I have more than a month of “Justice” to catch up on, after I took what I thought would be a short break for the Jewish holy days during which I’d catch up every few days. I’ll try not to do that again. It's also more than interesting that I have been thinking about this course and reading notes in the period around our recent election.
I noticed in my notes about the draft vs. conscription that there’s a note about Rousseau, who I didn’t think really came up in the course. It cites him for the idea that “in a true free state citizens do and not buy.” I think it’s talking about a radical distinction between public and private goods.
Professor Sandel used the question of military service to iterate the concept of equality. Previously, in utilitarianism, every person weights the same in social calculations. Now he went back and asked: What if equality is not in fact a self-evident given? Which brought us to libertarianism.
I didn’t remember quite how explicitly the link was made between libertarianism and the Reagan administration – the notes mention both Milton Friedman and David Stockman, Reagan’s first budget director. But what I do remember is that this was the point in the course where my own understanding of what a contemporary political philosophy is changed in the most important way.
Growing up in the ‘70s and as a teen in the ‘80s, I basically thought that Democrats believed in equality, both economic and racial, and were willing to spend public money for those, and that Republicans believed in free enterprise first and put more of an emphasis on national defense. I thought that Republican-ism was basically cruel.
The turn in the course to libertarianism was the first time I understood that there is a more fundamental disagreement that centers on the nature of freedom. So in Robert Nozick’s version, you posit an equal “initial state” and ask whether people are coerced in any way in their transactions and life choices. If not, you can’t critique the end result, which just emerges from free choices and exchanges. Nozick grounds this is in a kind of equal individual liberty, Locke’s theory of property where anyone can acquire something initially through their own labor, so long as enough is available for everyone to be able to do that.
I didn’t buy that from the beginning, clearly because the first premise doesn’t represent the real world. There was no initial state of equality that our current inequality emerged from. Nozick seems to reject that, at least in his writing (though I have heard very recently somewhere that in real life he thought of course there are reasons for state action). But I certainly did take seriously the argument that an “equality override” over individual liberty could be arbitrary and needs a robust justification. Professor Sandel, who clearly did not support Nozick’s libertarianism, absolutely made us presumably liberal students sit with the premises about liberty and property for a good long time. Taxation was presumptively forced labor or slavery, my notes say about liberatarianism.
In section, Benor gave a deeper dive into Locke, and possibly some interpretation. He leaned into Locke’s reliance on reason over power as a justification for private property in both the state of nature and under civil government. Somehow, in a way I don’t understand, the initial appropriation of property, by mixing land or things with labor, is limited by the need to leave enough for everyone else. A class society is just and it’s good for everyone. But in a state of nature this order is unsafe and tenuous, so people will rationally consent to a government that secures this order. So Locke seems to posit that even poor people are better off in a class society with private property than in a more equal state of nature. Locke’s is an argument, based on reason, or more accurately based on an account that can be couched in terms of reasons. It hardly looks airtight and it’s actually quite a consequentialist argument all the way down.
Professor Sandel pointed out the dialectic so far of the course, and one thing I marvel at is how he did make all of this into a dialectic and not just a survey. Utilitarianism we milked for a lot, but it has a problem with individual rights. Libertarianism corrects for that, but its account of rights is limited to property and economic rights. So what about human rights, and is there a more robust account of equality?
That got him to articulate the concept of a “right”, which is a claim that is fundamental and overrides otherwise sensible claims.
So he brought us to Kant. There is a big conceptual step back, toward a concept of human nature – that we are both sensual and rational beings, who can act out of inclination or choice. Our capacity to choose is what makes us human and gives us dignity, and morality in general is to treat all human beings in light of our dignity. Individual rights flow from and secure dignity, not property. On this account, morality cannot be about material consequences at all, but duty, the moral law itself.
