[SOUND]. >> Well, here we are for our final office hours of the Moral Foundations of Politics and I see actually more activity than last week on the forums, so we should get right to it. >> A lots of interesting questions and I'm going to ask some questions that are directly that were, you know, asked for office hours and also some of the interesting issues that have come up in the general discussions on the forums that have been, I mean, they, they've gotten more interesting even as, as we've gone along in the course and as people have been-. >> Mm-hm. >> Exposed to all the different traditions. >> Yeah, I agree. >> So let, we'll start with the first one. It's a pretty general question. It's kind of trying, I'm trying to, I think the students are wondering where you land on the different traditions. I think this is kind of where the, the spirit of the question. So there was a form where the students were kind of picking up on the fact that you seem to favor democracy. >> Mm-hm. >> Somebody who's read your work, I know that to be the case. But a lot of them were very worried about democracy, more worried than they felt you are about democracy. And somebody quoted the famous Churchill quote, you know, that democracy is worst form of government except for all the others. And so, if democracy has so many problems, why is it worth it? I mean, is there something should we agree with Churchill or is there something else about democracy that, that really does make it a, a good form of government or something that we should aspire to? >> Well, I think it its a well put question. I do think the alternatives really are worse. >> Mm-hm. >> So to that extent, I agree with Churchill. And it's, it's important always to make that point, because it's invariably the case that people come along and say, well, isn't some kind of soft authoritarianism better? And they reel out the soft authoritarian regime of the flavor of the decade, you know, Singapore or whatever it might be. The, there, there are not a lot of robust findings in political science. Not as many as a lot of political scientists claim anyway. But one of them is that benign authoritarian regime seldom rema, remain benign over time. They tend atrophy into, into pretty ugly regimes over time. And so when somebody points to an apparently benign authoritarian regime wha, what we should be careful in, in thinking that's, that's some kind of equilibrium. I, I do think that democracy is not just the least bad form of regime. I do think it has positive virtues, but what I've tried to suggest in the course is that we should think of democracy as a subordinate good. We shouldn't expect too much from it, this maybe overly dramatic analogy to the plumbing. That, it, you know, plumbing, plumbing isn't a source of anybody's edification or happiness in life in any direct sense, but if the plumbing doesn't work your life can be pretty bad pretty quickly. And so that, that, that was the idea behind the metaphor, which to suggest something that is important, essential to getting, you, you, to the, to having a good quality of life, but it's not itself the quality of life. And so, I, I do part company with people who have a more romantic expectation of what democracy's going to do for people. And so a, another way of, of bringing in some of the other traditions, I, you know, I think that the kind of impulse is great for your personal life, but not for public policy. And I think that utilitarian ca calculations are very important for public policy. But all of, always they have to be conditioned and constrained by democratic considerations. Part of the reasons we've talked about and partly because of the by, I almost sound sort of sound like a broken record in the course that you can't wring the politics out of politics. So that even when there are technically best solutions and a utilitarian calculist would tell you what they are, they're still going to disproportionately benefit some and harm others. And they're going to be costs that some people bare and they're going to be windfalls that some people experience and how best to manage those is not something that you can take out of politics. And so in that sense, I, I do think democracy contributes positive goods, but we should still keep it in its place. >> Well, speaking about people who are more romantic about democracy, I think a lot of those people are deliberative democrats we had some questions about deliberation. One people had, one person had a question about the we should, I mean, and maybe we showed a clip from Crossfire. >> Mm-hm. >> I think we did. And of course, you know, the two people are just yelling at each other. >> Yeah. >> They're not trying to seek truth. They're just-. >> Right. >> Trying to get their point across and be right. And so it does, certainly show that there, you know, a lot of deliberations are not truth-seeking exercises in any way. But one student brought up an interesting idea, which is well, what about the audience in that type of a situation? >> Mm-hm. >> Think about a public debate or debates that go on on TV. So maybe the people who are debating are disingenuous about their truth-seeking. But is the audience getting something of value out of watching deliberations and seeing deliberations go on in the public sphere? Where maybe the people who are debating are not going to change their mind, but don't