My name is Tamar Gendler. I'm professor of philosophy and cognitive science and chair
of the philosophy department at Yale University.
So philosophy comes from the Greek term meaning love of wisdom; philo, love; sophos, wisdom
and every culture from time immemorial has had a philosophical tradition. There are
philosophical traditions in western culture that have their roots in ancient Greece.
There are philosophical traditions in eastern culture, great Chinese and Indian philosophical
traditions. There are philosophical traditions in Africa. There are philosophical traditions
in native cultures throughout the world. What philosophy does in every society of which
it is a part is asks the question why, why are things that way they are and should they
be that way. The western philosophical tradition to which
my comments today will be restricted can be divided into two main segments. On the one
hand it has a descriptive component, which asks about how things are and how we know
that and on the other hand it has a normative component, a component which asks about how
things ought to be. So into the first category fall questions like what is the fundamental
nature of reality, does God exist, do we have free will.
Those branches of philosophy are known as metaphysics, fundamental questions about what
there is, and epistemology, fundamental questions about how we know things. On the other side
of the divide are the questions that I've called normative questions, questions about
values and that segment of philosophy has three main parts. One of them, aesthetics
is concerned with the question what is beautiful and what makes it so. The second part of
that division of philosophy, moral philosophy asks the question what is morally right or
good and the third part of that division of philosophy, political philosophy asks the
question how should societies be structured in order to allow human flourishing and what
makes societal structures legitimate Perhaps the most accessible and exciting part
of philosophy for people who have never encountered the discipline before is political philosophy,
which asks questions that we as citizens of a democracy need to ask ourselves in order
to be responsible participants in our joint governance, questions like what is the best
way for society to be structured in order to allow people to flourish, questions like
what is the appropriate division of rights and responsibilities in a society, questions
like how should the legitimate concerns of liberty on the one hand and equality on the
other be balanced and for those of you who are interested in studying a subject that
has practical import it may be worth realizing that political philosophy brought you the
world as you know it today. Political philosophy brought the world Greek democracy. It brought
us the Magna Carta. It brought us the French Revolution and the American Revolution.
It brought us communism. It brought us the Civil Rights Movement. It brought us feminism
and libertarianism. It even brought us the Tea Party. It was, as a result of thinking
about these sorts of questions that these movements came into being.
So I want you to start by asking yourself how you would answer these questions. Should
the State guarantee universal healthcare? Should there be an inheritance tax? Should
there be a draft army and should you be allowed to sell your vote?
The three people we’ll meet in the lecture are Thomas Hobbes who wrote a great book called
Leviathan in 1651, John Rawls who wrote a book called Theory of Justice in 1971 and
Robert Nozick who wrote a book called Anarchy, State and Utopia in 1974. It has been said
that political philosophy asks two questions, who should get what and who says so and you
might think of the three authors that we’re going to discuss as answering those questions
in different ways. Thomas Hobbes is primarily concerned with
the second question who says so, what makes the State legitimate and John Rawls and Robert
Nozick are in a conversation directly with one another about the question who gets what.
So Thomas Hobbes lived at the end of the 1500s and beginning of the 1600s roughly at the
time of Shakespeare and if you read Hobbes work in the original you’ll notice that
the language in which he wrote was somewhat archaic, but the questions with which he is
concerned in his great book Leviathan aren’t questions that just apply to his time, they’re
questions that concern us today as well. He asks the question what would the world be
like if there wasn’t a state and would that situation be better or worse than the situation
where there is some form of governance. In particular, Hobbes famously asks people
to imagine what life would be like in what he calls the state of nature,
a situation in which there is no external governing body and Hobbes points out that
in the state of nature people are all roughly equal in the following relevant way. All
of us, no matter how physically strong or intellectually clever are at risk of having
the work that we do disrupted by others, at risk of having the property that we’ve acquired
taken by others, at risk of having the things that we see as important to our lives destroyed
by others because all of us sleep and all of us go away from things that are important
to us. As a result says Hobbes, in the state of nature
people need to expand a tremendous amount of energy protecting their goods. there
is no opportunity in the state of nature to do the sorts of things which human beings
think makes life valuable, things like develop relationships to individuals far from us,
things like Hobbes mentions creating the skills of navigation, writing poetry, making music
or any of the things that you find valuable in your life. All of those things Hobbes
point out are possible only because you have a kind of security and safety. By contrast,
life in the state of nature says Hobbes, is solitary, poor, nasty, broodish and short.
