Liberalism
Liberalism
I. Liberalism
II. Social Contract Theory
III. Biographical/Historical Background
II.
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
Liberalism
Ascendance of
liberalism around the
world today
Much of the remaining
reading in the course
centers around this
idea: defending and
criticizing it
II.

Liberalism
Historically, liberalism is
built on 2 key ideas:
 Limited Government
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It was the political
solution to the struggle
for religious toleration
Attempt to keep politics
out of religion. The state
should not worry about
the state of men’s souls
Give freedom of religion
to the people
Why is this a good idea?
II.

Liberalism
A key component of limited government is:

Rights
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Theoretical underpinning to the notion of religious
toleration is that individuals have rights against the
state
We each have a right not to be interfered with by the
government or by other people
These rights are natural – they accrue to us simply by
the fact that we are human beings
Consider the following prisoner example…
Suppose you are a District Attorney in
a community that is composed of easily
recognizable majority/minority
communities.
A member of the majority community
has been killed and witnesses have
reliably identified a member of the
minority community as the perpetrator,
but the police have been unable to find
the exact person
The majority community is screaming
for vengeance and on the verge of
rioting.
We know that in the course of the riot,
at least 10 people from the minority
population will be killed in mob
violence.
As the DA you suggest the following
course of action to the mayor:

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In order to avert the riot and save lives, you
take a member of the minority community at
random, accuse that person of the crime, and
stage a very public arrest/execution
As the mayor, what do you do?
II.
Liberalism
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Rights mean that no matter
how good the consequences
of a particular action may be,
these consequences cannot
override individual rights
Why rights?
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Each individual possesses
dignity
Each of us is priceless
Roots are in the rise of
Christianity
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Secularized form – in lieu of soul
premise – treat people as ends,
not as means to an end
Every human being has infinite
weight, so can’t use any
calculation to justify hurting
some for the greater good
II.

Liberalism
Side bar:
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Suppose superior beings
from Planet Twylo descend
to earth and tell us they
have a food shortage
To alleviate this shortfall,
they plan on harvesting
human beings
Would we accept the same
arguments from them that
we offer to justify eating
animals or otherwise using
animals as means to an
end??
Just food for thought… we
won’t pursue it now
II.

Liberalism
So one component of liberalism is limited
government

The second component is capitalism
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By capitalism, we mean the idea that as long as a
transaction has no negative diseconomies and is
mutually advantageous, the transaction is
permissible
A deal made between two consenting parties and
no one is getting hurt, the state should not get
involved in the transaction
II.
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
Liberalism
The market is a private place where people
voluntarily dispose of their own property
Locke will present two arguments – one
secular, one religious – to show where this
right comes from
The overall idea justifying these economic
rights is roughly parallel to our political rights
in that the state should not interfere with
people doing what they want to do with their
property
II.
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Note, the argument itself need not be limited
exclusively to property and thus exclusively
the purview of the (political) right wing


Liberalism
E.g., sexual freedom, drug freedom arguments
could work equally well
Since the world is embracing variants of this
view today, an examination of its historical
evolution and philosophical premises is both
warranted and educational
II.
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
Liberalism
The key idea linking to the two strains is the
primacy of the individual
That is, the individual is the basis of power –
political, economic, social.
Political power does not come from divine
right or the rule of the stronger, but the will of
the people
II.

Liberalism
2 Implications
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If individuals are basis, then we can’t treat others
as means to an end… each is an end unto itself
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We are all individuals with separate and equally
valuable lives (valuable at least to us)
II.

Liberalism
Good political society is one which could have
emerged from unanimous agreement by these
individuals
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Hobbes and Locke are not trying to describe an actual
historical situation; they are not doing anthropology
Nonetheless, the description of human nature in this
prepolitical situation needs to be accurate otherwise
we can reject the conclusions by rejecting the
premises
II.
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
Liberalism
Question we need to face at root of political
philosophy concerns the necessity of the
state
That is, if the state did not exist, would it be
necessary to invent it?
In other words, is anarchy a viable option for
organizing human society?
Note: lots of other animal species are social,
but they’re all anarchic
II.

Liberalism
This question carries with it important
implications for understanding the society in
which we live in that if political philosophy
could not address and satisfactorily rebut
anarchist arguments, the state loses much –
or indeed all – of its intellectual support
III. Contractarianism
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What do we mean by contractarianism?
Key idea:
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Contractarian theory posits a theory of justice
which holds that our political and social
institutions are just to the extent to which they
could have been the object of a hypothetical
agreement among affected persons
This is what we mean when we say that they sign
or agree to a social contract
III. Contractarianism
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Basic Structure of Contractarian Argument
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Motivation Thesis
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An account of the emotional/psychological factors of
the persons
Environment Thesis
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Description of the pertinent features of the
environment in which the people are obliged to
interact
III. Contractarianism
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State of Nature (Non-Cooperative Outcome)
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Laws of Nature
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An account of the non-cooperative interaction of the
persons so motivated and so situated
Practical principles, the application of which marks
each contractor as rational in coming to an agreement
on terms of cooperation
Social Contract
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The terms of the social and political cooperation on
which the people would agree
III. Contractarianism
Reminders:
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The state of nature – the conditions of prepolitical
man – need not be read so much as a factual
account as a logical construct
The state of nature is part of the argument in that
we are postulating prepolitical relations and
people and then trying to discover what type of
government would they agree to
III. Contractarianism
We’ll address a number of questions:
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1.
2.
What would cause these people to give up their
anarchic relations and form a state?
What would that state look like?
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Remember, for the contractarian tradition, the just
state is one that could have arisen by mutual
agreement
We can choose an institution and ask ourselves
“would it have been the object of mutual consent of
dissociated individuals?”
III. Contractarianism
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For example, slavery
would not be chosen by
mutual consent, so it
was an unjust institution