Political Philosophy

An Introduction

Jason Brennan

• Publisher: Cato Institute
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781944424060
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Most political debate is superficial. Just turn on cable news. Philosophy is for people who want to understand the deep questions. The goal of political philosophy is to determine the standards by which we judge different institutions good or bad, just or unjust. Some people might think they don't have much need of political philosophy: "Who cares about wishy-washy obtuse notions of justice? I'm a pragmatist. I just want to know what works." But this isn't a way of avoiding political philosophy; it's a way of being dogmatic about it. Before we can just do "what works," we have to know what counts as working.

This book serves as an introduction to some of the major theories of justice, to the arguments philosophers have made for and against these theories, and, ultimately, to how to be more thoughtful and rigorous in your own thinking.

1

Fundamental Values and Why We Disagree

Consider how we evaluate hammers. We think hammers serve a purpose: to pound in nails. We judge hammers good or bad by how well they serve that purpose.

In contrast, consider how we tend to evaluate paintings. Here, we think paintings are good or bad because of what the paintings symbolize, or how beautiful they are, or who made them.

Now consider how we tend to evaluate people. People can be more or less useful or beautiful, and we do tend to care about who “made” them. (After all, most people value their own children more than they do others’.) But we also tend to regard people as ends in themselves—valuable for their own sake.

Now ask yourself, which of these models is the best way to think about the value of institutions? Some people might believe institutions are valuable because of how functional they are, because of what goals they help us achieve. (If so, which goals are we supposed to achieve?) Others might hold that institutions are (at least partly) valuable because of what they symbolize or who made them. (Consider: many people believe that laws, regardless of their content, become just, fair, or legitimate simply if they are passed by a democratic legislature.) Others hold that some institutions are ends in themselves. (Consider: many people believe that democracy is inherently just and that it itself is the ultimate value, even if other political systems perform better.)

People do not merely debate which institutions are just or good: they also debate standards by which we should evaluate institutions. People disagree about what justice requires.

When we see persistent disagreement about justice, we feel tempted to throw up our hands and conclude that there’s no truth of the matter, that opinions about justice are purely subjective. But that’s a mistaken inference. The mere fact that people disagree tells us little about whether there’s an underlying truth. Disagreement is ubiquitous. People disagree about all sorts of things—whether evolution happened, whether vaccines work and whether they cause autism, or whether the Earth is older than 6,000 years—about which we have overwhelming evidence for one side. Political psychologists—people who study how minds process political information—routinely find that most of us think about politics in biased—that is, irrational—ways.² It’s not surprising they disagree about what the evidence implies.

We don’t simply disagree with each other. Most of us also disagree with ourselves.

Most people endorse a wide range of moral judgments. Some judgments are general and abstract (e.g., “All things equal, increased happiness is good”), some are particular (e.g., “What you did was wrong!”), and others are in between (e.g., “Slavery is wrong”). We arrive at these beliefs for a host of reasons. Some we are more or less born predisposed to accept, others we learn at our mother’s knee, others we absorb from our peers, and some are conclusions from conscious deliberation.

We have thousands of moral beliefs of varying degrees of generality or particularity. We cannot hold all our moral beliefs in conscious thought all at the same time—we might instead be able to consciously think about only five or six ideas at once. We thus cannot check all at once to ensure that our beliefs are consistent—that is, that these beliefs don’t contradict each other. For that reason, most of us endorse a range of moral judgments that conflict with each other and cannot all be true at the same time. Part of what political philosophy does is bring these conflicting beliefs to light and then attempt to resolve the contradiction. Usually, that means giving up some beliefs—the ones we’re less confident in—for the sake of others.

For instance, the typical American believes slavery is wrong because people have an inalienable right to be free. The typical American also believes that people should be allowed to do what they want, provided they don’t hurt others. Now consider this: Is voluntary slavery permissible? Typical Americans have a set of moral beliefs that seem to commit them to answer both yes and no. Or typical Americans believe that people have the right to choose to associate with whomever they want. But they also believe that business owners have no right to refuse service to black or gay people.

Sometimes, when we disagree about political matters, it’s because we have different values, but sometimes it’s because we disagree about the facts. So, for instance, the left-liberal philosopher Joseph Heath and I disagree about the extent to which government should regulate the market. Our disagreement doesn’t result from disputes over fundamental values. Instead, Heath and I have different views about how well markets and governments work or how often markets and governments make mistakes. We have more or less the same standards—we agree about what it means to “work” and to “mess up”—but we disagree empirically about how well markets and governments meet those standards.

For all these reasons, there is no straightforward one-to-one logical correspondence between any set of background moral, religious, and social-scientific views and any particular political philosophy.³ A left-liberal can be religious or atheistic. A socialist could endorse any of the major moral theories, have no coherent moral theory, or even be a resolute moral skeptic. A libertarian could endorse Austrian economics or accept more mainstream neoclassical economics.

That said, different political philosophies do tend to emphasize one set of principles over others:⁴

• Classical liberal and libertarian political philosophies emphasize individual freedom and autonomy. They hold that to respect people as ends in themselves, all people must be imbued with a wide sphere of personal autonomy in which they are free to decide for themselves. Most also believe that imbuing each person with this wide sphere systematically produces greater prosperity, cultural progress, tolerance, and virtue.

• Communitarian and conservative political philosophies tend to emphasize order and community. For conservatives, civilization is a hard-won victory. They worry that the social order upon which we depend is unstable. Maintaining that order requires that people have a sense of the sacred and that they subscribe to common ideals, moral views, or cultural myths. Communitarians additionally hold that the collective or the group is in some way of deeper fundamental importance than the individual.

