History of Ideas Club: Rawls and Sandel

In this session of the History of Ideas Club, we dive into the thought of John Rawls, one of the towering figures of 20th-century political philosophy, and explore the debate he sparked with thinkers like Robert Nozick and Michael Sandel.

Rawls’ seminal work, A Theory of Justice (1971), redefined liberal political thought with his concept of "justice as fairness"—a vision rooted in equality, individual liberty, and the famous thought experiments of the "original position" and the "veil of ignorance." His model of a just society aimed to balance freedom with social cooperation, offering a compelling moral justification for a redistributive welfare state.

We also examine the powerful critiques that followed. Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) launched a libertarian counterattack, defending a minimal state and voluntary transactions over Rawlsian redistribution. Michael Sandel, meanwhile, challenged Rawls from a communitarian angle, questioning the liberal assumption of a detached, rights-bearing individual at the heart of justice.

Join us as we unpack the Rawlsian legacy, the philosophical tensions it exposed, and why this debate remains central to contemporary discussions on fairness, freedom, and the role of the state.

📚 Recommended Reading:

• John Rawls, A Theory of Justice
• Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia
• Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice

🎙 Hosted by: The History of Ideas Club
📍 Recorded live in London

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_06 0:00

Hello online.

SPEAKER_02 0:38

Have you come across rules in the show?

SPEAKER_04 0:42

No, actually, I haven't done a lot of reading numbers. So yeah, it was um I I got through some of it. So it was interesting. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 0:56

Well we'll get started shortly. Um very near to me. I mean, but I've been in North America, but yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:06

Um much legal philosophy.

SPEAKER_01 1:14

But I had a flat mate in other words who but he wasn't very big into all, but he was reading all of them. Which involved as him writing a heat of roles based on the works of John Gray and Michael Sanders. Um one of these things, I think it was John Gray accused John Hall of doing ontological violence to the human person. And I thought it was quite the criticism.

SPEAKER_06 1:44

Well it's always, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:46

Sorry, no, no, it was just I didn't come across that. So what was what was that? What happened?

SPEAKER_06 1:55

I think one of the things we'll explore tonight, I think, is how um roles wanting to put the the uh what he calls the uh what are the reasonable expectations? Yes, yeah, and that's sort of um yeah, essentially, essentially that's what you're doing.

unknown 2:20

Um before you question the what do you call moral desert or your board depending on the kind of person you are, actually.

SPEAKER_02 2:28

Um very sort of inheritance control, but what that looks like on the logic feature is I think that's what that could be also just a general point.

SPEAKER_01 3:03

And I think a lot of people feel that paradoxists need to be a kind of supplication of freedom of thought because the edges of what's questionable become increasingly well defined from a liberal perspective.

unknown 3:18

Yeah, um and people want to challenge the laws because they're the more co-defined space. Yeah, people mustn't people move to the extremes in the tolerant liberal society on the colour of the boredom, maybe um ugly.

SPEAKER_01 3:34

Um and so that was another way to develop violence.

SPEAKER_04 3:39

Yeah, exciting unfortunately.

SPEAKER_06 3:43

I think is it's five past six. I'm just gonna make a start and we'll see what happens. Do you want one of you want to say my car is? And then obviously, if we do get shouted out downstairs, we can quickly move downstairs. But welcome to our Liberty series, Michelle and Lorraine, uh uh on Rules and Sandell, the final episode in this mammoth saga that Jack and I have composed, um, taking place in person and online. Um we're looking at two figures, uh, John Rules, um, penning in the 1970s, and Sandell, a contemporary, what would you say, sort of academic and literary critic, uh sort of you know, uh uh within within the current sphere. So we're gonna delve into both of those. I'm gonna present the first half and we're gonna delve into the content of Rules, and then we're gonna look at some critiques uh going forward after Jack's done a small little bio of Sandell. So the introduction to John Rawls. Um John Rawls stands as one of the most influential political thinkers of the 20th century. He shaped modern political liberal thought with a theory of justice in 1971. His vision of justice as fairness, grounded in the principles of equality and individual liberty, sought to reconcile the tensions between freedom, uh between freedom and social cooperation. Rawls uses the term the original position and a veil of ignorance that provide a powerful framework for justifying a redistributive liberal democracy. His ideas sparked intense debate, most notably with Robert Nozick, whose Anarchy, State, and Utopia in 1974 mounted a libertarian critique. Nozick rejected Rule's emphasis on distributive justice, arguing instead for a minimal state that respected individuals' natural property rights. The rivalry defined a key fault line in contemporary political philosophy between egalitarian liberalism and libertarianism, shaping debates on justice, rights, and the role of the state that persists today. So before I delve into the text that we're actually going to focus on today, I thought we'd just go through a couple of supplementary texts. They're actually later than a theory of justice, but because I've just kind of outlined the main kind of arguments of a theory of justice, I thought I'd go through these first. So in 1985, John Rawls's essay, uh, Justice is fairness, political, not metaphysical, marks a key shift in his thought, clarifying his theory as a form of political liberalism rather than a comprehensive moral doctrine. Responding to critiques of the theory of justice, Rules emphasizes that justice is fairness is not grounded in any specific metaphysical or religious worldview, but is instead a freestanding political conception that can be endorsed by citizens with diverse moral and philosophical commitments. And that's one of the criticisms that I think Jack and I will certainly be raising about how do you grapple this question of diversity across the globe and without kind of homogenizing the individual agents, which we were just sort of talking about. This move reflects Rawls's growing concern with stability in pluralistic societies, laying a groundwork for his later work, Political Liberalism, in 1993, by focusing on the idea that overlapping consensus, he argues that different moral traditions can converge on liberal democratic principles without requiring deeper argument on ultimate truths. Though Rules does not directly engage with Robert Nozick in this essay, his reaffirmation of distributive justice and fairness implicitly counters the libertarian critiques. And when we say libertarian, we are talking about the classical liberals that we were looking at prior to Mill. Libertarianism is just the kind of modern term, really. I know we could go into more semantic detail about this, but realistically, libertarianism is classical and rules is very much in the modern vein. So Nozick's trying to uphold an old tradition of liberalism whilst adding obviously his own uh flair to it. Um his reaffirmation of distributed justice and fairness implicitly counters those libertarian critiques, reinforcing his commitment to an egalitarian liberal order. So, what did he say in the political liberalism? A quintessential text for everything that we've covered in these six sessions of the Reading Club. Um Rawls' political liberalism in 1993 represents a major development in his thought, shifting focus from justice as a moral ideal to justice as a basis for political stability in pluralistic societies. He responds to critiques of the theory of justice again by emphasizing that liberal democracy must not rest on any single comprehensive doctrine, whether religious, philosophical, or ideological, but instead on a political conception of justice that people with diverse worldviews can endorse. Central to this idea of an overlapping consensus, where citizens, despite deep moral and religious differences, can agree on core political principles. Rules also introduces the idea of public reason, arguing that political debate should be framed in terms accessible to all reasonable citizens. While political liberalism again doesn't engage Robert Nozick, its emphasis on fairness and stability reinforces Rules' rejection of libertarian, what they call minimalism. Instead, advocating a just democratic framework that respects pluralism while maintaining social cooperation. He argues that each person should have an equal right to a system of liberties that is compatible with the same right for others. These include political freedoms such as voting and running for office, freedom of speech and assembly, liberty of conscience, and personal freedoms like freedom of thought and the right to hold personal property. Rules assert that these liberties are lexically prior to considerations of social and economic advantage. Now, lexical priorities is something that comes up quite a lot to do with sort of what we were talking about, the original position and the veil of ignorance, the things that most people know. And then he comes up with this term lexically prior. So the first thing is to make sure that people have rights before you then go to the kind of economic redistribution of wealth. You need to make sure that you understand how individuals are have equal rights in the world, the things we discussed during talking about social contract theory. So trying to discover those, those are the most important, they're pivotal, so they're lexically prior to the considerations of economic advantage, meaning they cannot be sacrificed for greater economic efficiency or wealth distribution. So there's no way you can go, because you know, at the time, criticisms of someone like him, even though he's a centrist and liberal, criticisms, particularly in your home nation, would be all this is a socialist Soviet kind of imitator, but he wanted to condemn Soviet uh sort of uh command and control economies in the same way that he wanted to condemn the failures of the West. Um, so he wants to put these liberties first. He doesn't want to be regarded as a socialist, although later in his life he does call himself a liberal socialist, so we can get into that. He critiques utilitarianism for allowing individual rights to be compromised for the sake of overall social welfare. Instead, Rules insists that a just society must protect these liberties as inviable, forming the foundation for democratic legitimacy and social cooperation. Today we'll be discussing the Rules in principle, his argument for equal liberty, its justification, and its implications for contemporary liberal democracies. And I have a few questions there to start us off. And yeah, with that, if Michelle, you have a question, or Dara, you have a question, but otherwise, Jack, I'm sure the font of wisdom shall. Oh, hardly, hardly.

