Political Philosophy, A Theory of Justice - Notes | PHIL 2020, Study notes of Ethics

Download Political Philosophy, A Theory of Justice - Notes | PHIL 2020 and more Study notes Ethics in PDF only on Docsity! 3/22/11 Tuesday, May 10, 2011 1:55 AM Political Philosophy  Branch of moral philosophy  Questions about rights and liberties  Rights and liberties-- intrinsic features of human nature that are so important that they deserve protection ex. Freedom of speech, religious liberties  Liberal- committed to rights and liberties  Distributive Justice  How are material goods divided among all? How was this justice achieved?  Liberal Egalitarianism-- John Rawls  Justice demands a level of equity  In favor of higher levels of taxation for the wealthy in order to fund social welfare programs to help the poor and even out the level of equality  High taxation; more robust social welfare  Libertarian--Robert Nozick  In favor of free reign of the free market  Much lower rates of taxation and almost no social welfare  Only taxation approved of is to secure protection of property rights for a "night watchmen" state ( Army and police force) How should political institutions be organized??  Social Contract Theory  What would life be like in the State of Nature?  A pre-political society; no politics whatsoever  What kind of political institution would most people agree to in a social contract where there previously was none?  We would arrive at a just political institution. 3/29/11 Tuesday, May 10, 2011 3:15 AM 1971 John Rawls A Theory of Justice  Justice as Fairness Theory  Liberal egalitarian  Arbitrary Differences  There are certain differences that are significant in personal identity but are not justifiable bases for differential treatment by the state Ex. Gender, race  From the perspective of justice these differences are arbitrary from the moral point of view  Original Position  Decision mechanism/ procedure where contracts get made  Starts with imaginary people-- Contractors  Rational - Mutually disinterested rational utility maximizers- seeking to maximize their own ends while being selfish, but not looking to hurt anyone  Reasonable- Recognize that a basic set of rules would be good to have to structure conduct  Sense of justice  These people are behind the Veil of Ignorance  Takes away the arbitrary differences and basic facts about themselves. Without this veil, people would likely choose a contract that favors themselves and their position in society since they are rational beings  Yields 2 principles of justice  Greatest Equal Liberty a. People are to be as free as they can possibly be given that everyone has the same rights  The Difference Principle a. Concerns distribution of justice b. In not knowing who you are you are risk averse c. Concerned with the worst case scenario being as good as it can possible be. MAXMIN-- Maximize the minimum 3/31/11 Monday, May 02, 2011 5:29 PM Rawls Lexically ordered/Lexical Ordering The first principle of justice ( principle of greatest equal liberty) is higher lexically ordered; will be exhausted before people choose the second Whole thing is subject to Reflective Equilibrium We structure the original position & look at the principles of justice produced . If they were crazy ( slavery ok, etc) then you should go back & change/ manipulate the OP. Continue until achieve good results/ aka what he got. If the results are unexpected then you need to manipulate the system Problem: Not based on the truest account of human nature, we are more altruistic than he gives credit. However: not the point, just modeling ideas for decision making structure morals and not describing human nature. Non- philosophical but political problem: all politics should be based on human nature However: probably not important for exam, song likes it. Historical- looking at how some people got to their position in life. Look at the history of someone to determine if distribution is just . Current Time Slice- freezing time and looking at the distribution to determine if distribution is just. Atemporal Patterned- predetermined picture of how justice should be 1. 2. Rawls- difference principle and distributive justice. Everyone should have their slice of the pie and poverty is unjust because everyone deserves something. LITERAL EGALITARIAN Unpatterned- no pattern 3. Nozick just the way things are because of how you got there. LIB 4. Doesn't exist Nozick- extremely clever in his argumentation o Wilt Chamberlin Argument- argument against patterned theories of justice Grant theorists their patterned justice society with egalitarian pattern where everyone is equal. At the beginning of the season Wilt Chamberlin is the same as everyone else. Then when the basketball season starts, people are willing to pay extra money to see him play. When the season is over, Wilt Chamberlin has made money and is now richer than everyone else. Now everyone is not equal and the pattern is broken. The only way that a pattern can be maintained is by constantly violating people's liberties, which is wrong. Any patterned theory of justice is wrong. " Liberty Upsets Patterns" Sandel offers objections to Nozick's argument and the libertarianism in general, which is that people own themselves and they should be free to do as much as they want without interference. But this theory has far reaching consequences. Example: Laws against prostitution. Libertarians would be for prostitution. But some may say that sex has a value and it shouldn’t be sold. Puts coercive pressure on people to entertain that market. But libertarians would say that some may believe that but they shouldn’t impose their values on everyone else. Example: Selling organs before death. Also places coercive pressure on people to entertain this market. Rich people may prey on the poor to sustain their own lives. Sandel Argument?-- German man puts an ad in the paper. He is interested in eating a human being. A few people met with him. And he chose someone to have dinner with, and the man got very drunk and the German guy cut off a body part and ate it. The man died, and the German guy cut him up and froze him and ate him over the next few months. Libertarians would argue that this was concentual, and there is something wrong about limiting the actions of adults. 