The question is how can we get out of the state of nature? How can we get out of this
situation of perpetual fear, for as Hobbes point out active war isn’t what disrupts
human activity. The fear of war is sufficient to disrupt human activity. Think of the
ways in which after 9/11 your anxiety about your security was raised so that at every
moment you were attentive to things around you, hyper vigilant to what risks you might
face. So Hobbes’ idea in arguing for the legitimacy of government is to begin by asking
what would it be like if there were no government and to point out that that’s a state which
all of us find undesirable. There are says Hobbes, three things which
motivate people to try to leave the state of nature. They are, to quote directly,
“fear of death, desire of such things as are necessary for commodious living and the
hope by their industry to obtain them”.
So the puzzle the Hobbes raises is how can we get out of the state of nature and in subsequent
years game theorists who work at the intersection of what you might think of as philosophy and
economics have developed a way of representing the problem which Hobbes thinks we face in
the state of nature.
Life in the state of nature, according to Hobbes, embodies what is sometimes called
a prisoner’s dilemma. The prisoner’s dilemma gets its name from a famous example
. A small town police officer has captured two criminals and he wants to entice them
to confess, so what he does is he creates a structure of prison sentences where it’s
advantageous for each of the prisoners to confess regardless of what the other one does.
We can illustrate a prisoner’s dilemma by thinking about the situation of the United
States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Both sides would have preferred de-escalation
in terms of armament. Both sides would have been happy to use the money that they were
building missiles with to build schools and highways and hospitals, but both sides also
realized that if they engaged in unilateral disarmament they would be at risk. Let’s
look at the structure that governed the choice that those two countries faced.
The United States couldn’t choose whether the Soviet Union disarmed or not. It could
only choose whether it disarmed. The Soviet Union couldn’t choose whether the United
States disarmed or not. It could only choose whether it disarmed. For both countries
their first choice was that the other country disarmed while they kept their weapons.
Because of that what was rational for both countries to do was to keep
their arms. What that meant is that
the rational choice for both parties was to keep their arms rather than ending up in their
second choice situation, the situation where I have money to spend on my schools and hospitals
and Russia has money to spend on its schools and hospitals both countries in order to be
rational needed to spend resources on armament. This structure occurs over and over again
in human transactions. So unless there is some sort of enforcement mechanism in place
we will end up like the US and the Soviet Union during the arms race, with our third
choice situation. So the general problem with which the prisoner’s dilemma confronts
us is that if we behave in rational ways we will always end up not cooperating and the
puzzle that Hobbes’ confronts in his political philosophy is the question how is it possible
to bring human beings into their second choice situation, where they cooperate with one another
rather than competing. It turns out that in lots of small local interactions
human beings do manage to find a way out of this scenario. Famously, during the First
World War when soldiers were engaged in trench warfare the Germans and the Americans developed
a kind of truce whereby soldiers from one side could leave their trenches and get some
fresh air without getting shot and then soldiers from the other side would leave their trenches
and get some fresh air without getting shot. The idea was that as long as the other side
was behaving peacefully it was rational for you to behave peacefully as well
If you fail to cooperate or if it seems to me that you have failed to cooperate I will
retaliate by not cooperating. Because of the possibility that informal modes of cooperation
can breakdown Hobbes insisted that in order to get out of the state of nature we need
not only informal arrangements with one another, but a body that regulates human interactions.
Hobbes concludes that it’s in our rational self interest to submit our will to a sovereign
whom he calls the Leviathan and thereby to get ourselves out of the state of nature.
Let’s fast forward 300 years. A half century later philosopher John Locke writes another
book about social contract theory and 50 or so years after that the philosopher John Jacques
Rousseau writes a similar work, each of them refining Hobbes’ notion of the social contract.