SPEAKER_02 12:15

Yeah, I'll move the equipment over here.

SPEAKER_06 12:26

Go ahead, Jack, I can hear while I do it.

SPEAKER_01 12:28

Um can you remind me of the name for his um he had like two or three principles and judges depending on how you count them?

SPEAKER_02 12:37

So he said that um access to the same kinds of rights.

SPEAKER_01 12:57

Yeah. So there'll have to be a uniformity of rights, that's the first principle of justice. The second principle of justice articulates two conditions where inequality is tolerable. Yeah. Um the first is that when it's attached to sort of meritocracy, yeah, I guess. Difference principle. Um but um no, because I think that that's that's the name I'm looking for, the difference principle. That's the second one. The difference principle is is um that the the sort of an inner court it would be justified if the fruits of the of the successful were uh were basically mandated to be in the service of the least. Yeah. Um I I don't know Rawls so well, so I I wanted to know what what that looked like practically for Rawls, because uh earlier on I I think at the beginning of your introduction, you you I think you said Rawls wasn't someone who was interested in distributed justice, or who didn't advocate for it more precisely. But then this second uh condition of the second principle, this um I've forgotten what you called it a minute ago, the uh you know the this this uh what's it? The the difference. The difference that strikes me as something that would serve as the foundation for a distributed project. And when I was reading the Sandel, which we'll come to later, the question was in my mind, I kept going back and forth, I couldn't make up my mind as to whether um Rawls was an advocate of distributive or uh justice or not. Sandel seemed identified at least one place where he seemed to be.

SPEAKER_06 14:43

Um I mean, he certainly is. This does come back to that lexic horrible term, lexic lexical priority. Yeah, that the economic redistribution has to come after the establishment of the of the natural rights of the individual. But it's but it but incredible for Rolf can come after the should come after it. Certainly, yeah, yeah. And and he gets more intense on this at throughout his work. So this is obviously his first major work, and he gets more and more uh in favour of redistribution as he goes on. As as I suppose because he's seen the Soviet Union collapse, maybe he feels like he can kind of talk a little bit more freely from a kind of slightly more left of centre persuasion. But certainly by the political liberalism and by the 90s rules, it's very much in favour of redistribution. But I mean, the principle ultimately is rooted around a certain element of redistributive justice. Um, because obviously the original position has to be. Have you heard of these terms before, Michelle? What would you like to do?

