John Kilcullen
Copyright (c) 1996, R.J. Kilcullen.
In POL264 we have looked at two different approaches to the philosophy of politics: (1) one through a philosophy of history, an attempt to understand and forecast the course of history, (2) the other through development of ideas of justice and their application to such issues as justice between nations, justice between generations, and justice in the form of equality of opportunity. This is just a sampling of what has been written in political philosophy since the 18th century, but if you go on reading in this subject I think you'll find it is a reasonably representative sample. There is a third common approach during this period: Utilitarianism, the attempt to work out a political philosophy aimed at securing the happiness or well-being of mankind generally. The chief representative of utilitarianism is J.S. Mill, whom you met at the end of POL167. Most philosophizing about politics since the eighteenth century has come under one or other of these three heads.
In this last lecture I will say something about what I think myself about what emerges from this study. I do not believe that in this field there are established experts except about the literature. In other words, someone who has read in it for a long time can say what questions have been raised, what answers have been suggested, what arguments and objections have been advanced: but not what has been shown to be true. When it comes to drawing conclusions no one can speak with authority. This is, in part, the reason why university teachers in such fields usually teach in a non-committal way - we say what various people have said, but leave you to draw the conclusions. Still, we don't mean to teach that there cannot be any conclusions, or that ordinary people should not try to draw any. So let me sketch out some of my own conclusions, without claiming any authority for them.
It seems to me that although the two approaches to political philosophy we have been studying are interesting and worth studying (and I hope you think so), in the end they have not succeeded in what they set out to do. The first project, that of Adam Smith, Auguste Comte, J.S. Mill, Marx and Engels, Weber, has improved our understanding of historical processes, but not so as to forecast far ahead. People do sometimes anticipate what is going to happen, but not too far ahead, not on a large scale: and none of the theories we looked at could improve large-scale, long-term prediction. The main contributions they have made are a by-product: formulating and testing and trying to improve these ambitious theories has produced a larger repertory of concepts and possibilities useful in understanding small-scale change as it happens or a little way ahead, or (on a larger scale) afterwards.
As for (2), the rights and justice project, that has been of value chiefly in assembling collections of cases in which questions of justice arise, and in articulating more explicitly the various ethical intuitions we variously apply to them. None of these theories has, in my opinion, produced any better method than intuition: we inform ourselves of the facts, and turn them over in our minds or 'consider' them until we come to 'feel' that some decision is right. The principles merely indicate analogies among concrete cases - to all the principles there seem to be exceptions, they have to be balanced against one another, and to make decisions we need to consider cases as concretely as possible.
It seems to me that in recent times English-speaking philosophers, and indeed people generally, have been too much preoccupied with rights and justice. Other ethical values have not got enough attention. For example there is 'humanity' (treating people 'humanely'). According to the Roman lawyers it was nova humanitas, i.e. 'modern humanity', which had ameliorated the position of slaves, children and animals under Roman law. Slaves had no rights, but the law came to lay on masters certain duties of humane treatment. So this is an ancient idea, still influential - in our treatment not only of other people, but also of animals ('animal rights' is a phrase indicative of the preoccupation with rights). Notions similar to that of humanity are expressed by the terms 'solidarity' (identifying with other human beings, or some section of humanity, rather than pushing our individual interests), or 'fraternity' ('brotherhood'), or 'philanthropy' (not in the sense of making donations, but of love or friendship toward mankind - philia, friendship, anthropos, man), or benevolence or generosity. These are in fact the ideas that Utilitarianism was concerned with: the happiness or welfare of mankind generally, or of sentient beings generally.
What all these terms signify is a disposition to put aside self-interest to some extent, and do for others rather more than they can claim as a matter of strict right. This is vague, but not nothing. Consider the problem of foreign aid, or help for victims of famine or disaster or poverty in poor countries. There seems to be no adequate reason of a self-interested sort for us to help such people. If we see somebody injured in a road accident we might help with the thought that some day we may be in an accident, and it may then by in our interest for there to be a general practice or custom of helping people who have accidents. But we are never going to be in one of these third-world disasters. We will never benefit from a practice of aiding victims of such disasters. It is in our interest, in fact, for there to be a practice of 'passing by on the other side', and ignoring large-scale disasters: let them die quickly! And, please, not on our TV! So self-interest will hardly motivate famine relief. And invoking justice and human rights makes the duty to help sound more definite and precise than I think most of us will think it is, and the attempt to make it a strict duty in justice provokes a reaction against it. One or another of the words I listed above, e.g. humanity, better suggests the ethical value involved. One of the defects, as I see it, of recent political philosophy is that it has overemphasized rights and justice to the neglect of these vague notions. Political activists also talk too much about rights.
The 'philosophy of history' project was perhaps especially French and German. Political philosophy in France and Germany today is still greatly concerned with history, historicity, modernity - with trying to define and reflect upon the course of history, though no longer, I think, with any idea of predicting or controlling its course. It seems to me that writers in this tradition often exaggerate the coherence of history and of historical periods. To speak of the modern (or post-modern, or post-post-modern!) predicament suggests that everyone living at this time is in the same predicament, whereas in fact different people, even in the same society, can be living in different worlds. Historians aim at constructing a narrative and are tempted to make the story more coherent than it really was: philosophies of history are tempted to give history too intelligible a meaning, and insofar as their theory is meant as a guide to action are tempted to make life too much like a drama.