Together these three pictures of what makes a state legitimate allow the thinkers who
lie at the heart of the American and French Revolutions to articulate a picture of human
rights that makes those revolutions legitimate. From the French and American Revolutions which
give voice to the citizens we move through the 18th century to the emancipation of the
serfs in Russia and a general democratization of society, a recognition that individual’s
votes should not be dependent upon them being landholders, but should rather be open to
people of all social classes. Extending this idea Karl Marx writes the Communist
Manifesto and an entire enormous nation, Russia in 1917 reshapes the fundamental structure
of its society in response to a work of political philosophy. At the same time the tradition
which gave rise to the revolutions in the 18th century, one that says all human beings
have the right to have their voices heard, gives rise on the one hand to the women’s
voting movement in England and America and then to the Civil Rights movement on United
States’ soil expanding and expanding out of Hobbes’ fundamental idea that a government
to be legitimate, must be in response to the needs of its people. We get during this
300 year period an incredible opening up of political rights of a sort unknown in the
history of civilization. Political philosopher John Rawls was born
in the early 20th century in the American south. He was of a generation where he and
all his friends went off to serve in the Second World War and returned from that war concerned
with how it’s possible to create a stable and just society. Rawls spent most of his
academic career thinking about that question as a professor of philosophy at Harvard University
and when he was in his early 50s in the middle of the 1960s and early 1970s as the Vietnam
War was raging, as social protests were going on around him, as American society was reshaping
itself in ways that voice was given to the needs of the disenfranchised, Rawls tried
to articulate in the great social contract tradition a picture of what a just society
looks like and how a just society should be structured.
It’s in this time that John Rawls sets out to write his work, The Theory of Justice. It’s
worth listening to the extraordinary opening words of Rawls’ book. He says, “Justice
is the first virtue of social institutions as truth is of systems of thought.”
Rawls’ fundamental assumption in articulating what a just society looks like is that each
person possesses a certain inviolability which cannot be overridden even if doing so would
be of greater benefit to the society as a whole. In so doing he challenges what had
become a dominant picture of what justice and morality demand. That picture can be
traced to the 19th century works of the British philosophers Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart
Mill and is known and utilitarianism. It’s an incredibly appealing view.
What the view says is that an act is morally right if it produces the greatest good for
the greatest number of people. If I face a choice between saving one person and saving
five where I can save only one group or the other, utilitarianism gives what many people
find to be the intuitive answer that I should save the five, thereby bringing about more
happiness rather than the one. The problem with utilitarianism that Rawls
is concerned with is that it seems that in farfetched and typical circumstances utilitarianism
could demand that we violate the rights of the one to help the many. A famous counter
example to utilitarianism is that a healthy man walks into a hospital where there are
five dying individuals, one in need of a heart, one in need of a kidney, one in need of a
liver and two others each in need of parts that he has. The utilitarian rubric would
seem to suggest that if those five can be saved by harming him that that’s what morality
demands. This picture that each of us has inviolable rights and that those rights can’t
be overridden by the needs of others is part of what is new and exciting in Rawls’ discussion.
Taking as his premise the idea that justice is the first virtue of social institutions
that is that no unjust society is a legitimate one Rawls asks the following question. How
should the benefits and burdens of living together in a community be distributed so
as to best realize what justice requires? In particular, he asks what should the fundamental
institutional structures look like to allow a society to be a just society.
Rawls sees himself as the inheritor of the social contract tradition of which Hobbes
was the initial voice in the western tradition. Like Hobbes, Rawls asks what would people
choose to have their society look like if they were building it from the ground up.
Rawls says a just society is one that rational, free and equal people would choose to contract
into, but we enter our interactions with one another will all sorts of inequalities in
place. Some of us are wealthy. Some of us are poor. Some of us are endowed with
certain kinds of intellectual or physical skills that others lack. If we try to build
our society taking into consideration those facts about ourselves we aren’t doing it
from a position of equality, so Rawls’ insight is that sometimes the fairest way to make
a decision is to put yourself in a position where you have less information.
