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.
Practices
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From the course by Yale University
Moral Foundations of Politics
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From the lesson
Anti-Enlightenment Politics
This module explores the rejection of Enlightenment political thinking, again exploring both classical and contemporary formulations.
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 pick up where we left off last time,
discussing Alasdair MacIntyre, anti-enlightenment political philosophy.
And, as you'll recall, we ended last time with something of a puzzle that he
put out there, when he was discussing the emotivist culture that we all live in.
What was the puzzle?
>> Well, the puzzle is like if you think are unable to reach the agreement on these
burning issues such as, legalization of drugs gay rights abortion,
and, and similar topics, why then even to bother to go to the rational arguments?
>> Exactly right, that there, there seem to be this cognitive dissonance, so
now kind of, so, society-wide scale in that nobody expects
to persuade anybody of anything in an emotivist culture, that we've all sort of,
internalized Charles Stevenson in that sense.
But then, why do we go through the forms of rational argument about
moral disagreements?
Why is it, that people behave as we watched on that Crossfire clip?
Giving reasons for their views,
questioning the cogency of their opponents' reasoning, giving evidence for
their views, questioning the evidence given by their opponents.
and, and they're, they're going through the motions of arguing.
Yet, they don't ever ex, not only do they not resolve their disagreements,
they don't expect to resolve their disagreements.
So, what MacIntyre wants to say, is that this is a symptom of something important.
And the, the, the way he I think he would sum up what it's a symptom of it's that
even though we all live in emotivist culture, and
we act on its pre-suppositions, we're deeply uncomfortable with it
because it seems to take us to a place where nobody really wants to be.
And that his book is, is a design to unpack that, and explain it.
And so he, he, the way he puts it in, early on in the book it says,
rarely we face a basic choice between Aristotle and Nietzsche.
Now, we haven't talked about Nietzsche in this course,
but many people have read some Nietzsche.
Wha, what, when I say Nietzsche, what comes to mind?
>> Good and evil, nihilism.
>> Nihilism.
And what is nihilism?
>> It's it's the thought that, you know, nothing really has any meaning or
value outside the value that we place on it, as humans.
>> I think that's exactly, what McIntyre has in mind,
particularly the notion that nothing has any value.
The sort of, nihilistic idea that everything is as meaningless,
and in moral sense is everything else.
And so basically, what he wants to do though is convince you
that once the basic enlightenment move was made in the 17th century.
Really takes off in the 18th century,
of trying to justify morality from scientific principles.
It's only a matter of time before you wind up with Nietzsche,
it's only a matter of time before you end up with nihilism.
And most people don't want to get there and that's reflected in
their discomfort with culture which affirms the superiority of no values over
any other but they don't really understand the nature of they discomfort or
the source of their discomfort.
And when he says, Aristotle or Nietzsche, what he's saying is that unless we
go back to an Aristotelian world of view, and an Aristotelian ethics, which was
abandoned by the enlightenment thinkers, which Hobbs, for example, he'd scorn on.
Unless we, we go back and, and re-embrace a kind of Aristotelianism,
which is going to talk about in some detail in the book, we,
we're never going to resolve problem, this conundrum where we
live in an emotivist culture that has nihilist implications.
But we, we are de, deeply uncomfortable with it.
So let's just define a few terms here.
One very important term for MacIntyre is the concept of practice, and it's,
it's, it's pregnant with moral significance here.
What, what do you think he might mean by a practice?
>> I wonder if he thinks it's like, procedural practice?
>> So, that's, that's a reasonable thing to, yes, but
I think it, it doesn't capture, what he means by a practice.
He, he describes it as an, any coherent and
complex form of socially established cooperative human
activity through which goods internal to that activity are realized.
Now that's a mouthful,
probably doesn't illuminate very much, what he might mean.
But, so let me just put it into,
into more simple language, then, and maybe language he should have put it into.
He, His notion of a practice is, that it's a complicated collective activity.
And, like Burke, he wants to say, it's something you're born into, and
you then try and figure out what governs it.
So, for instance, if you,
you're students, you, you imagine the first college course you walk into.
Sit down.
You don't look around the room, and say,
to one another, how shall we run this class?
Which would maybe be suggested by the social contract modi, metaphor.
You know, What shall we all agree on?
That isn't what happens, is it?
What happens when you,
when you walk, when you walked into your first college class what happened?
What, what did you think?
>> I'm nervous that I'm unprepared, and I have no idea what to expect.
>> And so then what do you do?
>> Sit there and sort of, try to figure out, you know, where I fit into it all.
>> Exactly.
What are the norms?
What are the rules?
What are the expectations?
How do I do well, here?
How do I fit in?
What is expected of me?
Right?
And so, the, the practice comes before the participant.
This is very, very important.
Right?
And that's a sense in which he's a Burkean, right?
He wants to say, the Burk is you know,
there are these long established traditions of doing things.
That people are born into, and they internalize.
MacIntyre is going to say, we have to subordinate ourselves to practices.
So then another term that
is integral to realizing this that comes from Aristotle, is the notion of a virtue.
