Political Philosophy

A Beginners' Guide for Students and Politicians

Adam Swift

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745652375, 9780745652368
• eBook ISBN: 9780745672397
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Politicians invoke grand ideas: social justice, democracy, liberty, equality, community. But what do these ideas really mean? How can politicians across the political spectrum appeal to the same values?

This new edition of Adam Swift's highly readable introduction to political philosophy answers these important questions, and includes new material on global justice, feminism, and method in political theory, as well as updated guides to further reading. This lively and accessible book is ideal for students, but it also brings the insights of the world's leading political philosophers to a wide general audience. Using plenty of examples, it equips readers to think for themselves about the ideas that shape political life.

Democracy works best when both politicians and voters move beyond rhetoric to think clearly and carefully about the political principles that should govern their society. But clear thinking is difficult in an age when established orthodoxies have fallen by the wayside. Bringing political philosophy out of the ivory tower and within the reach of all, this book provides us with tools to cut through the complexities of modern politics. In so doing, it makes a valuable contribution to the democratic process and this new edition will continue to be essential reading for students of political philosophy and theory.

Part 1

Social Justice

The idea of distributive justice has been around for a very long time – the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BC) wrote about it. Social justice is different. That idea is relatively recent, creeping into use from about 1850 on, and not everybody likes it. It developed only as philosophers came to see society’s key social and economic institutions, which crucially determine the distribution of benefits and burdens, as a proper object for moral and political investigation. Some philosophers aren’t happy with it. People can act justly or unjustly, but what does it mean to say that society is just or unjust? Some politicians aren’t crazy about it either. For them, those who talk about social justice tend to hold the mistaken belief that it is the state’s job to bring about certain distributive outcomes, which means interfering with individual freedom and the efficient working of a market economy. (To get a common confusion out of the way, let’s be clear from the start that social and distributive justice are usually regarded as different from retributive justice. That is concerned with the justification of punishment, with making the punishment fit the crime. So we’re not going to be dealing with the kind of justice administered by the criminal justice system, the kind where we would talk about ‘miscarriages of justice’.)

Given that it is controversial, and relatively new, wouldn’t it make more sense to begin with liberty, or community – ancient ideas that everybody values? I start with social justice for two reasons.

First, and most important, most political philosophers would say that it was the publication of a book on social justice – A Theory of Justice (1971) by the American philosopher John Rawls (1921–2002) – that transformed and revived their discipline. I would agree with them. For many years before Rawls, academic political philosophy was either the history of political thought or quasi-technical linguistic analysis of the meaning of political concepts. Since Rawls, there has been systematic and substantive argument about what the societies we live in should actually be like. (‘Substantive’ means ‘to do with substance or content, not just form’.) Much of what has been written since then can helpfully be understood as engaging with Rawls’s theory – like it or not, those writing in his wake have to think about how their arguments relate to his – so it makes sense to lay out the basics of his position right at the beginning. His theory invokes and incorporates ideas of liberty, equality and community. These concepts are all closely interrelated, and thinking about his approach to justice provides the most convenient way in.

Second, one of Rawls’s most famous claims is that ‘justice is the first virtue of social institutions’. That is debatable, as we shall see: one might judge that other goals, goals that conflict with justice, are more important. But it is at least quite common for people to believe that other goals can only be pursued to the extent that that pursuit is compatible with the claims of justice. Think about the situation where one can make a lot of people very happy by killing an innocent man. (Suppose they mistakenly think he is guilty and that’s why they would be happy.) Most people feel that to do that would be wrong, because the most important thing is not to treat people unjustly. Something similar underlies the thought that it is better to let the guilty go free than unjustly punish the innocent. On this kind of view, justice is a constraint on what we can do. It doesn’t tell us everything – remember we are talking about the virtues of social institutions, not the virtues we might exemplify in our individual lives. But it does tell us what must be our top priority when it comes to deciding the rules we are going to live under.

Concept v. conceptions: the case of justice

Let’s begin with an elementary but very useful analytical tool: the distinction between a concept and the various conceptions of that concept. Much confusion can be avoided by holding on to this distinction, which applies to many political concepts, not just those discussed in this book. With this clearly in mind, it gets a lot easier to see what is going on in political debates where, typically, those on different sides use the same word to mean things that, when probed, turn out to be rather different. Understanding how they differ, and what underlies the disagreements, is the first step towards deciding which side is right.