people in the audience change their minds when they see other people debate about these topics? Is that maybe like a side effect of deliberation that's important. >> Well to some degree that well, that would be a side effect of argument. >> Mm-hm. >> You know I, in the course, I really wanted to make a distinction between argument and deliberation. Argu, argument after all is about winning. >> Mm-hm. >> You try to win the argument. Deliberation is a cooperative enterprise trying to seek the truth. So Mill, for instance, thinks argument is really important. >> Mm-hm. >> The pop, the market place of ideas, sharpening your wits by defending your views against all comers. And, you know, the Schumpeterian model of democracy seeks to institutionalize that through well, I, I gave the example of prime ministers questions time-. >> Mm-hm. >> In, in parliament. And there the idea is, it's, it's competitive. It, it's, it's they, they're both trying to win. Of course, they're not trying to persuade each other and they don't pretend to anymore than the people do on Crossfire. So there are, if you say, now well what about the audience? There are two audiences. There are in, in all those sorts of things they're sort of firing up your base. >> Mm-hm. >> Which is not about convincing anyone, but rather just energizing the people who all ready agree with you by demonizing the other side and so forth. And so to that extent, I don't think there's any kind of epistemic benefit. >> Mm-hm. >> Knowledge generating benefit. But then there, there is a second, a second dimension of it, which is that, by criticizing other arguments that, and this was Mill's idea. The truth comes out. You can expose corruption, you can expose specious reasoning. And for the people who are not you, you know, your pre-committed base, that might be important. People who, who maybe vote differently on different issues, who undecided or. For whatever reason. So that can be important. And then, I also think that, that criticism is important for generating opposition. And, we talked about the-. >> Uh-huh. >> Independent importance of opposition. So, the crossfire example, those people are such walking stereotypes that, you know, and they have no authority to decide anything. Whereas, the, the Westminster model, these are the people, actually, who can either be the government or the opposition. So, there's more politically and more at stake with them. >> So, the, another question about deliberation was, we have this example about there's, like, a cow in a field. >> Mm-hm. >> And, a bunch of people are standing around trying to guess the weight of the cow. And, it turns out that if they don't talk about it, and they just all guess and we average their guesses-. >> Yeah. >> That they're going to get closer to the weight of the cow. So, somebody suggested, well, maybe you could have a similar kind of exercise for, on, you know, issues that would otherwise come up in polling, you know, deliberative polls. Where you could have, instead of having them deliberate about it the way Fishkin sets up, you know, those exercises. You would have an app on your phone and, you know, whatever questions and information are going to come out. You would just get it personally, you are never going to talk to anyone else about it, and then you could do your vote. And, the person was asking would that be a better way to reveal the general will, like, maybe we could get to it that way, a different kind of deliberative polling. >> Well, it's not deliberative at all. >> Not delib, non-deliberative polling. >> It's just a kind of polling. So, it's, it speaks to the wisdom crowds point with the wisdom of crowds being the idea, that the crowds separately making their own judgements get, get the right answer. Which is, is a sort of political analog of the argument why markets generate good information. Because markets are also, you know, hundreds of millions of people making independent decisions all the time. And so, the wisdom of crowd's literature sort of piggy backs on that notion. It's, it's just a, a different way of pulling opinions. Whether it generates the general will is another matter. You know, take, that takes us back to the error problem. >> Mm-hm. >> Which is if there, if there are cyclical preferences in the population, what comes out of the voting may or may not actually reflect the majority. And that'll, that, a, and, e, you know, even if it might reflect a majority, we're never entirely sure whether it's a majority that's an artifact of whoever ordered the questions in the poll, and so on. And, if they'd been ordered differently, would there have been a different apparent general will, and so on. So, it's, it's a method of aggregation. That's, that's all it is. >> Mm-hm. >> And the example you suggested. The one area where I think it does make a difference and could make an important difference is the easier it gets to vote with technologies that are, are widely available, the, the less you'll have issues about voter registration- >> Yeah. >> And turn out determining outcomes. Because different social groups are in, are registered to vote in, in you know, in quite different proportions. And, if you if, if you get this, this, you know, before we had computers, this was all about the motive voter registration was a way to change the demographics of who registers to vote. And so, new technologies