SPEAKER_05 15:49

Not many of them. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_06 15:51

So the original position is essentially the idea that you're saying a baby in a bubble, uh floating around the earth, looking down on the earth, and you have no idea where geographically, uh, what quality economically, um gender, race, uh, situationally, what you're going to be born into. And the idea is that from the original position, you're looking at the earth through what he terms a veil of ignorance. So you don't know uh what you'd be born into. But you also have to remember this is a collective thought. I mean, it all gets a bit too meta for me in some ways, but it's sort of a collective thought of if we were all babies in a bubble floating around the world thinking, well, I have no idea what situation I'm going to be born into. So therefore, I have an obligation to make the world at least good enough so that regardless of which original position I end up being born into, I could achieve a reasonable, you know, a reasonable way in life. Um, so you have so you have to envisage building a world which, yeah, you're looking through the veil of ignorance into the world and going, I don't know where I will be born, so I need to I need to at least redistribute to the level where everyone has an equality of opportunity. And ultimately, he is at least sort of tentatively pointing in the direction of equality of outcome because there is an element of him which is saying, you know, for example, one thing he really takes to task is inheritance. So he he despises the idea that people will inherit wealth to pass on to the next generation because he thinks that just creates a uh a cyclical uh system of inequality. And and for him, the fun which Jack and I always like, even if we don't necessarily agree with Henker, we do like someone who's very sort of forquick about this. And his argument is if you're creating a system of inequality, then that flies in the face of ever saying that you're a liberal democracy, because if you have a self-perpetuated system of wealth that just keeps getting passed down, there's no room for meritocracy. Meritocracy is a lie if you're just saying, well, everyone inherits wealth. So you wouldn't have that. You'd have an original position where you go, right, everyone's born into the world at least fairly equal, still the difference principle, as Jack and I were just talking about. And then behind this fail of ignorance, you decide on a world where you can create at least a fair, a level playing field for when you have a sort of start of your life. Um, but to answer Jack's question, he certainly does believe in redistribution check. Um, whether he goes the whole hog on terms of in terms of distributed justice, he he sort of stops short as because of the difference principle of kind of being a fully convicted socialist. He does believe that there should be difference between people, he thinks that that's actually fundamental to a functioning society. That's a very interesting.

SPEAKER_01 18:54

Um also the the the the liberal theory behind the um behind free market. Um the inequalities sort of disappear because you can trade an exchange and social mobility and so forth.

SPEAKER_06 19:14

Definitely.

SPEAKER_01 19:15

Um why why is um why does inheritance perpetuate a systematic inequality?

SPEAKER_06 19:22

Why can't it why can't it not be in the service of the least in the way that the uh kind of you know business monopolies that's true in the free market would have served the least, kind of the amount of money they have in like he says it quite explicitly, and you've got to remember as well, this is in the context of the Vietnam War, this is in the context of a man who went to uh is it Stanford? I can't remember, it's either Harvard or Stanford. I'm having brain full now. Yeah. Um I think I think it might be Stanford, yeah. Um and did an accelerated degree because it was in the middle of uh sorry, not the Vietnam War, the second world war. Um, and he does an accelerated degree to get out. But obviously, by the time he's writing this, he's seen the Vietnam War, so he's got some jumbling up my stories here. I'm gonna go with the first story. He comes out from his accelerated degree and he goes into the army. You'll like this, Dara. He goes into the army, obviously, because it was conscription in the second world war, but he doesn't, unlike most university students, ask for a commission. He he says, No, I will not request a commission, I will go in with the regular soldiers because there's no right for me, just because I'm a graduate, to um to take a commission. Um fast forward to the Vietnam War, he's seeing the political chaos in the States um of what he sees as kind of political power, which is dominated by people who have the wealth and they've that and that wealth, yes, maybe they've made for themselves, but in a lot of circumstances it's really not someone who's built from the ground up, that each president isn't a Jimmy Carter, who's kind of you know, um, and he says, doesn't he? He says, even if formally granted political liberty loses its value whenever those who are better off are able to control the course of policy to their advantage. So he he's consistently thinking that inherited wealth will lead to a political class. That is his main issue, that it will lead to a political class who will only develop policy in the interest of inherited wealth and and of maintaining the power of that class of sort of uh legislators who will decide. And that's why he's so obsessed about this veil of ignorance, because you need to have legislation that's made from a completely reduced perspective. Now, whether or not that kind of reductive attempt is actually possible is one of the main flaws, I think, in Ruth's argument. But um we can get into that. But yeah, that's that's what I'd say in terms of the inherited wealth. It's very much his issue with the political class.

SPEAKER_00 21:54

You said you said that the political class, right? But if you think about obviously, you talk about his example of him not. Not wanted to go and get a commission in the army. That's obviously not the political class. And he obviously he would apply the sort of the same principles of barristers or lawyers or doctors. So it wouldn't just be the political class, but it would be the like the ruling class, perhaps, maybe.

SPEAKER_06 22:14

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And and I suppose he's using that he's using that situation as a vehicle of a broader argument, which is like there shouldn't just be an expectation that one group of people are different to the other. You know, conscription is a universal thing, everyone's got an obligation. Why would he be any different just because he studied uh law and economics at Stanford? Like, why would that suddenly make him a much greater individual to serve rather than obviously we know that education and these things are important, and he loves meritocracy. That's part of the reason why he wants to do away with this kind of elitist political class, but he also sees people who are getting into university because of their background and then getting commissions, and he's saying, Well, that's not quite right, they're not necessarily the most talented people, really. They're getting into university and getting out of being conscripted as a regular GI because of their wealth. Uh I think is it's is sort of the the kind of underlying factor in that. Um which obviously the current president has some issues with as well.

SPEAKER_04 23:23

But uh he says he's for a meritocracy, but we've not quite seen how he got there yet, but exactly.

SPEAKER_06 23:33

But yeah, but obviously the political classes of most countries do ultimately reside in a certain level of wealth, so he's got a real problem with the legislation.

SPEAKER_00 23:43

How would you then say that we'll get over that?

SPEAKER_06 23:46

How would he change that? Well, his idea is that you don't he he basically would believe in almost a full taxation on inheritance, like that would be his opinion. But he thinks it's just fundamentally wrong that there's some people, you know, again, it's situationist because he's a utilitarian, but he's situationist as well, so he's combining these two philosophies. So, as much as he would like that, he would obviously want to look at sort of how much wealth someone had and whether that wealth could benefit them, you know. Again, and I'm sure Jack will very much delve into this, but it's a bit like trying to discuss Bentham. It's like, well, how do you actually work out the hedonic calculus? How do you work out whether it's going to be the maximum pleasure for the maximum number? For him, it's like, yeah, how do you actually work out where wealth is benefiting someone fairly, or you know, it's complicated, but ideally that would be the situation that you would withdraw the inheritance completely, basically.

SPEAKER_02 24:42

Yeah, sorry, Jack.