4/12/11 Tuesday, April 12, 2011 9:30 AM Reductio ad absurdum-- a mode of argumentation that seeks to establish a contention by deriving an absurdity from its denial, thus arguing that a thesis must be accepted because its rejection would be untenable. Pasted from <http://www.iep.utm.edu/reductio/> Property rights- What are they? Libertarian= Natural rights- given to humans at birth and inviolable Liberal Egalitarian= Conventional Rights- rights that depend on human agreement Ex: You're at home, you wash a tablecloth, and you hang it up to drive and leave. A drunken bus driver runs off the road and kills the children in the accident. They need bandages, so they rip up your tablecloth to use. You come home and say "stop that's my tablecloth its mine!" Have they wronged you by using your tablecloth? Probably not Other: Same scenario but you see it happen. The children need organs this time though, and they see you watching and chase you down and take your kidney. In this case they are obviously wronging you and this case will probably be undisputed, because no one should be able to violate your bodily integrity. Markets and Morality- Sandel A. Intro example: "Story of the Don"... at the end of the semester a student thanks him for the class and leaves him a tip. Why is this weird? He is evaluating as well as performing a service? Not a social convention? The constitutive value of education is separate and distinct from just economic value. It corrupts the value of the service to tip a professor or don. B. Commodification- the act of taking something not originally bought and sold and selling it. C. Commercialization-- The model of an economic market being applied to things that are not concerned with economics. Ex: LSU brand- football and advertizing ; Thinking of students as consumers i. Some may worry that this corrupts the service or activity Sandel Arguments Against Commodification Coercion- A reason that selling a good that hasn’t been previously sold is morally wrong is that it puts coercive pressure on people to enter this market. Corruption- selling certain things as goods that haven't previously been sold corrupts the activity. 4/26/11 Tuesday, April 26, 2011 9:20 AM Classical Economics The Market  Rewards success  Punishes failure  Price mechanism  Price goes up, produce more goods  Price goes down, produce less goods  Conveys information quickly and only to the people who need it Kuttner  Thinks that the power of free markets is almost magical  Supermarkets  They almost never go out of business  They operate on razor thin margins, usually 1 or 2% profits ( make 1 or 2% more than they buy products for)  Good at getting things and selling things very efficiently  Book is about conditions in which free markets will not work efficiently- Market Failures  Types of things needed for market efficiency 1. Perfect Information a. You need to know the prices of all goods to have market efficiency 2. Perfect Competition a. If there's only one place to buy a good, market efficiency is low 3. Mobility of Factors a. You need money in order to start a business. If you don't have access to loaning institutions, you cannot start your business and there will be no competition. b. If you do not have labor, you will not be able to start a business  Will only achieve efficiency through government regulation General Theory of the Second Best  To have a properly functioning market, you need all three things  If you don't have all three, adding one of these things wont necessarily make the market better  Attempts to make a second best market more market-like, may or may not increase efficiency  Innovation and market growth  Underpriced research and innovation  Innovation is only possible when the spread between production and profit is large enough to invest a large chunk of money in something else  These individual assets are divided up into tranches based on risk; riskier assets are more likely to default but pay a higher interest rate.  The appeal of CDO's is that in bundling numerous assets into one investment device, it minimizes risk. And they earn really high interest payments. CDO CDO's are cut up into tranches: A, B, and C A gets paid off first, B second, C last. Payoff increases by tranch, you can take the risk and be in C to get paid last but paid more 3% A 4% B 5% C 1000's 5/3/11 Tuesday, May 03, 2011 9:24 AM 4. CDO's, CDS's, SCDO's  Credit Default Swaps (CDS's) o A financial innovation that allows investors to ameliorate their risk. o It is a default swap, in the sense that one is swapping the risk of defaulting on some investment o CDS's in effect operate as financial insurance. o The genius of CDS is that they eliminate risk, and a well hedged firm can make money o matter what happens to an asset. o They also allow third parties to speculate on the value of an asset that they do not own.  Synthetic CDO's o An SCDO is a CDS that is structured to act like a CDO. o Like a regular CDO, it is security whose value rests upon underlying assets. o Unlike a regular CDO, there are no real assets . It is composed entirely of CDS's that are structured to mimic some CDO. o The genius of SCDO's is that they allow investors to speculate on assets that they do not own.  The Meltdown o Housing bubble  A financial bubble is when the value of some asset class rises at an unrealistic of unsustainable rate. The price is an asset does not reflect its real value.  Through the 2000's housing prices soared at unrealistic rates, driven in part through policies that encouraged home ownership , low interest rates, and financial speculation that encouraged subprime loans. o Rampant Financial Speculation  Leverage  Prime Mortgages  Subprime Mortgages  CDO's  Bond Rating Agencies  A Vicious Feedback Loop o Liquidity Crisis  Homeowners begin defaulting.  Value of CDO's plummet.  Creditors call back loans.  