Jason Brennan - Political Philosophy: An Introduction

CONTENTS

Imagine Virtuous Vani cares deeply about others and is willing to do whatever ittakes to save lives. She believes that processed sugar is a scourge killing Americans.So one day she packs a pistol, invades the local 7-11, and declares, This here gunsays you cant sell Big Gulps anymore.

Principled Peter believes that you dont give enough money to charity. Youre livinghigh while people die. One day he sends you an email: FYI: I hacked into your bankaccount. I transferred a third of it to poor single moms.

Decent Dani thinks you should buy American rather than German cars. After all, yourfellow citizens provide you with roads, schools, and police. You owe them some business.He finds you shopping at a foreign dealer, pulls out a Taser, and says, You knowwhat? Ill let you buy that BMW, but only if you first pay me $3,000.

Youd probably regard Vani, Peter, and Dani as criminals. How dare they treat youlike that? Youd want the police to arrest them.

But theres a puzzle here. While the police would indeed arrest Vani, Peter, andDani, theyre also happy to help other peoplebureaucrats in Washington, Berlin,or Ottawado the same things Vani, Peter, and Dani want to do. So this set of examplessuggests a few questions: What, if anything, explains why its wrong for Peter totake a third of your income but not wrong for the government tax office to do so?What, if anything, justifies the Food and Drug Administration in determining whatyou can and cant eat but forbids Vani from doing so? In general, governments claimthe right to do things ordinary people may not do. What, if anything, justifies that?

This is one of the central questions in political philosophy . There are many others:What kind of government, if any, ought we have, and what should it be permitted andforbidden to do? Do we have any moral obligation to obey our governments laws andcommands? What rights do people have, and why? Should people be allowed to own privateproperty? If they dont have enough property to live well, should the governmentprovide it through tax-funded welfare programs? Should people be free to choose whatto eat, how to live, what to worship, what to say, or on what terms they will work?Is it important that everyone have equal opportunity to succeed? Should we make sureeveryone ends up equally successful? Should people be allowed to emigrate freely?When, if ever, is war justifiable? Whats more important: liberty or equality? Andwhat exactly is liberty, anyway? Political philosophy is the branch of philosophythat attempts to answer these questions in a rigorous way.

In the abstract, political philosophy is the normative analysis of social institutions.Institutions are the rules of the game in a society or, more formally, are the humanlydevised constraints that shape human interaction. For example, if you think aboutit, democracy and monarchy are really a set of rules about who gets to make the rules.The institution of marriage is a set of rules about how to allocate and control property,children, and sex. The institution of private property is a set of rules about whogets to use, modify, trade, and destroy various goods.

Political philosophy tries to determine the proper standards by which we can judgeinstitutions as good or bad, just or unjust. Of course, to pass judgment on institutions,we usually need to know how they actually work and what the alternatives are. Forthat, we need the social scienceseconomics, political science, sociology, and anthropology.Still, the social sciences alone arent enough to determine which institutions arebest. The social sciences can tell us what the trade-offs arefor instance, thatstrict economic equality might come at the expense of economic growthbut they donttell us which alternative to take. Is it better to be equal but worse off, or isit better to be unequal but better off? To answer that question, we have to thinkcritically about justice. Well have to know how to weigh equality against freedomor prosperity.

This is a primer on political philosophy. My goal here is to give you a working knowledgeof many of the major issues, ideas, and arguments in political philosophy. I wontbe neutral regarding all the theories and arguments we consider, but Im also notgoing to try to convince you of any particular ideology.

1
Fundamental Values and Why We Disagree

Consider how we evaluate hammers. We think hammers serve a purpose: to pound in nails.We judge hammers good or bad by how well they serve that purpose.

In contrast, consider how we tend to evaluate paintings. Here, we think paintingsare good or bad because of what the paintings symbolize, or how beautiful they are,or who made them.

Now consider how we tend to evaluate people. People can be more or less useful orbeautiful, and we do tend to care about who made them. (After all, most peoplevalue their own children more than they do others.) But we also tend to regard peopleas ends in themselvesvaluable for their own sake.

Now ask yourself, which of these models is the best way to think about the valueof institutions? Some people might believe institutions are valuable because of howfunctional they are, because of what goals they help us achieve. (If so, which goalsare we supposed to achieve?) Others might hold that institutions are (at least partly)valuable because of what they symbolize or who made them. (Consider: many peoplebelieve that laws, regardless of their content, become just, fair, or legitimatesimply if they are passed by a democratic legislature.) Others hold that some institutionsare ends in themselves. (Consider: many people believe that democracy is inherentlyjust and that it itself is the ultimate value, even if other political systems performbetter.)

People do not merely debate which institutions are just or good: they also debatestandards by which we should evaluate institutions. People disagree about what justicerequires.

When we see persistent disagreement about justice, we feel tempted to throw up ourhands and conclude that theres no truth of the matter, that opinions about justiceare purely subjective. But thats a mistaken inference. The mere fact that peopledisagree tells us little about whether theres an underlying truth. Disagreementis ubiquitous. People disagree about all sorts of thingswhether evolution happened,whether vaccines work and whether they cause autism, or whether the Earth is olderthan 6,000 yearsabout which we have overwhelming evidence for one side. Politicalpsychologistspeople who study how minds process political informationroutinelyfind that most of us think about politics in biasedthat is, irrationalways. Itsnot surprising they disagree about what the evidence implies.

We dont simply disagree with each other. Most of us also disagree with ourselves.

Most people endorse a wide range of moral judgments. Some judgments are generaland abstract (e.g., All things equal, increased happiness is good), some are particular(e.g., What you did was wrong!), and others are in between (e.g., Slavery is wrong).We arrive at these beliefs for a host of reasons. Some we are more or less born predisposedto accept, others we learn at our mothers knee, others we absorb from our peers,and some are conclusions from conscious deliberation.

We have thousands of moral beliefs of varying degrees of generality or particularity.We cannot hold all our moral beliefs in conscious thought all at the same timewemight instead be able to consciously think about only five or six ideas at once.We thus cannot check all at once to ensure that our beliefs are consistentthat is,that these beliefs dont contradict each other. For that reason, most of us endorsea range of moral judgments that conflict with each other and cannot all be trueat the same time. Part of what political philosophy does is bring these conflictingbeliefs to light and then attempt to resolve the contradiction. Usually, that meansgiving up some beliefsthe ones were less confident infor the sake of others.