The 'rights and justice' project, and more generally the attempt to analyze ethical notions relevant to politics, has been especially British and American. You may know that after World War II Oxford became, once again, a major centre for philosophy, and people went from Australia and the U.S. to learn to 'do' philosophy in the Oxford style (or one of the several Oxford styles), and returned to the provinces and colonies to teach it. This way of doing philosophy is represented in almost every philosophy journal published in the English language. I suppose that today most philosophers working in this style are in the US; Oxford is no longer the centre. The Anglo-American styles have various names - ordinary language philosophy, linguistic analysis, conceptual analysis, and so forth. Its characteristic purpose is to clarify what ordinary people mean when they say what they ordinarily say: not an attempt to persuade them to say or think or do anything different, or to provide them with any deeper knowledge than they already have. So moral and political philosophy in this vein does not set out to control or influence the course of history, or to support any political program. The only practical value it claims is that if people get clear what they mean, they may be able to discuss their differences with less confusion.
I have never been an adherent of the Oxford approach to philosophy. Until I became an atheist twenty years ago I had been pretty serious about religion, and I have continued to take seriously the questions religious people take seriously. The analytic approach - of assuming that there is no more to know about these questions than ordinary people already know, that all that remains is to get it clear - has always seemed frivolous to me. Nevertheless, I think the analytic method - of trying to spell out explicitly the meaning, presuppositions and implications of what is said (not just by 'ordinary' people, but by anyone who seems to have something to say) - is worth learning, and using as part of an attempt to answer the questions the Oxford philosophers were reluctant to take seriously. Part of this method is to insist on getting things clear to the ordinary person - at least if the ordinary person is willing to go into the matter thoroughly. I think it is a good discipline in philosophy to check occasionally that you can explain to yourself, and could explain to someone else not a student of philosophy, how you came to think the thoughts you now think in the language you now use, starting from your thoughts and language before you got involved in this subject.
I speak of the Oxford philosophers in the past tense because I think the style of philosophy in English has changed, at least in political philosophy. John Rawls made the change by doing something that analytic philosophers were not supposed to do; he violated the Oxford dictum that philosophy is about language - that the only facts philosophers deal with professionally are linguistic facts. Rawls made assumptions about psychological motivation, and this led to a connection with economics and game theory. Other philosophers were also becoming interested in game theory, which they could view as akin to logic. Unfortunately Rawls inherited the Oxford habit of assuming that there are no serious differences among people about matters of great importance, at least, not among the people that count. In articles he has published since A Theory of Justice this attitude has become more explicit, e.g. in 'Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical', Philosophy and Public Affairs, 14(1985) pp.223-251: 'Since justice as fairness is intended as a political conception of justice for a democratic society, it tries to draw solely upon basic intuitive ideas that are embedded in the political institutions of a constitutional democratic regime and the public traditions of their interpretation...it starts from within a certain political tradition' (p.225). 'We collect such settled convictions as the belief in religious toleration and the rejection of slavery and try to organise the basic ideas and principles implicit in these convictions into a coherent conception of justice. We can regard these convictions as provisional fixed points which any conception of justice must account for if it is to be reasonable for us' (p.228). 'For us': that is, for American Liberals. Religious toleration is hardly a fixed point for the various kinds of fundamentalists. 'A political conception of justice...must be in accordance with our considered convictions' (ibid.). People who don't share these convictions are ignored. One of the supporters of Rawls's approach is Richard Rorty, 'The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy', in The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (Cambridge University Press, 1988): 'We heirs of the Enlightenment think of enemies of liberal democracy like Nietzsche or Loyola as, to use Rawls's word, "mad". We do so because there is no way to see them as fellow citizens of our constitutional democracy, people whose life plans might, given ingenuity and good will, be fitted in with those of other citizens. They are not crazy because they have mistaken the ahistorical nature of human beings. They are crazy because the limits of sanity are set by what we can take seriously. This, in turn, is determined by our upbringing, our historical situations' (pp.266-7). Rorty acknowledges that to refuse to argue about what human beings should be like 'seems to show a contempt for the spirit of accommodations and tolerance'. But 'accommodation and tolerance must stop short of a willingness to work within any vocabulary that one's interlocutor wishes to use, to take seriously any topic that he puts forward for discussion' (p.268). So at a time when the mainstream consensus in American life seems to be a breaking up under attack from religious and political conservatives, when multi-culturalism challenges the view that there is and should be a central culture, these philosophers are once again restricting themselves to clarifying what 'we' think.
My own view is that political philosophy is the construction and criticism of arguments, lines of reasoning, that are intended to move the persons addressed by the argument some considerable distance: to change minds on points of importance. For the argument to be worth much its premises must be acceptable to people who don't already accept the conclusions. I don't think there are rock-bottom premises that everyone does or should accept. Philosophy is dialectical, as Socrates practiced it - one person reasons together with one other person, not for the time being trying to justify things they both accept, not for the time being trying to satisfy the objections of some third person: there will be another dialogue later with the other person. But for any of these dialogues to be worth listening to the interlocutors must be some distance apart to start with. Just spelling out the implications of what 'we' already all think is no great achievement.
