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.
The Overlapping Consensus
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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 I
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
So, let's talk about Rawls's version of this.
He wants the, what he calls, the authority of overlapping consensus.
Now, I wanna make a distinction here between what I'm gonna call positive
overlapping consensus and normative overlapping consensus.
What do you think I might be getting at here?
Positive.
>> Actual reason versus?
>> Yeah, remember we talked about natural law versus positive law.
Natural law is the moral law in some sense, the higher law.
The positive law is what actually happens In the world,
right, what legal system actually exists.
So Bentham said that's all there is, there's only positive law, okay.
So in Rawls' sense of overlapping consensus,
obviously there was positive overlapping consensus to support
the United States Constitution at least from 1787 until the Civil War.
Right?
1787, we get the Constitution adopted, not quite unanimously but enough to survive.
And then finally in 1860 it falls apart when the South
loses the election and they say well, we don't accept the result.
Overlapping consensus.
Falls apart.
We have a Civil War.
That's basically what happened.
Rawls is talking about normative overlapping consensus.
He's not just talking about what people happen to agree upon.
And his idea is to talk his principles of justice, the ones we were discussing last
time, The general conception of justice, the principle governing liberties,
the principle governing opportunities, the principle governing income and wealth.
And say well, the reason these principles are justified,
we know it's not the original position, cuz the original position was set up to
generate them, so it would be a completely circular argument to say Remember this?
We talked about the fair way to cut a cake doesn't show you that an equal division
really is fair.
It assumes you decided that, yeah?
So the original position doesn't justify anything.
There had to be some independent justification, right?
And that was the conquien argument and
all the you know universalized ability and so on.
And we saw the problems with that Rawls says lets just take all of that off
the table and talk about overlapping consensus.
And by that, he says, a political conception of justice as he calls it
That's one grounded in overlapping consensus,
aims to be the focus of an overlapping consensus.
It includes all the opposing philosophical and religious doctrines likely to persist
and gain adherents in a more or less just constitutional order.
Another definition he gives is that, overlapping consensus seeks common ground
or if one prefers, neutral ground, given the facts of pluralism.
So one way you can think about this, is.
With sort of Venn diagrams with luck, our belief systems
each constitute a Venn diagram with a little bit of overlap with some others.
And it's just the ones where they all overlap enough
to support the political order.
That's all we need.
Right so this is the notion that he wants to say his political conception of
justice is that intersecting set on the Venn diagram where all of
the different people given their different values their different metaphysical
systems will agree on that overlapping consensus.
And so that's the idea.
And so, another way I find it sometimes helpful to explain this notion is that
if you're raised in a traditional enlightenment way.
You say well if you're going to have a theory of justice
First you better persuade people of your epistemology and metaphysics,
your general theory of knowledge, your theory of how the world works.
Your theory of logic, your theory of science, just as Hobbes did or
as Locke did.
All of them, remember.
We started with all those things about them, what they thought the nature of
reality was, what did they know and then finally when you've convinced people of
all of that, then you convince them of the political theory that follows from it.
So you build from the ground up.
Whereas when we're looking at this world from this post-metaphysical lens,
where do you say no?
The goal is To describe an attractive destination from many points of view.
Cuz if you can describe a destination that many different people will find attractive
from their metaphysical point of view, they'll do the work to get there, right?
Cuz they wanna get to the destination.
And so I think a good example of this,
something we discussed earlier in the course, is Mill's Harm principle.
We saw looking at Mill's Harm principle
that there are many problems with it, you know.
Any half competent graduate student can expose the flows in Mill's Harm principle.
But, it comes back again and again and again.
That rights utility synthesis that's built into the harm principle
just keeps coming back.
Why?
Because it's an attractive destination.
It's something that people intuitively want to affirm.
Right, and so that's Rawls' idea, he wants to say If I can give an attractive enough
depiction of the principals of justice, you'll get there.
So that's what reflective equilibrium becomes.
It's your problem to get there from your metaphysical beliefs, your assumptions
about human nature, your assumptions about how the world works and all that.
So the trouble is, though, and Rose never
ultimately resolves this, is that there isn't overlapping consensus on justice.
It would be great if there were, but there isn't.
And that's why the students laughed at that.
Kid in my course many years ago.
They intuitively sense there is an overlapping consensus on justice.
There's a kind of circularity to Rawl's in that,
it's very hard to tell what he's saying is that overlapping consensus is
whatever is needed to support his theory of justice, or that the theory of justice
is legitimate because the overlapping consensus happens to support, if it does.
And, so it again is a kind,
it's either assuming what it has to prove or it doesn't work.
And there's no way around that problem.
And I want to give an illustration of
that by going back to our old friend the workmanship ideal.
Remember this idea, the workmanship ideal, is that you're entitled to what you make?
Yeah?
We are miniature Gods?
This goes all the way back to Locke, all the way to the beginning of the course.
And I said that Rawls plunges a dagger into this
idea with his moral arbitrariness argument right.
He points out that whether it's nature or nurture,
the differences between us are morally completely arbitrary.
And since you did nothing to get the genes you have and you did nothing to be born
the way you were born, whatever benefits you get from the work you did you're
not entitled to them anymore than the next person who didn't do the work, right?
