I noted yesterday, that in writing his work on collective choice Sen had apparently read not only the work of John Rawls (which was inevitable), but responses to Rawls about the humans-only nature of the deliberations Rawls imagines behind the veil of ignorance. We are supposed to imagine ourselves as ignorant of our social class, race, and native intelligence, but presumably cognizant of the fact that, when the veil is lifted, we will turn out to be humans. The responses wondered why the species barrier is that strong. What piques my interest is that Sen refers to these critiques (he does not source them specifically -- admittedly it is a bit of a digression from the main line of his thought) as half in jest and half serious. Hmmmm. Has Peter Singer written in response to Rawls? If he has, (and I'm too lazy to look into it right now) then I can easily imagine Singer making the point Sen emphasizes in dead earnest, utterly without jesting. What Sen sees...
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Amartya Sen, an economist/philosopher, was born in November 1933 and he is still with us. He may be the single most important philosopher alive. One of his works is COLLECTIVE CHOICE AND SOCIAL WELFARE. Or, perhaps, you might count this as two of his works. The first book of that title was published in 1970, then a much expanded and re-written version appeared in 2017. I'd like today to quote a bit from the 2017 edition, in which Sen is with some sympathy discussing the work of John Rawls. He says (this is a footnote): A half-jocular, half-serious objection to the criteria of fairness of Rawls and others often runs like this: Why confine placing oneself in the position of other human beings only, why not other animals also? Is the biological line so sharply drawn? What this line of attack misses is the fact that Rawls is crystallizing a rule of fairness that our value system does seem to have, rather than constructing a rule of fairness in vacuum based on notion...
As of this moment, I have NOT been able to give this answer to this question at Quora. For some reason, my interface with the site for this purpose has been unsuccessful. I will post here then, to lessen the sense of frustration. Both question and answer. Hello: To the people who read philosophy, can you explain to me its benefits and why I should read a book by a philosopher and then read a book by another philosopher who responded to him 200 years later, for example? Those are two very different requests, but since you have used only one question mark I suspect you think you have asked only one question. First you asked whether I, someone who reads philosophy, can explain its benefits. Presumably this means its benefits to me, whatever keeps me reading such books and articles. You could probably have put a question mark after the word “benefit”. Thereafter you ask a very different question: whether I can tell you why you should read at least two books by phi...
In a footnote on p. 197 Sen writes, "A half-jocular, half-serious objection to the criteria of fairness of Rawls and others runs like this: Why confine oneself in the [original] position of other human beings only: why not other animals also? Is the biological line so sharply drawn? What this line of attack misses is the fact that Rawls is crystallizing an idea of fairness that our value system does seem to have, rather than constructing a rule of fairness in vacuum based on some notions of biological symmetry. Revolutions do take place demanding equitable treatment of human beings in a manner they do not demanding equality for animals. 'If I were in his shoes' is relevant to a moral argument in a manner that 'if I were in its paws' is not. Our ethical system may have had, as is sometimes claimed, a biological origin, but what is involved here is the use of these systems and not a manufacture of it on some kind of a biological logic. The jest half of the objection...
Had things worked out a little better for him on Tuesday, Bernie Sanders would be in a position to regret his participation in the last round of Democratic Party rule making. There is a paradoxical tone to the situation that I have not seen anyone in print pick up on yet. So I guess I'll have to do it. Sanders is the most Rawlsian candidate in the race. Yet though the Rawlsian notion of justice works for him, the Rawlsian notion of a social contract that depends on a veil of ignorance works at the expense of a procedural position he has taken. To get this, we have to distinguish those two parts of Rawlsian social theory: the idea of the social contract, with of course traditional Lockean roots but filtered through game theory; and the suggested content of the contract, which the contractors supposedly agree to in the Rawlsian model. [That's a portrait of John Locke you're looking at, BTW. ] As to the contract: Rawls said that justice should be understood as the set...
Grant John Rawls a lot of assumptions. Grant his moral epistemology of "reflective equilibrium," to start. Grant that justice consists of the broad institutional features of a society, and grant that THESE should be what hypothetical negotiators would cook up behind a "veil of ignorance." All those concessions still won't lead us to the conclusions that Rawls is set upon, unless we also agree with him about whether the negotiators would adopt the conclusion that Rawls thinks they will adopt? Would they adopt the equal liberty principle and difference principle, and would they do so in a lexical ordering? The decades since Rawls' elaboration of his views in A Theory of Justice have given people plenty of opportunities to spill out alternative outcomes of those negotiations. But James Mirrlees (pictured above) didn't need a lot of time. He did so almost instantly. I haven't read Mirrlees' paper, but a secondary source describes him as sayi...
