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M. Andrew Holowchak
Itinerant Philosopher/Aging Powerlifter

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

Course Syllabus

Final Essay Questions. Choose One.

1) For Rawls, what precisely is justice as "fairness"? Be sure to include talk of the original position, the difference principle, and primary goods in your answer.

2) MacIntyre maintains that a solution to the current crisis of "fragmented survivals" from a moral past, poorly grasped, can only be had through Nietzche's will-to-power irrationalism or Aristotle's virtue-based ethics, which allows for no distinction between factaul and evaluative claims. Why?

Rousseau's Social Contract

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)

The Origins of Inequality (1755)

  • What are the differences between natural (physical) inequality and political (moral) inequality for JJR?
  • What is the modus operandi of this treatise?
  • What is JJR's view of private property? Do possessions soften or weaken the human spirit/condition?
  • For JJR, what is the origin of war? --justice?
  • What is JJR's view of slavery?
  • What is JJR's view of science?
  • How is the social contract formed?
  • What is JJR's view of liberty here? Is it best found in civilized societies or the state of nature?
  • What is the paradox of progress for JJR? How does the study of humans contribute to this paradox?
  • Are humans happy in their civilized roles? Why does he think that savages live within themselves and socialized persons live outside of themselves?
  • Does JJR view reflection or rationality as a good thing? Explain fully. Where do philosophy and the passions fit it?
  • What are the three stages of (political) inequality? How is the final stage a return to equality?

The Social Contract (1762)

  • Does this treatise mark a shift or change in JJR's thinking?
  • What different sorts of questions is JJR trying to answer in this essay?
  • Why does JJR think that men are not naturally bellicose?
  • What is JJR's view of slavery in this treatise?
  • Does JJR believe that humans can and should return to the state of nature?
  • How do force and liberty work to preserve social living? What changes occur in the state of society that were not in the state of nature?
  • What are natural liberty and civil liberty?
  • What is the social contract? What is the sovereign and how is it related to the general will? Why is the sovereignty indivisible and inalienable? How is the general will related to private wills?
  • What is the role of property in civil society? When does someone have a right to property?
  • How is equality possible in civil society? How does equality maintain sovereignty?
  • When does a state become a republic?
  • How are power and wealth to be distributed in a proper civil society?
  • What are the three main types of government for JJR? Why does he believe that these are illegitimate labels?
  • Why are different countries suited for different governments?
  • What is the surest and simply sign for JJR that a civil society is thriving?
  • Why do civil societies decay?
  • What is JJR's view of representative government? --private interest in governmental affairs?

Mill's Libertarianism

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)

Book I

  • How much power may collective opinion (government, majority, special-interest groups, etc.) legitimately exercise over individual? How much suppression of instinct is warranted? Who is in a position to tell us just what our “best interest” is?
  • What are the differences between antagonistic and representative governments?
  • What is the "tyranny of the majority"?
  • What is the main thesis set out my Mill?
  • How does Mill's thesis square with Utilitarianism?

Book II

  • Why does Mill believe that tolerance of contrary opinions is needed?
  • What is Mill's view of the power of truth?

Book III

  • What does Mill mean by individuality asserting itself? What are the constraints? What is the benefit?
  • Is Mill's attitude towards the masses contemptuous?
  • In what sense could this chapter be a cry for help that reflects Mill's own personal-life crises?

Book IV

  • What obligations does an individual have to the state? What rights does he have?
  • Where does morality factor into the equation? Are private actions moral actions for Mill?

Book V

  • What is "liberty" for Mill? Why might he be labeled a libertarianist?
  • What bearing has Mill's thesis for democratic societies today?