SPEAKER_06 25:00

And a prime example, just while Jack's thinking, is obviously the case of Citizens UK and the US with the super PACs, you know, before the Citizens UK case, at least there was the opportunity, a bit like with say Bernie Sanders' campaign of kind of like doing uh individual donations and things like that. A perfect case of what rules would hate is the idea of the super PACs where a certain cabal of people push money into political campaigns, and thereby even if the candidate isn't inherited well, you know, uh isn't an inherited wealth and could be a self-made man or woman. Um ultimately the super PACs who are the inherited wealth are deciding who the candidates could be. So that would be a prime example today where Rules' ideas would really apply, and he would think that society has gone downhill since his time. Yeah, Jack and you.

SPEAKER_01 25:54

Um I think we have an immediate response to that. I was I am interested, however, in the electrical priority thing. Um why does he separate um economic social policy from um something secondary to um more fundamental questions of right and liberty, justice?

SPEAKER_06 26:21

Well, he does talk about um this again in the chapter where he says each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice, then even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. So he he he's got this fundamental issue with utilitarianism just as he has it with like free market capitalism, which is that there is a worry that like if you um if you accept say a basic utilitarian perspective, you maybe try and work out first of all, yeah, the pleasure, how much pleasure is someone getting, we need to aim for pleasure, right? He then thinks, well, on an individual basis, if you're doing that, trying to work out the individual pleasure. Well, what if one person, if we take the example of one person, what if one person has loads of pleasure and one person has a medium amount of pain? Well, the utilitarian argument would be you need to uh accept that person's moderate pain um and then you know uh try and support the person's maximalization of pleasure on the other part. For him, that's flawed, like because if you extrapolate that to society, that could mean well, we'll just make it really, really hard for a subsection of society. You know, we can see Mill here, we can see the the um the what we discussed about the 99 versus the one in society. The power which showed the illegitimate. Exactly, exactly, and and and he would agree because he's not, you know, right and left both kind of bandy around terms about rules. And I mean he's not he's not a left-wing thinker, he is a he is a centrist in many ways because he's combining both traditions of the left and the right. Um, but he would he would see that as the worst sort of outcome to see a minority subjugated for the pleasure of others. Um, so he really feels he's in a Lockean tradition in that sense. He really believes that the rights are the priority, you need to establish those before anything else. Um so that that that's why that's fully prioritized above any economic considerations. Um yeah, totally. Um was there anything else uh there, Jack, that you wanted to expand on? Um I can only hear Samuel, but not Jack and the others. Oh, the fancy mic could be moved to the table if it were not already. That would be great. I'll move the iPad as well, just in case I don't know how the mic and iPad uh correlate. Sorry, Lorraine, I'm just gonna move the iPad a little bit closer to them as well. I may have just been pensive silence. Um, your direction do I just in case there's any messages? I'm sure that'll be fine.

SPEAKER_01 29:35

Um so I was reading the Stanford Encyclopedia and started to get a sort of view and they described roles, projects as trying to sort of overcome this tension between um freedom and freedom and justice. Um yeah, I guess so. Um no, the tension between freedom and equality. Yes, right, that was it. And uh right, that the idea of um justice and fairness was what mediated between these, and that's central to the text, um, a theory of justice. Um I wondered if you could clarify what what precisely he means by fairness, whether you think it's a successful mediator of those two, of of of sort of the demand for freedom to pursue our obligation, but also this this this um fear for inequality that emerged.

SPEAKER_06 30:46

I mean it's strange, isn't it? Because he's I don't know whether this is also something in the US, Michelle, but is done more often, but the sort of conflation of justice and fairness in his work, I think, maybe is a to is a way like in the US linguistically, would you use those terms almost interchangeably?

SPEAKER_05 31:04

Would you say that's fair or that's just yeah, you never hear about justice, like we don't care about justice.

SPEAKER_06 31:13

Because I'd say in at least in the UK, justice comes with a very legalistic framework. Uh it's closer to higher. Yeah, and I feel that he sort of uses them interchangeably. Like if you had a kid come back from school and they said, Um, I think I was treated unfairly at school today, that'd be fine. If you have a kid come back from school and says I was treated unjustly today, you know, you think is that person's father a lawyer, or like you know, like what's going on here? Um, so I mean, I think he bandies them around uh quite interchangeably. But I mean, the equality question, I would say, he, and again he addresses this in the chapter where he says the basic liberties must be the same for all, and their worth must be guaranteed regardless of one's social or economic position. So fundamentally, these are things that need to be just or need to be fair between everyone before you start to build up that economic redistribution that we've been discussing. And again, I think I think the equality needs to be there because, as I've been saying, he's not he's not like when we discussed the French existentialists, he's not sort of like some sort of fanboy of the of the uh Soviet regime. He's very much a believer in democracy and how democracy can really fulfill the you know the dream that he's setting out in this text. And he says, the basic, oh sorry, the liberties of the equal citizens are taken as settled. The rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests. So I think there what he's addressing is exactly what you're asking, Jack, which is that he wants equality, he wants equality of opportunity, and we can debate how far he wants equality of outcome because it obviously is pointing in that direction much more than any just think that we've discussed in this series. But he he doesn't want there to be projects which start to say, well, yes, of course, rights are important, but ultimately we need to think about the whole, you know, um a much more left-wing project um in the direction of uh Soviet totalitarianism. He wants, and and and as we use that term calculus, he's really directly criticizing someone like Bethham as saying, I don't want there to be a calculus of sort of uh uh bargaining rights with equality. I want rights first and then work out how we do equality. Great, great, great. Yeah. Michelle O'Darr, any any questions in terms of like any other sort of elements of this?

SPEAKER_05 34:07

No, I guess just how how do you get to that even ground? Which is obviously, yeah, I mean, we're definitely trying to figure that out in the States, and I feel it's very apt with the what's happening back home with like Trump dismantling DEI and that being you know on the table, it makes sense that it doesn't work within a meritocracy.

SPEAKER_03 34:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 34:39

Um but yeah, I think how do you get there?