• Left-liberal and socialist philosophies tend to emphasize material equality and equality of social status. They regard equality as inherently fair and believe departures from material equality must be justified. Socialists tend to believe that few such departures can be justified and that private property is a threat to equality. Left-liberals are more sanguine about markets and private property. They tend to hold that inequality is justified so long as it benefits everyone, especially the least advantaged members of society. They advocate having market-based economies but believe that government should rein in the excesses of the market and ensure that each person gets a fair shot at a decent life.

2

The Problem of Justice and the Nature of Rights

Twentieth-century left-liberal political philosopher John Rawls characterized a society as a “cooperative venture for mutual gain.”⁵ In all but the worst of societies, we’re each far better off living together than apart. For that reason, we each have a stake in society and in the basic institutions that hold it together and that structure the terms of cooperation.

But while we each have a stake in the rules, the rules can also be a source of conflict. Different institutions—different rules of the game—tend to “distribute” the benefits and burdens of living together differently. Rawls doesn’t mean to overstate this. The rules of the game don’t straightforwardly translate into particular life outcomes for any of us. After all, how our lives go depends in part on individual choice. Still, the rules make a difference. So, for example, a society with the institutions of medieval Europe or Japan will tend to best reward those born into the right families and secondarily reward those with a talent for fighting. The United States’s current institutions tend to most reward those with high IQs or those good at cultivating political networks. The present world order—a world divided into nation-states that forbid most international emigration—tends to favor skilled professionals over unskilled workers.⁶

Most of us prefer having more stuff rather than less. We prefer having higher rather than lower status. So, Rawls said, self-interested people are likely to disagree on just which institutions and rules are best. They each tend to favor whatever rules benefit them. Principles of justice, Rawls said, are supposed to resolve this disagreement in a fair or reasonable way. Principles of justice are meant to determine the morally reasonable way to assign rights and duties and to determine the proper distribution of benefits and burdens of social cooperation.

Consider one simple theory of justice: utilitarianism. In its crudest form, utilitarianism holds we should just do whatever maximizes net aggregate happiness. Pretty much everyone agrees that happiness is intrinsically good and that pain is intrinsically bad. It seems plausible that we should try to maximize the total happiness of society and minimize the total pain. Utilitarianism leaves us with a simple imperative: pick the action that produces the maximal expected net utility. Many economists thus find utilitarianism attractive. It reduces questions of justice to the search for what economists call Kaldor-Hicks efficiency.⁷ Many times, when economists or others say they are “pragmatists” who eschew what they regard as hifalutin’ theories of justice, what they mean is that they’re utilitarians of some sort.

This crude sort of utilitarianism appears plausible at first glance. But it has serious defects. It seems unproblematic for me to make trade-offs with my own welfare. Suppose I cause myself some suffering now to get greater overall happiness later. I could suffer through accounting class to land a better job or accept painful shots to prevent disease. But suppose instead that we make you suffer so I can enjoy greater happiness. Imagine we hurt you to help me. On its face, that doesn’t seem right.

Yet crude utilitarianism happily condones hurting you to help me, provided I benefit more than you suffer. That’s the essential problem with utilitarianism. It imagines us each to be receptacles for pleasure and pain. So long as we maximize net aggregate happiness, it doesn’t really matter whether some people suffer greatly so that others may be happy.

Fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” illustrates this problem. The story describes an idyllic, almost utopian society. There is no war or disease. Everyone is healthy, beautiful, and happy. However, we soon learn that Omelas has a secret. A single child is kept imprisoned in a closet, filthy, starved, tortured, and afraid. It turns out that, through some sort of magic, torturing the child is what makes the city so splendid. At some point in their education, all citizens of Omelas are brought to see the child. Le Guin ends her story by describing how each night, a few citizens walk away from Omelas.

Omelas appears to be a counterexample to utilitarianism. If utilitarianism were true, then Omelas would be a just city. However, Omelas is unjust. Therefore, utilitarianism can’t be true.

In Anarchy, State, and Utopia , the 20th-century libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick introduced a similar thought experiment. He asked us to imagine a “utility monster,” a person who enjoys watching others suffer more than those others hate suffering.⁸ So suppose I am a sadistic utility monster with an almost-infinite capacity for pleasure. Whenever I watch someone being tortured, if that person feels, say, X units of pain, I experience X² units of pleasure. Utilitarianism implies that if a utility monster existed, we “should all be sacrificed in the creature’s maw, in order to increase total utility.”⁹ Utilitarianism implies we are morally obligated to feed ourselves to the utility monster. That seems absurd.

Some people might complain that these thought experiments are unrealistic and therefore tell us little about what’s right and wrong. It’s not clear what force such objections have. In fact, we have little trouble making moral evaluations of unrealistic circumstances. The Force in Star Wars isn’t real, but even my young children can judge it’s immoral to use the Dark Side of the Force. Godzilla isn’t real, but if you produced a moral theory that implied “you should feed your kids to Godzilla for fun,” the theory would be, for that very reason, absurd. The purpose of these thought experiments is to isolate the various morally relevant factors, and they are designed...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• CONTENTS
• Introduction
• 1. Fundamental Values and Why We Disagree
• 2. The Problem of Justice and the Nature of Rights
• 3. The Nature and Value of Liberty
• 4. Property Rights
• 5. Equality and Distributive Justice
• 6. Is Social Justice a Mistake?
• 7. Civil Rights: Freedom of Speech and Lifestyle
• 8. The Scope of Economic Liberty
• 9. Government Authority and Legitimacy
• 10. What Counts as “Society”?
• 11. Why Political Philosophy Needs Political Economy
• Endnotes
• Recommended Readings
• About the Author
• Libertarianism.org
• Cato Institute