In Politics, Aristotle argues that to lead a flourishing life, it is imperative that all free men embrace their responsibility in the political system, thereby protecting the interests of their personal lives, social class, and community, as well as instilling virtue in oneself through civil servitude and leadership. Consistent with this theory is the notion, as described by our political philosopher, that inherent human nature holds men to the conviction that they should participate in governmental proceedings, as he finds, “soul and body are the basic constituents of an animal, the soul is the natural ruler; the body the natural subject.” (8). In this statement, one can decipher that Aristotle believes that each citizen rules in how the city-state is governed through a democratic system and is ruled by obeying the laws and keeping allegiance towards the governing body. In the opening pages of Book I, Aristotle produces a strong declaration about those who do not wish to take part in politics, “…human is by nature a political animal, and that anyone who is without a city-state, not by luck but by nature, is either a poor specimen or else super human…for someone with such a nature is at the same time eager for war, like an isolated piece on a board game.” (4). As the collection of political theory progresses, Aristotle examines the necessity of an established community, governing body, social hierarchy, and inter-household status ranking in living a perfectly joyous and happy life, however we first must decide what exactly constitutes this supposed “flourishing life” in ancient Greece.
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Any theory of ownership must always answer the challenge of how initially unowned things can come to be justly owned. Intuitively, the world-ownership hypothesis—that a person may appropriate any number of un-owned resources in the world as long as some conditions are met—faces the objection (among others) that it seems like an arbitrary deviation from an equal-share hypothesis, which would entitle one to an nth of those un-owned resources. This, however, is merely an intuitive claim, reflecting more of an intellectual discomfort rather than a clear picture of the origins of entitlements.
While we have yet to settle on any such picture, other intuitions can present us with a different picture. Israel Kirzner’s article, “Entrepreneurship, Entitlement, and Economic Justice” (1978) provides us with an excellent intuition as to how else these entitlements could come about, through appeal to the idea of value: the chief reason why we gain our entitlements to property is because we have created an economic value in it.
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In Original Rights and Just Redistribution, Hillel Steiner attempts to answer three questions: to what sorts of things do we have original property rights?; how do we distinguish these sorts of things to which we have non-original property rights?; and finally, who counts as being one of ‘us’ with these rights? He begins with the concept of self-ownership: for someone to have any rights at all, he must not be part of another’s bundle of possessions. After establishing that laboring within’s one domain produces products within one’s domain, he asks how initially unowned things outside of one’s domain becomes justly ownable. He concludes that our equal original property rights entitle us to an “equal share of (at least) raw natural resources.”
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[Readings come from Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Part II, Sections I & II]
Locke’s Theory of Acquisition
Nozick’s goal in this section of AS&U is to, in his words, “introduce an additional bit of complexity into the structure of the entitlement theory.” To do this, he uses as a starting point Locke’s approach to justice in property acquisition—namely, that ownership of an object originates in one’s mixing of labor with that object. Nozick then proceeds to ask the standard gamut of questions calling attention to some difficulties in Locke’s theory of acquisition, like whether dumping a can of tomato juice in the ocean constitutes “mixing one’s labor” with the ocean. Essentially, the questions seek the strict boundary between what constitutes a mixing of labor sufficient for just acquisition and what does not. Under the Lockean notion of acquisition, it seems that one naïve interpretation would say that improving upon an object entails full ownership of the object. Of course, as Nozick points out, if the stock of improvable unowned objects is limited, this view is unfeasible. He uses the appropriation of a grain of sand as an example of one’s appropriation removing another’s liberty (as Hohfeld uses the word) to act on a previously unowned object, but intuitively suggests that this particular removal is not problematic. The central concern, he says, “is whether appropriation of an unowned object worsens the situation of others.”
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I don’t think I’ve covered feminism anywhere in my blog, so I’d like to quickly render my position for reader reference. It’s certainly more nuanced than what I’ve provided with the following, but this will be a start. I bring this up because I was recently reviewing Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s Herland, which portrays a society run solely by women. It’s also been the object of a renewed wave of radical separatist feminism, which often is based on the premise of some sort of fundamental dissimilarity between men and women that makes civil society with both genders unacceptable.
