Political Philosophy

Dudley Knowles

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781135360863
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This comprehensive introduction to the major thinkers and topics in political philosophy explores the philosophical traditions which continue to inform our political judgements.
Dudley Knowles introduces the ideas of key political thinkers including Hobbes, Locke, Marx and Mill and influential contemporary thinkers such as Berlin, Rawls and Nozick. He outlines central problems in political philosophy and encourages the reader to critically engage with all the issues discussed.
The individual chapters discuss and analyse:
* utilitarianism
* liberty
* rights
* justice
* obligation
* democracy
Political Philosophy is ideally suited to students taking introductory courses in political theory and philosophy.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Young children, we understand, are born philosophers. They ask exasperated parents such deep questions as ‘Where is my mind?’ or ‘Is Granny living with all the other dead people in the churchyard?’. The spirit for philosophy which is born out of naïveté is soon extinguished, so the taste for philosophical reflection has to be rediscovered. I conjecture that it is an acquired taste, prompted by some strange contingency. Who knows the story behind your picking up this book? Still, some brands of philosophical enquiry are more likely to be prompted than others. An adolescent who found himself pondering the nature of numbers would be a splendid eccentric. By contrast, youthful rebellion can be relied upon to kindle low-level philosophical musings about the rules of behaviour. If parents say such and such is the right thing to do and the teenager insists that he does no wrong in not doing it, the conflict of views is likely to raise all sorts of philosophical questions: What is the nature and extent of parents’ authority? What sort of respect is required for their rules? They can enforce their demands and prudence may dictate compliance, but does that make it right? If the question of who decides what behaviour is acceptable and what is not seems up for grabs, the question of how to decide will surely follow. Is it a matter of choice or preference or personal belief ? And so on.

Such questions (and many more) comprise the subject of ethics, and I suspect that most people dip their toes into the water in the minimal sense of recognizing that there are questions to be answered, issues to be debated. Political life has the same character of putting philosophical questions up front. Authoritarian regimes prompt the same reflections as authoritarian parents. Democratic regimes conduct debates about competing policies in terms of the values such policies embody. Liberty may be opposed to justice. The public interest may require the sacrifice of persons’ rights. This is the diet of editorials in tabloids as well as the broadsheet newspapers. Questions of ethics and political philosophy are ubiquitous, in the very air we breathe. The surprise for many is that the problems are not novel, that there is a rich history of careful deliberation about them, that the questions which seem fresh in 2000AD have often been recorded as debated for the last two and a half millenia.

We are heirs to this rich tradition of philosophical dispute. Though philosophical problems seemingly spring up afresh each day like mushrooms, similar problems have been worrying folks for as long as intellectual problems have been recorded. When we take seriously the philosophical questions posed directly in political life, we encounter immediately a vast literature organized around the problems mankind has encountered, the philosophers who have contributed to their solution and the theories that have been recurrently proposed as the means of tackling them.

The prospect can appear dismal. You ask: Do I have an obligation to obey the law? and one of nature’s teachers gives you a reading-list – as they say, from Plato to NATO. In truth, this should be a source of excitement, since the history of philosophy does not parade itself as a progressive discipline in the manner of the history of science. You can learn from the Ancient Greeks, not least because the present is a small parish inhibited by parochial concerns. Escape into past ways of thinking, in philosophy if not in physics, can be a liberation. What a marvel it is to read Plato’s report in the Republic of Socrates working out why might is not right, or Hobbes at the time of the English Civil War describing anarchy and arguing for the necessity of an absolute or unrestricted sovereign power. These are people you will want to argue with and you will find, to your pleasure, that it can be hard to do so.

Everyone who studies political philosophy has to know something about the history of the subject because that history is a priceless resource as much as it is an antiquarian interest. But this book will not address this history directly. Rather we shall concentrate on the central questions of political philosophy and the leading theories that have been employed to answer them. For the moment, I want to examine the methodology of political philosophy, to say a little more about the relationship of theory to judgement in the sphere of ethics – of which political philosophy is evidently a part.

The methods of ethics and political philosophy

A methodological impasse?

Let’s begin our reflections with a hackneyed example. Suppose we have a sheriff who, along with utilitarian thinkers, believes the right action is the one that produces the greatest human welfare. Faced with a rioting mob, he decides a scapegoat is required to prevent widespread harm. He selects a plausible (but innocent) culprit for punishment and calm is restored. Harm and injustice is done to the poor innocent – but the greater evil is averted. The utilitarian sheriff defends his action as the right thing to do in the circumstances. A critic objects. The sheriff’s action was wrong because it was unjust. No amount of benefit to any number of third parties can vindicate the punishment of an innocent man or woman. That principle is inviolable.

