Unit 5 Study Notes.docx

Unit 5 Study Notes One of the main problems in democratic politics is to figure out when society begins to have authority over people’s actions. The answer of J.S. Mill and other liberals is that we can coerce people only to stop them from harming other people (but not themselves). This is what is r...

Unit 5 Study Notes One of the main problems in democratic politics is to figure out when society begins to have authority over people’s actions. The answer of J.S. Mill and other liberals is that we can coerce people only to stop them from harming other people (but not themselves). This is what is referred to as the “harm principle.” Utilitarianism and Freedom Mill’s objective in On Liberty is to defend what we can call anti-paternalism. This is the belief that we shouldn’t treat adults as children. Mill tells us that adults are “the proper guardian” of their own moral, physical, and mental well-being and that we can never justifiably coerce people unless it is for their own good. This implies a fundamental distinction between what is good for us, and the kinds of goods that states can justifiably pursue. On the liberal view, that is, there are some good things that states cannot legislate for us and there are some bad things that they cannot interfere with. This might sound obvious to us now, but it wasn’t the traditional view. The traditional view, which goes at least as far back as Plato, is that states should pursue any good purpose that is in their power to pursue. The fundamental idea uniting Locke and Mill, which makes them both liberals, is the assertion that the state is of limited use. Mill believed in liberty as a zone of protected choice. This has the important implication that some things are taken entirely out of the scope of state decision. The model for this idea is Locke’s argument for religious toleration. What is important about Mill is that he extends this to include freedom of discussion, lifestyle, and a variety of other things. In short, freedom in choosing how we live is the idea of liberty defended by Mill. Social Contract Theory and other Alternatives to Utilitarianism Rawls developed a theory of justice by revising the social contract tradition. He claims that “justice” is what free and equal persons would agree to as basic terms of social cooperation in conditions that are fair for this purpose. This idea he calls “justice as fairness.” Nozick’s entitlement theory is based on the idea that only free market exchanges respect people as equals; for him, as “ends in themselves.” Distributive schemes, which allow people the products of their talents only to the extent that they benefit the less talented – such as Rawls’ – treat people as mere means to the enhancement of the less talented. Put simply, Nozick argues that if we own ourselves absolutely, then we own what we produce absolutely. Cosmopolitanism holds that there are global principles of justice that apply to all individuals of the world. Persons are citizens of the world in the sense that they belong to a system of justice that includes all persons within its scope. Their global citizenship exists in the sense that they have entitlements as members of this universal set of principles of justice and they may also have responsibilities as citizens of the world. Communitarians argue that we should prefer a politics of the common good to liberalism’s neutrality with respect to any conceptions of the good. While the “common good” for liberals is an optimal combination of preferences, its does not judge the value of any preference. On the other hand, communitarians think that we can and must make such a judgment; a society can survive only if it promotes values which each recognizes as objective. Conclusion The current dominance of philosophical liberalism may irk those who feel that its approach pre-emptively biases consideration of important matters and ignores crucial facts. But those who feel that way must recognize that it is to liberals we owe the revival of political philosophy and our present ability to discuss the problems of our social and political existence.