Think about what the fairest way to divide a cake is. The fairest way to divide a cake
is to ask you to divide it not knowing which piece you’re going to get. If you divide
the cake unaware of which part will be yours you will be inclined to divide it in a fair
way. This is the veil of ignorance Let’s go behind the veil of ignorance and
ask a question that Rawls asks, namely, which of the two principles that he has derived
ought to take priority over the other? Do we care more about fundamental rights or do
we care about the distribution of income? So suppose you’re faced with a choice of
three societies in which you can live not knowing what role you will play in the society.
In society number one the average income is $100,000, but only 85% of the people have
fundamental rights, only 85% of the people have the right to vote, liberty of conscience,
the right to a fair trial. In the second society the average salary—in the second
society the average salary is $70,000 and only 85% of people have fundamental rights.
In the third society the average salary is $70,000, but 100% of people have the right
to vote, freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial. Which society would you
choose to live in, average income of %100,000, 85% free, average income of $70,000, 85 % free
or average income $70,000, 100% free? When confronted with this choice set anybody who
is paying attention rejects the second option. It has all of the disadvantages of the first
and all of the disadvantages of the third, but it’s also true that when confronted
with this choice almost everybody rejects the first option as well. If you don’t
know whether you’re going to be one of the ones with freedom then even though you’re
guaranteed to have a higher income in the first society than the third more than 95%
of people choose to live in the third society. This idea that when you don’t know where
you’re going to end up you have an inclination to be risk adverse is what lies behind Rawls’
conclusions about what would be chosen from behind the veil of ignorance.
People want to make sure that the bottom is safe before they worry about what the top
looks like, so Rawls suggests that to the extent there are inequalities in a society
they should satisfy two conditions. So the first condition is that the benefits
of those inequalities be accessible to all and the second and perhaps most controversial
part of Rawls’ theory is that to the extent that there are inequalities in a society they
should be distributed in such a way that they are to the benefit of the least well off,
so if it turns out that having a lower tax rate in the highest bracket produces wealth
and income in a way that leads those in the poorest quintile to benefit Rawls says that’s
okay, but if it turns out that that’s advantageous only to those in the highest segment of society
that inequality, says Rawls wouldn’t be countenanced from behind the veil of ignorance.
It isn’t a way that people would choose for a society to be structured if their fundamental
concern was with justice. In 2005 two psychologists inspired by the
work of John Rawls decided to survey several thousand randomly selected Americans about
what they thought the distribution of income would look like in a society of which they
would want to be a part and they presented those citizens with two different pie graphs.
In the one, which you can see on the top the vast majority of wealth was held by the top
quintile of society and a small amount by the second quintile with virtually none held
by the remainder of the society. In the other the distribution was more equal. Roughly
a third of the wealth was held by the top quintile and the remainder was distributed
among the remaining four. Given the choice between those two social structures 92% of
Americans chose the bottom. As a matter of fact the top graph, which only 8% of subjects
chose represents the actual distribution of wealth in contemporary America, whereas the
bottom graph represents the actual distribution of wealth in contemporary Sweden.
The distribution of wealth where no more than 60% of the wealth is held by the top fifth
and where at least some of the wealth is held by the bottom two-fifths seems to be an ideal
for all Americans, not just for those who would benefit thereby.
Rich people and poor people give the same answer from behind the veil of ignorance.
Men and women give the same answer from behind the veil of ignorance. Religious and nonreligious
people give the same answer from behind the veil of ignorance and perhaps most strikingly
democrats and republicans give roughly the same answer from behind the veil of ignorance.
As a matter of fact, 85% of the nation’s wealth is held by the top quintile, roughly
10% by the second, roughly 5% by the middle and virtually none of the nation’s wealth
by 40% of the country. Does that mean our society is fundamentally
unjust? John Rawls would give the answer yes. By contrast Robert Nozick would give
the answer no. because the structure of society in which we find ourselves is one that has
arisen as the result of voluntary interactions, of human beings engaged in legitimate transactions
whatever distribution results, says Nozick, is a just one.
