"A good politician is someone who knows how to defend, enrich, and bring honour to the state. ... What citizens most need from their rulers is effectiveness."
"Although Machiavelli was rather a failed politician, he can be remembered as a truly great man because of the two works - THE PRINCE, and THE DISCOURSES.
In them he addressed a central problem of politics: it is almost impossible to be both a good politician and a good person in a traditional christian sense."
John Rawls:
1. Things as they are now are radically unfair.
As an example, there is extreme poverty and extreme wealth within society.
2. Imagine if you, were not you.
Would you be willing to go back and be born into any family within you society - regardless of social class or economic position?
3. You know what needs to be fixed.
We can see the problems within society - why can't we fix them? Society is inherited, and changing societal norms and methods is extremely difficult - with no guarantee of success.
4. What to do next?
Rawls asks us to consider an issue by asking ourselves: How would I feel about this issue if I was stuck behind the veil of ignorance?
Henry David Thoreau:
Walden: or Life in the Wood - 1854
" I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life. And see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
Self-Reliance:
Thoreau distrusted society and the progress it claimed to have made... He felt that economic independence from other people and from the government was crucial.
Thoreau argued that people are morally obliged to challenge a government that uphold hypocritical or flagrantly unfair laws.
Civil Disobedience:
Peacefully resisting immoral laws in protest.
Thoreau challenges us to be authentic, not just by avoiding material life and its distractions, but by engaging with the world and withdrawing our support for the government when we believe it is acting unjustly.
Thoreau and Civil Disobedience:
Civil Disobedience - 1849
At the heart of the essay is the question of what an honest citizen should do about a president he or she wholeheartedly opposes.
He argued against the idea that a good citizen should fold away their objections and respect the will of the majority. He suggested that true patriots were not those who blindly followed their administration. They were those who followed their own consciences and in particular, the principles of reason. Thoreau wished to redistribute prestige away from blinkered obedience towards independent thought. ...An election may settle who the president might be, but it doesn't determine that everything that president does is right or that one should simply do nothing until the next election.
"Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is a prison."
Thoreau hated political passivity. He wrote: "There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothin to put an end to them; who esteeming themselves children of Washington and Franklin, sit down with their hands in their pockets, and say that they know not what to do, and do nothing".
Thoreau argued that the citizen must never just resign his conscience to the legislation and put himself at the service of some unscrupulous man in power. He mocked that most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders...are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God.
Karl Marx:
Karl Marx was born in 1818 in Trier, Germany.
He became involved with the Communist party, a tiny group of intellectuals advocating for the overthrow of the class system and the abolition of private property.
Problems with Capitalism:
Modern work is "alienated" - specialized jobs make the modern economy highly efficient but they also mean that it is seldom possible for any one worker to derive a sense of the genuine contribution they might be making to the real needs of humanity. This leads to a feeling of disconnection between what you do all day and who you feel you really are and what you think you might ideally be able to contribute to existence.
Modern work is insecure - Capitalism makes the human being utterly expendable; just one factor among others in the forces of production that can ruthlessly be let go the minute that costs rise or savings can be made through technology.
Workers get paid little while capitalists get rich - capitalists shrunk the wages of the labourers as much as possible in order to skim off a wide profit margin. Marx saw profit as theft, and what you are stealing is the talent and hard work of your work force.
Capitalism is very unstable - Marx proposed that capitalist systems are characterized by a series if crises and they're caused by the fact that we're able to produce too much - far more than anyone needs to consume.
Capitalism is bad for capitalists - Marx believed that the capitalist system forces everyone to put economic interests at the heart of their lives, so that they can no longer know deep, honest relationships. He called this psychological tendency commodity fetishism because it makes us value things that have no objective value.
A capitalist society is one where most people, rich and poor, believe all sorts of things that are really just value judgements that relate back to the economic system: that a person who doesn't work is worthless, that leisure is sinful, that more belongings will make us happier and that worthwhile things (and people) will invariably make money.
The biggest evil of Capitalism is that capitalist ideas teach all of us to be anxious competitive, conformist, and politically complacent.
Communism vs. Socialism:
Communism:
There is an inherent inequality between owners (bourgeoise) and workers (proletariat); with workers being exploited for profit by those who own the means of production.
To fix this inequality, society must shift towards a model, where the proletariat hold this power instead by collectively controlling the means of production.
Collective ownership, of not just the means of production, but all aspects of society and the economy, including private property. The intention of abolishing private property is classless, moneyless and sateless society where everyone works towards the same collective goal of being healthy happy and fee.
"There has never been a communist country."
Corruption is rampant in countries like the former USSR, Venezuela, Vietnam and North Korea. Largely due to people in power, abusing that power instead of using it to help the society they control; and refusing to give up that power to the people.
