Engaging Political Philosophy

An Introduction

Robert B. Talisse

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781136497964
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Engaging Political Philosophy introduces readers to the central problems of political philosophy. Presuming no prior work in the area, the book explores the fundamental philosophical questions regarding freedom, authority, justice, and democracy. More than a survey of the central figures and texts, Engaging Political Philosophy takes readers on a philosophical exploration of the core of the field, directly examining the arguments and concepts that drive the contemporary debates. Thus the fundamental issues of political philosophy are encountered first-hand, rather than through intermediary summaries of the major texts and theories. As a result, readers are introduced to political philosophy by doing philosophy. Written in a conversational style, Engaging Political Philosophy is accessible to students and general readers. Instructors can use it in the classroom as a stand-alone textbook, a complement to a standard collection of historical readings, or as a primer to be studied in preparation for contemporary readings.

Part I

Setting the Task

1 Some Preliminary Considerations

• The Social World

• What Is Political Philosophy?

• How We Will Proceed

• A Final Preliminary about Philosophy

• For Further Reading

1.1 The Social World

It may sound overly dramatic to say so, but each of us is born into a world that is not of our own making. This is obviously true of our physical environs. Upon arriving on the scene, we quickly confront several brute facts, such as that fire burns, unsupported objects fall, ice melts, and glass shatters. We simply find ourselves within a world of objects and forces, and there is not much we can do about it but learn how to work with what we have. According to a common view of these matters, the natural sciences are devoted to the task of learning how to work with our physical surroundings. There is no denying that these sciences have been quite successful; for instance, science produces various forms of technology, and we now are able to control, harness, and direct many of the features of our world.

Yet our world is not exclusively physical in this sense. We are each born into a social world as well. This is a world populated by other people, and here too we must learn how to work with our surroundings. But the social world into which we are born is not simply a world of other humans; it is also a world that features institutions that produce rules and practices that structure, and sometimes define, our interactions with others. Consider that each of us comes into the world already standing in relation to certain other people, and these relations are defined by social institutions. To point to a few obvious examples, each of us is somebody’s biological child, some of us are born into siblinghood, and some are born into more complex familial relationships. The family is a social institution—perhaps the most basic social institution—and it is by reference to the family that we can identify certain others as our parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, siblings, and so on.

Although the family is perhaps the most obvious example of a social institution into whose structures we are born, it is not the only one. We are often also born as members of communal entities beyond the family, such as neighborhoods, villages, towns, cities, and geographical regions. Hence in the United States some people identify themselves as New Yorkers, others as Southerners, still others as Midwesterners, and so on; these designations are often taken to have significance beyond the merely autobiographical information that they impart. That is, New Yorkers tend to have views about what people from the South are like, just as Southerners tend to have views about New Yorkers. And even within these broad categories, there are further classifications of the same kind. For example, I know firsthand that many Nashvillians tend to consider themselves to be living in the “New South”; they hence regard other cities in Tennessee as belonging to the “Old South,” and see inhabitants of these cities as importantly different from themselves. There’s a similar phenomenon among people who live in New York City; those living on the Upper West Side regard those who live in lower Manhattan as significantly dissimilar from themselves, and those living in Manhattan typically turn up their noses at those who live in the City’s other boroughs. Of course, this is to say nothing about the view commonly held by those who live anywhere in New York City of those who live in New York State (that is, the parts of New York that are not New York City). Further, some Manhattanites view those who live in neighboring New Jersey as utterly alien and sometimes contemptible, too.

These phenomena are highly complex, often confusing, frequently just silly, and sometimes instances of plain bigotry. My point in mentioning them is neither to condemn nor condone. Instead, I note that although the facts of where and when one is born are matters of chance, we, for better or worse, often take them to be relevant in deciding who we (and others) are. This is because the circumstances of one’s birth are typically closely tied to facts about how one was raised, what customs one has adopted, how one was educated, what religion one practices, what values one holds, and much else. And these facts tell us something important about a person. It is crucial to see that these facts are all products of social institutions.

Things get more complex, and decidedly less silly, when we consider that individuals are often born into membership in various religious communities, economic and occupational classes, as well as ethnic, gender, and racial groups. Consider first membership in a religious community. Religious communities set an expansive range of life-affecting rules and expectations for their members. These involve matters ranging from what foods one eats and what clothes one wears to more intimate matters, including who one can marry. For those who are members of a religious community, membership (at least initially) is often non-voluntary. Individuals are typically born into a religious community; they are “raised” in a given religion, and the religious community often serves as the social center of individuals’ lives, especially during their more formative years.