might actually have an impact on, on that, but I don't think they make any analytical difference. >> Okay, so let's switch gears. We, there was a discussion on the forums from a question that you posted in the forums about the EU. And, that was in the context of the social contract, and there was a lot of discussion on that forum post. So, there were, it, the issue of democracy also came up in this context. >> Yeah. >> Where people were debating about how possible it is to have super national democracy, or even world democracy if, is some, do you thin something like that is possible? And, if it where, what kind of decision rules would, would you best use, like on, on a world level for a democracy to institute it well? >> Well, there's, so there's the EU, and then there's-. >> Yeah, the two different [CROSSTALK]. >> Well, there's world democracy. I think world global democracy would be a bad idea. If, if, for the, even if it were feasible which I think it's not, because we don't have a barbarian state. You know, so all the issues we discussed in connection with, with Nozick become relevant. We don't have a global monopoly of force and therefore I don't think it's feasible. But, putting that to one side I agree with Kant and others who said that even if you had a, a global political system, it's far from obvious that it wouldn't be tyrannical. >> Mm-hm. >> And, if we think about the, the things that people don't like, like, we, we know now that democracy's compatible with massive inequality. There's no reason to think that would be any different in a global democracy. So, you know, we could do a whole separate course on international relations, but the, the bottom line is that I, I think from the point of view of democratic politics. It's better, you, the better path that goes to trying democratize existing, non-democratic regimes rather than trying to create a global regime. And then, think about other ways to manage the issues that come acr, up across borders. So, and I know Ashley, you work on that subject. >> I do. >> So, you all should look out for Anna's book- >> [LAUGH] >> When it gets published in a couple of years. >> [LAUGH] One day, yes. >> She'll have a lot to say about that. >> I'm also worried about world democracy. [LAUGH]. >> The EU is a more an, more localized set of issues. And so, and this actually scratches the surface of something, which would take another course too. If you really wanted to get into it, which is that there's a deep paradox about democracy, which is that democratic political institutions are, are public goods. That is, they must be supplied to everybody, if they're going to be supplied to anybody. And the, they have this feature of non-rivalrous consumption, so you're, you're consumption of it doesn't prevent my consumption of it. So, they're what economists call public goods. Now, the problem is it's hard to pro, provide public goods democratically for a variety of reasons that political economists have talked about for a hundred years. And so, then you have a, an apparent paradox because how is it going to get legitimacy if it's not provided democratically- >> Mm-hm. >> If the only source of legitimacy is democracy? And I think that's a deep problem for regime construction. So, and, and what it means is that in real, in the creation of real political regimes, there has to be a kind of dynamic dimension to it. So, that i, if you look, say, at the creation of democracy in South Africa after 1994, at key moments, things were pushed through from above. >> Mm-hm. >> There was a, an elite deal between the ANC and the government, the old apartheid government. It was basically rammed through because the round tables and all the. Democratic mechanisms were preventing it from being rammed through. >> Mm-hm. >> But then the elites had to do things to legitimize what they had done. They had to they, the, the old, the white regime held a referendum to legit, legit, legitimize what he, they were doing among white voters. The ANC did various things to legitimize it among their grass roots supporters. They held things like amnesty hearings. So they had to do a lot of stuff to build support, build new constituencies for, for what they were doing from above, so it, it's, it's the, and it's imperfect but it, it's in the nature of things that if you're going to provide a democratic public good you can't do it all public you can't do all of it democratically. But then you have to find surrogates for not having done it democratically. >> Mm-hm. >> If it's going to build legitimacy over time. Now, the EU is a very good case in point. Because a, as Tony Jun's, Tony Judt's fabulous book called Postwar, I mentioned before in this course. >> Mm-hm. >> Which everybody should read. He details at considerable length, the extent to which the EU was an elite project. And largely ran through and when it's been come up in referendums it. >> Yeah. >> It doesn't do very well. >> Which is why they didn't get their constitution passed. >> Yes. >> There's an actual constitution. >> So it, then, this is where the phrase democratic deficit. >> Mm-hm. >> Sort of originated was in total amount in EU. And there's been the sense for decades that that it, that it lacks democratic legitimacy and it spun an elite project from the beginning. And Judt interestingly predicted in his book, which came out in about 2006, that the