Socialism:
According to Marx, socialism is a precursor to communism and the next logical step after capitalism.
In Socialism a democratic state controls the means of production rather than having private companies hold ownership.
Socialism has workers contribute as much as they can to the greater good, and then they all share equally in that good.
Both:
Desire to limit worker exploitation
Lower or eliminate the influence of economic classes in society.
Adam Smith:
Adam Smith was born in Scotland in Kirkcaldy - a small manufacturing town - near Edinburgh in 1723.
He deals with the dilemma of how to make a capitalist economy more humane and more meaningful.
He noticed that when one considers the modern world of work, two facts stand out:
modern economies produce unprecedented amounts of wealth
many ordinary people find work rather boring and meaningless.
Theory of Specialization: He observed that in modern businesses, tasks formerly done by one person in a single day could far more profitably be split into many tasks carried out by multiple people over whole careers. Smith hailed this as a momentous development: he predicted that national economies would become hugely richer the more specialised their workforces became.
The problem with specialisation: meaning When businesses are small and their processes contained, a sense of helping others is readily available. But when everything is industrialized, one ends up as a tiny cog in a gigantic machine whose overall logic is liable to be absent from the minds of people lower down in the organization.
Smith believed that luxury consumerism had a very serious role to play in a good society - it generated the surplus wealth that allowed societies to look after their weakest members. Consumer societies, despite their frivolity, didn't let young children and the old starve, for they could afford hospitals and poor relief.
Then, as now, the great question was how to get the rich to behave well towards the rest of society.
The Christian answer was to make them feel guilty
The left-wing answer was to raise taxes
But Smith disagreed with both approaches: the hearts of the rich were likely to remain cold and high taxes would simply lead to the rich fleeing the country.
He proposed that what the rich really want is honour and respect. The rich accumulate money not because they are materially greedy, but primarily in order to be liked and approved of. So society should give them the recognition they crave for doing good.
He argues that it is not companies that primarily degrade the world. it is our appetites, which they merely serve. As a result, the reform of capitalism hinges on the education of the consumer. We need to be taught to want better quality things and pay a proper price for them, one that reflects the true burden on workers and the environment.
John Stuart Mills:
Terms to know:
The harm principal
despotism
humanitarianism
despotism
Soft Paternalism
When can the government legitimately restrict your freedoms by imposing and enforcing laws? Always? Never? Only sometimes?
What does it meant to be 'civilized'?
Example of Soft Paternalism: "Prostitution in Canada. Current laws on sex work, introduced by the Conservative government in 2014, make it illegal to purchase or advertise sexual services and illegal to live on the material benefits from sex work. Although it is legal to sell sexual services, in some cases it is illegal to solicit in public areas." Discuss.
Is it causing 'harm' to help critically ill patients to die through the use of euthanasia?
"Those who are still in a state to require being taken care of by others, must be protected against their own actions as well as against external injury." Can you think of any examples in which this, seemingly reasonable doctrine, might be put to 'harm'?
Protesters, particularly in the United States at the moment, are pulling down statues and public monuments because these men once owned slaves, or were actively against the abolitionist movement. As with Mills' views on colonialism, how much should we edit, abridge, and white-wash the past in order to make it fit with our modern values? Should the good, someone has done to bring society into its current state be overshadowed because they were not immune to, what current society judges was, the negatives of their society?
Are colonialism and imperialism things of the past, or are they still alive and well today?
The Chinese-Ethiopian Donkey Problem
Modern-day economic imperialism:
"Ethiopia is meant to be China's example country in Africa. In their new form of imperialism, infrastructure is traded for control of said infrastructure."
"Like many attempts to colonize Africa, [the Chinese] are not exactly endearing themselves to the local people...the Ethiopians absolutely hate the Chinese who are living here... In the eyes of the local people, a nation that prides itself on never being colonized, China's presence here feels like the new threat."
"The incoming Chinese workers don't believe in the local religion or follow their ways of life. They have no tribal connections. They have no historic land."
"For all the wealth they've brought, the people aren't seeing it as a give. They're seeing it as change that they don't want. A threat to the culture."
Donkey Slaughter-houses:
In Ethiopian culture donkey's are considered "haram" (unclean) but the Chinese wanted to use their skins as a type of medicine.
"The story of Addis Ababa's first slaughter house is...the story of all colonization in Africa. Despite having nearly endless capital, those Chinese investors trying to build that factory failed. And failed because they repeated the same paternalistic mistakes that had happened all throughout colonization's history. They imagined that their capital was worth more than the local culture. They imagined that if they controlled those on top, they also controlled those on the bottom."