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At the foundation of modern moral justifications for the establishment of a coercive state is the voluntarization of that coercive power – in other words, the implication that obedience to governments is in some way chosen and thus morally binding. The philosophical construct that has come to embody this approach is described by the term “social contract.” Though the works of important philosophers like Hobbes and Locke employed a version of the social contract, the work which came to inhabit and popularize the phrase was Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s influential 1762 treatise, Du Contrait Social (“The Social Contract”).
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December 11th, 2007
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The following is a summary and critique of J.L. Mackie’s “The Subjectivity of Values,” an absolute MUST-READ for anyone interested in ethics. As the professor who graded the original version of this adequately pointed out, I addressed the Mackie’s relativity argument but not so much the queerness argument.
In “The Subjectivity of Values,” a chapter in Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, J.L. Mackie develops his theory of “moral scepticism.” In the first sentence, he states his thesis plainly: “there are no objective values.” He goes on to fully define his position, by clarifying the sense in which he means it: that there do not exist in the world any such values. Though Mackie’s moral scepticism is a strong explanation for the failure of theories which posit values that are intrinsic features of the universe, such theories do not account for all theories which hold objective values; in short, not all objective theories are of the kind that Mackie describes and critiques.
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In the United States today, the public debates about healthcare, Social Security, and the standard of living have reached a new level of prominence. While some of these dialogues pertain to already-existing, but failing institutions like Social Security and the minimum wage, more than ever the climate of public opinion states, “government ought to provide its people with economic security.” Of course, the degree of the economic security to be provided varies greatly, from simple safety nets such as unemployment payments to outright socialization of particular industries. The nations of Europe are examples of affluent “democracies” (broadly speaking) which incorporate strong social programs, taxing usually between half and over two-thirds of all income to pay for (among many other things) public education, employment agencies, guaranteed housing, and most conspicuously, universalized healthcare. The ideological underpinnings of the pervasion of the belief in the need for such institutions in America have their contemporary roots in the early 20th century, which heralded the Progressive movement. The movement successfully established an essential power for the exercise of any resource-intensive redistribution scheme: the graduated income tax. With the coming of the Great Depression, the shift in the national mood was solidified; attributing the economic decline to Herbert Hoover’s inaction, Franklin D. Roosevelt attained the presidential office. His New Deal solidified, constitutionally and psychologically, the role of the U.S. government as a major actor in the economy. The subsequent creation of his “Second Bill of Rights,” and later the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, codified the supreme change in the language of rights from the Founding’s conception of formal political guarantees, to substantive economic entitlements. No longer would one simply have the Lockean rights to protection from harm, freedom to choose one’s own path in life, and the ability to acquire and hold property freely; one would also have the right to have certain kinds of property, regardless of one’s success in productive endeavors (invariably coming into conflict with traditional property rights).
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November 22nd, 2007
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Thomas Hobbes and John Locke were relative contemporaries in philosophy, so it is no surprise that their comparison has become something of a cliché (hence this?). While both philosophers use language couched in the tradition of natural law, they both advocate radically different views on human nature and ideal governance, as will be seen. Since Locke and Hobbes get name-dropped by pseudointellectuals regularly, it’s probably a good idea to get a feel for the basics.
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Utilitarianism is a philosophical epidemic in contemporary social and political dialogue. In one form or another, the notion of a “greater good” above the good of individual agents has taken root in group-centric ideologies. Dictators have invoked it on nationalistic or ethnocentric grounds; leftists have promoted it in the name of “mankind”; even the most individualistic of nations, such as the United States, are overrun by policy concerns for the “national interest.” Part of its appeal is intuitive: if happiness is good, and we want more of good things, then the greatest happiness is what we ought to look for. This looks decent enough in words, but it is only a connection of similar sounds that holds it together. What is meant by “happiness,” and what is the sense in which it is “good”? To whom does the “greatest happiness” pertain, and why “ought” we to pursue it? Utilitarianism, even in its most “complete” form, fails to address these questions with valid answers.
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