first time that EU hit a real crisis this issue was going to explode, which is, which it's been doing. >> Mm-hm. >> And it's slow train wreck for five years now. And the answer is going to be, you know, either it's really going to consolidate, or it's going to deconsolidate. Because what they have now is not an equilibrium. And it's, I think it's actually an open question, which way it's going to end up, because the fiscal pressures, the immigration pressures, the fact that they've lost, most countries have lost control of their monetary policy, except for the UK that are in the EU, all contributes to a perception of disempowerment of European voters concerning the decision-making-. >> Mm-hm. >> That governs them. So either the EU is going to become more of a genuine state, I think, or it's going to, or it's going to fragment and fall apart. >> [SOUND] It's very interesting. We'll have to see. [CROSSTALK] I mean it's been a big topic on the forums too. I think that this is-. >> We could easily have a whole course on this. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Okay, so let's talk a little bit about corruption in democracy. Or not necessarily just corruption. One of the things. So we started with this question about, you know, the quote from Churchill and people being worried that democracy is not all that good. >> Mm-hm. >> Or functional. So, one of the things that makes people very dissatisfied about democracy is that representatives get into power and then they build power from the power once-. >> Yeah. >> They get there. >> Yeah. >> And there can be an entrenching of interests, you know, interests from outside that are pulling the strings moneyed, you know, lobbying and that kind of stuff. And so, what can, what type of things can be done to stop democracies from starting to look like oligarchies once people get too much power? So, things came up like, what about term limits? >> Mm-hm. >> Why don't we have term limits? You know, on representatives in the US in the Congress. Or what about campaign finance rules, would that help the problem? >> Well, tho, those two things are very different. So, term limits you know, we, we put in term limits on the presidency in the US after FDR won four, four successive elections, and it was felt that he, he was becoming an oligarch, and he died in office. >> Mm-hm. >> Which is you know, what tends to happen. You, I think the, the worry about term limits is that the cure can be worse than the disease. And they had actually debates about term limits during the constitutional convention and oppose them if, if the goal is to prevent corruption it's not clear that term limits do that. I mean some countries it depends what the source of the corruption is. If you have heavily clientelist systems, such as in many Latin American countries they, they've argued that term limits are really important, because politicians maintain their power by essentially by giving out goodies to constituents. And so Mexico now has one term for almost every political office. The danger, and, and you could say i, if, if basically political offices about giving private benefits to its supporters rather than public benefits to the society, that term limits might limit corruption. But the, the danger with term limits is that all politicians while in office are looking for their next gig. They're thinking about what are they going to be doing when they leave office. And so that promotes a different kind of corruption because they're going to get jobs working for the firms say that they are regulating. >> Mm-hm. >> And so on and so forth. So that's one problem. A, a second is that that they're, they're very unhealthy effects of knowing that somebody's a lame duck in politics because basically it means that people lose the incentive to cooperate. So it, it, you actually get, m-, you get better quality of politics. This is a lot of game theory about this that we don't have time to go into now that comes out of the idea of prisoner's dilemmas, but, you, prisoner's dilemmas are situations in which it would be better for us to cooperate, but we each have individual incentives not to cooperate. >> Mm-hm. >> And so, we, we, we don't get to the best solution. And it turns out that uncertainty about the future promotes cooperation. And the, the, problem with term limits is, everybody knows this person's going to be done. So, they don't have to, they can just wait him out. >> Mm-hm. >> And so we we'll see now, this now in the Obama administration. So it, it's all, you know, so there are other costs to term limits that have to be factored in. And my own view is, and it's particularly if you don't have a client list political system, that a cure is worse than the problem with term limits. Campaign finance yes. I, I think that what we have, what we have morphed into in the U.S. is the worst possible system in that the cost of entry into politics are so high, the need to raise endless amounts of money perverts the system in numerous ways. And we would be far better off going the way of many other countries which don't treat campaigning and spending money on campaigning as free speech to protect it by the First Amendment as we do here. But rather as structured competition over public office. >> Mm-hm. >> And have public funding of elections. I should mention that and this connection might be interesting. There was a, one