The ‘concept’ is the general structure, or perhaps the grammar, of a term like justice, or liberty, or equality. A ‘conception’ is the particular specification of that ‘concept’, obtained by filling out some of the detail. What typically happens, in political argument, is that people agree on the general structure of the concept – the grammar, the way to use it – while having different conceptions of how that concept should be fleshed out. Take the case of justice. The basic concept of justice is that it is about giving people what is due to them, and not giving them what is not due to them. (This, at least, is how a lot of people think about it, though it is true that there might be disagreement even about this. I don’t want to get on to that, more properly philosophical, terrain.) What is due to them. Not what it would be nice for them to have. Not what it would be polite to give them. Not even what it would be morally good to give them. (I’ll explain this one in a minute.) What they have as their due.

This analysis, then, ties justice to duty – to what it is morally required that we, perhaps collectively through our political and social institutions, do to and for one another. Not just to what it would be morally good to do, but what we have a duty to do, what morality compels us to do. And, of course, there are many different conceptions of this concept, because people who agree that this is what ‘justice’ means, as a concept, can still endorse different conceptions of justice, can (and do) disagree about what justice ‘means’ in terms of the content fleshing out the grammar of that term. This part of the book will say a bit more about the overarching concept of justice, and then lay out three influential conceptions – Rawls’s justice as fairness, Robert Nozick’s justice as entitlement, and the conception of justice as desert. Most people endorse bits of all three. Sometimes this is done in an informed self-reflective way that has worried about whether the overall package of beliefs about justice is consistent (for there are ways of combining elements of these – and other – conceptions into a coherent whole). More often, however, it happens unthinkingly, in a way that turns out, on inspection, to contain a deal of confusion.

Back to the concept of justice. There might be things it would be morally good to do that aren’t requirements of justice. Think of justice as a specific subset of morality. If Rawls is right that justice is the first virtue of social institutions, then that means that the most important set of moral considerations relevant to politics and the organization of society is that which concerns giving people their due. And what is due to people has a good deal, though not everything, to do with what they have a right to. That’s why justice and rights are so closely connected. Consider the contrast between justice and charity. One might think it was morally good to give charitably to those in distress without thinking that it was a requirement of justice. Indeed, if one thought of oneself as giving charitably, then one would precisely not be thinking of one’s act as a requirement of justice. (Of course you might give to particular needy individuals or organizations calling themselves ‘charities’ because you felt that their claims on you were indeed claims of justice, but then you would not be giving charitably.) It is quite common, I think, for people to regard their reasons for helping those who are starving in far-off countries as reasons of charity, or as deriving from a principle of humanity (say, a concern and respect for fellow human beings), but not as reasons of justice. We ought to help them in times of need, it is morally praiseworthy to do so, and the reasons to do so are moral ones, but there is no duty to do so, for their claims on us are claims of common humanity, not claims of justice. The same kind of thinking is applied by some – such as the libertarian Nozick, whose views we’ll examine shortly – to our obligations to help needy members of our own society. It’s a morally good thing to do, but justice is about protecting legitimate property rights and it should be up to the individual to decide whether to help or not.

This brings us to the big reason why the distinction between justice and other kinds of moral claim is typically seen as so important. The state is justified in making sure that people carry out their duties to one another. It is justified in using its coercive power to force people to do what they might not do voluntarily. This is a big deal. As I said in the introduction, the state, as political philosophers think about it, is not something separate from and in charge of those who are subject to its laws. It is – or should be – the collective agent of the citizens, who decide what its laws should be. So to say that the state is justified in forcing people to comply with their duties is to say that citizens are justified in using the coercive apparatus of the state (laws, police, courts, prisons) to force one another to act in certain ways – including ways that some citizens might believe to be wrong. This, of course, raises big and difficult issues to do with the justification of state authority and whether, or in what circumstances, individuals are obliged to obey (and perhaps sometimes to disobey) laws they disagree with. Fortunately, this book is not about those big and difficult issues. What matters here is the significance of justice, given a common and plausible view of what the state can and cannot make people do. If you think that the state can justifiably force people to be charitable to one another, you are guilty of conceptual confusion. But thinking that the state can justifiably force people to carry out their duties to one another is, for many, part of the point or significance of the concept of duty. So justice is central to political morality, because of the widely held claim that once we know what our duties are to one another then we also know when we can justify using the machinery of the state to get people to do things they might not otherwise do, and might even regard as wrong.