Marx's Socialism

Karl Marx (1818-1883)

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts

 Alienated Labor

  • What does Marx mean by the “fact” of “political economy”? How does it lead to workers’ alienation? Does this put Marx at the level of theory or description?
  • What does he mean by “objectification of labor”? How does it lead to alienation?
  • What is the difference between (1) alienation caused by the products of labor and (2) alienation caused by labor itself?
  • What is the third notion of alienation caused by capitalism—alienation from human’s species? How does beautiful production factor in? Why does Marx think that human’s cannot be separated from what they create—i.e., that production itself cannot merely be a means, but must also be an end for humans?
  • How might Marx be classified as a champion of humanism in E&PM?
  • Is Marx’s critique of (capitalistic) productive activity devastating? Or can one imagine a capitalist’s defending himself capably?
  • Why does Marx think that private property is the effect, not the cause, of externalized labor?
  • How do wages help to affect a sort of slavery to private property (i.e., the capitalist)? Why does a raise of wages fail to remedy a worker’s alienation? Would equality of wages across the board solve the problem? Consider Marx’s causal chain: Private property à Alienation à Wages
  • Why is the relationship between the laborer and the capitalist antithetical?

Private Property and Communism

  • How does the dialectical tension between labor (subjectively, the exclusion of property) and capital (objectively, the exclusion of labor) resolve itself in communism? Is this dialectical resolution a product of observation or mere teleological speculation?
  • Why is it that envy and the desire to level comprise (capitalistic) competition?
  • What is Marx’s distinction between crude “political communism” and “positive communism”? How does the latter solve the “riddle of history”? Why does he believe that the movement to positive communism is inevitable? How does a human find himself in the latter?
  • Why does Marx believe that humans are the immediate objects of natural science?
  • Why does Marx think that atheism, the negation of deity, is senseless? How is it that, through positive communism—i.e., the negation of a negation—humans become emancipated?

The German Ideology

  • Marx specifically distinguishes human being from other animals by their mode of producing his subsistence. What is the significance of that for humans? How do population growth and interaction factor into the equation?
  • Marx states that the driving forces of international relations are productive forces, the division of labor, and domestic concerns. Do you agree?
  • Marx states that the division of labor in a nation comprises industrial/commercial labor and agricultural labor and that that leads to a division of town and country. Is that still applicable today?
  • Marx states flatly that thinking and conceiving are the direct result of material (productive) behavior (“Consciousness does not determine life, but life determines consciousness”)—i.e., behavior gives rise to thinking, which only then gives rise to new behavior. Do you agree? What room does that leave for morality, religion, and metaphysics? Do they become epiphenomena?
  • What does Marx mean when he states that men in the empirically perceptible process of development, not statements of isolated “facts”, are the true “premises” undergirding his view? What might he say of the “premises” of Newtonian physics?
  • What are the four factors that enter into historical development? How are these materially conjoined? Where does consciousness factor in? How does a division of labor occur?
  • How does the division of labor lead to alienation? –class struggles?
  • Why does Marx believe that communism is not an ideal, but a real movement? What two conditions must be met to get communism off the ground?
  • Give a critique of Marx’s (re)definition of “history”? Do you agree? Even if not, does his critique of other views of world history persuade?
  • Is Marx’s characterization of big business on the global scale accurate? Does it destroy nationalism and proffer, in its place, a class of global capitalists?
  • Do you agree that competition between big businesses isolates individuals?
  • What is Marx’s distinction between an illusory and real community?
  • What does Marx believe that proletariats must do to escape their meaningless condition?
  • Does Marx adequately dismiss the argument of world history as conquest? How does Marx go from taking to production?
  • Why does Marx think that the proletariats must achieve an “appropriation”? What are the two phases of this appropriation?

Poverty of Philosophy

  • Hegel's Logic: Thesis vs. Antithesis --> Synthesis; Marx's Reformulation: Affirmation vs. Negation --> Negation of the Negation. Why does Marx consider Hegel's method an abstraction and his own as material?
  • Why do bourgeoisie interests have a double character?
  • What does communism offer the proletariate?

Rawls' Liberalism

                 John Rawls (1921-2002)

Justice as Fairness

 

I) Fundamental Ideas

§         What are the four tasks of political philosophy? Which of the four does Rawls think most important for his undertaking?

§         What is Rawls’s most fundamental principle of “justice”?

§         What are his two companion ideas?

§         What is Rawls’ notion of “social cooperation”?

§         What are the limits of Rawls’ inquiry?

§         How does the notion of the original position guarantee fairness? Why is the original position hypothetical and non-historical?

§         What are Rawls’ two moral powers?

§         Why are persons assumed to be equal and free?

§         How does public justification, not utility or rational intuitionism, support Rawls’ notion of justice as fairness?