Investment firms go bankrupt. Nozick Tuesday, May 03, 2011 1:43 PM Nozick illustrates and defends the entitlement theory in a famous thought-experiment involving the basketball player Wilt Chamberlain. Imagine a society in which the distribution of wealth fits a particular structure or pattern favored by a non- entitlement conception of justice – suppose, to keep things simple, that it is an equal distribution, and call it D1. Nozick’s opponent must of course grant that this distribution is just, since Nozick has allowed the opponent himself to determine it. Now suppose that among the members of this society is Wilt Chamberlain, and that he has as a condition of his contract with his team that he will play only if each person coming to see the game puts twenty-five cents into a special box at the gate of the sports arena, the contents of which will go to him. Suppose further that over the course of the season, one million fans decide to pay the twenty- five cents to watch him play. The result will be a new distribution, D2, in which Chamberlain now has $250,000, much more than anyone else – a distribution which thereby breaks the original pattern established in D1. Now, is D2 just? Is Chamberlain entitled to his money? The answer to these questions, Nozick says, is clearly “Yes.” For everyone in D1 was, by hypothesis, entitled to what he had; there is no injustice in the starting point that led up to D2. Moreover, everyone who gave up twenty-five cents in the transition from D1 to D2 did so voluntarily, and thus has no grounds for complaint; and those who did not want to pay to see Chamberlain play still have their twenty-five cents, so they have no grounds for complaint either. But then no one has any grounds for a complaint of injustice; and thus there is no injustice. What this shows, in Nozick’s view, is that all non-entitlement theories of justice are false. For all such theories claim that it is a necessary condition for a distribution’s being just that it have a certain structure or fit a certain pattern; but the Wilt Chamberlain example (which can be reformulated so that D1 is, instead of an egalitarian distribution, a distribution according to hard work, desert, or whatever) shows that a distribution (such as D2) can be just even if it doesn’t have a particular structure or pattern. Moreover, the example shows that “liberty upsets patterns,” that allowing individuals freely to use their holdings as they choose will inevitably destroy any distribution advocated by non-entitlement theories, whether they be socialist, egalitarian liberal, or some other theory of distribution. And the corollary of this is that patterns destroy liberty, that attempts to enforce a particular distributional pattern or structure over time will necessarily involve intolerable levels of coercion, forbidding individuals from using the fruits of their talents, abilities, and labor as they see fit. As Nozick puts it, “the socialist society would have to forbid capitalist acts between consenting adults.” 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. Distributive justice, properly understood, thus does not require a redistribution of wealth; indeed, it forbids such a redistribution. Accordingly, the minimal state, far from being inconsistent with the demands of distributive justice, is in fact the only sure means of securing those demands. Pasted from <http://www.iep.utm.edu/nozick/> Web Sources for PHIL 2020 Tuesday, May 03, 2011 1:52 PM More Nozick http://www.iep.utm.edu/nozick/ John Rawls http://www.iep.utm.edu/rawls/#SH2c Distributive justice http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice-distributive/ Final Exam Study Questions Thursday, May 05, 2011 9:23 AM FINAL EXAM STUDY QUESTIONS PHIL2020: ETHICS Friday, May 13th, 7:30-9:30AM 1) What is a social contract theory? How do they work? a. A social contract theory determines what life would be like in the State of Nature, which is a pre-political society with no politics whatsoever. functioning of free markets? Friedman- libertarian economist. Laissez fare unfettered free markets. He thinks they He thinks that markets work less well when there is any government interference. Price Mechanism- In free markets the price of any good will be determined by the buyer and seller. A product does not have a starting value. It is determined how much people are willing to pay for it. Product value is set by supply and demand. A price is not just a price, it conveys information. It is that efficient transfer of information that makes free market themselves so efficient . Price mechanism tells everything that suppliers need to know, only to the people that need to know. When price increases, there is high demand and not enough supply. Supply increases, price goes down. Supply gets constrained, price goes up. 10) What three basic conditions need to exist in order to achieve market efficiency? Briefly describe each.  Types of things needed for market efficiency 1. Perfect Information a. You need to know the prices of all goods to have market efficiency 2. Perfect Competition a. If there's only one place to buy a good, market efficiency is low 3. Mobility of Factors a. You need money in order to start a business. If you don't have access to loaning institutions, you cannot start your business and there will be no competition. b. If you do not have labor, you will not be able to start a business 11) What is the General Theory of the Second Best? General Theory of the Second Best  To have a properly functioning market, you need all three things  If you don't have all three, adding one of these things wont necessarily make the market better  Attempts to make a second best market more market-like, may or may not increase efficiency 12) Describe how, from a standard neoclassical economic perspective, economic efficiency should lead to stagnation? 13) What is the Schumpeterian view of how and why economic growth occurs? Mentioned Sandel Markets growth and innovation Economic growth is driven by innovation that creates new products. What is good for economic growth is limited competition between mini monopolies to control costs, but to obtain profits that are very robust so that companies can reinvest and innovate. 14) Describe the main features under which a traditional mortgage is made. How is the new market for mortgages different? 15) What is a CDO? What is its special appeal? 16) What is a CDS and what original investing purpose did they serve? What new use have they come to have? 17) What is leverage (in the financial sense)? 18) Name and briefly describe three contributing factors to the recent financial crisis. Will be just like the midterm Be very specific in answering the questions Complete answers Questions may be reworded Need blue book!!