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.
Necessity and Obligation
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From the course by Yale University
Moral Foundations of Politics
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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.
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
Today we're going to continue talking about Robert Nozick,
who we started with last time.
The bumper sticker for the class today is necessity and compensation.
That'll be pretty opaque to you right now, but I think it'll, it'll become less so
as we go on and you'll see why I chose that, that description.
By the time we get to the end.
But let's start with some preliminaries.
Who is this gentleman here staring at us?
>> Immanuel Kant.
>> Yes, it's Immanuel Kant, right.
And we have mostly talked about
Immanuel Kant in this class as a defender of the,
what we call the categorical imperative, this notion of universalisable principles,
that replaced natural law in the, in the natural rights tradition.
As we move from the classical expositions are to the modern ones.
That's an important role that kind of places in Rawls theories and
in Nozick's theory.
Nozick very much has this concrete view you need to take deadly seriously the idea
of treating people as ends in themselves not as means to our own ends and.
So Nozick takes for granted Kant's ethics in the same way Rawls does.
But, actually, today I'm referring to something different about Kant,
a different argument that he makes,
that turns out to be centrally important for Nozick.
And that has to do with his treatment of necessity.
An obligation.
And so what I want to, ask you is a way of getting into this is, do, do you
think you can be obliged to do something that it's impossible for you to do?
>> Yes, absolutely.
>> Give me an example.
>> Well, you can be biologically limited from doing something that you're,
you know, obliga, you know, that's obligatory.
For instance, being sentenced to multiple life sentences in prison.
You can't do it.
>> Okay, multiple life sentences.
So, Bernard Madoff was sentenced to 150 years.
And he can't serve 150 years, but
you think he's still obliged to serve 150 years.
>> He's obliged to try.
>> He's oblig, okay.
Do, what do you think, do he can be obliged to do something that's impossible?
>> Yes.
>> Like what? >> To stay in a marriage forever.
[LAUGH]
>> I, well you are saying it's literally impossible.
No, I'm saying that you coming to this kind of agreement with goodwill and
you make well when something may happen that will make it impossible for
you to keep the promise you made.
>> But you're still obliged, even if it's not po,
it really, really, it is not possible for you to keep your promise.
You're still obliged. >> Church, for
instance, would say, yes, you're obliged.
There is no like, such thing as divorce.
If you're a religious person.
>> Okay.
>> And the contract says you know, for better and for worse.
>> Okay, so maybe you shouldn't make promises that you can't keep.
Once you've made them, you are obliged even if, even if you can't.
So Kant wrestled with this problem under the general heading of,
that people talk about, that ought entails can.
And as he put it at one point.
He says, since pure reason commands that such,
such actions ought to occur, then they must also be able to occur.
Now that isn't exactly dripping with lucidity, right.
It's a, it's a little unclear.
And it's ambiguous between two possible meanings that have
actually were going on what you two were both saying.
On one hand it could mean that if,
if something's obligatory than it must be possible to do it.
Otherwise it wouldn't be obligatory, right?
Or it could mean, and this is the way it's more conventionally interpreted and
in this way you two are both somewhat unconventional,
it could be interpreted to mean that if something's imp, literally impossible.
Then it can't be obligatory.
You can't be obliged to do something that you literally cannot do.
So let's say somebody is dying of a terminal illness,
and if the physician is told that it's your obligation to save him and
you, the physician says, I can't save him.
There's no treatment for this illness.
Then the physician doesn't have an obligation, so
it's not possible to deliver on it.
So that's what is typically meant and
we'll see that that's what Nozick means or entails can actually to mean.
That you can't be obliged to do something that's impossible.
Yeah.
Now you might, you might wonder, well, how do you know that something impossible?
And especially with empirical propositions for
sure that, that can be much debated.
You know, we saw earlier in the course when we talked about Bentham, he said,
you, it's not possible to redistribute from the rich to the poor beyond a certain
point, because the rich will burn their crops before giving them to the poor.
Well, how does he actually know that?
Right.
How do you know what's possible?
In the 18th century, when the British was talking about abolishing the slave trade.
The standard argument was it's not possible,
if the British get out of the slave trade.
You know, the Spanish and the Portuguese will just take it over.
Turned out they were wrong.
So there's a real question about how we know what the boundaries of
the possible are.
And we'll come back to that later in the course actually, but for
Nozick's purposes here, he's going to say it's, it's not an empirical proposition.
It's really more like an, an analytic truth of impossibility that he's going to
appeal to in limiting what he can, what we can be obliged to do.
