When do governments deserve our allegiance, and when should they be denied it? This course explores the main answers that have been given to this question in the modern West. We start with a survey of the major political theories of the Enlightenment: Utilitarianism, Marxism, and the social contract tradition. In each case, we begin with a look at classical formulations, locating them in historical context, but then shift to the contemporary debates as they relate to politics today. Next, we turn to the rejection of Enlightenment political thinking, again exploring both classical and contemporary formulations. The last part of the course deals with the nature of, and justifications for, democratic politics, and their relations to Enlightenment and Anti-Enlightenment political thinking. In addition to exploring theoretical differences among the various authors discussed, considerable attention is devoted to the practical implications of their competing arguments. To this end, we discuss a variety of concrete problems, including debates about economic inequality, affirmative action and the distribution of health care, the limits of state power in the regulation of speech and religion, and difficulties raised by the emerging threat of global environmental decay.
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From the course by Yale University
Moral Foundations of Politics
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From the lesson
Welcome to Moral Foundations of Politics
Welcome to the course. Meet your instructor and learn about the structure of the course and what makes it distinctive.
Meet the Instructors
Ian ShapiroSterling Professor of Political Science and Henry R. Luce Director
The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale
But let's talk a little bit about expectations.
What are you expecting?
what, what brought you here?
What are you expecting to take away from this course?
>> Well, in my experience I've worked in other areas of political science but
now I really want to focus on the theory.
And to understand how theory is connecting to the real world politics.
>> Okay, so you, you're interested in the relationship between
political theories and what actually happens.
This is certainly going to be a big part of our preoccupation.
What brought you here?
>> I think I'd like to understand a bit more about why people have
such stark ideological differences and maybe more importantly,
why they seem completely unable to reconcile them.
>> Okay, we're going to spend a good amount of time on political disagreement,
how deep that disagreement runs, and
whether, and under what conditions political disagreements can be resolved.
And more importantly, particularly in the last part of the course,
what to do when they cannot be resolved.
So, I think some of your expectations at least will be met.
But I should emphasize, there are no silver bullets in this course.
And that's something I'll come back to in a minute.
Couple of other things though.
First of all, no prior knowledge is presupposed in this course.
We do everything from the ground up.
Everything is explained from first principles and the, the presumption is
that anybody who participates in the, in the classes and
does the reading will be able to understand everything that we do.
Related to that,
I want to emphasize that there are no technical prerequisites in this course.
There's no technical knowledge that you need to have.
We will, from time to time, make use of charts and diagrams.
For instance this is a, a diagram that I will not explain today
that deals with Jeremy Bentham’s political philosophy.
The reason I'm showing it to you is that there's a certain kind of person who,
when you put a diagram up on the,
on a on a blackboard as we use to do in the old days.
We're now on a slide.
You put a diagram up like that.
There's certain kind of person, they get a sick feeling in their stomach.
They start to feel nauseous.
Their eyes glaze over and their brains stop working.
I can totally relate to such people because I happen to be one of them myself.
And so what I want to say to you today and the commitment I'm making to you is that
everything we do with a diagram, we will also do verbally.
Diagrams at the end of the day are nothing more than a form of shorthand.
For people for whom they are useful, They’re
a shortcut to getting an, usually an analytical point across very quickly.
For people, where they're not useful, they're just not useful.
And so as I say, my commitment is that we will never do
something with a diagram that we don't also do without a diagram, and
we don't also explain verbally, from the ground up.
I should say that political theorists and
political philosophers are not famous for user-friendly, lucid terminology either.
Sometimes one's tempted to say, they never say in words of
one syllable what can be said in words of five syllables.
And again, it's part of my commitment here to dispel any
lack of understanding that comes from jargon or
abstruse philosophical terms that people don't understand.
But rather to explain everything in common sense terminology.
When we do have complex terms, to show why they're used, what they mean and not allow
anybody to walk out of the room because some term was used that I didn't explain.
And one thing I always say when I teach this course.
And one thing you should both feel free to do is,
if I do use a term that you don't understand.
You should stop me and ask what it means, because if you don't understand it,
probably there are people out there watching who don't understand it, either.
So no esoteric knowledge.
No high barriers to entry that cannot be surmounted by anybody.
Related to that, I want to say that there's no party line here.
The idea is not to convince you of my political ideology or
beliefs or convictions in fact, what you are going to discover might surprise you.
If I were to say to you.
Who is the most radical, political thinker of the last generation?
Who would you naturally reach for?
>> Probably Marx?
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah? >> Probably Marx.
People tend to think of Marx as a very radical figure.
Communism is the most radical alternative to democratic institutions and so on.
One of the things you're going to learn here is that, actually Marx is not a
particularly radical thinker, that many people who you
might think of as less radical than Marx, in some ways, are more radical than Marx.
And indeed, I think
I'll say something now that you might find quite strange, but
I don't think you'll find strange by the end of the course, which is.
That where somebody stands on a left, right spectrum, from liberal to
conservative as we use those terms in America in the 21st century.
Where they stand on that
continuum is probably going to be the least interesting thing about them.