SPEAKER_06 34:45

And again, I think the US is I think the US is the best example because a prime example that um comes up a lot if you read any anything about rules applied to modern politics, particularly from the 2000s, um, obviously the most catastrophic event in the early 2000s, 9-11, um, rules' ideas are immediately brought in because or not immediately, but sort of in the aftermath of the kind of like uh revelations of the tortures in Guantanamo Bay, for example. And how do you how do you put social welfare to this kind of lexically inferior, but still very high up on rules' agenda or a liberal democracy's agenda? How do you how do you weigh up social welfare, you know, trying to make sure that 9-11 never happens again? So, you know, getting information out of terrorists, etc., with these natural rights that rules is saying are the priority above anything else, the you know, the right of that terrorist or whatever, um, needs to be sackosanked, and we're we're trying to get things out of them by basically alienating their rights, saying you don't have any rights, um, and we're going to torture you to get information. But again, that's for social welfare. But for rules, that would be wrong because you missed the first priority, lexical priority. You need the liberty of rights first before you start to try and address any social issues. You need to remember the innate rights of every human being. So very Lockheed, but coming down the chain starts to become a little bit more returned, starts to become a little bit more contemporary liberal in terms of the the social distribution. Um, so yeah, so I think that's sort of how I would uh tackle tackle that. Um and did I have any other particular points?

SPEAKER_02 36:38

Um printed out papers for today, I feel very formal. Uh I mean I could quickly uh what is the time?

SPEAKER_06 36:58

But I've probably got about five minutes until I should let because we're going to be covering this obviously anyway, so I'll let you I'll let you pass over uh and then and then we'll go into Sandell. But quickly before we do, and to set the frame for I think where Sandell's coming from, let me just touch on Nozick. So in Anarchy State and Utopia, Nozick sort of engages in this discursive debate about um Rules' theory being seen as sort of a responsible utilitarianism, um, justifying actions based on the greatest good for the greatest number, but creating theory of justice that would safeguard the individual rights that we've been talking about. Nozick critiques utilitarianism just like rules is, so you know, both of them are critical of utilitarianism in its sort of purest form, but particularly because it can justify the violation of individual rights in the pursuit of social welfare. So, exactly the tension we've just raised. Nozick's like saying, Rules, you haven't answered this. You've kind of like you've used this term lexical priority, but ultimately in the day-to-day, you can't say, Oh, well, I'm I'm not sure whether I want to help that person because uh it might infringe my rights, or I'm not sure uh whether uh well you know um uh I want to yeah torture someone. You can't you can't just say lexical priority and and then say everything's fine. It's like this kind of weird fallback of rules is added between two perennial issues in political philosophy and just say, well, just consider it as a lexical priority. It's like, well, that doesn't really help legislators. So Nozick um is criticizing rules for that um and rejects any version of justice that involves redistributing wealth. So Nozick basically goes back to this classical liberal position and says, Rules, you haven't answered the question at all. Basically, all we can do is ensure that people have rights, and beyond that, the state really isn't very effective at doing anything to redistribute. Um at the same time, Nozick is a proponent of libertarianism, as I was sort of saying at the start, which emphasizes the individual freedoms of Locke. Um, and what, yeah, at this time that this obsession with the phrase minimalism, state minimalism, or I don't know what it would be today, but it's very Trumpian, you know, sort of uh state withdrawal, withdrawing from intervention. Um obviously, rules is often associated with the social contract theories that we've explored over the last few sessions, um, which argue that individuals need to come together to form a society based on principles of fairness and equality, etc. Um, but Nozick critiques rules um and essentially one thing I missed in my introduction is that essentially you've got to remember that rules is theories, as much as after the war you have the API government, you have an FDR in the States really doing these big social welfare projects. The actual the idea of social contract theory, you know, maybe up until Mill, but social contract theory has been out of fashion for by no by uh rules' time, it's been out of fashion for seven decades. I mean, no one's talking about social contract theory. The existentialists are talking about individualism, there's no place for social contract theory in an individualist society, and they're on the left, and then on the right, you've got massive individualist political philosophy theories, um, obviously anything from libertarianism to kind of anarcho-capitalism to kind of uh you know laissez-faire economics. I mean, the idea of a social contract, as much as you have the left-wing projects after the war, they're much more in this kind of communitarian, very much political agenda rather than there being a sense of kind of like the social contract. So Rules is drawing on a very old tradition which leaves him open to a lot of criticism by three generations of people who have rejected social contract theory. So it's very difficult for him to be a defender of it. Um you also have a sort of tension uh between Robert Nozick and Rules on a sort of Hegelian versus a Marxist view of the state. Um, or Hegelian and a Marx if you want to say, sorry, because Hegelian and Marxist views focus on the ways in which the state serves the interests of particular classes, often viewing the state as an instrument of economic domination. And Rules, although he's not a Marxist, um, aligns more with that idea that the state has an active role in addressing inequality, as you were saying earlier, Jack, in terms of how does that redistributed element work. Nozick draws from the classical liberal perspective, which is primarily a protector of individual rights, um, and very much arguing against the idea that the state should be involved in peripheral matters and particularly not on central matters like the economy. Uh, so this is a real cache of ideas. Um on individual rights, uh, Nozick in his anarchy state utopia says individuals have rights and there are things no personal group may do to them without violating their rights. The minimal state is the most extensive state that can be justified, and any more extensive state violates people's rights. A distribution is just if it arises from another just distribution by legitimate means. So essentially, everything, a bit like Jack was saying about the free market, everything, if you want there to be a functioning state, it has to be really a free market. You can't have a theory on the state. On the theory of justice is a historical process. Nozick says a theory of justice then is a historical theory, one that looks to the process by which holdings are acquired and transferred. Um, and then criticizing rules, the difference principle violates people's rights by interfering with their legitimate claims to the products of their labour and their choices. So he says, Well, yeah, rules leave a bit of space for a bit of difference, but ultimately he still wants to redistribute, so you're just taking away from people who've worked hard who have you know have succeeded, that sort of thing. Um, so very, very critical. And I think with that, that lays a perfect segue for Jack to present Sandell and his criticisms. Uh do you want Jack to the iPad's there? I will, yes, yeah, come around and mind.

