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michaeljuan's review against another edition
3.0
This book is very long but its very interesting and it taught me alot
dngoldman's review against another edition
4.0
Rawls does an excellent job of explaining the core philosophers of western liberalism along with critiques by Marx and to a lesser extent Rousseau. Even thought I was familiar with each of these thinkers, Rawls helped me gain a firm grasp on each along with an understanding of the development of liberalism. Rawls does not dwell at length on this own Justice as Fairness, although the theory is mentioned at times as contrasting with certain thinks. In particular, Rawls theory of knowing too much leads to poor judgements. Yet, if one is looking detail on Rawls’ own work, this isn’t it. If you are looking for a insightful, clear, but not oversimplified intro into Hobbs, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Mills, and Marx, this book is for you. Here are some key points I gleaned.
Liberalism - "A legitimate regime is such that people live in social institutions are justifiable to all citizens by addressing the reason theoretical and practical. Justification of the institution of the social world must be in principle available to everyone until justify level to all who live on the legitimacy of the liberal been depends on justification” 13
HOBBES:
- Hobbes’ project was to show that Charles II after the civil war was a legitimate ruler.
- Natural law - while divine in origin, completely derived from what a rational person would find reasonable.
- In a state of nature, man lives in state of "continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”
- Rawls uses the metaphor of the prisoners dilemma to explain Hobbes theory of why an absolute ruler is just. It is rational to trade freedom for relief from the state of nature. But you’d only do the rational if you were assured others would do the same. Thus, the need for the absolute ruler
Social contract - amount members of society with the sovereign as their agent.
LOCKE
- Solving a different problem than Hobbes - supporting the legitimacy of the parliament just disbanded by the king.
- Locke adds freedom to his state of nature. - People can’t agree to change in nature unless it improves their lot. Thus, Hobbes’ absolute is worse than the state of nature.
-Social contract maintains the legitimate government can be founded only on the cornet of free, equal, rational, personal.
- God as sovereign of the world promulgates law that is universal and ties humanity together. We can use reason to decide natural law as compared to divine law. Thus, nature law provides an independent basis for liberalism. The law of nature would suffice without venial people (cf Hobbes)
- Locke starts with the right to punish the venial person who transgresses natural law. The social contract is limited to preventing such transgressions and the common good. But not the most common good - like utilitarians.
- Property - while a conditional right, not a right that gives you other rights (eg. To vote)
- Social contract based on collective rationality. Again uses the P’s dilemma to show why people could contract for a propertied class system.
HUME
Problem trying to solve: a legitimate form of government that promotes the greatest welfare that could be set up as compared to alternatives. Utilitarianism
U. Differ from Hobbes. Rejects psychological egotism - there is an objective reasonable principle of utility
H v Locke. Locke - historical; Hume naturalist study of nature/psychology; Hume - first principles of psychology; Locke first contract.
H’s critique of social contract: Consent can’t form the basis - too distant; too many psychological factors, most founded on force anyway. There are duties we owe others (fidelity; justice toward property; civic allegiance. These flow not from natural rights or agreement, but from utility. Thus, social contract is implausible and unnecessary.
Notion of the good (pleasure/absence of pain) vs. the right. Institutions are legit if the maximize the good, understood as either measure or fulfillment of desire where we are summit gate good all individuals in society, both present and the future (not the past - cf Locke). There is not separate right of equality
Moral judgements are based on a psychological “common sense” tendency toward moral sensibility
Judicious spectator - we should judge based on the judicious spectator without reference to our own preferences.
ROUSSEAU
- Problem trying to solve - pave the way for a new social order that would come with transformations such as the French Revolution. To create a link between natural inequalities (strength; artistic talent) vs. social (income)
- Man is naturally good and only through social institutions become bad
- Stages of history of man leading to our current stage of political authority which uses the right of property, which was legit in earlier stages, to arbitrary power to enforce equality. Two varying forces - of perfectibility and alienation. This is an outcome of a particular course of history, not the only one. There can be social institution that bring out the force of perfectibility.
MILL
-Educator of enlighten age, to defend the appropriate fundamental philosophical, moral, and political principles a modern society should be organized.
-Benthem: happiness, meaning by that the term pleasure and exemption from pain is the only thing desirable in itself and that all other desires are a means too that end. Mills thought this was too narrow and inadequate to to deal with the political and social questions of the age. Social structures that merely provide incentives for good and disentives for bad. But creating a culture where people have the character not to commit crimes
-Human happiness is the first principle that can be used to settle disputes. But happiness not nearly pleasurable feelings but a way of being. Requires the higher faculties.