Consider next membership in economic classes, and the frequently intertwined matters of ethnicity, race, and gender. It is far less common these days, but it used to be the case that trades were passed down from parents to their children. For example, the son of a farmer would be a farmer himself, and the daughter of a seamstress would learn the craft of sewing from her mother. Consequently, the family into which one was born would fix much of the course of one’s subsequent life by determining one’s occupation and thus one’s economic class. Note that we still see informal remnants of this kind of phenomenon in certain professions, including among lawyers, physicians, musicians, and police officers. Furthermore, although great progress has been made in the last century, there are still significant respects in which various occupational, economic, and social roles are fixed by ethnicity, race, and gender. I am not (yet) an elderly man, but I can still remember a time when non-male non-white physicians, female accountants, and African American lawyers were markedly rare, if not totally unheard of. I am also old enough to recall a time when my mother was deemed ineligible for a credit card because of her gender; she was told that she would need to have her husband as a co-applicant. And I distinctly remember an episode over a family holiday dinner when a male guest confidently and proudly declared—in a room mostly of women and young girls, no less!—that women should not be allowed to vote because such an arrangement gives their husbands (or fathers, or boyfriends) two votes; his assumption was that women would naturally defer their political judgment to the men in their lives. I should note that this holiday dinner occurred in the mid-1970s, more than fifty years since the Nineteenth Amendment was introduced into the US Constitution.

I hope these events from my youth strike you as unbelievable, the stuff of a dark and thankfully distant history. But, in fact, episodes like these were commonplace not too long ago. We have made great strides in eliminating many of the most overt forms of institutional support for practices that determine an individual’s social position and opportunities on the basis of such things as ethnicity, race, and gender. However, practices of this kind undoubtedly persist in our society. Women still tend not to get paid as well as their male equivalents in the workplace, and although legal racial segregation in the United States was eliminated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, there remains unofficial but nonetheless socially enforced racial segregation in the United States. Whether the progress we have made is sufficient from the point of view of justice will be addressed in Chapter 5. For now, the point, again, is that our lives are undeniably and appreciably shaped by social institutions, and these institutions are not of our own making.

As a further example of the deep impact of institutions on our lives, consider that most individuals are born in a particular country, a fact that commonly renders them citizens of particular states. States are large-scale social entities, and though there are philosophical controversies concerning what precisely states are, we could say for now that states are social institutions that govern or preside over all other social institutions within their territory or jurisdiction. States regulate, structure, and monitor the other facets of our social world. For starters, they make and enforce laws, they imprison people and punish them in other ways; they regulate commerce, they raise and maintain armies, and they can declare war on other states. States are massively powerful.

States of certain kinds wield their power in ways that terrorize, dominate, and oppress their citizens. In fact, in the case of certain states, it is not clear that the term citizen even applies properly to those who live within them; those who live under the governments of tyrannical and authoritarian states are perhaps better characterized as subjects of the state rather than citizens. In cases of extremely brutal tyranny, we might prefer to speak of those living within the state’s territory as among its victims. Of course, there are states of other kinds that aspire to govern for the sake of the people living within their borders; they exist and rule for their citizens, on their behalf. These states also create and enforce laws, punish people, make war, and the rest. But they do so with the express purpose of serving their citizens, typically by sustaining a social order in which all could thrive or flourish.

We will have occasion in later chapters to examine a range of questions concerning the nature and power of states. Let us now note that the state into which one is born largely fixes an expansive range of features of one’s life. The languages one will speak, the food one eats, the religion one practices (if any), the education one receives, the art to which one is exposed, the occupations that one may pursue, and much else—including the likely length of one’s life—are all largely a matter of where one is born. Furthermore, what might be called one’s overall worldview—one’s general understanding of human history, science, the nature of the universe, the meaning of life, and what it is to live well—is largely a product of the country into which one was born.

But this is not the end of the story. Importantly, citizenship also carries with it obligations to one’s state. For example, that one is a citizen of the United States entails that one owes allegiance to its laws and its government. This is why a citizen of, say, Canada cannot commit an act of treason against the United States. As a US citizen, one also arguably has a duty to vote and to participate in the shared task of democratic self-government. It is also commonly held that one has an obligation to one’s state to contribute to its protection in times when it is threatened; consequently, in many states some form of military service is required, or at least under certain circumstances expected, of citizens. So one’s citizenship determines, or strongly influences, a great deal concerning how one’s life will go. And the status of citizen is acquired typically at the moment of one’s birth. The world of states and citizens, and our own place within it, is something we simply inherit.

Thus far I have been laboring a single simple point, namely, that we are born into an array of social roles and relations and these in turn are defined by their corresponding social institutions: the family, the neighborhood, the city, the religious community, the economic class, the ethnic, racial, and gender group, the state, and so on. And each role we occupy carries with it various kinds of moral, social, and legal significance. Our place in the social world, though largely not a product of our individual choices, nonetheless establishes for us certain central duties, obligations, and expectations. It also plays a considerable role in determining the range of opportunities and benefits available to us throughout the course of our lives. The impact of social institutions is so pervasive that we may begin to wonder whether human lives really are that much different from the law-governed paths of falling heavy objects. Maybe our lives are merely the effects of all the physical and social forces at work at the moment of our birth.