SPEAKER_01 43:24

You want to sit here, Sam? Uh I don't mind. You can say what if you want, I'll I'll uh go and take this seat. Um I thought next to the microphone. Um I have my any comments in the chat. Uh no, it's just just yeah. Which is good because it means they can hear us. Okay. Um yeah, it's a good segue because um the the paper uh obviously chapter from Sandel sort that we said deals precisely with this question of what to make of of ownership, what to The right to property and then the right to anything in general, the right to possession of anything in general. Because although Rawls begins with this idea that property rights, as one example of certain rights, are electrically prior to socioeconomic conditions, the idea of redistribution sort of goes up against that. And it's if you dig a bit deeper, it turns out that Rawls doesn't really believe that anyone has an intr- like an intrinsic right to property, but more that people have a right to property based on certain criteria that they meet in the socioeconomic world. So it paradoxically it ends up coming last. It's the state that assigns to you what property you own and what doesn't. So it's the authority comes first, not it sort of his critique of inheritance, right? So I don't I come to this word a blank slate, um, politically speaking. Um echoing things we've talked about before like um kind of like Bill Locke, which I don't think would be a redistributionist. No, no. Well, maybe actually, because he he does qualify that um he doesn't he he he thinks that there is a a common sense access to property and that ought to be cut, which is an interesting side point. Yes, um I'm sorry, I would just um enjoy the segue of it. Um I I also just wanted to um the reason I was mentioning that is because although we've just heard Nozick's criticism of the redistribution, the the one of the the core things that Sandel's chapter deals with is saying that actually Nozick, your argument doesn't work because it's founded on the same premise that enables Rawls to say that distribution is a social good, namely the premise that the subject is this blank slate. So the the core of Sandel's argument against Rawls and against Nozick is we've got a return to a concept of the situated subject. That's the means of the segue. So um Michael Sandel, um, he's still alive. He's the first and only thinker we're dealing with who's still alive. Um, I'm very pleased to say that he was born in 1952. He's an American political philosopher and popular author on such subjects as liberty, justice, um you know, the common good, meritocracy, um, free market, the ethics of such things, uh, globalization and localization, um, the the loss of community, the decline of community, and how we might recover it. Those are the things he's very interested in. Um, the reason for this is that he, or part of the reason for this, is that he studied um in Oxford under a guy called Charles Taylor, who is a very significant philosopher, I think he's also still alive, a very significant philosopher of political theory and of um and of ethics, um, who is one of the earliest figures in a tradition, a modern tradition that we call uh communitarianism, not communism. Umitarianism was very interested in exposing certain assumptions in uh political source, particularly in libertarianism and liberalism to do with radical individualism, you know, and you know, putting the community second, um, putting virtue ethics second, uh putting all kinds of value second, and trying to strive for this value neutral location. And the communitarians were saying that value-neutral plate doesn't exist. You've got to start with the community, with the tradition, with the inheritance, um, the intellectual inheritance uh primarily, but also the I guess the the the um the geographical and the institutional inheritance also. Um you don't get to abstract, as roll does, um, from that condition. Um as Hayek, Hayek also agrees on this, although he's not a communitarian and he still is an individualist at heart. Um, but Hayek does believe that um you know reason and freedom are constituted by tradition, do not themselves make uh traditions out of nothing, do not make institutions out of nothing. So we saw that on Tuesday. Um so the other um important writer of communitarian is a guy called Alistair McIntyre, he's famous for a book called After Virtue, I think it came out in the 70s, and in After Virtue um he basically said, Look, our our discourse on ethics is in shambles, um and here's why. Um these in internal disagreements, there is no value neutral point. Um, and the dominant discourse on ethics is uh what he calls the motivist, it's it's well I think this is right because I say so. He's sort of the the justification for ethics is in the individual alone, and so he he he challenges that and he puts forward a uh a way of dis uh uh advancing on our ethics without claiming to leave our traditions and leaving our worldviews and leaving our cultures and communities. Charles Taylor did the same thing, and the the basic concept, and you see this in Sando, which is why I'm going on about it in some detail. Um, but the basic idea is that we've got to stop trying to think about ethics um from a priori principles, um, you know, like arguments from a natural as I said from a state of nature or from from a you know an abstract state of affairs prior to all context. That that kind of argument, as powerful as it has been in the philosophical tradition, is too ambitious with all the skepticism we have today. So let's just settle for a kind of comparative argument where we have a discourse about ethics and we say, Well, my ethical worldview seems to account for more of the problems that we have in ethics than yours does, and maybe that makes it a better, better worldview. I haven't left my worldview, I haven't claimed to get a neutral point, but by a relative comparison we do and make advances. So the communitarians were very big, big on this. It's a kind it's a style of argument that dominates in the tradition of scientific thinking. So, um, how do scientists advance their theory? They don't they don't do a priori arguments, they say, well, my scientific theory accounts for this anomaly and everything else yours does. Yours doesn't account for this anomaly, therefore let's let's let's change the change the story we're telling. Okay, so that's a bit about the communitarians. So that's uh that's what Sandel inherits. Um so clearly of influence the Sandel who first published um Liberalism and the Limits of Justice in 1982, specifically targeting role theories of justice and the radical individualism that role presents and the value the intro to the reason and described. The work came after his employment at Harvard, where he taught classes on justice for over two decades. And I was reading the Wikipedia article on this, and it was so popular. Um, he had um, I think he would teach it in in 2005, or something like 1,500 students over the year on this course, and um, and they it was the first program that Harvard commissioned to be televised. He turned into a series of videos and televised it, and the BBC did something similar, and LSE did something similar also. Um very, very popular course. Um, subsequently published um very popular work, which I guess is why I think you've described for the literary critic. Yes in your popular also, you'll go down to Waterstones up the road and you'll find Michael Sandel. You won't find John Rawls in a um on the front page, you'll find him in the philosophy section tucked away. But Michael, you'll find Michael Sandel on the table. Um uh Democracy Discontemption was him in 1996, incidentally, during a time that we associate with the the peak of optimism about liberalism. Um, and I guess Francis Fukuyama's famous book must have come out around that time as well. The Berlin Wall had fallen, we seem to have our economy sorted out as it just before 9-11, where things were clearly shouldn't have been not right. Um, and he published this book in 1996, basically saying, Well, there are all these these anxieties and tensions about democracy. People do not necessarily feel that um their voices are represented in um in the government. I came as early in 1996, so I was very surprised to learn that. Um public philosophy, 2005, more of a communitarian thing. Um money can't buy the moral limits of the market, where he talks about how the free market sort of makes us sacrifice a lot of our um our morals, and he talks about how um you know, on a free market worldview you can exchange body organs and traffic people, you know, because it's just you know the the only value that the free market's interested in, technically speaking, is economic value. Um so he's he's naturally criticizing that, drawing our attention to it with some some urgency. Um, most recently, the tyranny of merit, um where he criticizes um meritocracy um for I think similar reasons um as sort of his criticism against a free market. Um the the meritocracy thing for Sandel I suppose abstracts a little bit from um from socioeconomic circumstances, I think that's the argument he put while I haven't read that book. Um okay. The chapter as I just mentioned comes from Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Um there, Sandel argued that the veil of neutrality that role depended on for the selection of the basic criteria of justice for the fantasy. So if we recall the the the veil of neutrality is role's neutral starting point, um but the baby in space that Sam so creatively came up with that um enables us to use common like common reason that's available to everybody to determine the basic starting point for questions of freedom and questions of what rights we have. Um because um Sandel is a communitarian and he wouldn't like I should mention he wouldn't be so happy with the term. I think you see this stuff as a little bit different. In what precise respects I'm not sure, but for our purposes it doesn't matter. Um because Sandel committed to this idea that um human beings are situated and that you can't abstract their values from their their identity and their inheritance from their identity, this idea of the of the value neutral um space is absurd. There's no way of moving from that place that role articulates as the original position to community and just to life as we experience it. Um the kind of abstract question that Rawls uses to frame justice don't seem to match on to our lived experience of questions of justice and right, according to Sandel. Um the technical way of putting it is Sandell is committed to the idea that people's moral values are constitutive of their identity and not accidental to it. Um consequently has no real relation to lived experience. Um, not simply for the reason that it's um like ideal in a like like a matter of degree from the practical reality. Roth Laws is happy to say that the original position is a theoretical construct, but it's just a few tweaks and then you get to the limb reality. Roth Sandel is saying there's absolutely no relation here, there's no possible neutral point between different conceptions of justice, um, between different worldviews. Um he draws from this that Rawls' idea of the citizen is morally incompetent, um, because he has no experience of what it's like to um to work out moral differences within um inherited traditions and inherited worldviews. Um argued that liberalism broadly has insufficiently accounted for the historical and social situation as an individual that has consequently tended to reduce public goods to private interests and ultimately to detach the common good from the problem of providing for liberty and justice. So we sort of saw that um Rawls treats the issue, I would I would argue treats the issue of common good as distinct. I think he said explicitly in um, I can't remember if it was the Stanford article I read or in the chapter you set, Sam, that we deal with the the rights and and then secondarily we deal with what the common good is. Um for um for Sandel, although they're inseparable. Um there must be a return to moral and civic formation in community and in the universities as the cornerstone of society, very Rousseauian. Um, this project must be in turn uh must in turn be shown to be entirely compatible with a positive conception of freedom. Um, because Sandel is Sandel criticism is that the libertarians are dishonest about the step that their starting point. It's not value neutral. So, first be honest about that or be aware of it. Um, second, he's gonna be honest about what his um vision of the common good is, and everyone else should be honest about that vision, and we're going to use the institutions at our disposal to have a like a serious conversation about that, and through comparative argument, we're gonna grow, um, but we're not going to abandon our um our communal type and our and our ethics for that purpose. Um, and so it's this is a positive conception of freedom because everyone's operating on the premise that what we are trying to be free for a particular thing. Um it isn't just free to self-determine, it you know, everyone free to self-determine in an abstract way. Um even the state itself has some idea of what we're striving for, otherwise, there wasn't there wouldn't be a state because there'd be nothing binding us. Um, too many theorists are too shy to talk about this, including Hayek. Um yeah, Sandel follows, as I mentioned, so Sandel follows Taylor in arguing that an honest discourse about ethical differences will overcome pluralism by drawing attention to those conceptions of justice that solve more problems than the alternatives in the comparative style of arguments. What is important is not so much the sort of amelioration of differences as being able to propose gender and alternatives. Um liberalism in Sandell's view tended towards a relative hegemony on now reminded us about policy. Um, okay, um, I had some questions. I I I sort of rushed to to write them down this afternoon. Um maybe use them as a last resort. I don't know if they're helpful, but perhaps there are questions.