Clearly, if justice is about identifying the scope and content of coercively enforceable duties, or if we think that by definition the duties that arise are coercively enforceable, then it becomes particularly important correctly to identify the scope and limits of justice. And it’s not surprising that there are big disagreements about that scope and those limits. Everybody will agree that it is legitimate for the state to (try to) enforce the law against murder. We all have a duty not to murder one another, and a duty to do what we can to prevent people performing the unjust act of murdering others. That some people might want to murder others, or might disagree that they have a duty not to, is neither here nor there. But claims about social or distributive justice go way beyond this kind of claim, in terms of the extent of the duties they imply. Do talented, productive people have a duty to forgo some of the money they earn to help those less fortunate than themselves, a duty, compliance with which we can – or even have a duty to – enforce upon them? Or is that properly a matter of charity – something beyond the realm of the state? The three conceptions of justice we will look at shortly give different answers to these questions.

Justice can be the first virtue without being the only one. This is an instance of a quite general point that it is always useful to keep in mind. Different morally valuable political concepts – justice, liberty, equality, democracy – need not coincide completely. This is a hard thing for politicians to accept, since they tend to be reluctant to acknowledge that their preferred policies or positions might involve anything other than the complete and harmonious realization of all good things. You don’t often find a politician being honest enough to say something like: ‘I believe in social justice of type x. I accept that this involves significant restrictions of individual freedom, that it does not provide anything I could honestly call equality of opportunity, and that its realization requires substantial limitations on the scope of democratic decision-making. Nonetheless, here are my reasons for believing in it.’ Why not? Because their opponents would make a big fuss about the loss of freedom, the lack of equality of opportunity and/ or the restriction on democracy – each of which would doubtless be described in terms much more confused and vague than they intended. Compared to real politicians – who have to worry about how their statements will be interpreted, twisted, used and abused rhetorically, and spun – political philosophers have it easy. They can say precisely what they mean, with a reasonable degree of confidence that they will be taken as meaning precisely what they say.

This point about conflicts between political values should not be misunderstood. Of course, our aim is indeed to achieve the best reconciliation possible – in the sense of coming up with an overall position which does the best job of giving proper weight to these differing values. Of course there are different conceptions of the various concepts in question, and which conception we favour may in part reflect our other value commitments, which will in turn influence our preferred conception of another concept. We may well have an overall vision about how society should be that informs the way we think about all of them. But none of this means that we should start by simply assuming that, since equality and liberty or justice and democracy are good things, we must be looking for a way of thinking about these concepts which avoids the possibility of conflict between them. On the contrary, clarity is best achieved by keeping concepts as distinct as possible, resisting the temptation to let them melt into one another.

The most common example of confusion on this issue concerns the idea of democracy, a concept with such positive connotations that it is typically stretched in all sorts of directions. Who will confess to not being a democrat? But democracy, at core, is to do with the people as a whole having the power to make decisions about the rules under which they are going to live. This, on the whole, is a good thing – for lots of reasons. Who is more likely to make good rules than those who have to obey them? Rules restrict people’s freedom, but those restricted by rules they have themselves been involved in making retain a kind of freedom – at least when compared with those subject to rules made by others. It’s fair – it treats citizens as political equals – if rules are made by citizens as a whole rather than by some subset of the population. It’s good for people’s characters and personalities that they should take an active role in the public life of their political communities. These are four, different, weighty reasons that do indeed make a very strong case for democracy. Part 5 will add more to the list. But even the weight of these combined does not mean that democracy is always a good thing, or that all good things must, because they are good, therefore be ‘democratic’.