How are we to adjudicate the issue? On the side of the sheriff, supposing all the facts of the case are right, is a deep and plausible moral theory. The pity is that this theory of what constitutes right action commits him to doing what would normally be judged a wrong action. On the side of the critic is the principle (‘intuition’ is the term often used here) that it is unjust, and therefore wrong, to punish the innocent. The sheriff has a theory, which he can defend if pressed, which enables him to judge what is right in tricky cases like this. She (the critic) thinks that his theory is indefensible if it justifies him acting in a way that violates her principle. So – do we keep the theory and sacrifice the principle or do we jettison the theory because we cannot find it in us to reject the principle?

This question, often posed in the discussion of utilitarianism, is, at bottom a dispute about methodology. There are many ways forward and all of them are controversial since philosophical dispute reaches into the methods of ethical and political theory as well as the diet of problems which give rise to speculation about the appropriate method for tackling them. First, we need to understand the notion of a theory as the sheriff is employing it. The first, simplest, conception takes the theory to be a systematization of the moral and political judgements we are inclined to make. We find ourselves judging that this action is right, that action wrong, that this system is fair, that unjust. And we accord these judgements considerable status. They are not self-evident or absolutely unrevisable, but we are more likely to stick to them than we are to accept a theory which is inconsistent with them. We recognize that we operate with a great and complex stack of moral principles and reflection suggests that such judgements are the product of a deeper principle – in the case of the sheriff, the utilitarian view that actions and practices are right if they maximize well-being. We have explained the judgements we reach, but this explanation may serve wider purposes. It may guide us when we find ourselves in a difficult dilemma. In entirely novel circumstances, of the sort that medical advances seem to throw up daily, the theory may show us the way forward. Obviously, this conception of moral theory cannot help us if we review the above example. The sheriff and his critic differ precisely on whether the case represents a decisive example which should cause us to reject or qualify the theory. Since both agree that what is decisive is the authority of the particular moral judgement or rule, I shall dub this view ‘particularist’.¹

A different conception of moral theory regards the task of the theorist very differently. On this account, the task of moral theory is to validate or generate moral principles, to serve as a foundation for them. Utilitarianism may be viewed in this light, too, since, as we shall see, its techniques may be employed to assess not just specific actions and practices, but moral rules as well. If this is right, if some such theory finds conviction, whether it is utilitarianism, Kantian formalism which uses the test of the categorical imperative, contractualism or the theory of Divine Command, it follows that our intuitions regarding subordinate principles are all revisable in light of the theory to hand. Possession of such a theory would settle the dilemma posed by the sheriff’s actions and the critic’s challenge. We can dub this notion of theory ‘foundationalist’ – again with warnings about incautious use of the terminology. Unfortunately, I have no such theory to hand, believing that all attempts to delineate such an ambitous project have failed.

We have two different conceptions of moral theory and two different accounts of the status and revisability of the moral judgements and principles that such theories (in their different ways) encompass. It is worth noticing that these disputes about the nature of normative ethics find an echo in deep disputes about the appropriate methods of political philosophy. Hegel noticed that modern subjects claim what he described as ‘the right of the subjective will’, a distinctively modern attitude which claims ‘that whatever it is to recognize as valid should be perceived by it as good’. (Alternatively: ‘The right to recognize nothing that I do not perceive as rational is the highest right of the subject.’)² This stance may be dubbed ‘individualist’ or even ‘liberal’. It echoes Kant’s claim that ‘Our age is the genuine age of criticism, to which everything must submit’.³ In this context, the thought is that the individual who seeks the credentials of principles or institutions has detached himself from their moral ‘pull’ in order to conduct his investigation. He has placed himself above the mêlée, abstracting from all prejudice and allegiance in order to carry out a judicious review of what theory (in the guise of reason) requires. Suppose I find myself questioning the obligations I hitherto felt to a parent or a child. I see others behaving differently and wonder if perhaps I can legitimately do the same. It looks as though the only way I can examine these questions is by stepping outside of the institutions of domesticity and subjecting them to an external assessment. Or suppose I find myself breaking the law with impunity and no sense of guilt – buying my under-age child a glass of cider in a country pub. Being philosophical, this causes me to wonder whether I have a general obligation to obey the law. Again, once prompted, once the question has been asked, I find myself at a distance from the press of what hitherto I had taken to be an obligation. Detaching myself from the moral force of the institutions that bind me by their rules, I can pursue my investigation as an outsider would. Should I subscribe to this general rule or should I modify or reject it in the light of the best reasoning I can command, the best theory at my disposal?