There’re going to be many more interesting things about them and,
which we'll reveal for instance Edmund Burke.
Whose often thought to be a conservative is in
many ways a much more radical thinker than any of the enlightenment thinkers.
Including Karl Marx.
But all that's for the future.
The main point is, we are not looking to come out of this, to see what,
you know, whose party line to believe, least of all mine.
But rather to understand our own political beliefs and convictions more
thoroughly, see where they come from, see what they presuppose and
see where they lead us, and also to understand political beliefs and
commitments that we don't agree with more thoroughly as well.
And partly in the service of addressing your questions about what to do
about political disagreement.
No silver bullets.
One reason they're no silver bullets
is that even though we will be looking at the most important, the best,
the most influential political arguments that have ever been developed in the west,
none of them turns out to be without serious problems.
That might seem strange to you and you could, you could say,
well, then why do we bother studying them at all?
There are two reasons we do.
One is, has to do with the internal analysis that even though as,
as architectonic systems, as comprehensive theories,
they all fail in one form or another, or have serious deficiencies.
They don't fail utterly.
So each of the traditions we look at nonetheless despite it's
problems has some enduring insights that it will be useful to
you to hold on to as you go on your way after you leave here.
So they're not utter disasters, if you like.
They have some partial insights that are worth knowing about.
But then secondly, having to do with external analysis, one of the reasons we
study these ideas is that they are the most important in a ideological sense.
They are the most important ideas that have shaped
political thinking in the modern West.
so, why they've had this enormous power and why they've been so
captivating to so many people is,
is something worth understanding independently of whether they actually add
up in the ways that their proponents think they do as philosophical arguments.
This course is taught from a point of view, namely my point of view.
Even though it's an introductory course it did, it does reflect my own
philosophical commitments and to some extent, my own philosophical agenda.
That will become obvious as we go along, and
particularly in the last part of the course.
so, one reasonable reaction to that, that any person might have is that,
that is very arrogant on my part, that it reflects a kind of hubris.
I mean after all,
here we are, studying the greatest thinkers in the Western tradition,
over the last several hundred years and I am talking about my views as well.
You might say, where does this guy get off?
Who does he think he is?
And let me just tell you a little story to put that concern in context.
When I was an undergrad here many years ago, I took lectures on Immanuel Kant,
political philosophy from the great Kant scholar, Stephan Korner.
And he opened his first lecture with the following statement.
He said, Kant was a great philosopher, and I am a minor philosopher.
But, with me, you have the advantage that I am alive.
>> [LAUGH].
>> Yeah.
And that's the spirit in which I talk about my own views some of the time in
this course.
It's partly and importantly to get you to see that these are very much live debates.
All of the traditions we're talking about as I said earlier
have contemporary proponents, detractors.
They're very much in currency in academic life and in public life.
And the idea is not antiquarian.
The idea is to give you a historical sense of where the doctrines come from.
But also to engage you in contemporary debates about them.
So, it's not that I have illusions that I'm
the next John Locke or something of that.
I have no illusions of that I can promise you.
But rather to give you a sense that this is very much a living field.
That people are engaged in and developing.
And that you should think about being engaged in and developing.
What we're going to do next time is start with something that I
call the Eichmann Problem.
Who was Adolf Eichmann?
>> He was a German colonel.
>> He was, he was a lieutenant colonel, actually.
>> [LAUGH].
>> But that's okay.
>> Okay, so he was in charge for shipping the Jewish people to concentration camps.
>> Yeah, that's right.
He ran that rail networks that were responsible for
shipping Jews across Germany during World War II.
What do you know about him when I, what comes to mind?
>> Well I know that, you know, after the war he was hunted down
by the Allies arrested and tried for crimes against humanity.
>> Well actually, yeah,
he was briefly captured by the Allies right after the war.
But they didn't realize who they had, and he somehow managed to escape.
And like many Nazis who had escaped at the end of
the war he wound up in Latin America.
in, living under an assumed name actually in Argentina for many years.
And in the late 1950s, Israel Mossad, the Israeli Secret Service,
began to track down a lot of these Nazis who had escaped the,
the Nuremberg Trials that had been held after World War II in Germany and
were living all over Latin America under assumed names.
And they figured out who he was and where he was living, living and
they went there and they kidnapped him,
brought him back to Israel in 1960 and tried him and
executed him for crimes against the Jewish people and crimes against humanity.
Crimes against humanity had been the,
the term that had been used at the Nuremberg trials in the late 1940s.
And what we're going to do is use the story of Adolf, of Adolf Eichmann and
what happened to him, as a way into the substance of the course.
And what I want you to think about is two questions.
One is, what things make you most uncomfortable about Eichmann's actions?
What kind of person was he?
is, what is it about him that makes you nervous?
He is somebody that will, you'll find as you read about him,
sort of gets under your skin.
But then also I want you to think about, what two things make you most
uncomfortable about the event surrounding his apprehension trial, and execution?
That he was kidnapped, that he was brought to Israel,
he was actually tried by laws that had not existed,
by a regime that had not existed when he committed his crimes, and was executed.
And think about the, the two things that make you most uncomfortable about that,
and we'll start with those issues next time.
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