To think that a decision should be made democratically is to think that it should be made by the people as a whole. Do we really want all decisions to be made this way? Aren’t some decisions better regarded as private, better left to individuals than to the political community? Imagine two societies. In one, there is a democratic vote on what religions people are to be permitted to practise. In the other, there is a constitution granting every individual the right to practise the religion of her choice. Which society is better? The second. Which is more democratic? I think the first. To be sure, some individual freedoms can be regarded as necessary for democracy itself. Freedom of association or freedom of expression are like this. If a society denies its members the right to say what they think, or to get together with others who agree with them, then we may well judge that it is denying them things that are needed for that society to be regarded as democratic. This is because of the connection between expression, association and political activity. So some constitutional rights may be necessary conditions of, not constraints on, democracy. But is freedom of religion like this? Suppose a society doesn’t prevent would-be followers of a religion from putting the case for why they should be allowed to practise it, or from organizing with would-be coreligionists to advance their cause. It simply prevents them from practising it. Is there anything that should be called undemocratic about this? Or what about freedom of sexuality? One might well think freedom of sexuality to be a central human freedom. A society that allows its members to do what they like sexually – as long, of course, as they don’t harm others – is, other things equal, better than one that doesn’t. But I don’t think we should say that it is also a more democratic society. In fact, we should say that it is less democratic. It removes an issue from the scope of democratic control.

If we judge that the individual has a right to freedom of religion, or of sexuality, then these freedoms can be regarded as central to social justice. A society that denies them treats its individual members unjustly – being willing to violate people’s rights and to impose the will of the majority on a matter that should be left to the individual. There is, then, plenty of room for conflict between justice and democracy. Both are good things. We are ultimately going to be looking for the best balance between the different values that they embody. But we are not helped in thinking about the real issues by the misguided idea that the two concepts must coincide. On the contrary, we make intellectual progress by focusing precisely on the places where they come apart.

A society could be perfectly just – everybody is getting what they have a right to and all are acting dutifully towards one another – without its being a perfect society. Perhaps the vast majority of its members are bored (or, worse, not bored) couch potatoes, spending vast amounts of their time watching daytime TV. Justice is one dimension along which we can judge societies as better or worse than one another, but it is not the only one. It matters also how people live their lives within the social institutions that embody principles of justice – what they choose to do with their various rights and their just share of goods. Where things get interesting, of course, is where we think that justice and other good things are in some sense competing with one another. Then it really does matter whether we agree with Rawls about justice being the first virtue. There is a famous climactic scene on the big wheel in the classic movie The Third Man, where Orson Welles, as Harry Lime, sketches the relative merits of Switzerland and Florence under the Borgias. Florence was savage and violent – not much social justice there – and it gave us the Renaissance. Switzerland has been a model of peace, fair-mindedness and social solidarity – and it gave us the cuckoo clock. Lime’s thought, of course, is that this is not coincidence. It’s not simply that there are more good things than social justice, but, worse, that social justice is actually inimical to some good things. Justice, from this perspective, can start to seem a rather tedious, tame virtue. A virtue, to echo the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), fit for slaves, not for people capable of actions nobler and more heroic than the petty, cowardly concern to treat one another justly.

The idea that justice might be inimical to excellence has other, less drastic, incarnations. Some defences of inequality appeal not to the idea that inequality is just, but to the claim that disproportionately concentrating resources in the hands of the few is a necessary precondition for intellectual or artistic progress. Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–59), the French aristocrat who wrote about democracy in America, thought that the system whereby estates were divided equally between sons rather than passing intact to the first, as happened in France, meant that America would necessarily produce fewer, perhaps no, great thinkers. Great thinking requires people with leisure and an aristocratic culture committed to the cultivation of the intellect so that, for example, children are not expected to pay their way but rather devote many years, perhaps their whole lives, to the acquisition of intellectually valuable but financially useless skills. America’s commercial and democratic culture, though better in many respects, and, for Tocqueville, overall, was bound to lead to a kind of intellectual mediocrity. Similar arguments abound today. Is it right to spend large amounts of public money subsidizing cultural activities, such as opera, that tend disproportionately to be valued by the better off – especially if, as is the case with the UK’s National Lottery, the money is disproportionately raised from those who are less well off ? Can the British universities of Oxford and Cambridge justify the claim that the state should provide any of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• TitlePage
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Preface to Third Edition
• Introduction
• Part 1: Social Justice
• Part 2: Liberty
• Part 3: Equality
• Part 4: Community
• Part 5: Democracy
• Conclusion
• Index