§         What is reflective equilibrium? What is the difference between narrow and wide equilibrium?

§         Why is pluralism a necessary consequence of Rawls’ notion of justice?

II) Principles of Justice

§         How is justice legitimated by the enactment of a constitution?

§         What are Rawls’ two principles of justice? Do you find these principles reasonable?

§         How is fair equality of opportunity to be secured?

§         Does Rawls’s non-historical method of securing rights and liberties reduce to intuitionism?

§         What is the four-stage sequence of the adoption and application of the principles of justice?

§         What is the problem of distributive justice? How does Rawls’ basic structure try to secure distributive justice? Factor in the “difference principle” and reciprocity.

§         What are the five sorts of “primary goods”? Why are freedom and equality not included among such goods?

§         Why can’t Rawls factor moral worth into his political conception of justice?

III) Original Position

§         What precisely is the original position and how does it secure justice?

§         In what way are the parties involved rational?

§         What presuppositions does Rawls make to get off the ground his original position?

§         What are the “political values” expressed by justice? Why are these not founded intuitively?

§         What is the maximum rule?

§         What is a “utility function”?

§         What are the two fundamental cases? Is it important for free people to form their own conception of the (moral) good?

§         What is Rawls’ view of private property?

§         How are basic rights and liberties to be fixed?

§         How is Rawls’ political culture up to its citizens?

IV) A Just Basic Structure

§         What are the differences between “property-owning democracy” and the “capitalist welfare state”? Why does he disavow welfarism? Why does Rawls favor “classical republicanism”?

§         Does Rawls adequately show that “right” and “good” are complementary? What are his six notions of “good” assumed in justice as fairness?

§         Why does Rawls argue for a constitutional democracy and not just a procedural one?

§         What is Rawls’ view of perfectionism?

§         What is the difference between political and comprehensive liberalism?

§         How does the difference principle differ from the principle of just savings?

§         How does “family” fit into Rawls’ system?

§         How does Rawls factor in leisure?

V) Question of Stability

§         What is the question of stability?

§         Does Rawls run into a circularity of a type with his political conception of justice without drawing on independent non-political values?

§         Discuss Rawls’ view on the reasonableness of a comprehensive doctrine?

§         What are the three requirements of stability?

§         When is a political society good?

MacIntyre's Communitarianism

Alasdair MacIntyre (1929-)

Questions: One for Each Chapter

 

·        1: What is Mac’s “disquieting suggestion” and how does it motivate the rest of the book?

·        2: What is emotivism? How does it explain moral claims?” Contrast moral claims like “Socrates is good” (value-claims) with non-moral claims like “Socrates is pug-nosed” (fact-claims).

·        3: What is the self and its social roles of emotivists?

·        4: What is the “Enlightenment” project of justifying morality?

·        5: What does Mac think that the Enlightenment project had to fail?

·        6: What is the paradox of contemporary morality?

·        7: What has empirical science taught us about the difference between facts and values? Because of the theory-ladenness of even the most fundamental linguistic concepts, can there be such a thing as “fact”?

·        8: How do predictability and unpredictability enter into human activity and make it possible?

·        9: How does Nietzsche respond to the Enlightenment depiction of human morality? Why does Mac find Nietzsche a suitable and viable contrast to Aristotle?

·        10: What is the heroic self? What is heroic realism?

·        11: What was virtue for the Athenian philosophers? What were the four chief “virtues”?

·        12: Sketch out Aristotle’s account of virtues. How was human action possible? What is different about Aristotle’s notion of “self” as compared to the modern notion?

·        13: How did the medieval view of morality differ from that of Aristotle?

·        14: Why does Mac think that there is a telos to human living? Do you believe that there is an one such thing that unifies (or ought to unify) all human activity?

·        15: What is the sort of narrativism that Mac endorses and makes use of for the unity of self? How is my narrative related to those of others? How does my narrative connect me to the past? –the future? Why is virtue relevant?

·        16: How does virtue tie a person to his society?

·        17: What are Rawls’, Nozick’s, and Dworkin’s notions of “justice”? Why does Mac think that each is wrong? What fundamental mistake does each thinker make?

·        18: How is Mac’s view a synthesis of Aristotle, Trotsky, and St. Benedict?