L1 - intro Flashcards
Eichmann revisited
Hannah Arendt (German), Eichmann in Jerusalem: a report on the banality of evil (trial tried to paint Eichmann as avatar for all nazi crimes, but he was a meak man)
report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in the Beth Hamishpath - House of Justice (Jerusalem)
Eichmann (1906-1962) = nazi functionary responsible for Jewish deportation to extermination camps (1942-44) by organizing and facilitating trains, a literal nazi, a terrible person, job to murder people
Arendt: you can make him out to be a horrible person (he was undoubtedly), what comes out of the trial is that he makes an interesting/powerful defense of himself (even though he is indefensible: sent 1000s people to their death):
- “This was the way things were, this was the new law of the land, based on the Fuhrer’s orders; whatever [Eichmann] did he did, as far as he could see, as a law-abiding citizen. He did his duty, as he told the police and the court over and over again; he not only obeyed orders, he also obeyed the law”
profound bc he is saying the court is trying to establish he was acting unlawful, but what he did was lawful, problem is that the law was wrong
- to understand what is wrong about Eichmann, putting him to trial is not enough: there is more than if he is guilty under the law -> need preceding THEORY OF JUSTICE, of what the law should be
- he acted immorally, he did not break the law
- on what can we base a theory of justice?
what is political philosophy?
- gen + Swift book
- It is philosophy because it seeks truth (i.e. it attempts to determine values and principles through the use of rational argumentation)
- political bc it pertains to state institutions and people as public citizens : what do we owe to each other as citizens
Swift (book): Political philosophy asks
- how the state should act,
- what moral principles should govern the way it treats its citizens
- what kind of social order it should seek to create …
- what we should do, as individuals, when the state isn’t doing what it should be doing …
!should -> moral philosophy, it is interested in justification, in what the state ought (not to) do
Swift:
- state = the collective agent of the citizens, who decide what its laws are.
- question of how the state should treat its citizens = that of how we, as citizens, should treat one another.
- The state is a coercive instrument. It has various means – police, courts, prisons – of getting people to do what it says, whether they like it or not, whether they approve or disapprove of its decisions.
-> Swift: Political philosophy, then, is a very specific subset of moral philosophy, and one where the stakes are particularly high.
-> It’s not just about what people ought to do, it’s about what people are morally permitted, and sometimes morally required, to make each other
it’s all about values
what is political philosophy?
- Fabre:
“One of the most important questions in contemporary political philosophy is that of which principles ought to regulate major social and political institutions, so as to ensure, as much as is feasible, that we are given what we are due. An answer to this question provides a theory of social justice: of social justice, in that it addresses the issue of what we owe to each other, and of social justice, in that it attends to the organization of societies …. A theory of justice sets out what is owed to whom. In other words, it sets out the content of justice and delineates its scope”
basic questions political philosophy
- when is society just?
- what does it mean for its members to be free?
- when is one distribution of goods socially preferable to another?
- what makes a political authority legitimate?
- how should we trade off different values, such as liberty, prosperity, and security, against one another?
- what do we owe, not just to our fellow citizens, but to people int he world at large?
- can war ever be just?
relation polsci and political philosophy
they fit together like a hand and a glove
political science = describes and explains political phenomena (usually with empirical claims, with what/why questions)
political theory = addresses conceptual and normative question
(what is freedom? what is a fair taxation scheme?)
Valentini and List:
“Political theory and political science can complement each other. Normative recommendations and evaluations of policies or institutional arrangements often rest on empirical premises. It is hard to arrive at a blueprint for a just society, for example, without understanding how society actually works, since normative recommendations may have to respect feasibility constraints … Thus political theory requires political science … Similarly, when political scientists investigate, for instance, whether democracy promotes economic development or whether free societies are more politically stable and less corrupt than un free ones, they need to know what counts as a democracy or how to define freedom. These questions require the conceptual input of political theorists”
key quote = political theory requires polsci (understanding of society) + polsci questions require conceptual input of political theorists (if you research the effect of freedom, you want to first know what freedom is)
why political philosophy?
- Rawls
- To uncover deep moral understanding and compatibility, even at the root of warring peoples and ideologies. It is through digging deeper into the core of our beliefs that we discover core similarities at their root
- i.e. someone pro-trans rights, someone anti-trans rights -> conflict = ideological BUT that is just surface, if you dig into the value at the core: why do they deserve rights -> disputes fall away when you look into the value (political agency from personhood, not from e.g. sex)
- it is about values, seemingly valuable political - to reconsider our own institutions + purpose in participating in institutions
- look at institutions rationally, we understand their own rational fabric
- it is to help create the terms for a REASONABLE UTOPIA (accepting the world as it presents itself to us, and partially to help us structure a better world to our liking)(utopia given constraints)
NB: Rousseau: the aim of political philosophy is to “take men as they are and laws as they should be”
thinking like a philosopher
- social justice (not global justice)
Rawls: “justice is the first virtue of social institutions”
SOCIAL justice = complicated term
- how can society be considered just or unjust?
- can society act?
what we mean by social justice is a set of things (which can be phrased as questions):
- what can the state legitimately coerce us to do? (e.g. force you to go to prison when you’ve killed someone)
(diff between are you ought to and should the state coerce you) - how can (and should) the state constrain individual action?
- how can the law be justified?
- how should society be organized?
thinking like a philosopher
- ideal theory
+ criticism
= pursuit of ‘ideal’ principles that should guide society
(everything we do in this class is some form of this some extent, e.g. reasonable utopia: you can’t understand the reasonable, you need to figure out the ideal)
but can we really approach society this way?
-> two objections:
REALISM: pursuit of the ‘ideal’ of justice is unmoored rom reality (qua politics) = it is insensitive to power
- idealists visions misunderstand the nature of politics: vicious + sometimes irrational struggles for power
- don’t begin with moralism and apply it to real politics
- suggests diff approach: begin with real politics and aim for good outcomes
- criticism that idealism is insensitive to POWER
NON-IDEAL THEORY
- idealist theories of justice can’t apply to actual societies, i.e. it is unmoored from reality (qua PRAGMATICS)
- e.g. problems of non-compliance: idealism has no answer, it is unpragmatic
- needed = principles for what to do in our actual societies
- ideal theory is abstract -> pursuing it may be dangerous (bc it is unmoored from social reality)
(Raymond Guess on the realist approach to political philosophy)
= centered on the study of historically instantiated forms of collective human action with special attention to the variety of ways in which people can structure and organize their action so as to limit and control forms of disorder that they might find excessive or intolerable for other reasons
why do ideal theory?
- generate principles to guide society towards moral ends - ‘lighthouse’ function
- goal isn’t just to design an ideal society but figure out why it would be ideal
- it determines what values take precedence over others
- determine what is at stake morally, in decisions we make politically