And I mentioned at the time, we had some back and forth about it.
I mentioned at the time that most people
can't see an argument against this, but that they don't like it.
They don't want to live with it.
Why don't they want to live with it?
They probably have some things or they've accomplished something and
they wanna feel like- >> That was their accomplishment.
>> That's right.
>> So, I think that's exactly right and Barack Obama hit this nerve during
the 2012 presidential campaign, when he made this speech where he got up and
said one day >> If you've been successful you didn't
get there on your own.
I'm always struck by people who think well it must be because I was just so
smart, said President Obama.
There are a lot of smart people out there.
It must be because I worked harder than every body else.
Let me tell you something.
There are a whole bunch of hard-working people out there.
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help.
There was a great teacher somewhere in your life.
Somebody invented, invested in roads and bridges.
If you've got a business going, you didn't build that.
That was the line that got people's attention.
>> [LAUGH] >> You didn't build that.
Somebody else made that happen.
The Internet didn't get invented on its own.
Government research created the Internet so
that all the companies could make money off the Internet.
This all hell broke loose when Obama made this speech.
I don't know if you remember this, this part of the campaign.
But the Republicans just published ad after ad, after ad
lambasting him with this claim that if you started a business, you didn't build that.
Right.
But the truth is Obama was right in exactly the same Shroles is talking about.
He's saying many people just as we talked about the example
of the medical school student who's stay at home wife, remember, yeah?
She did, he didn't do it on his own.
But this was just explosive.
Why was it so explosive?
Why was it seen as a giant political blunder on Obama's part?
>> Because he's saying basically that you cannot make it on your own which is a big
problem for the American culture because >> This is this big idea
here that you are a self made person, and that you can, like, from rags to riches.
>> Right. >> So he
attacked basically the American Dream through this.
>> It seems like, yeah, he's attacking the American Dream.
Would you add anything to that.
>> There's a lot of people in America that feel like everything that they have and
everything that they've done is a creation of just them themselves.
But the reality of the situation is they've stood at
least on somebody else's shoulders to accomplish that.
>> So you're with Rawls and President Obama.
>> Oh, I totally agree.
I mean, think about it in some sort of medical Fields sphere I mean if
you're doing medical research and you have some breakthrough
you know you are not completely responsible for that breakthrough yes you
helped to create it but all the research in that field that was done prior to you.
>> Right.
>> Your standing on the shoulders of giants.
>> So that's the reasonable answer but
as I just said in politics appealing to reasonableness doesn't work.
Why didn't it work?
Of course, Obama's handlers quickly walked him back from this and
tried to change the subject, didn't try to argue this point.
One might think, an enlightenment theorist might think Obama would have come back
with exactly that, he would have come back with exactly your argument, but oh no.
They walked them away.
They said let's start talking about the 47% percent or
some, let's change the subject.
This is a losing topic for right.
Why do you think?
>> It attacked the workmanship model.
>> Right. So that is the thing about the workmanship
model is, you can't live with it, and you can't live without it.
As somebody once said about relationships,
you can't live with them, you can't live without them.
Even though we can't give a convincing philosophical
justification for the workmanship ideal People just won't let go of it.
IT threatens their very sense of efficacy even their sense of selves,
their identities at some ultimate level.
And so the political metaphysical move would have to be that
any conception of justice that's gonna get any traction
at some level Is gonna have to affirm the workmanship model.
Not perhaps as dictated by any metaphysical conception of things,
but maybe just because there's no other way for society to run.
So what are we taking away from Rawls, as a scientific thinker?
The young Rawls completely failed to come up with watertight justifications for
his principles, and he understood that and he acknowledged that, and
that was his reason for the post metaphysical turn.
But the difficulty for
the mature Rawls is that it seems to assume what it needs to establish.
That is, this idea of overlapping consensus has a lot going for
it, as I've been trying to indicate for you, going along now.
It is at the root of a lot of how politics actually happens.
People don't in a pluralist society.
People don't agree on their metaphysical views, and
they don't even expect to be able to agree on their metaphysical views.
That's why they laughed at that student, right?
That nobody expects to.
Still and all, to say that that generates
anything as ambitious as Rawls' theory of justice Is not plausible,
because the sort of things that proponents of, say, protecting people at the bottom,
and proponents of libertarianism who say, leave the people at the bottom alone.
You know, that's not gonna be resolved by appealing to overlapping consensus.
And if it were resolved, we wouldn't have the kind of political fights that we do.
As a right's theorist, in some important sense
Rawls is the of workmanship,
that is if our standard is the original enlightenment
goal of giving it a water tight justification of workmanship.
We now see that it can't be done.
And that is the kinda end of rights as trumps.
All distributive arrangements stand in need of some kind of legitimation,
that was Susan Hurley's point that we talked about.
Oh, yeah.
But You're never going to come up with one that wins the philosophical high ground.
So rights are going to be there isn't some imported way,
they're not going to go away, people are not going to get rid of,
people are not going to agree to our getting rid of them, but
they're not going to be given the status of a science.
Okay, next we will talk about Robert Nozick,
another modern social contract theorist whose ideas we've confronted a little
bit in our critiques of others, but now we're gonna see what his argument was.
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