of Bob Dold's, Bob Dold I've mentioned in the, in the de, lectures on democracy was probably the most influential democratic theorist of the 20th century. One of his last books was a book called On Democracy. And since he offered, he died last year, the Yale Press is doing a new edition of that book. To which I added a couple of short chapters at the end, one of which is on this topic. >> Oh, interesting >> Yeah. It'll be published in April or May, I think. Yeah. >> So, what's next for, this is not, this is, it is a sensitive question, but it's kind of for the students as they move beyond the course. What, for students who really like thinking about political ideas the way that the course is set up, you know, has, you know, put the ideas forth, how can students continue to hone their, their, you know, political acumen, and what, what books should people read if they really like this course? What would be interesting to people who like this flavor of talking about politics? Any good recommendations? >> Well, I think there, there are two things to say about that. One is that if you want to read more political philosophy we scratch the surface of these texts that have been around for three, 400 years. And you can go and actually, you know, we have a, we put together the reader that is heavily excerpted and people can go back and actually dig in to these works and read them. >> Mm-hm. >> Like almost nobody ever reads Pareto's Manual of Political Economy, for example, but it's, you know, it's a stunning book. >> Hm. >> And people can go and read Rawl's Theory of Justice and go and read Hobbes' Leviathan. And all these books, and take courses that deal with them in depth. That's one, one path to go, but I think another thing to say is that the, the central ideas don't change that much. The central issues don't change that much. The central dilemmas don't change that much, and so, in some ways the better thing to do is to read books about the political landscape and the real world, and then bring to bear the ideas that we've talked about in this course in thinking about them. >> Mm-hm. >> And so then I would reach for some of the most, important books written in, in recent decades, and three come to mind, all of which are mentioned briefly at one time or another in the course. One is Piketty's book. >> Mm-hm. >> On capitalism, which many people have been writing about in the media. And there, all of, almost all of the attention has been focused on the top 1%. Did he measure it correctly? What about the moves- >> Mm-hm. >> from the top 1% to the top 0.1%? And all of that. But there, there are many other questions besides the top 1% like, what does this mean for the middle 40% or the bottom 30% the, these changes, and that hasn't had anything like the attention that all those folks in the top 1% has had. So I think that, that that's really important, book. Or, or a, a really important set of issues-. >> Mm-hm. >> raised by the book which you can use the tools that we've, we've talked about in this course to interrogate. A second one is Pinker's book, The Bel, The Better A, Angels of Our Nature, which is this hugely interesting book. Pinker is a psychologist at Harvard, but this is a multidisciplinary book that argues that over the past several centuries, even millenia, violence on earth has en, violence and cruelty in the world have been declining. Now s, some aspects of it are quite controversial. But the, the broad thesis is largely correct. And I think it's also another book that anyone who's deeply interested in the topics we've been talking about in this course would do well to read, it's, it's a big book, it's a big investment to read it, but many of the issues we've talked about come up in that book, and are affected by, the findings in that book. So I think it's another area where you could deploy them. And, and, it, it's also incidentally I think puts a different perspective on all the hysteria, for instance about, Islamic fundamentalism and so on. It takes a somewhat wider view of these things, I, I, I, not that those issues are not serious but it puts them in a different context. And the third one I would, I would mention is, Kahneman's book, Daniel Kahneman Thinking Fast and Slow. He got a-. >> It's on your desk. >> Yeah, here it is. >> [LAUGH] >> Right on the desk. I'm teaching it in my, in my graduate political philosophy-. >> I think it's a [CROSSTALK]. >> seminar. >> [LAUGH] >> Giving him some press here. >> [LAUGH]. >> This is a, this, this book records the rise of behavioral psychology, but that's not so much why it's important in the context we've been talking about. But, it's been a frontal assault on economic rationality. >> Mm-hm. >> So, you know, before the rise of behavioral economics which piggybacks on behavioral psychology. The division of labor basically was that economists said, we don't study where preferences come from, we, we do the rationality. Let the psychologists study where preferences come from. And what Kahneman and Tversky, his co-author and now deceased, did, they, they started the revolution. Which said, actually, you've got the wrong idea of rationality. It's not, we're not just studying where preferences come from, we're studying rationality and you've basically got it wrong in important ways. That leads to, I, I just touched the surface when I talked about the sunk cost fallacy and >Mm-hm. >> thing that loss operation that people perceive losses differently than fu, on gains, and- >> Mm hm. >> it has huge implications for economics, and this, that's one of the reasons Kahneman got the Nobel Prize for it. So, I would say, you know, it that's what I would say. Dig in to the classics. Get a better grip of them, but also bring the tools you've used to the findings from the s, the social sciences about generation and see what you think about them. >> So we ca, I, we, we can't close out the course without me asking this question, which I've been waiting to ask. So, you seem to come to the conclusion in the course that it's not, the course is called the Moral Foundations of Politics. >> Mm-hm. >> But in the end we kind of leave without being sure whether you can really have a moral foundation for politics. Is there a moral foundation for democratic rule? Do you believe that? Is, is there one in the end? I don't think there's one. I think there's more than one. I you know, one of, one of the points about not being able to ring the politics out of politics is you can't escape the moral questions. Because there's no moral neu, morally neutral ground. So democracy by its very terms affirms some normative stances, and I think they're better than the going alternatives. As I said, there's no single definition of democracy. I said it's, it's a family resemblance idea. But I think the, the, the three normative ideas that are most central to democracy are first of all majority rule. And for the reasons Locke said, not the aggregating preferences idea that it's living in a community you have to be bound by something, and it's better to be bound by that than by minority rule, or the going alternatives. Secondly, the, the, the principle of affected interest, which is the idea that people who are affected by a decision have some presumptive say in making it. It's clearly a normative idea. >> Mm-hm. >> And I think it's the best normative idea. And last but by no means least the notion of non-domination which to some degree is intention with majority rule. >> Mm-hm. >> Because majorities might choose to dominate and so that's another reason why it's important to affirm non-domination as well as majority rules, so that when those two things conflict we look for mechanisms to, to manage the conflict. But the idea of resisting domination that was so well-captured in that Nelson Mandela quote from the before sentencing in 1963. >> Mm. >> That we used in the course. It's what animates them, people to to demand democracy and to protect it when it's threatened. So, I think that this idea that if, if we want the best tools we can have to resist domination and that's surely a normative commitment. We can't do better than democratic politics. >> Great, so the last question then, is, will this course run again, or can students, so should they put the course on their watch list, or are you going to maybe do any more courses with Coursera that they could look out for in the future? >> This particular course, we are discussing doing it again, probably in the fall, and by fall Americans may September to December, somewhere in that range. But, but you know, all of this Coursera teaching has got ex, experimental dimensions to it. And so in, eh, eh, I'm not sure it will be in exactly the same format, but basically people can put it on a watch list and look out for it when August or September rolled around. As for other courses, so what we found very intriguing and, and I've one, one of the great things about doing a Coursera course is it really makes you think about your teaching in a, in a-. >> Mm-hm. >> Because you have to think a lot about how it's going to work, how are things going to come across. You know, part of the reason we came upon this mo, this semi-dialogue model was that I found when we were doing experiments that, if you, if you go into a studio and did your lecture into a camera, you sort of come across as someone who's selling real estate on cable at 2 in the morning. >> [LAUGH]. >> And it didn't it didn't work in, in the, in same way as if people film you in a lecture theater talking to a student but the, the other thing I've, so in, partly as a result of the going through the process to come up with this, this approach to teaching this course and partly by thinking a lot about the international character of this course,. >> Mm-hm. >> One of the things we're exploring now at the McMillan Center at Yale, which is the center for international activities is co-taught MOOCs. Where you would have a Yale faculty member co-teach a course with a faculty member from a university in another part of the world on some to-, some topic. So it would, it would be conversational in, in obviously not conversation in my mind was with the two students but a dynamic interaction between two professors say to- teaching a course. So we're, we're now actively exploring three, three or four possible courses that Yale faculty might teach in some collaborative way with one or more other people. So, I would just stay, say stay tuned. >> Just stay tuned. >> And then look out because there are all kinds of exciting possibilities coming down. >> Well, that's very exciting and thank you so much for all the office hours. >> Thank you. >> I think the students really enjoyed it. And maybe they'll see you again in the future. >> Maybe we will. >> [LAUGH]