So, that, that, I want you to now just put this
conversation to one side, and we're going to come back to it in a few minutes.
Let's just recap where we were at the end of the last time, and then you'll see why
I did this little hiatus to talk about Kant in the idea of what entails can.
So, you recall that last time, we traced Nozick's invisible
hand argument about how a state would emerge if it didn't,
if we he started with a state of nature, he pointed out it would be highly
inefficient, because there would everybody would have to protect their own rights.
You'd have you couldn't you couldn't go anywhere be, for fear that somebody would
steal your car and so, people would create protective associations sort of
block watch type arrangements that too would be somewhat inefficient,
because some people don't ever want to have to watch their car.
So they would morph into, sort of, more like militias, or gangs, or
business selling protection and then, because this force is a natural monopoly,
coercive force is a natural monopoly, a very important claim for
Nozick eventually one of these protective associations would become dominant.
Right, the, the gangs would either buy up the other gangs or beat them out
in a given territorial area and then you have a Dominant Protective Association.
Then we spent quite a bit of time talking about, well,
what about the people who wouldn't join any Nozick calls them independents.
These people who don't, who want to fend for
themselves, whether they're philosophical an, anarchists running around their
wilderness, or whether they are terrorists.
We don't know, but there are people out there who,
who we said the dominant protective association wouldn't tolerate them.
Why wouldn't they tolerate them?
You remember this?
>> They would not tolerate them, because they imposed fear to the society.
>> Right. They might be terrorists.
>> Mm-hm. >> Even if, we don't know for
sure, even if they say they're not terrorists, maybe they are.
>> Mm-hm. >> And some of
them might declare that they are.
And so, what Nozick going to say there is
that's important for what's coming up now, is so if, if there are people out there,
who could be terrorists, after 911 and all that.
We all to some degree live in fear of that possibility, and that means, so
long as they're out there, if you like everybody in
the society's utility goes down a little bit because of that fear.
They're not as happy as they would be if,
if there wasn't that possibility that the their building's going to be blown up or
planes are going to be flown into it, or something like that.
So but, of course, once the independents are forced to join
that fear goes away, because now we know that, that they're not out there anymore.
Is that right?
>> Not necessarily.
>> Because?
>> Because we don't know if they're really going only to participate, and
be included, or they're going to really become an actual members of the society.
>> Okay.
>> Are they going to be sleeping cells?
Is this going to be their strategy, just like to, for then as if they're included.
So this is a think the grey zone for the theory.
>> Yep. So that's always a possibility, but
so they, they could become criminals.
And we all have some fear of cri, criminals.
or, or as you say some sleeper domestic terrorist.
But presumably you know, what Nozick would say about that is well, yeah,
so there'll be a criminal law system to stop them, and they'll be you know,
there'll be an FBI and CIA gathering intelligence about such things
to the extent these people really pose a threat.
I mentioned last time before the Oklahoma City bo,
bombing, nobody took the, the Michigan Militia very seriously as a seri,
actual threat to civilians in a, in a city like Oklahoma City.
After that you can bet your last dollar that the law enforcement agencies,
you know, ramped up the intelligence on all of these groups and you know,
so in that sense they're not, they're not going to spend their time
policing groups that don't pose a threat, sort of the Amish, but
and there will be some judgement calls and some mistakes, but by and large.
They're going to have what, what the sociologist Max Weber called a monopoly
of co, of legitimate coercive force within the territory, and
people who pose a threat are not going to be tolerated, inside or outside.
And that's when you have a minimal state.
Right? >> Mm-hm.
>> And the, that's what he calls, he say's it's the classical night watchman state of
19th century liberal theory devoted to protecting property rights, and
basic physical freedom of action, but nothing more.
There's no reason to think the state would become more extensive.
Because people don't have the same values,
people don't agree on what sorts of activities it should engage in,
and so, he's against what he calls pattern theories of justice,
that is you specify some pa, some pad and
you know, you're an egalitarian so you think it should be equal.
But somebody is not an egalitarian and they think it should be meritocratic,
there's no way to resolve their disagreement so, if we make it egalitarian
the, the the person who doesn't want e, equality's going to be unhappy.
If we, if we don't make it egalitarian the person who does want it to
be egalitarian will be unhappy.
There's deep pluralism of values people just don't agree about what sort
of patterns of distribution we should have.
So, we shouldn't be in that business.
Right.
It's only, because of this natural monopoly of force that, that we,
we're compelled to create the situation that produces the minimal state.
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