-Common sense morality based on utility.
-Cf. locke - legitimat regine is one that can arise in an ideal history contracted by rational person without violating any duties imposes on them by a law of nature (266). Rousseau by contact sees inequality as giving rise to vices of civilization. The social contract is the right principals between free and equal citizens to benefit the general will. Equality is more central to Rousseau and his work brings us closer to the justice as fairness concept of Rawls himself.
- Justice (all laws apply equally) and liberty (enough freedom to decide his own utility) are two gudinging principles of Mills’ utility.
- Mill justice is byproduct of utility not a separate standard to judge utility. Thing are “wrong” when the are bad enough that it increases social utility to stop them.
Liberty is also subordinate to utility.
- prevailing moral wisdom because it allows to decide unreflexively - the way I feel toward those I like becomes what’s moral
- the only justification for coercion is to stop an act path would produce even to some one else. Not for his own good. Can be seen as a moral principle limiting certain reasons for guiding legislation. Only certain types reasons are justifiable when considering public utility. Yet Mill would not see this limit as evoking a natural right apart from utility. He’s saying that this limit is a type of public utility.
- while justice as fairness has a different grounds for limiting government action, the two are not antithetical.
MARX
Studies of class societies, of which capitalism is one. Where people receive or don’t receive benefits because of their class. "For example in slave societies the labor of the slave is at the disposal of the master as owner in the slave unpaid labor in the product he produces is the property of the master. And feudal society the surplus labor of the server was appropriated by the Lord to come the surf was banned in most fields the surfers were part work a certain number of days each year. This was forced labor with the server produced on the Lord's field was the Lords…. These two examples illustrate institutional setups that enable a certain class of people to appropriate as their own the property. ... Mark studies capitalism as a class society. This means that for him there is some class of persons in capitalist society who an virtue of their position in the institutional set up our able to appropriate the surplus labor of others. For him, like slavery in feudalism, capitalism is a system of domination and exploitation. What makes capitalism distinctive is that to those who make their decisions in guide their actions according to its norms, it does not appear to be a system of domination and exploitation. Mark thinks we need a theory to explain why these features of the system go unrecognized and have they are hidden from view.” 326
Because capitalist, as a class, own the means of production as property, works must pay a fee (surplus labor value) to use their productive instruments (labor) 330. Thus, exploitation happens as part of a fully functioning capitalist system, not a distorted one..
Taking of surplus labor value is not bad by-itlself. A socialist system would take but it would do so to provide services to labor not to capitalist as private property.
Capitalism under Marx is not always seen as bad by itself.
Liberalism - "A legitimate regime is such that people live in social institutions are justifiable to all citizens by addressing the reason theoretical and practical. Justification of the institution of the social world must be in principle available to everyone until justify level to all who live on the legitimacy of the liberal been depends on justification” 13
HOBBES:
- Hobbes’ project was to show that Charles II after the civil war was a legitimate ruler.
- Natural law - while divine in origin, completely derived from what a rational person would find reasonable.
- In a state of nature, man lives in state of "continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”
- Rawls uses the metaphor of the prisoners dilemma to explain Hobbes theory of why an absolute ruler is just. It is rational to trade freedom for relief from the state of nature. But you’d only do the rational if you were assured others would do the same. Thus, the need for the absolute ruler
Social contract - amount members of society with the sovereign as their agent.
LOCKE
- Solving a different problem than Hobbes - supporting the legitimacy of the parliament just disbanded by the king.
- Locke adds freedom to his state of nature. - People can’t agree to change in nature unless it improves their lot. Thus, Hobbes’ absolute is worse than the state of nature.
-Social contract maintains the legitimate government can be founded only on the cornet of free, equal, rational, personal.
- God as sovereign of the world promulgates law that is universal and ties humanity together. We can use reason to decide natural law as compared to divine law. Thus, nature law provides an independent basis for liberalism. The law of nature would suffice without venial people (cf Hobbes)
- Locke starts with the right to punish the venial person who transgresses natural law. The social contract is limited to preventing such transgressions and the common good. But not the most common good - like utilitarians.
- Property - while a conditional right, not a right that gives you other rights (eg. To vote)
- Social contract based on collective rationality. Again uses the P’s dilemma to show why people could contract for a propertied class system.
