Political Philosophy Read online

  Political Philosophy

  A complete introduction

  Dr Phil Parvin & Dr Clare Chambers

  ‘Phil Parvin and Clare Chambers have produced a state of the art textbook, which provides students with a comprehensive and bang up-to-date introduction to contemporary political philosophy. Topics are introduced in a clear and eminently readable fashion, using accessible real world examples whilst drawing on sophisticated scholarly literature. There is no comparable book which covers such a wide range of topics in such a student-friendly manner.’

  Dr Daniel Butt, Lecturer in Political Theory, University of Bristol.

  ‘A lively, accessible and engaging read. Comprehensive and well organized, it provides an updated account of key concepts in contemporary political philosophy, and highlights their relevance to political life in the 21st century. A valuable book for anyone taking their first steps in the world of political philosophy, or anyone who seeks to understand the normative challenges faced by our society today.’

  Dr Avia Pasternak, Lecturer in Political Theory, University of Essex.

  ‘Written in a clear and accessible style, it is an engaging introduction for those who are new to political philosophy and wish to think through some of its most important questions. In addition to offering outlines of key arguments, each chapter also contains a summary of main concepts, self-test questions, a wonderful selection of quotations and some attention-grabbing ‘nuggets’’

  Dr Zosia Stemplowska, University Lecturer in Political Theory, University of Oxford.

  For Harley and Caspar

  Contents

  Introduction: What is political philosophy?

  Part One: Essential concepts

  1 Freedom (1): Negative freedom

  Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between negative and positive liberty

  The distinction between formal and effective freedom

  G.A. Cohen on negative liberty

  Conclusion

  2 Freedom (2): Positive freedom

  Freedom as doing whatever one wants vs. freedom as being in control of one’s desires

  Freedom as a protected private sphere vs. freedom as political or community participation

  Conclusion

  3 Equality (1): The concept of equality

  Defining equality

  Treating people as equals

  Equality and difference: does equality mean treating people the same?

  Equality of outcome

  Why should we value equality?

  Conclusion

  4 Equality (2): Equality of opportunity

  Equality of opportunity as non-discrimination

  Positive discrimination (or affirmative action)

  Equality of opportunity as a meritocracy

  Conclusion

  5 Power

  Some initial thoughts

  Lukes and the three dimensions of power

  Michel Foucault and self-policing citizens

  Conclusion

  6 Democracy

  From direct to representative democracy

  Three problems with democracy

  Two alternative conceptions of democracy: deliberative and radical democracy

  Conclusion

  7 Rights

  Two liberal arguments in defence of rights

  Are rights too individualistic?

  Conclusion

  8 Political obligation

  A successful theory of political obligation

  Social contract theories: obligation based on consent

  Fair play

  Natural duties

  Conclusion

  Part Two: Contemporary theories and debates

  9 Utilitarianism

  Consequentialism and deontology

  Utility

  Act-utilitarianism

  Rule-utilitarianism

  Conclusion

  10 Rawls's justice as fairness

  Rawls’s critique of utilitarianism

  The original position and the veil of ignorance

  The two principles of justice

  The equal basic liberty principle

  The equality of opportunity principle

  The difference principle

  Conclusion

  11 Libertarianism

  The limits on state action

  Nozick’s entitlement theory of justice

  Redistributive taxation

  The principle of self-ownership

  Against patterned distributions: freedom vs. equality

  Conclusion

  12 Luck egalitarianism

  Luck in Rawls

  Equality of welfare

  Dworkin and equality of resources

  What is the point of equality?

  Conclusion

  13 Communitarianism

  Michael Sandel and the unencumbered self

  MacIntyre’s critique of the Enlightenment

  Conclusion

  14 Political liberalism

  Liberalism is political not general

  Liberalism is political not comprehensive

  Liberalism is political not metaphysical

  Conclusion

  15 Perfectionism and state neutrality

  The policy implications of Rawlsian neutrality

  Neutrality of effect

  Neutrality of justification

  Raz and liberal perfectionism

  Young’s critique of liberal neutrality

  Conclusion

  16 Multiculturalism

  The argument for liberal multiculturalism

  Criticisms of liberal multiculturalism

  Conclusion

  17 Feminism

  The existence of patriarchy

  Sex and gender

  The importance of power

  The personal is political

  Conclusion

  18 Global justice

  Statism

  Cosmopolitanism and particularism

  Global poverty: humanitarianism vs. global coercive redistribution

  Conclusion

  19 Intergenerational justice

  Utilitarianism and the repugnant conclusion

  Liberalism and person-affecting moralities

  A liberal response: Rawls’s just savings principle

  Conclusion

  Answers to Fact-checks

  Introduction: What is political philosophy?

