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.
Liberty Upsets Patterns
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SM
Dec 16, 2015
Excellent, thought-provoking course. I especially enjoyed the final week lectures that pulled it all together. Both should be required listening for both voters and politicians in democracies.
SS
May 28, 2018
I learned way more than I'd imagined, and puts a broader perspective on today's political climate by learning about past theories, its values, its failures, and what we can take away from it.
From the lesson
The Social Contract Tradition II
This module looks at classical formulations of the Social Contract Tradition, locating them in historical context, but then shifts to the contemporary debates as they relate to politics today.
Taught By
Ian Shapiro
Sterling Professor of Political Science and Henry R. Luce Director
Today we're going to complete our discussion of, of Robert Nozick and
with that our discussion of the three enlightenment traditions that
have preoccupied us in the course thus far.
And we're going to focus our attention going into this on the distinction
he makes between patterned and procedural conceptions of justice.
This seems like technical mumbo-jumbo perhaps, but
it won't pretty soon, I think.
And what I want to just make clear is where Nozick thinks he's
going before we dig into the question, I'll ask you to think about for today.
What he wants to say is that historical or procedural rights-as-side constraints
are better than end-state principles of justice.
The principles that specify some goals,
some theology, some outcome that we want society to conform to.
And in this sense, he wants to say he's the only real Kantian.
He's the only real deontologist,
he's critical of Rawls's thin theory of the good, and he wants to say, no,
we have to take deadly seriously this idea that rights should be
distributed independently of anybody's conception of the good, because,
at the end of the day, people don't agree on their conceptions of the good.
And we think plu, pluralism is a good thing and liberty respects that pluralism,
so that's where, that's where all of this is headed to, and we'll get,
we'll go through some labyrinthine examples.
But it's important to have one eye on the destination.
Okay, so the question I'll ask you to think about for
today was it might seem pretty far removed from what I just said.
Which was why does Nozick think his Wilt Chamberlain example
is an answer to the left critique of markets?
So we should just get clear on what we,
what is, what's the standard left criticism of markets?
>> Well, it's, is that certain people are going to get rich and some people aren't?
>> Yeah. >> And they may not be deserving of it.
>> Okay, and why may they not be deserving of it?
>> Well, they, they have this idea of equality, and
that equality should perpetuate equality.
But, but the fact of the matter is-
>> Okay. >> But this, I,
I think there's a sharper point that, I think that's all true, but
there's a sharper focus that the left critics often have of market.
People say, markets are great, they're all voluntary transactions that
nobody does anything they don't want to, so it makes everybody better off, but.
>> But it's basically procedural and it never tells you where the status quo is.
It doesn't tell you where to start from.
>> Exactly, exactly.
Anytime you draw an X axis and
a Y axis and you put some point on it, you're starting somewhere.
And the question is, well, why start there?
Why start with a rich employer and
a, and a, a poor person who either has to work for a low wage or not have a job?
Why not start some different place?
And so this kind of inequalities that are built into
the status quo reproduce themselves through markets into the future, and
if, if you have a just initial situation, it's fine.
But, but most left critics of markets think,
well, that people have ill-gotten gains.
And then they come and said, oh, respect the market system.
Just as when we talked about Mill and mar, and Mill said, well
people can complain about the corn dealer of being a star, a starver of the poor,
but they can't do anything about it, because that would be harm.
Right, so this is the idea that voluntary transactions are all parasitic upon
some status quo, and if that's unjust, then it infects everything going forward.
And this is why Nozick conceded right off the beginning that you have to
have a theory of just initial conditions, because otherwise everything is tainted.
Okay? So, that's the left critic.
Right.
Now, he wants to say that this Wilt Chamberlain example actually is
an answer to that.
So, that's what we want to dig into.
So, who is Wilt Chamberlain?
>> NBA player, very good one.
>> Very good one.
The best of his day, right?
And so you remember the, never, never mind the exact details,
but what the basic outline of, of the,
this imaginary deal that Wilt Chamberlain has with the Los Angeles Lakers?
>> Oh, on top of his normal contract salary he,
he was getting paid a certain amount per, per visitor, per fan.
>> Per fan.
So he, he said what I want is at every home game there's going to be
a little box, maybe quite a big box.
And fans who want to see me play have to put 25 cents in the box, right?
To see me, to see me, right?
So, and Nozick, this was written in 1974.
Nozick estimated a million home game spectators over the course of the season,
so at the end of the season Chamberlain winds up with
a quarter of a million dollars.
If we convert that to modern day thinking both with inflation
plus the changing norms of, of compensation, let's say he ends up in,
in modern day terms with a $25 million bonus at the end of the season.
Okay.
All right.
Fine.
We can understand all of that.