While John Rawls was writing Theory of Justice as a distinguished philosopher in his mid
50s having fought in the Second World War and then taught philosophy for many decades
thereafter. Down the hall from him was a precocious young man in his late 20s who had
recently started teaching at Harvard. That young man by the name of Robert Nozick took
upon himself the task of writing a rebuttal to Rawls’ Theory of Justice. And three years
after Theory of Justice was published Nozick published his retort, Anarchy, State and Utopia.
Nozick was concerned that Rawls had placed the wrong fundamental notion at the center
of his theory. Nozick writes: “Individuals have rights
and there are things that no person or group may do to them without violating those rights.
The minimal state limited to narrow functions of protection against force, theft and fraud,
enforcement of contracts and so on is the most extensive state that can be justified.”
Like Rawls, Nozick is challenging the utilitarian picture. Like Rawls, Nozick thinks the goods
of one person can’t be traded off the goods of the community, but unlike Rawls Nozick
places at the center of his political philosophy not the notion of equality or justice, but
rather the notion of liberty. Let’s look at what a society governed by
Nozick’s principles might look like. Nozick famously articulates a view of the conditions
under which property is legitimately held and his view is this. It’s legitimate
for you to own something if you acquired it in a legitimate way when it was un-owned or
if you acquired it in a legitimate way from somebody else who already owned it. If I
got the property from you as the result of your having given it to me then no one can
legitimately take that property away from me. This may sound relatively uncontroversial,
but let’s look and see what it implies. Suppose each of us starts out with the same
amount of money. Say each of us has $100 and there are thousands and thousands of us
all of whom are fans of the great 1970s basketball star Wilt Chamberlain, so suppose you give
25 cents of your money to Wilt Chamberlain and I give 25 cents of my money to Wilt Chamberlain
and our friend gives 25 cents of his money to Wilt Chamberlain and so on thousands and
thousands of times until Wilt Chamberlain comes to have not the $100 with which each
of us started out, but thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars. On Nozick’s
picture any decision to take away any of the money which Wilt Chamberlain got through this
voluntary and legitimate transaction is a violation of rights. Then no distribution
of income, including one in which 1% of the people own 99% of the wealth could ever be
illegitimate because what matters is how it actually came into being. If all that 99%
of the wealth came to those individuals as the result of legal transactions then nothing
can be done without violating rights to redistribute it.
There is no easy answer to this question. There is a strong intuitive pull to the view
that Nozick advocates—it is in some sense theft to take from Wilt Chamberlain what each
of us has voluntarily given to him. On the other hand without such theft, more commonly
known by the term taxation, we will find ourselves perhaps in the sort of situation that neither
Rawls nor Nozick wants to be in. If all of us give our quarters to Wilt Chamberlain
and his companions. Instead of having a society of which we’re
all equally a part Wilt and his wealthy friends are able to buy access to the media, are able
to buy advertising time for candidates that they support, are able to send their children
to schools where they gain power and advantage and access to resources with the result that
the fundamental rights which Nozick as well as Rawls was concerned with preserving become
difficult for people to exercise. The Wilt Chamberlain example illustrates a
general phenomenon which we face in a society, one which was foreshadowed in our discussion
of prisoner’s dilemma. Individual decisions that are acceptable may be problematic if
large numbers of people make those decisions. The problem that this gives rise to is sometimes
called the Tragedy of the Commons, so suppose there is a green area where I let
my cow graze and you let your cow graze and our neighbor lets his cow graze. So far
no problem, for each of our cows there is enough to eat, but suppose that each of us
instead of having one cow has 50. If you alone had 50 cows there would be no problem.
If I alone had 50 cows there would be no problem, but if hundreds of us have 50 cows the entire
green space will disappear and all of our cows will die. This structure manifests
itself in situation after situation. Over fishing results from each of us taking what
would be a fine amount of fish if were the only ones doing it, but an amount that becomes
problematic if others are doing likewise. Each of us polluting a small amount causes
no problem. All of us polluting together can lead to drastic consequences.