  Does the state have the right to tax its richer citizens in order to give to those who are worse off? How can we defend the idea that human beings have rights? How can we ensure equality between women and men? Do rich states have a moral obligation to give some of their wealth to poorer states? Should a democratic state follow the will of the majority, even if doing so would result in the persecution of minority groups?

  Political philosophers ask questions like these – and attempt to answer them! Political philosophy interrogates our assumptions about politics, society and the relations between individuals. It is therefore different from other areas of political inquiry. Most political ‘science’ is descriptive: it seeks to describe and explain political phenomena through empirical data. Political philosophy, on the other hand, is primarily prescriptive rather than descriptive. Political philosophers may use the empirical evidence gathered by political scientists, but our aim is not to describe the world as it currently is but to determine how it ought to be. Political philosophy is normative: political philosophers are concerned not with what is efficient or economical, but with what would be morally right or wrong.

  Political philosophy is exciting and important: as political philosophers we raise profound questions about the way we live our lives, the values that we hold, and the social and political institutions that regulate our lives.
We ask why society is structured in the way that it is, and whether it should be structured differently; why we have the values that we do and whether they are the right ones; and on what grounds states, individuals and other organizations can justify their actions.

  Political philosophy is also challenging. It requires us to think critically and deeply about issues that may seem settled or obvious or, alternatively, abstract and hard to grasp. In political philosophy we reason analytically about the nature of human beings, and about concepts such as freedom, equality, power, authority and justice. Members of liberal democratic states like Britain and the USA often take the meaning and value of these concepts for granted; political philosophy forces us to confront our assumptions.

  Themes and structure

  The book is split into two parts. In the first we discuss the meaning of some of the most fundamental concepts that we use to understand politics, the obligations individuals living in a society have toward one another, and the institutions that we create to regulate our public and private lives. The second part is devoted to a discussion of the different normative arguments which have divided Anglo-American political philosophers, and have served to shape the conduct of the discipline for the last half-century.

  It is important to begin with conceptual analysis. It is too easy to assume that the meaning of fundamental concepts is settled simply because we are used to invoking them in a particular way. We are all used to appealing to ideas like freedom or equality or rights in political debate: such concepts provide the background context within which we debate more specific policies or government actions. But while we may be used to debating which policies are most in line with our most cherished ideals and values, it is not often that we go further and question these ideals and values themselves. What do we mean by freedom, or equality, or justice, or democracy? Why should we value these things? The fact that ideals like freedom and equality are widely supported in our public culture is not a good enough reason for valuing them: many practices and values, widely supported at one time or another by the citizens of liberal democratic states like Britain, have been subsequently rejected for being unjust; moreover, many just practices and values are not currently the subject of widespread agreement in liberal democratic states.

  We need to know what ideas mean, and how they are justified, in order to know how important they are. This is crucial because we often have to choose between competing values. Should we prioritize freedom or equality, if they conflict? More fundamentally: how do we go about answering such a question? Similarly, how do we deal with the choice between security and civil liberties? And if we are forced to choose between respecting the rights of a child (for example, to receive an education which prepares them for an autonomous adult life) and the rights of parents (for example, to remove their children from formal education on the ground of religious beliefs), how are we to decide?

  Some argue that the answers to these kinds of questions are provided by important documents or accepted practices: bills of rights, international agreements, constitutions and so on. But complex political questions cannot be resolved simply by recourse to legal precedents or constitutions.

  Firstly, constitutions are particular to different nation-states and political regimes. The conceptual context set by the US constitution only holds for the US, and similarly the provisions embodied in the constitutions of Australia, Thailand, Iran, Britain and everywhere else only hold for those states.

  Secondly, whether something is ‘constitutional’ and whether it is ‘right’ or ‘just’ are very different questions. Constitutions can be unjust, as can international agreements and other formalized political practices. Hence, we need deeper grounds than constitutions and international agreements if we are to know how to order our political lives. We need deeper grounds than constitutions and international agreements if we are to evaluate and (perhaps) criticize constitutions. We need normative debate about politics.

