categories (different ways of classifying how and what exists) are considered to be socially constructed: group membership, social property (of persons and things), social relations, legal status, so on and so forth. To get a better grip of this ontological mess, two further distinctions between different kinds of social construct/constructions are useful.

Social construction: idea vs object

• THe claim that money is socially constructed has two readings

  • The idea and concept of money is dependent on our social practices

    • Concept helps us organize a messy and complex world through a unified lens of cognition. Yet it does not always mpa onto “joints” of nature or the social world as we discover new things about nature or reconfigure the landscape of the social world. 

    • E.g., the concept of money plausibly used to involve it being a physical means of exchange, but it arguably no longer does. 

  • Some groups of object including paper bills, coins, cheques, etc., are brought into existence in virtue of our social practices

    • We can further distinguish between the social construction of an F as G (e.g., a piece of paper as a money) and the social construction of the group G. Social ontologists disagree on whether these are two different questions with different answers. 

Social construction: causal vs constitutive

• There are two kinds of social construction: 

  • Causal construction (causation)

    • X is causally constructed if X is causally influenced by social forces, including social practices, institutional rules, laws etc. 

    • E.g., a statue is causally constructed by an artist whose causes the statue to exist by shaping it from a lump of clay

  • Constitutive construction (constitution)

    • X is constitutively constructed if to be X is to be (partially) constituted by things like social practices, institutional rules, laws etc. 

    • E.g., the statue is partially constituted of the lump of clay but not of the artist. A piece of paper bill is (partially) constitutively constructed by a piece of paper, certain prints on the paper, and collective acceptance of papers with said prints to be paper bills. 

    • Views that argue for certain kinds/objects to be constitutively constructed often aim to debunk the assumed “naturalness” of them. 

Misogyny

• Naive conception: a property of individual agents (typically, although not necessarily, men) who are prone to feel hatred, hostility, or other similar emotions toward any and every woman, or at least women generally, simply because they are women (2017, p.32). 

• Manne finds the naive conception too narrow: 

  • It does not account for hostility towards particular women and articular kinds of women:

  • It overlooks the ideological and hence political aspect of misogyny.

• Manne’s preferred definition: misogyny ought to be understood as the system that operates within a patriarchal social order to police and enforce women’s subordination and to uphold male dominance (ibid, 33).