HUME
Problem trying to solve: a legitimate form of government that promotes the greatest welfare that could be set up as compared to alternatives. Utilitarianism
U. Differ from Hobbes. Rejects psychological egotism - there is an objective reasonable principle of utility
H v Locke. Locke - historical; Hume naturalist study of nature/psychology; Hume - first principles of psychology; Locke first contract.
H’s critique of social contract: Consent can’t form the basis - too distant; too many psychological factors, most founded on force anyway. There are duties we owe others (fidelity; justice toward property; civic allegiance. These flow not from natural rights or agreement, but from utility. Thus, social contract is implausible and unnecessary.
Notion of the good (pleasure/absence of pain) vs. the right. Institutions are legit if the maximize the good, understood as either measure or fulfillment of desire where we are summit gate good all individuals in society, both present and the future (not the past - cf Locke). There is not separate right of equality
Moral judgements are based on a psychological “common sense” tendency toward moral sensibility
Judicious spectator - we should judge based on the judicious spectator without reference to our own preferences.
ROUSSEAU
- Problem trying to solve - pave the way for a new social order that would come with transformations such as the French Revolution. To create a link between natural inequalities (strength; artistic talent) vs. social (income)
- Man is naturally good and only through social institutions become bad
- Stages of history of man leading to our current stage of political authority which uses the right of property, which was legit in earlier stages, to arbitrary power to enforce equality. Two varying forces - of perfectibility and alienation. This is an outcome of a particular course of history, not the only one. There can be social institution that bring out the force of perfectibility.
MILL
-Educator of enlighten age, to defend the appropriate fundamental philosophical, moral, and political principles a modern society should be organized.
-Benthem: happiness, meaning by that the term pleasure and exemption from pain is the only thing desirable in itself and that all other desires are a means too that end. Mills thought this was too narrow and inadequate to to deal with the political and social questions of the age. Social structures that merely provide incentives for good and disentives for bad. But creating a culture where people have the character not to commit crimes
-Human happiness is the first principle that can be used to settle disputes. But happiness not nearly pleasurable feelings but a way of being. Requires the higher faculties.
-Common sense morality based on utility.
-Cf. locke - legitimat regine is one that can arise in an ideal history contracted by rational person without violating any duties imposes on them by a law of nature (266). Rousseau by contact sees inequality as giving rise to vices of civilization. The social contract is the right principals between free and equal citizens to benefit the general will. Equality is more central to Rousseau and his work brings us closer to the justice as fairness concept of Rawls himself.
- Justice (all laws apply equally) and liberty (enough freedom to decide his own utility) are two gudinging principles of Mills’ utility.
- Mill justice is byproduct of utility not a separate standard to judge utility. Thing are “wrong” when the are bad enough that it increases social utility to stop them.
Liberty is also subordinate to utility.
- prevailing moral wisdom because it allows to decide unreflexively - the way I feel toward those I like becomes what’s moral
- the only justification for coercion is to stop an act path would produce even to some one else. Not for his own good. Can be seen as a moral principle limiting certain reasons for guiding legislation. Only certain types reasons are justifiable when considering public utility. Yet Mill would not see this limit as evoking a natural right apart from utility. He’s saying that this limit is a type of public utility.
- while justice as fairness has a different grounds for limiting government action, the two are not antithetical.
MARX
Studies of class societies, of which capitalism is one. Where people receive or don’t receive benefits because of their class. "For example in slave societies the labor of the slave is at the disposal of the master as owner in the slave unpaid labor in the product he produces is the property of the master. And feudal society the surplus labor of the server was appropriated by the Lord to come the surf was banned in most fields the surfers were part work a certain number of days each year. This was forced labor with the server produced on the Lord's field was the Lords…. These two examples illustrate institutional setups that enable a certain class of people to appropriate as their own the property. ... Mark studies capitalism as a class society. This means that for him there is some class of persons in capitalist society who an virtue of their position in the institutional set up our able to appropriate the surplus labor of others. For him, like slavery in feudalism, capitalism is a system of domination and exploitation. What makes capitalism distinctive is that to those who make their decisions in guide their actions according to its norms, it does not appear to be a system of domination and exploitation. Mark thinks we need a theory to explain why these features of the system go unrecognized and have they are hidden from view.” 326
Because capitalist, as a class, own the means of production as property, works must pay a fee (surplus labor value) to use their productive instruments (labor) 330. Thus, exploitation happens as part of a fully functioning capitalist system, not a distorted one..
Taking of surplus labor value is not bad by-itlself. A socialist system would take but it would do so to provide services to labor not to capitalist as private property.
Capitalism under Marx is not always seen as bad by itself.
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