Now why am I, Nozick think this isn't important?
Why is he bothering with this?
Why, what I mean, he's not a stupid man.
There must be some point to this, right?
What is his point do you think?
>> Well, I think voluntarily.
>> Everything is voluntary.
>> Right. Voluntarily,
the fans have made him an exceedingly rich person,
and it's exacerbated, it, it's an extreme example of inequality.
>> Yeah, so, inequality has come about as a result of
completely voluntary transactions, right?
Nobody's stolen anything from anyone.
Those people didn't have to go and put those quarters in the box.
They could have stayed home.
They didn't have to watch him, right?
So, this is why Nozick says, liberty upsets patterns.
This is his bumper sticker for his theory.
And what is, but what is this have to know with the left critique of markets?
The tyranny of the status quo and all that.
>> Because it always changes.
>> Yeah.
So this is his point.
He wants to say, look, all this stuff about the status quo in
market systems infects everything that comes later.
It's a giant red herring.
It's actually just a, it's just a polemical point, because think about it.
Let's say you're an egalitarian, you produce you prefer absolute equality.
Okay, I, Robert Nozick, I'm going to say to you fine, you, you set the status quo.
So we'll have equality, total equality everybody will have
exactly the same wealth and exactly the same salary.
Time line.
Now, we're going to get, let markets run.
What's going to be the case five years later?
>> Not everyone will be equal.
>> Why not?
>> Some people are going to naturally win out.
Some people are going to naturally lose.
>> Some people are going to be good basketball players, and
some people are going to pay money to see them, right?
That's his point.
Liberty upsets patterns.
So, the problem isn't with the status quo, because now you've said, you know,
you, you're an egalitarian.
You create an egalitarian status quo.
You're a Rawlsian, you create a status quo that protects the bottom.
Somebody else is meritocrat, they create a status quo that protects merit.
Whatever it is, if you let markets run, it's going to get scrambled over time.
So this, all this huffing and
puffing about the injustice of the status quo is really pointless.
That's his argument.
Okay? And that's why he wants to say
there isn't really a big deal about letting markets run and
letting whatever redistribution occurs as a result of transact,
market transactions happen, because the alternative is coercion.
So if we go back to you're the egalitarian, we let it run for five years.
Then we would have to engage in confiscatory taxation of Chamberlain and
give it back to all of those people if we wanted to
re-establish the status quo anti that we had agreed was just.
So, there's no way to preserve your conception of justice,
your patterned conception, right?
You're an egalitarian.
That's your pattern, equality.
>> Um-hm. >> There's no way to
preserve it without coercion.
Whereas my, Robert Nozick's conception doesn't require any con, coercion.
So that's my idea of rights as side constraints.
So he's kind of calling the bluff of the left critique of Markets by saying,
pick whatever you like.
We'll let markets run, and, you know, we'll see what happens.
Okay.
so, he sort of turns it on its head and
turns it back, very it, it's sort of a clever move.
And this might seem like a contrived example, so let me give you
a more realistic case where something analogous actually happened in the world,
which was after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989 and they,
these, a lot of these communist countries turn, tried to transition to capitalism.
One of the things that happened was they privatized these
massive state enterprises, the big steel works in,
in in many of those countries, but in Poland, in Krakow, in Katowice.
And so one of the, one common practice was they would take this big
state enterprise and they would give all these, you know,
thousands of people a little check saying, you own, you know, 120,000th or
something of this enterprise, and there it is, it's yours.
And so you probably can guess what happened.
Right, what do you think happened?
>> Wel,l some people kept those checks, those pieces of papers, and
they became rich.
Some others, they rid of them.
>> Yeah, some people roll cigarettes with them.
Some people put them under their bed, but some people went around buying them up
and, you know, five years later they were millionaires.
Exactly the same thing.
Liberty upset patterns.
So this is Nozick perpetual refrain
that no matter what you feed into a market system,
it's going to get scrambled by the voluntary choices that people make, okay?
And only his theory of rights as side constraints is immune from that.
And so he thinks that's kind of unique solution to the problem of justice.
Because he wants to say something that seems completely unassailable, he's got a,
what I call a little justice syllogism.
He says, if you have just initial conditions,
voluntary transactions, then the outcome must be just.
The standard left critics said, but we don't have just initial conditions, so
he says, okay, you can fix that with the Wilt Chamberlain, pick whatever you want.
Now, we're going to have voluntary transactions,
we can't any longer interfere with what markets do.
So, we shouldn't really be so hung-up on the initial conditions thing, right?
But you have to accept that, does that sound right?
If the initial conditions adjust and
the transactions are voluntary, you've gotta accept the result.
Yeah, it's a, so there's a certain plausibility to it.
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