Normative Political Philosophy

1. Normative Political Philosophy Background and History

2. I. Why do we care? • Most interesting political disputes involve conflicts between values: liberty vs. equality, good ends vs. unpleasant means, good intentions vs. bad consequences, etc. • Examples • Should we torture suspected terrorists to extract information? • Should we threaten to destroy cities full of innocent civilians in order to protect our own innocent civilians? • Should we execute people if doing so fails to deter crime? • Should we respect property rights if property owners want to discriminate against other races? • Is it OK for the US government to lie to its citizens about whether it is testing biological weapons? • If gays want to marry, how to we know how to respond?

3. II. Division of the Subject: Behavior and Institutions

4. III. Origins of Political Philosophy • Religious justifications prior to 600 BCE – Egypt, Israel, India, Mesopotamia • Kings as divinely inspired • Checks and balances through divinity • Citizens: Loyalty = Piety

5. B. Hammurabi’s Code (1750 BCE): Political Philosophy? • The Code Itself: 282 Laws for Babylonia • Social context: Separation of King and Divinity (Oaths to both King and God) • General principles behind the laws (implied, not explicit) • King’s legitimacy derives from being the purveyor of justice (Code as justification), possible divine mandate • King’s actions must be just – no pardon without private forgiveness • Three classes of citizens with different rights: aristocrats, landless, slaves • No absolute rulership: Not all citizens are slaves; king has limited power

7. C. What about China? • 6th-2nd Centuries BCE: Flourishing of Chinese moral philosophy • Taoism: Virtue from genuineness; being from mystery. Generally interpreted as anti-political • Yin-Yang School: Need for balance in life (i.e. reason/intuition). Skeptical of formal logic. • Confucianism: Emphasizes filial piety, need for good behavior without laws (relies on ritual to internalize shame) • Mohism: Consequentialist morality emphasizing need for authoritative rule from above. Heaven will punish wrongdoers. Eventually loses out to Confucianism. • Legalist School: How people can best be controlled by laws (opponents of Confucianism) • School of Names: Concerned with use of language to produce logically-correct inferences. Mostly lost, dismissed by other schools.

8. Characteristics of Ancient Chinese Philosophy • Naturalistic focus: Tends towards description of the underlying substance or forces in the universe (analogous to pre-Sophists like Thales) • Political implications are scattered throughout – few if any treatises on political life generally. Reflects belief that personal and political are identical (i.e. filial piety, harmony) • Many schools that did emphasize political life survive only in brief fragments (Mohism)

9. D. The Pre-Socratics of Greece: Antecedents of Western Political Philosophy • Greeks credit Egypt for inspiration • Naturalists: Focused on physical science and nature of souls: mundane concerns of human relations received little attention • The Physis-Nomos distinction • Physis – Universal and timeless reality • Nomos – Customs that may change • Which is good governance? Depends on philosopher… • Influences on Plato • Parmenides: Parmenides argued that reality must be timeless and changeless.  Plato: True knowledge is knowledge of the timeless and unchanging. • Heraclitus: Nothing is permanent in the sensible world.  Plato: We cannot get knowledge of the timeless and unchanging truths by using our senses alone.

10. 4. The Sophists: Practical Advice for Wealthy Boys Entering Politics • Skepticism -- Good arguments on both sides of every issue (rejection of divine truth) • General question: preservation of virtue – Can virtue be taught? (Implication: Will transition from aristocracy to democracy lead to disaster?) • Sophists generally said virtue was nomos, subject to change whenever law and society changed.

11. IV. From Sophism to Socrates • Was Socrates a Sophist? • Peers: Yes – Skepticism, emphasis on debate, practical knowledge • Plato: No – Denial, no charge, emphasis on timeless truth, no claim to be a teacher

12. B. The Socratic Method • Socratic Method- asking questions and offering counterexamples in a manner which ultimately leads the other person to reach the right (or at least a better) conclusion. • Philosopher as “gadfly” (to prick at complacently held prejudice, and ill founded opinion) or “midwife” (to help others to give birth to truth, by asking the right questions to help them to figure out what the answer might be). • Socrates opposes written philosophy! He wrote nothing, because paper can’t talk back and question the reader. That’s what this class is for.

13. C. The Socratic Moment • 12-15 Socratics began publishing Socratic dialogues: • Nearly 200 books with more than 300 dialogues written in a few decades • Nearly ever Athenian philosopher acknowledges Socrates’ influence – virtually no other books published on philosophy • Shift in philosophy from demonstrating theses to critically examining common beliefs – Socratic dialogues often end up “proving” nothing positive on the surface • For an entire century, Greek philosophy is almost entirely composed of pupils of Socrates or pupils of his pupils!

14. D. Plato 1. Plato’s world: Born in 427, sees nothing but war, epidemic, social collapse for 23 years. • Student of Socrates • 388: Plato founds Academy; admits women • 375: Plato writes The Republic at age 52. 2. Socrates is a character in The Republic. Unclear if Socrates’ views actually represented

15. 3. Reading Plato • Meiutic method: Philosophical dialogue aims to help people to give birth to their own ideas, not simply to persuade others or provide them with information. • Plato vs. Socrates: • Plato often uses dialogue form, but many of them aren’t “real” dialogues • Republic: After Book I, most characters reduced to “Oh, of course, Socrates” and “All can see you are correct, Socrates!” Seldom any real challenges to Socrates. • “All of Western philosophy consists of footnotes to Plato” (A.N. Whitehead)

16. IV. Aristotle’s Virtue Ethics • You are assigned sections of Nicomachean Ethics, but not the ones that actually list the virtues. • Method to identify virtuous path = “doctrine of the mean” (see handout for examples) • Fundamentally conservative philosophy. Why? • What is Gilman’s alternative, and how does she differ from Aristotle, who argued for the inferiority of women?