SPEAKER_06 59:18

Um do you think Sandev actually solves that issue um in terms of in terms of you know the perennial issue that we have been discussing, which is you know not to be too kind of blunt, but are they not talking past each other to some to some point like rules isn't only you know Tyndell's criticism is one of uh he's homogenizing? Well, yes, he is, but rules is addressing two fundamental questions of political philosophy, which are how do you try and synthesize economic justice with a sort of uh individual liberty? Now how far is Zandel actually solving that question rather than just criticising one half of the argument, rules is coming at it from a perspective of I want to try and bridge the gap between these two things. Is Sandel just say is is Sandel just saying you can't do that? You have to just take into perspective situation individual circumstance, um, and it's impossible. Or isn't there a way that Sandel can say to bridge that divide?

SPEAKER_01 1:00:39

To bridge the divide between liberty and economic justice.

SPEAKER_06 1:00:44

Um and obviously economic justice is a great term because rules isn't saying like everyone should have the same amount of money.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:52

Um I guess um my impression, my limited impression is what I've read is that um you're going to solve the economic inequalities um not through this like through abstracting from the economic inequalities. And and I guess um the most important thing for Sandel is to show at least in this text and um and and in this work, um, is to show that what while Rawls sets out to to bridge these, um the I guess the the ontology gets in the way of that, the ontology of the human person gets in the way of that. Um there is then in a contradiction in Rawls, um, which he doesn't seem to be so aware of. You know, there's the the property rights and then the freedoms initially, and then suddenly there's the redistributive policy, and the the hit the the hidden assumption that makes that work is this idea of a per of an abstract person to whom no property, no inheritance could ever have been said to have been uh uh owed to by by natural right. Yeah. Um and so I guess Sandell would say that that almost brushes aside the real problem because it it discounts what you might might be describing as legitimate claims um to property for the state of solving an abstract problem of of um of inequalities which sometimes seem to serve the lower classes, sometimes don't. I'm not sure if if property is really, for instance, so distinct. And I suppose some of the other things that he thinks do serve the lower classes.