  Thirdly, constitutions, international agreements and so on are themselves products of prior (and ongoing) philosophical, political and legal debate. True, we need a (conceptual, philosophical, moral) framework within which to undertake the difficult work of resolving complex questions about how to order our social and political lives, what institutions we need, why we need them, who should hold power, and what the limits of this power might be, and so on. We need a principled foundation of concepts and ideas that we can draw on in our discussions about specific questions. And, true, in the modern world these foundations tend to be provided by important documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But these documents are the distillation of years of philosophical debate about who we are and what kind of world we want to live in, and are themselves characterized by internal tensions and ambiguities. Constitutions, like international agreements, treaties and other formal documents which stipulate fundamental powers and responsibilities on the world stage, are works in progress.

  While many people often use political concepts as if their meanings were settled, then, it is one of the duties of the political philosopher to explore the nature of political concepts and to challenge their validity. It is only having explored the nature of our basic political concepts, and the vocabulary that we use in our discussions about how to order our social and political lives, that we are able to move forward and form more concrete normative proposals about what politics should look like, what it should be about, and what we should expect from the institutions that we create.

  We engage in this further normative debate in Part Two. We discuss the ways in which political philosophers have used normative concepts as the basis for arguments about the roles and responsibilities of social and political institutions, and the obligations that individuals have to one another.

  Part Two begins by discussing utilitarianism (which was once the dominant approach to resolving normative questions about morality and politics) before introducing the canonical rejection of it provided by John Rawls in his ground-breaking work A Theory of Justice (1971), as well as his liberal alternative. Rawls’s book remains the most important work in contemporary political philosophy. It effectively reinvented the Anglo-American tradition of political philosophy and showed that normative theorizing about politics was both possible and important. Rawls’s work used the tools of analytic philosophy (its focus on clarity and logic) in order to present a ground-up defence of liberalism and the Enlightenment values of reason, individualism, freedom and equality on which it was based. In Part Two, we discuss in roughly thematic and chronological order some of the most important debates which emerged in the wake of Rawls’s work and which continue to shape the discipline, from debates between libertarians and egalitarians about economic redistribution, inequality, and the role of luck, to issues concerning personal identity, community, the status of cultural and religious values in political life, the obligations that rich states may or may not be understood to have to poorer states, the obligations that currently living people may or may not have to those who lived before them or will live after them, and the very sources of morality and justice itself.

  In doing so, we hope to encourage you to think more deeply, and in more detail, about the political world in which we find ourselves, about the values that we cherish, and the forms of behaviour that we take for granted as being right or appropriate. Philosophy is about the search for truth, and political philosophy is about the search for truth about the way we order our social and political lives: it is about subjecting accepted truths, and widely held assumptions, to rigorous examination in the interests of revealing new insights about them, including new strengths and weaknesses. It is about looking at the way we are governed, the institutions under which we live, the nature and distribution of power, wealth and status in a society, and the values which shape the political world, and asking: Is this how we should live? If so, why? And if not, how should we live?

  Dig deeper

  A.J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic (London: Victor Gollancz, 1936
).

  Brian Barry, Political Argument (London: Routledge, 1965).

  Isaiah Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Pimlico, 1998).

  H.L.A. Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961).

  Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974).

  Phil Parvin, Karl Popper (London: Continuum Press, 2010).

  Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963).

  John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).

  Bertrand Russell, The History of Western Philosophy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1946).

  Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).

  Part One

  Essential concepts

  1

  Freedom (1): Negative freedom

  Freedom is one of the most important concepts in political philosophy. For many, the principal purpose of a legitimate political system is to protect the freedom of its citizens. Thus the majority of anglophone political philosophers agree that some form of liberalism is required. Liberalism seeks to maximize free choice for all individuals, but recognizes that freedom must have limits. As one of the founders of liberalism, John Locke, put it, liberty is distinct from licence: no one can do whatever they want all the time. The freedom of each individual must be balanced against the freedom of others. It also needs to be balanced against other values, such as equality, social stability and security. Thus liberty must be defended in the context of these other values.

  The key is to work out which constraints on individual freedom are just. In other words, we need a normative theory about the requirements and limits of state action. But first we need to determine what freedom is. Is freedom merely the ability to make choices without external interference from the state or from other people? Or does freedom require particular circumstances: are things like poverty, lack of education, or social norms constraints on freedom?

  In these first two chapters we discuss two ways of understanding freedom: negative freedom in this chapter and positive freedom in the next.