Polsci Tutorial Class 3

Justice
Moral dimension of the law, and law's order
Plato's Republic
giving each person his due
doing good to friends and harm to enemies? what if immoral, moral?
"due" according to strength? ("realistic" - but justice?)
Answer of Socrates - starts at state level. Peace between following, all working together
for advancement of state
Guardians - philosopher kings - best citizens
Auxiliaries - defenders of the state
Producers
Comes back to individual level: whatever best supports above state peace is justice. Each
person thus has a role. Further on individual level, just man balances rational, spiritual and
sexual elements of himself.
Conservative view - hieraqrchy, authority, censorship, propaganda, censorship, division of
classes according to merit. Plato wanted merit based selection, even regardless of sex -
wanted education for women
Bentham's utilitarianism
Greatest good of the greatest number
Philosophers don't decide which values state should pursue, go with whatever reflects citizens'
moral, ecoomic and aesthetic choices. "Pushpin is as good as poetry."
Universal suffrage as best way to represent people's interests
Justice = democratic society that respects moral equality of the individuals composing it
Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, described utility as "that property in any object,
whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness...[or] to prevent
the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness to the party whose interest is considered."
Consequentialist
Act (do what is likely to cause most utility) vs rule utilitarianism (follow rules intended to
maximize utility)
Maximise total, average or minimum utility?
Bentham's hedonistic calculus
value of a pleasure or pain, considered by itself, can be measured according to its
intensity, duration, certainty/uncertainty and propinquity/remoteness.
1st order vs 2nd order - a beggar stealing from a rich man is not offence because of 1st
order but because of 2nd order effects
JS Mill - explicity designed to further utilitarianism
“By the age of six,” Reeves notes, “young Mill had written a history of Rome; by seven he
was reading Plato in Greek; at eight soaking up Sophocles.” By twelve, he more or less sat
his examinations for university entrance.
Rejected purely quantitative utilitarianism
Higher and lower pleasures
 Social utility - actions that contribute to pleasure of socety are of good character, this
is justice. Hedonistic view
Aristotle - hedonism as a doctrine worthy only of swine - in Nichomachean Ethics,
says good=pleasure leads to life of a beast
Pleasures of the mind: "greater permanency, safety, uncostliness"
Few human creatures would consent to be changed into any of the lower
animals, for a promise of the fullest allowance of a beast's pleasures; no
intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no instructed person would
be an ignoramus, no person of feeling and conscience would be selfish and
base, even though they should be persuaded that the fool, the dunce, or the
rascal is better satisfied with his lot than they are with theirs.… A being of higher
faculties requires more to make him happy, is capable probably of more acute
suffering, and certainly accessible to it at more points, than one of an inferior
type; but in spite of these liabilities, he can never really wish to sink into what he
feels to be a lower grade of existence.… It is better to be a human being
dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be [Socrates] dissatisfied than a fool
satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they
only know their own side of the question…
Mill observes that even if the possession of a "noble character" brought less
happiness to the individual, society would still benefit. Thus, because the
greatest happiness principle considers the total amount of happiness, a noble
character, even if it is less desirable for the individual, is still desirable by a
utilitarian standard.
Not as democratic
"Competent judges" will decide which pleasures are preferable. If disagreement,
vote among them. DIfferent from Bentham
Pursue higher pleasures becasue "some displeasure will eventually creep in.
We will become bored and depressed"
Fallacies:
naturalistic fallacy: Mill is trying to deduce what people ought to do
from what they in fact do;
equivocation fallacy: Mill moves from the fact that (1) something is
desirable, i.e. is capable of being desired, to the claim that (2) it is
desirable, i.e. that it ought to be desired;
Rebuttal - ultimate ends do not admit proofs, he is only trying to make
his preferred version more appealing
the fallacy of composition: the fact that people desire their own happiness
does not imply that the aggregate of all persons will desire the general
happiness.

- "Self-development" - from German continental philosophers as opposed to

utilitarianism towards later life

"stop all the present and future pain and suffering of all sentient beings, and to bring about all
present and future pleasure and happiness" - Shantideva, Nalanda University, 1k years before
Bentham
 Apparently he was one of those people who didn't show up for anything, never
studying or coming to practice sessions. His fellow monks said that his three
“realizations” were eating, sleeping, and
shitting.7(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shantideva#cite_note-chodron-7)

After being goaded into giving a talk to the entire university body, Shantideva delivered
_The Way of the Bodhisattva
Concept applied to
social welfare economics
atom bomb - ww2
global poverty
raising animals for food
avoiding existential risks to humanity

Tell me straight out, I call on you—answer me: imagine that you yourself are building the
edifice of human destiny with the object of making people happy in the finale, of giving them
peace and rest at last, but for that you must inevitably and unavoidably torture just one tiny
creature, [one child], and raise your edifice on the foundation of her unrequited tears—
would you agree to be the architect on such conditions? ... And can you admit the idea that
the people for whom you are building would agree to accept their happiness on the
unjustified blood of a tortured child, and having accepted it, to remain forever happy?

John Rawls's liberalism

Addressed some of the problems of utilitarinism

Nozick's libertarian idea of justice (entitlement theiry of justice)

Nozick’s response to such arguments is to claim that they rest on a false conception of
distributive justice: they wrongly define a just distribution in terms of the pattern it exhibits at a
given time (e.g., an equal distribution or a distribution that is unequal to a certain extent) or in
terms of the historical circumstances surrounding its development (e.g., those who worked the
hardest have more) rather than in terms of the nature of the transactions through which the
distribution came about.
One ideal: private property. Protected by minimal state (book called Anarchy, State and Utopia)
Just acquisition

Locke: homesteading principle. Provisos:

Sufficiency
Spoilage
Just transfer
Rectification
Talk about “distributive justice” is inherently misleading, Nozick argues, in that it seems to
imply that there is some central authority who “distributes” to individuals shares of wealth
and income that pre-exist the distribution, as if they had appeared like “manna from
heaven.” Of course this is not really the way such shares come into existence, or come to
be “distributed,” at all; in fact they come to be, and come to be held by the individuals who
hold them, only through the scattered efforts and transactions of these innumerable
individuals themselves, and these individuals’ efforts and transactions give them a moral
claim over these shares. Talk about the “distribution of wealth” covers this up, and
unjustifiably biases most discussions of distributive justice in a socialist or egalitarian
liberal direction.
Does not believe justice needs to follow any pattern - rejects all non-entitlement
theories of justice.
"This is not merely a regrettable side-effect of the quest to attain a just
distribution of wealth; it is a positive injustice, for it violates the principle of self-
ownership."
Nozick emphasizes that his vision of the minimal state is inclusive and is compatible
with the existence of smaller communities based on varying theories of justice. A
group that wished to form a socialist community governed by an egalitarian theory
would be free to do so, as long as it did not force others to join the community against
their will. Indeed, every group would enjoy the same freedom to realize its own idea
of a good society. In this way, according to Nozick, the minimal state constitutes a
“framework for utopia.”