Let me mention one other case, a political scientist by the name of Ian Hurd, who teaches at Northwestern University, was commenting on the debate about whether the US should become involved in bombing Syria to stop the effort to basically kill the opposition that the Assad regime was engaged in. And Hurd was on the side of intervening. He said we should bomb Syria. But he said nobody should pretend that this is a legal act, it's an illegal act but it's none-the-less the right thing to do. So all of these kind of cases create what I call, here, a paradox of discomfort. Because if we go back to the Eichmann problem, think about our earlier discussion. On the one hand, when you talked about what made you uncomfortable about Eichmann, your basic complaint was that he didn't make a moral judgement about what he was doing, that he didn't question authority. That he didn't pay any attention to who it was he was transporting, whether it was the right thing to do. That he just wanted to be a good manager, to be applauded, to get an A. On the other hand, when we talk about what Israel did, they did what you faulted Eichmann for not doing. They ignored the prevailing legal and political institutions of the day, because they made their own moral judgment. So, on the one hand, Eichmann does not resist the prevailing legal order, does not resist, does not make his own judgement about it. On the other hand, the Israelis do make their own judgement about it. And that seems to create something of a tension, or a paradox. How do you wrestle with that? How do you think about that? >> Well, it's a very difficult question. It's a moral question. Because you ask yourself, who's your employer? So if I need to work for you, how I can separate myself and my action from who you actually are? So in this way, it's very important, at least for me, to question that but they are not my employer, whether the state is legitimate or not. >> Okay, legitimate? So we're coming back to this difficult notion of legitimacy. Why does that matter for wrestling with this question? >> Legitimacy? Yeah. >> You always want to be viewed by the outside community as legitimate, but I think legitimacy boils down to some sort of a moral foundation. >> Legitimacy boils down to a moral foundation. You're certainly close there to the basic question. Because whether or not the prevailing order is legitimate, is going to condition what we think about the appropriate response to it as being. So if we think back again to the Third Reich, the Eichmann case, of course it was morally a very difficult case, but conceptually it's a very easy case. And the reason it's an easy case conceptually is nobody today has, or virtually nobody, small Nazi fringe parties still in Germany, but basically, nobody has any doubt that the Nazi regime was a criminal regime. That it was engaged in an indefensible actions on such a scale that it was simply an evil regime. And so saying I was only obeying orders, I was doing what I was supposed to do according to the rules, doesn't cut much ice with us in that circumstance as a justification for what he did. These other cases we've been talking about are much more complex. They're much more ambiguous. Because after all, if you think about what Israel did, yeah they didn't give Eichmann his due process in every sense of the word but certainly he got some process. He had a defense attorney, there were rules of evidence. He certainly got some process. There is this problem of needing to, everybody recognizing the need to ask for forgiveness rather than permission, otherwise he was gonna escape scot-free. And when we think of the NATO action in Kosovo, particularly in the light of what had gone on in Rwanda, and indeed I think it was still after all the Clinton administration in Kosovo, part of the reason President Clinton decided to act was the criticism he had taken after the failure to act in Rwanda in 1994. And recognizing that the peculiar structure of the Security Council which gave the Russians, as they by then were, a veto, and they were allied with the Serbians in this conflict, meant that there wasn't going to be an authorization, and so it becomes morally more ambiguous. Likewise when we're now still struggling with what to do in Syria, again, it's much less clear because we have less in the way of settled convictions about whether or not the rules should be obeyed because we have less in the way of settled convictions about the orders that they protect and whether they are legitimate. So, it was because the Third Reich was not a legitimate state, that we think Eichmann should have resisted it, on the one hand, but in these other cases where there do seem to be somewhat legitimate institutions, it becomes more morally ambiguous. Well, so that is the central organizing question of the course. We're gonna ask, what is it that make government legitimate? A fully legitimate government should obviously be obeyed at all times, one might say, and a fully illegitimate government need not be obeyed, but, and, in fact, maybe sometimes you have an affirmative obligation to disobey. This is what people were imputing to Eichmann. But then the question is, the 64 million dollar question becomes, what is it that make governments legitimate? That is the question this course is designed to explore. And we are going to organize our exploration of it by looking at it through the lens of five different traditions. We're gonna ask what are the sources of state legitimacy first, and three traditions that are part and parcel of what I'm gonna call the Enlightenment. The first of those is the Utilitarian tradition. And the central idea that informs the Utilitarian tradition is maximizing the greatest happiness of the greatest