There is a paradox in Kant – the more free we are, the more we are morally bound to a universal law that will be the same for everyone. It seems like the very determinism that a pure materialist might hold to. Kant says that all other ways of acting are however based on the finitude and contradictions of desire and inclinations, so only a moral law chosen purely on rational grounds can be just.
Kant’s critique of Locke and libertarianism is that rights are not in nature at all, not in physical nature or the nature of the land. So rights cannot be derived from land or property and a person’s interaction with them.
At this point, Professor Sandel grouped libertarianism and Kantianism as two forms of “liberalism.” In both, there are rights that cannot be overridden for a utilitarian good, and a presumption that the state should be neutral with respect to the good life. I’m not sure how he got to the second premise as a Kantian one. But it was really important for me to get this definition of “liberalism”, which I think had been in the Milton Friedman reading, as different from the liberalism of being a Democrat. It was also important to see the political debate in the U.S. potentially as a philosophical debate.
Also at this point, and for the next couple of lectures, there was a gap between Kantian equality of dignity, and two other colloquially “liberal” things: economic equality, and a state neutral with regard to the common good. Safeguarding individual autonomy seems as I read like something a Lockean libertarian state could do also, if it is not going to force people into a specific conception of social or economic equality?
I think this might be an imperfection in the dialectic design of the course, in that I’m not sure that Kant himself was ever an egalitarian liberal politically. The course went toward issues of public education, like whether a state could teach creationism and whether school vouchers are better or worse than universal public school. Things got a bit muddled.
Although I have to say that the paper I think I wrote about education launched me on something professional. Educational policy questions were obviously interesting philosophical questions. But all the thinking about education and the different dimensions of content and access planted a thought I hadn't had before, that education might be a super important area for the practice of moral philosophy. And maybe I should think about being an educator, even though I didn't think of myself as much of a classroom teacher. Maybe it would be worth developing that aspect of myself, because of its ethical importance. I know I had that thought at some point in college for the first itme, and I am trying to remember if this is when. I ought to track down my paper in the class and see if there is evidence there.
As I say, the course seemed a bit muddled for a week or two; there were a lot of balls in the air. But then in this muddle Professor Sandel named a problem, though he named it philosophically. Isn’t equality itself a specific good, that a neutral state has no grounds to impose any more than creationism? Isn’t building a neutral state also dependent on a specific conception of society? As he put it, isn’t the categorical imperative of Kant just another teleology, just one with freedom and dignity as its highest good?
That took him to Aristotle (and way faster than I remembered; this is the end of October in the notes, and there are still a couple of months to go!). The idea of teleology is that any moral or political theory, according to the ancients, flows from a conception of the good society and is about how people group together to create such a good society. Rights are not categorical, but exist only to serve that end.
Professor Sandel crystallized this with the negative example of pornography. A “categorical” liberal would say that the state should not be involved in policing what people choose to look at, even though most people would objectively classify pornography as evil. A “teleological” liberal might permit pornography even if it is objectively evil and has a social cost, depending on smaller communities to teach standards and cultivate people who would squelch the demand for or interest in pornography. In both cases there is the same policy but different grounds.
I’m going to take a breather here even though I’m not quite caught up! I will say that at this point in the course, I saw and I still see that the grounds for a libertarian politics and even a conservative teleological politics seem much stronger in the sources. I’ve written before about sitting and reading Kant for the first time, and the thrill of that. Reading Aristotle for the first time was also really interesting. I remembered in the early chapters certain things in Maimonides I had read in English as a teen, in a book I had gotten for my Bar Mitzvah with excerpts from the Mishneh Torah. Both are very propositional texts, and the feel of reading them was the same even separated by a few years. I recognized in Aristotle a lot of Maimonides; obviously Maimonides was the one drawing on Aristotle. I know that the questions I had in Justice about Aristotle – about the connection between different virtues, the connection between individual virtue and politics, and whether individual virtue or the political good is fundamental – these I still have. I have to look at the notes more to see if there are suggested solutions; I don’t recall them.