We have as yet only scratched the surface. Hence we should avoid drawing any distinctively philosophical conclusions at this early juncture. There is much more to say about the nature of social institutions and the roles that they play in our lives. In fact, this entire book is devoted to examining various facets of this very issue. But the little that has been said suffices to show that the social world has at least as much impact on our lives as the brute facts of our physical environment. That fire burns and unsupported heavy objects fall are facts that we all do well to take account of in our everyday knocking about in the world. It is nonetheless important, though, to keep in mind the facts of our social existence. That some given action to which we are inclined is a crime or is harmful to others, for example, is something worthy of note in our day-to-day lives.

Still, what has been said thus far also brings into focus one crucial respect in which the social world is fundamentally different from the physical world. Although neither is of our own making, the social world exists because of us. The total disappearance of human beings from the world would not change the fact that fire burns, but it would cause governments, laws, families, and the rest to vanish. Were all human beings to disappear suddenly, the social institutions, roles, and practices that we have been discussing would be things that used to exist, but no longer do. So we may say that although the social world is not of our own individual making, it exists and persists because we collectively sustain it. This means, in turn, that even though we are born into a social world that we did not create, we nonetheless play some role in shaping it. As we know from even very recent and local history, the character of social institutions can change, and along with these changes come alterations in the relationships we have with each other and the rules that govern our interactions. More importantly, we know that we can change the institutions and rules by which we live together. So although we do not create the social world so much as inherit it, it is nonetheless ours in that we maintain it by engaging in social relations, and through our participation, sometimes things change.

That the social world is partly our own doing helps to explain one of its central features. Thus far, we have been speaking as if institutions, and the rules or laws that they produce, are detached from us, as if the forces that structure our social interactions could be ultimately of the same kind as the laws that govern falling objects. To be sure, there are some political philosophers who have defended the view that there are laws of politics that are as fixed and stable as the laws of gravity. But even according to views of this kind, social institutions are not quite as distant as the forces of nature. Institutions are collections of roles and offices that are occupied by people. Unlike physical laws, which all by themselves govern the motion of bodies, the rules and practices that govern our social lives get their force from us. That is, we enforce the rules; we hold each other to them.

Of course, not all enforcement is of the same kind. As was mentioned above, states enforce laws by means of the exercise of their power; they enact laws that incentivize or encourage certain kinds of behavior, and they punish those who fail to comply. But there are more subtle and ordinary forms of enforcement that are direct in that they do not invoke the power of the state. Consider the familiar phenomenon of line-cutting. When there is a sizeable line of people waiting for coffee at the local café, the social rule says that the person who has most recently arrived on the scene joins the line at its very end. When someone elects to violate this rule by cutting in line, there is often an outcry from the others. Of course, the enforcement of the rule against line-cutting rarely involves anything like a physical removal of the cutter, yet nonetheless the cutter is typically subjected to various signals of disapproval, and sometimes is confronted by others who demand that she take her proper place at the line’s end. Similar phenomena prevail with respect to traffic laws. The person who drives recklessly, or who “cuts off” another driver, is often subjected to a protracted horn-blowing. This is a mild form of punishment; it is an expression of condemnation that is intended to shame or chastise the perpetrator. Other examples are easy to formulate.

We might be inclined to view cases of line-cutting or aggressive driving as more on the order of bad manners than rule-violation; we would then see the consequent social signals of disapproval amounting to little more than an expression of dissatisfaction. But this view misses something important about these phenomena. After all, the line-cutter is sometimes reprimanded even by those who are not adversely affected by his cutting; bystanders frequently protest along with those who are impacted by the bad behavior. Indeed, we often go out of our way to express disapproval of those who break certain social rules, and we do so at a cost to ourselves. That is, these ordinary reactions to mild forms of social rule-breaking are attempts to affect changes in the behavior of others. When we blow the car horn at a careless driver, we do not simply seek to express our disapproval of his driving; the point of expressing our disapproval is to attach a social cost to careless driving, and thus to encourage the careless driver to drive in accordance with the rules.

These commonplace instances of informal rule-enforcement are in some ways of the same kind as the official enforcement enacted by the state. To be sure, a police officer who issues a ticket to a careless driver is acting in a way that differs from your horn-blowing in the severity of the punishment imposed on the violator. The officer acts on behalf of the state in ways that are designed to encourage compliance with traffic laws and to punish those who violate them. At more complex levels, of course, the state organizes official processes and procedures for making, enforcing, and interpreting laws; these include an expansive court and legal system, a series of representative bodies responsible for making legislation, a broad arrangement of institutions t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Setting the Task
• Part II: Fundamental Concepts
• Index