But the doubts go deeper than that. Suppose we do agree; is that enough to guarantee truth - even in matters of ordinary sense-perception? Suppose we walk around the object and agree that it is blue. Is that enough to guarantee that it is truly blue? Since the 17th century there has been a doctrine among philosophers and scientists that colour and other qualities are 'secondary' - i.e. the object in itself is not blue, but a blue sensation arises in our mind when light rays of certain wave lengths reflected from a surface that absorbs other wave lengths act upon our organs of vision. Maybe the world in itself, or for other kinds of perceiver, does not have the qualities we agree it has; and maybe if we could agree about the ethical characteristics of actions we could still not be sure that they do truly have them.
This is a variety of scepticism, already clearly presented by the ancient sceptics (see vol. 1 of Sextus Empiricus in the Loeb edition, pp. 27-55). In the face of this some philosophers say that truth is coherence and self-consistency among our perceptions and beliefs, not correspondence between how we think things are and how they are. I don't accept this: I think we mean by truth correspondence, and, more important, care about attaining truth because we want to achieve this correspondence. We wouldn't be satisfied with being coherently and self-consistently deluded about the world. We can of course never compare our beliefs with the way the world really is: it is indeed possible that we are self-consistently deluded. As far as I can see there is no way of ruling out this possibility. On the other hand we don't believe we are deluded, and the possibility that we may be can make no difference to our thinking or our action. We are not talking here about correctable mistakes. The possibility that I am mistaken in some belief I can check up on and correct does and should make a difference to how I think and act - if it is important I should check up on it. But the possibility that my whole machinery of perception and thinking may yield a self-consistent delusion - self-consistent meaning that nothing of what I believe will ever signal error in others of my beliefs - this is a possibility that can make no difference to how I think or act. All I can do is acknowledge this possibility, and go on believing and acting on what seems true and right after whatever checking seems necessary and is possible. See Essay IV in my book Sincerity and Truth: Essays on Arnauld, Bayle & Toleration. Applying this to ethics and political philosophy: all we can do is to act on our well-considered intuitions after we have discussed the matter with other people and turned it over in our minds.
Still, we would like arguments, reasons, proof: 'after careful consideration it seems to me ...' falls short of proof. To that I think we have to say that proof requires premises, and in the end the premises are going to be propositions that seem right after careful consideration. 'In the end' means simply when it is time to stop thinking about this because the time has come to do something else. No question is ever decided with absolute finality; if there is an opportunity we may come back to it, and then we may reach a different conclusion. If we do come back to it we may find arguments or reasons for some of the propositions that last time were unargued premises, accepted because they seemed right. But I don't think any amount of time would be enough to discover reasons resting on premises in principle beyond question, beyond doubt, beyond possibility of reconsideration. This is a view common among philosophers these days, that there are no foundations. But where I think many of them go wrong is in treating consensus or agreement among some community of people as a substitute for foundations. In my opinion thinking is done by individuals, arguments are offered by individuals to themselves or to other individuals, in the dialectical, Socratic way. What I am looking for is what seems right to me, you are looking for what seems right to you. I don't mean this is a relativistic sense. If something seems right to me, and wrong to you, that doesn't mean that it is right to/for me and wrong to/for you: one of us is simply wrong. What I am looking for is what seems, to me, to be right. So proposals and arguments are to be tested against my intuitions, and against yours (since we regard other human beings as possibly good judges), and against anyone available for discussion; not against the consensus of some particular community. Even a consensus of the whole human race would not guarantee truth.
Darwinism is behind some of the scepticism of modern philosophy. Is it reasonable to suppose that natural selection has 'designed' belief-forming organs that tell us how the world really is in itself? Won't it 'design' organs simply with a view to survival? Survival is a matter of coherence and self-consistency: we will survive well enough (i.e. live for long enough to propagate) as long as our expectations, however much deluded, are not seriously affronted by the world. And Darwinism provides a reason especially for being sceptical about matters of value. There is indeed no designer, there are no values or proposes built into human nature. No entity in the universe besides ourselves cares about what we care about, and when the human race ceases to exist no one will care at all. In a million years time, or perhaps next week, the whole history of human struggle will have ceased to be of interest to the universe. A gloomy thought, to which my answer is that the fact that something that matters to me now doesn't matter to someone else, and eventually won't matter to anyone, is not a reason why it should cease to matter to me now. As long as it matters while I'm doing it, it doesn't have to matter afterwards. One of the most mysterious features of the universe is time. Another mystery is action. There seem to be objects that last through time, but our actions exist only while we do them. Sometimes action produces an object that lasts, but most of what we do is not production. (Aristotle: 'Life is action, not production'.) So we act and have nothing to show for it. And the human race acts throughout history and will eventually have nothing to show for it. But this is no reason for not caring about how we act while we're doing it.
Return to Teaching
Materials on Political Thought
Return to Home Page