Let’s return to our four opening questions and ask what Rawls and Nozick would say about
them. —with respect to the question of whether societies should guarantee universal healthcare
Rawls would say yes and Nozick would say no. On Rawls’ picture health is a precondition
for participation in a civic society and from behind the veil of ignorance clearly everyone
would choose a society in which they had the guarantee of safety on Rawls’ picture.
By contrast, on Nozick’s this provision would be possible only as the result of illegitimate
interference in people’s lives. With respect to the question of whether an
inheritance tax is legitimate Rawls would say yes, Nozick no. Rawls says each of us
has the right to be born into a roughly equal community and those who inherit large amounts
at the moment of birth are disadvantaged in ways which presumably is not to the benefit
of the least well off. Nozick by contrast wonders where Rawls gets the idea that it’s
anybody’s business to tell me whether I can give my money to my children.
With respect to the third question should the army be constituted by draft or by volunteers
Rawls would, at least in conditions of wartime, advocate a draft army.—just as the benefits
and rights of a society that are fundamental need to be distributed equally across all
so to on a Rawls’ picture must the burdens. The only fair way to distribute those sorts
of responsibilities is as the result of a random process. Nozick by contrast would
be happy with a volunteer army. Individuals have the right to contract into risk and the
fact that most of the individuals who contract into risky situations are those for whom there
are not so many options isn’t something that would bother Nozick, though of course
under both circumstances there are many who would choose to serve their society—simply
out of a desire to protect it. Finally, with respect to the question should
it be legitimate to sell your vote Rawls gives the answer no. That is a right that he considers
unalienable, unalienable because from behind a veil of ignorance we saw that no one would
choose to live in a society where such rights weren’t distributed equally. Nozick by
contrast thinks that this, like everything else should be something which is your discretion
to choose and if you decide that one of the best ways for you to finance something that
you care about is by selling your vote to another person what business is it of anybody
else to tell you that you can’t. You, I imagine, have your own answers to those
four questions. Perhaps they line up completely with one or the other of the authors that
we’ve discussed, but what you now have in addition to your answers to those questions
are some tools for thinking about why you give those answers.
When I graduated from college I spent a couple of years doing education policy work and then
decided to go back to graduate school to study philosophy. In 1990 I was lucky enough to
enroll as a graduate student at Harvard University where two of my teachers were the political
philosopher John Rawls and a man who ended up being my dissertation director Robert Nozick.
It’s from the two of them that I learned what I know about political philosophy.
What political philosophy and philosophy in general encourages you to do is to step outside
the specificity of your own situation. Hobbes and Rawls and Nozick all recognized that each
of us wants more rather than less of a share of the goods of our society, but what they
ask you to do is to think about how the fact that you want more rather than less suggests
that everyone else probably does too. Philosophy has always been connected to the
works that are going on in other fields at its time. In ancient Greece the philosopher
Aristotle was not only doing work in metaphysics and epistemology. He was collecting constitutions
from various other Greek city states to provide the first catalog of political systems.
He was doing biological experiments and thinking about the nature of physics. In the early
modern period philosophers like Rene Descartes or Thomas Hobbes were major contributors not
just to the philosophical work of their time, but also to the scientific work. Descartes
invented coordinate geometry, which we still know by the name Cartesian geometry and Hobbes
did work not just in the domain of political philosophy, but also work in the sciences.
This has been true throughout philosophy’s history that it’s great thinkers think not
only about questions central to the discipline, but also about how those questions relate
to the fields around them, so philosophers of mind right now contribute to debates about
the nature of consciousness thinking both about what it is for people to be conscious
and making use of the resources of a 500 year-old tradition of thinking about the relation between
mind and body. People who major in philosophy have gone
on to do a huge range of things. They go to law school. They go to business school.
They go to medical school. Some of them go onto be philosophers in a professional
sense, but what philosophers typically go onto do is to be thoughtful, reflective participants
in whatever they end up doing whether that be working in real estate or working as a
nurse or being a fulltime parent or being mayor of their town.
The most profound questions of the world are the ones which philosophy gives you permission
to ask and to learn how to answer and it’s for that reason that the study of philosophy
can be an enormously illuminating and valuable part of anyone’s life. Thank you. Thank
you. Thank you.