Just a brief quote today, from John Rawls. "To say that a political conviction is objective is to say that there are reasons, specified by a reasonable and mutually recognizable political conception (satisfying those essentials) sufficient to convince all reasonable persons that it is reasonable." Yes, in context Rawls had also listed the "essentials" to which he makes reference here. But we don't need them for today's point. I think this illustrates the sort of circular reasoning to which constructivists in moral philosophy often fall prey. This is part of the argument behind his theory of justice as a matter of the principles that would be adopted behind a veil of ignorance by, yes, reasonable people. The problem is that such work ends up presuming in a word like "reasonable" the whole of its eventual conclusions. So ... my theory is in accord with reason because it is the one with which reasonable people would agree. The people who do ...
In the previous two posts, I've given brief blurbs to each of two distinguished contemporaries in the world of social and political philosophy, Amartya Sen and Alan Thomas. Today I'd like to bring their views in contact with one another. The most obvious point to make is that Thomas identifies himself as, if not a 'Rawlsian' exactly, at least a member of the family. Sen, on the other hand, describes his own views in anti-Rawlsian terms. John Rawls is generally credited with reviving political philosophy in the Anglophonic philosophic world after a long period of neglect. Some say he did more, that he revived substantive moral inquiry itself in that world, after a period in which it had disappeared into meta-ethics. So it seems fitting that nearly half a century later, once should describe two major figures by where they stand vis-a-vis Rawls. Thus, I'm illustrating this post with his visage. Rawls' work mixes teleological and deontological elements. Of...
The title of this blog entry, Republic of Equals, is also the title of a new book on political philosophy. The author, Alan Thomas, a philosophy professor at the University of York, and the head of the department there puts forth a theory of justice he calls "predistribution." The underlying idea is that a republic is valuable and sustainable only to the extent that the ownership of property and/or "access to capital," is widespread, that is, to the degree that there are institutional checks in place to prevent a drift toward oligarchy. Further, it is Thomas' contention that this "stable management of capital dispersion ... require[s] relatively extensive involvement by the state." The term "predistribution," which Thomas adopts from other thinkers, is a name for the idea that it is better to keep the horse in the stable than to try to chase down the horse after it has run away. Thomas' notion of justice, derived largely from a c...
John Rawls saw himself as an heir of Immanuel Kant. I have long had this tidbit of knowledge stuck in the back of my head, a remnant of my law school days when Rawls was a common subject of discussion. But I've never bothered to document it. Recent interests have led me to do so, and among supporting texts I'll offer only three. One comes from the Preface, where he states clearly, that his theory is "highly Kantian in nature. Indeed, I must disclaim any originality for the views I put forward." A little later, in his Chapter One, he invokes Kant to explain the "original position," his reworking of the old idea of the "state of nature." This original position "is not, of course, thought of as a an actual historical state of affairs, much less as a primitive condition of culture. It is understood as a purely hypothetical situation characterized so as to lead to a certain conception of justice." That phrasing seems to admit that the ...
Recently I wrote a little about ethicist Derek Parfit. I've been doing further research on him since, and will now describe his Big Picture as I've come to understand it. Parfit believes that the western world only started taking ethical philosophy seriously (as a domain separate from theology) around the time Nietzsche declared that God was dead. There are only three possibilities, in terms of the God/morality issue: 1) You believe that God exists and that His commands define morality 2) You deny that God exists and, like Nietzsche, infer from this that in the absence of commands there is no right or wrong, or 3) You deny that God exists yet persist in believing and attempting to discern right and wrong. From a certain point of view there could be a fourth category, for people who believe that God exists but that His existence is irrelevant to morality, He doesn't issue commands at all, etc. Still, from DP's perspective that sort of God ...
I've posted in various places lately an inquiry about contemporary ethical and meta-ethical inquiry. I'll post it again here. Do my readers know of any scholar (preferably someone with academic cred, though not necessarily in a philosophy department) whose published positions enable us to describe him with each of the following four adjectives? Cognitivist, intuitionist, consequentialist, pluralist. It seems like a natural combination. As a cognitivist, our scholar would hold to a meta-ethics in which right and wrong, good and bad, are genuinely subjects for knowledge (not merely, say, for expressions of emotion). As an intuitionist, he/she would believe that there exists some immediate , non-inferential, grasp of some datum at the base of our reasonings on the subject. I have in mind especially Moore's notion that the good is in some sense like the color yellow, a perception that neurologically normal folk can take for granted, so that we don't reason about w...