In the seventeenth century, for a variety of reasons, philosophers who reflected on politics began to question the grounds of their allegiance and the legitimacy of the constitutions of particular states. From what stance could this appraisal be conducted? It seemed obvious to some that the best way to answer the question of whether or not they had good reason to obey a sovereign power was to hypothesize that they had none – and then ask whether rational agents with a specific set of wants (Hobbes) or wants and values (Locke) would have good reason to establish one. They deduced that those without a sovereign power (as they said, in a State of Nature) would recognize that a sovereign ought to be instituted; those who found themselves already subject to the claims of sovereign authority should recognize it as legitimate. The reasoning which generated these conclusions could be advanced by (or expained to) each sceptical individual. Individualism of this methodological stripe has its origin in a sceptical impulse that subjects to scrutiny what many take to be the givens of one’s moral and political regime. In order to conduct this scrutiny, it is evidently necessary to have some theory at hand that can serve as the test of the principles called for judgement. It is worth adding at this point that those who detach themselves in thought from the concrete demands of the institutions which govern them, seeking a rationale that should be good for any enquirer, generally attribute to all persons a moral status that endows them with liberty and equality as well as the universal ends of survival and ‘commodious living’.⁴ In a nut-shell, this is why individualism as I have described it may also be termed ‘liberalism’. (And while we’re charting the ‘isms’, this stance of the detached, disengaged, perhaps alienated, enquirer may be described as ‘atomism’ if a society is thought to comprise an aggregate of such individuals. But an intellectual health warning should be issued concerning the careless use of philosophical labels!)

By contrast, a different view will reject the possibility of this radically abstracted self. Call its protagonist the ‘communitarian’. She will insist that we cannot, even in thought, strip off the lineaments of our personalities – for our moral constitution goes as deep as this. For better or worse, we are burdened by intuitions concerning the moral standing of ourselves and others and what it is for folks like us to live well. Our views on these matters are not optional extras; they will be embedded deeply in our language and the very ways we think. On an extreme view, we just find ourself located at a particular, specifiable, moral address. According to some feminists, humans are possessed of a socially constructed gender which has determined in a fundamental way their moral orientation – towards categories of rules and duties (men) or virtues of care and compassion (women). Most of us are enmeshed in families whose structures are describable in terms of rights and duties from which we cannot renege without doing wrong. These families may find their origins, sustenance and detailed regulation within a tribe or race, which may subscribe to a religion or worldview which gives point to its ceremonies and rituals. Such wider communities may inhabit a region with environmental exigencies which structure their domestic constitution. In the modern world they are likely to be regulated by a state whose history (and myths) deeply engage the allegiance of the people.

Our identities may be thick with attachments and emotional ties deriving from all of these sources and more; attachments and ties which cannot be repudiated or even questioned without the deepest personal loss and fragmentation. Such a dense moral address Hegel called our ‘ethical life’. Its reality and the objectivity of the claims it makes upon us he called ‘ethical substance’.

The modern debate between the individualist and the communitarian is not a fad of the moment. It echoes (in a distorted fashion, for historical purists) the contrasting views of Plato and Aristotle on the good society – Plato advancing a utopian vision founded on a conception of justice he worked hard to elaborate, Aristotle describing those institutions mankind has discovered to be necessary for the fullest expression of human nature. At the turn of the nineteeth century, battle was renewed again between another pair of near contemporaries, Kant and Hegel – Kant aspiring to a standpoint of reason which in ethics takes us right outside the phenomenal world of everyday experience into a noumenal world where principles of practical reason are disclosed to any dispassionate enquirer; Hegel, by contrast, finding this standpoint ‘empty’ and counselling us to seek a deep understanding of the principles and institutions which history has deposited as the framework of our social lives. To grossly caricature the contrast, the individualist seeks a perspective of reason whereas the communitarian articulates a description of ethical reality.

In the context of political philosophy, I am tempted to label the respective camps ‘radical’ and ‘conservative’. The individualist position is radical because of the implicit commitment to subject all beliefs and institutions to review, according none a privileged status of critical immunity. The communitarian position is conservative in the sense that it accepts the validity of central categories of moral self-description which are entrenched within the practices and institutions of society. We cannot escape those dimensions of moral vision and feeling in which we have been enclosed by socialization. Outside of the sense of ourselves which the communitarian philosopher articulates, we would not employ the sharp vision of the detached critic; we would be altogether lost and aimless, without any sense of characteristic human ends or aspirations. We must begin at that place where we come from.

