Name: Tamar Gendler: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Politics and Economics !
Uploaded: 2013-03-24T12:55:24.000Z
Duration: 44 min 26 s
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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

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

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. 