number. This is a doctrine that was formulated first in the 18th century and enormously influential in Anglo-American political thinking ever since. And legitimate governments act in the interest of the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Of course, different Utilitarian thinkers differ a great deal on what they mean by happiness, whether they think it can be measured in one way rather than another. Whether you can compare happiness across people, across individuals, between peoples, whether we should consider the happiness of creatures other than human beings, such as animals. All of those sorts of considerations get dealt with in different ways by different Utilitarian thinkers. And so we will spend a good deal of time considering different ways of thinking about the meaning of Utilitarianism and the pluses and minuses of them. But still at the end of the day, Utilitarian thinkers are all committed to some variant of the view that legitimate governments promote happiness or utility of the people who they govern. The second Enlightenment tradition we're gonna talk to is the Marxist tradition named for perhaps the world's most famous revolutionary, Karl Marx, who wrote in the 19th century. And the Marxist tradition revolves around the concept of exploitation or more precisely of limiting or eliminating, in the best possible case, exploitation. Again as with the Utilitarian tradition, there's huge disagreement within the Marxist tradition as to what counts as exploitation, how you know it when you see it, just who exploits who in different circumstances, what can be done about it, whether exploitation can indeed be eliminated in a communist utopia as Karl Marx himself believed, or whether it can only be ameliorated. And if so, if we're only gonna be talking about different degrees of exploitation, and how do we calibrate those degrees. All those sorts of questions occupy people who operate in the Marxist tradition. But their basic framing preoccupation is with the concept of exploitation. And then the third Enlightenment tradition we're gonna attend to is the social contract tradition. This is a tradition which, in its modern form, begins in the 17th century with the works of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke and is later developed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant and modern social contract theorists, like Robert Nozick, and John Rawls. All of whom we will attend to, as we trace the evolution of the social contract tradition. We'll discover that they have many disagreements among themselves, again, but what they all affirm at some level is the notion of consent. If you ask a social contract theorist what makes a government legitimate, it's the extent to which it is authorized by the consent of those over whom it exercises political power. So those three Enlightenment traditions, the Utilitarian tradition geared toward promoting happiness or utility, the Marxist tradition geared towards limiting or getting rid of exploitation and the social contract tradition which wants to constrain governments by the consent of the government, are the three enlightenment traditions that we're going to explore for the first two-thirds or so, of the course. Then we're gonna look at the reaction against the Enlightenment, where the core Enlightenment values are rejected and instead, what anti-Enlightenment thinkers tend to appeal to is the notion of tradition. What makes a government legitimate to the degree that it respects the traditions that gave life to it in the first place. We see this in the U.S. for example in debates about the original intent of the framers. So a justice like the Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, appeals to the traditions that were established in the creation of the American Constitution as what should constrain us. And so anti-Enlightenment thinkers, we're gonna start with Edmund Burke, the Irish thinker in the 18th century who was appalled by the French Revolution and particularly the aspiration of the French Revolutionaries to sweep away everything that had previously existed and build new institutions. And we'll see that anti-Enlightenment thinkers are convinced that that's always a mistake. That you need to affirm the traditions that you've inherited and use them as a guide to what counts as legitimate action. Again, they will understand and interpret the meaning of the term, tradition, very differently from one another. But tradition is the central organizing concept, the center of gravity, if you like, of anti-enlightenment thinking. And then in the last part of the course we're gonna look at the democratic tradition, which says, in contrast to all of these other appeals, such as utility, getting rid of exploitation, consent, and tradition, that no, in fact, what matters now is the principle of affected interest. That governments are legitimate to the extent that they govern in accordance with the interest of those over whom the power is exercised. And that's the notion that gave rise to the democratic revolutions of the 19th, 20th and now 21st centuries and have become seen as the main font of legitimacy in the modern world, this idea that those people who have interest at stake should play a role in decision making. Now all of these traditions to some extent overlap with one another, at least at the margins. And we'll talk to some extent about those questions, but they're also importantly distinct. And it's therefore useful to consider them separately. So we will begin starting next time with the Enlightenment tradition as a background to the three Enlightenment sub-traditions that are going to occupy us. Namely, Utilitarianism, Marxism, and the social contract. See you then.