Now Aristotle's ethics, if we took, if you guys took a course in the history of moral
philosophy, would learn there's a book called The Nicomachean Ethics in which
Aristotle says, there are certain virtues, such as honesty, and courage and, and
justice, and the idea is to produce people who have those virtues.
He talks about a virtue as an, an acquired human quality the possession and,
and exercise which, of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods,
which are internal to practices.
And the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving any goods.
So that's, again, a reader mouthful.
But the, the intuition here is, and
the most important word is the internal to practices.
So, what counts, as virtuous is defined within this practice that we inherit.
And we subordinate ourselves to.
So for instance, if you play chess with me,
and while I'm not looking you steal one of my pawns off the board, and
then I, I come back, and I don't notice you've, I wouldn't be a very good
chess player if I didn't notice but let's suppose I didn't notice.
That wouldn't be an internal good, it'd be an external good.
You're cheating, you're not going by the norms that govern the practice, and
the rules, and the expectations.
And so, McIntyre's idea is that we want to do well,
within practices, within the norms.
So, so to give another example suppose you're a carpenter, and you're an author.
And I'm somebody, who both builds garden sheds, and writes books.
If I were to bring you a book, you the carpenter my book and
say, look at my book, and you'd say, wow, I couldn't do that.
That's really a good book.
It's really impressive.
And I bring you to my house, and show you the,
the shed that I had built and you're a nerdy academic type, and you,
you don't know anything about carpentry, and so you're impressed by this shed.
McIntyre's point is, that's not going to be very satisfying for me because what I
really want is that the, the person who knows about books will value my book.
And the person, who knows about carpentry will value my shed.
Right? So there's a phrase you might recall,
when that people talk about in baseball when they say, he's a pitcher's pitcher.
Right?
That means the, the best pitcher in the world would recognize.
That there are, he understands things about pitching,
which maybe most baseball fans wouldn't even be able to see, right?
But that's a notion, he a pitcher's, pitcher.
So you want to do well by the norms within a practice,
that's what makes you feel satisfied.
So it's a very deeply other reverential view of human beings.
It's similar to that philosopher Hegel, we talked about briefly,
when we were talking about what Marx was reacting against.
Hegel has a book called, The Phenomenology of Spirit,
where he talks about different social forms of social organization.
And at one point he describes a master slave society, and he wants,
he Hegel is talking about, why it would be unstable?
And he makes the point, it's not just the slave, who would find it unsatisfactory.
The slave obviously, would, but Hegel says, the master would, as well.
Because the master wants recognition from somebody that the master regards,
as an equal, as somebody worth getting recognition from,
is getting, getting somebody in your power, somebody who's your
slave to say nice things to you isn't going to be satisfying.
So, it's this idea that we have a need to be recognized, to be affirmed by
people who we value, and we would value within a practice because they've
accomplished the, the norms they, they understand from the inside.
So this is, the virtues are embedded in practices, and we always live within
practices, and we have to understand that, and come to grips with them.
So, as he, as he puts it in a nice little summary of his view, he says,
it belongs to the concept of a practice, as I've outlined it.
And as well,
as we are all familiar with it in our actual lives, whether we are painters, or
physicists, or quarterbacks, or indeed just lovers of good painting.
Our first-rate experiments or
a well-thrown pass, that its goods can only be achieved by subordinating
ourselves within the practice in our relationship to other practitioners.
We have to learn to recognize, what is due to whom?
We have to be prepared to take whenever self-endangering risks are demanded along
the way.
And we have to listen carefully to what we are told about our own in,
inadequacies, and to reply with the same carefulness for the facts.
Okay, so this is the basic picture that he has.
We, we're born into these practices.
They're governed goods that are internal to them.
In order to understand them, and to learn how to do well,
with respect to those goods, we have to subordinate ourselves to the practices.
We learn the rules, and then we try to excel.
Yeah.
>> How he then explains or
purpose, how we chose those people who are setting up the practices?
How we know- >> How do we choose them?
>> Mm-hm.
>> So, this is, that's a very well, put question.
He, he says, by and large we don't.
We're born into them.
So, and remember this is a man, who was born into the Catholic tradition that he
rejected, and eventually re-embraced, so
it's some decs, degree you might say, it's a kind of projection.
That, that it, that we can't escape our word, so to speak.
Now, it is true that, that, and I'll say, more about this in a minute,
that he doesn't think we accept them uncritically, right?
So to go back to my example of, of your first college class maybe the, the first
class you come in, and you're nervous, and you say, where do I fit in and so on.
But after you've taken three or four courses, and you have you know,
a 4.0 transcript and you walk into a you know, cla, class in your junior year or
sophomore year, and you, you might at that point say, turn to some of your peers and
say, you know, this could be done better if we change this, that, or the other.
So, so he's not saying, he's, he's not a Burkean reactionary in that sense.
He's saying, we might, we might cha, choose to change the practices we inherit,
but always having first subordinated ourselves to them,
having first embraced where we've come from.
You can't escape your roots.
So to speak.
We are by natural constitution, historical creatures.
So we start from where we are.
We don't start from some magical choice about where we would like to go.
Yeah.
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