The issue is complex, but it should not be too hard to see how this dispute about the character of political theorizing reproduces the methodological disputes recorded earlier. The first should be obvious. In the first part of this chapter, I contrasted the respective approaches of the foundationalist, the theorist who wields a decisive theory, and the particularist, the thinker who takes her stand on principles or intuitions. The differences evinced by these two approaches reflect a pair of contrary dispositions – a top-down impulse to validate and a bottom-up need to explain and systematize. I believe that, in so far as the individualist/communitarian distinction is concerned with the methodology of ethics and politics, the same two dispositions are at work. The individualist, as I have characterized this position, is committed primarily to evaluation from a theoretical stance he endorses. Unless rules, principles, practices and institutions can be validated in the light of higher values to which he subscribes he will not authorize them, they have no claim to legitimacy. The communitarian, by contrast, is distinguished by what she takes as given, the values, principles, practices and institutions which constitute her historically contingent identity. She cannot, in fact, detach herself in principle so as to achieve a theoretical stance from which her commitments can be appraised.

Reflective equilibrium

Back to the sheriff’s dilemma. Since we don’t possess the quick fix of a theory which can review the situation and settle decisively whether the sheriff or his critic is right or wrong,⁵ a first way forward is to expand the data available for judgement and hope that with more information to hand some agreement may be attained. We may amplify the detail of the example. The description already available is true, we have supposed, but that does not establish that it is sufficient for a correct verdict to be reached. In fact, the opposite is the case. The information given in the example is palpably insufficient for a consensus on the rightness or wrongness of what the sheriff has done. When more information is brought to bear – perhaps the critic can get the sheriff to agree that he can’t keep secret his practice of framing innocents and so lots of citizens will become anxious that they may be selected as scapegoats – it may transpire that theory and intuition are brought into line as protagonists agree that the example has not shown that maximizing human welfare can require acts of injustice.

Second, we may review the theory. We may limit its ambitions, draw in some of its horns. We can supplement the restricted theory with another, different one which offers a better explanation or justification of the troublesome case. The resulting bunch of theories will be messier, an altogether less elegant intellectual structure and perhaps it will create boundary problems within the body of theory which has been yoked together. But this may be a price worth paying if the resultant structure promises an understanding of how we reach decisions in a disconcertingly wide range of cases. In the case of the sheriff, we may limit the scope of utilitarian reasoning and insist that independent principles of retributive justice apply.

Third, we may review the principle about which the critic was so confident. Perhaps we can get her to accept that there are circumstances, real or hypothetical, where it seems to imply conclusions which are unacceptable. An example which illustrates much the same point as that of the sheriff who lynches the plausible scapegoat, but which can trigger very different reactions, concerns the reality of systems of criminal justice. Let’s all agree that in this world of fallible human beings it is quite impossible to devise a criminal justice system which can be guaranteed never to convict an innocent. Different mixes of procedural rules will generate different probabilities of innocents being acquitted or convicted. Now suppose we have to set up such a system or endorse a system which is in place. We know that sooner or later an innocent will be punished. We know that some unfortunate individual will have to pay for the utility (or justice) of our having instituted a workable system of trial and punishment to deal with criminals. Against this background – of having to establish some systematic procedures for responding to crime – the critic may come to recognize that, in practice, any such response will permit unintentional and undiscovered miscarriages of justice. Examples such as this may cause the critic who is confident in her intuitions of principle concerning the punishment of the innocent to register a doubt. In which case she, too, may be willing to enter negotiations when theory collides with intuition.

Let us review the conclusions of this discussion of the methodology of ethics. In my book there are two villains. The first is the philosopher who claims one can get nowhere in ethics until one has discovered, through a priori reasoning or the investigation of a sufficient range of moral judgement, some high-level theory of ethics which can serve the purposes of testing lower-level principles of action and generating verdicts of right/wrong, good/bad, just/ unjust in respect of any particular action brought forward for judgement. The second villain is the philosopher (or ordinary moral agent) who believes himself endowed with a set of moral principles or intuitions which are in principle immune to correction, which brook no qualification or exception, nor require careful contextual elaboration.

What we are left with is a pair of propensities which draw away from and collide with each other in fruitful co-existence. The first is a bottom-up drive to gather together judgements made in particular cases and formulate principles which articulate the rationale of these judgements. We go further. Having to hand a set of principles, we can try to establish whether this exhibits any common features which we might employ to propose a still more general theory of ethics. Success i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Utilitarianism
• Chapter 3: Liberty
• Chapter 4: Rights
• Chapter 5: Distributive Justice
• Chapter 6: Political Obligation
• Chapter 7: Democracy
• Notes
• Bibliography