SPEAKER_06 1:02:58

And I suppose bouncing off of that, would you not say that one fundamental issue of Sandel's critique is that Rules explicitly says he's not laying out a moralistic kind of like day-to-day ethical way of living? He's not a utilitarian, he's not a he's not trying to lay out how you should live your life day to day. He's explicitly trying to lay out a political framework. And and and and just before tiring, um Is Dandel not not coming at him as if he's like an ethical philosopher and coming at him like, oh, you're abstracting? And whereas what Rules is really trying to do is say, no, what I'm trying to do is abstract simply for political purposes. I'm not trying to abstract for ethical purposes, I'm not saying that there's not individuals. I've actually laid out that individuals are the most important thing above everything, and I'm being criticized more as a philosopher, as an ethical, as an ethicist, rather than as a as a political thinker.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:58

Do you see what I mean? I I I understand your point. I think Sandel is saying that that is precisely the problem with roles. So so he's not trying, he's not trying, yeah, exactly. So he's not trying to say that roles is a bad philosopher of ethics, he's saying that he completely discounted like genuine ethics. Yeah, you know, at some point like that, we would actually ask these questions to ourselves. Um he he's similar to Hayek. I was I would say the same thing about Hayek. Um, Hayek speaks of virtue and of morality as though it's just mere pragmatics and competence and and so forth. And Rolle is the same, it's it's sort of political utility, social utility. It had nothing with it. That's one aspect of ethics, yeah, one aspect of justice. Um so I guess um Sandel's challenge to to to to role and to Wodasink is to enrich their concept of the human birth and thereby enriching the concept of justice, um to bring back the more ethical dimension, to um yeah, to to put back in the centre the human being who has um by by by virtue of his birth and his situation, social bonds, linguistic bonds, cultural bonds, now which can't be discounted.

SPEAKER_06 1:05:24

To be the um political historian here, what I would like to add in is that we live in a unique moment, I'd say, in history now, which obviously Sandale is more, as he's a lot, uh more primary place to address, which is that the issue that um the issue that Rawls was trying to address right was this tension between liberty the free market US and economic justice and Soviet totalitarianism. Um there's always been this idea that. If you move in one direction, the other will be limited, right? Okay, so if you move towards more focus on freedom, individual freedom, individual rights, you're going to move away from economic justice. If you move towards economic justice, you're going to infringe on people's expression and people's way of life. We live in a time now where there is an erosion of both simultaneously. We can see this, say Bolsonaro, and the rise of authoritarianism in countries where you're voting in people who are directly infringing on rights in the idea of sort of social welfare, but at the same time, social welfare is decreasing in these two authoritarian nations. Now, I don't know how Sandell would respond, I'm not sure how rules would respond, but actually we live at a time where both are decreasing because of the way that people are making their political decisions. That liberties are decreasing and social welfare is decreasing. I'm not saying that's happening necessarily in the UK or the US, but we can see it in other countries. Do you think rules and sandale would have any way of responding to that? Because they were addressing a fundamentally different question that one would rise as the other would fall. If both are falling at the time we live, do rules and sandale have any answer to the kind of situation that we're living in today?

SPEAKER_01 1:07:29

Very good question. I have no idea.

SPEAKER_05 1:07:33

Well, they're still live, we can call.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:35

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I have a paragraph that comes right at the end of the Sandel chapter, which maybe touches on this. Um but he said literally the last paragraph, liberalism teaches respect for the distance of self and ends. And when this distance is lost, we are submerged in circumstances that cease to be ours, referencing the totalitarian moment. But by seeking to secure this distance too completely, as roles goes in closely in this paragraph, liberalism undermines its own insight, the insight of maintaining the distance between self and ends. By putting the self beyond the reach of politics, it makes human agency an article of taste rather than an object of continuing attention and concern, a premise of politics rather than its precarious achievement. This misses the passos of politics and also its most inspiring possibilities. It overlooks the danger that where politics goes badly, not only disappointment but also dislocations are likely to result. And it's against the possibility that when politics goes well, we can know a good in common that we cannot know alone.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:49

Did that answer your question?

SPEAKER_06 1:08:58

I think um well, Dara or Michelle, do you have any questions about Sendel?

SPEAKER_05 1:09:07

No, he just he sounds like he's just playing devil's advocate of roles.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:13

Sounds remote reaction for them in the same way.

SPEAKER_05 1:09:16

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_06 1:09:18

Well, that kind of feeds into what I was going to say, and depending on how much more we want to do. I mean um the biggest criticism that I think to be honest with you, my knowledge of Sundell was very limited before Jack enlightened me in the lead up to this. Um but it came from the post-modernists, it came from you know this sphere of left-wing intellectuals, and you have two people that I mentioned before, um, Charles Mills and Carol Payton in the 1970s and 80s, who are writing the racial contract and the sexual contract. And their criticism, similar to Sandell about the sort of how can you individuate within Rawls' conception of this sort of abstracted idea, and their criticism is the history of social contract theory, the reason people abandoned it was that the social contract theory originated from a very Western, homogenized view of how politics operates, right? So if you withdraw to this abstracted state, yes, you can withdraw, but you're withdrawing within a certain vision of uh of the state as it is, you're not withdrawing to the level of Russo, you're not saying, like, oh, we're living in the forest, and everyone's sort of like trying to kind of work out how to live, you're withdrawing within a certain paradigm.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:44

And Charles Mill says, it's just not possible.

SPEAKER_06 1:10:49

You're ignoring history, essentially. If you try and say everyone has an equal, equal sort of like abstracted state, you're not taking into account slavery, you're not taking to into account the subjection of black um Africans within the Western world, you're not taking into account the Carol Paitman, you're not taking into account the fact that you know how is politics operating at the time? In the UK, it's only been about 10 years at the time that um maybe even not that, um, when does it change? It's within a decade, it's probably even less than 10 years, but even in the UK, um cumulative voting for a family was still the case into the 60s. So, you know, we always think that franchisement came when women were given the vote. But in the 60s, you could still go and vote on behalf of you and your wife if you were married. No questions asked. So even in this kind of progressive 60s period, you could still go and vote. The the state to which rules is suggesting we withdraw is clearly a very biased perspective of the world. It's still going to be this kind of white Western male version of how we want to build the world, and this is where it feeds into what Jack's been saying about Sandell. Because if you don't take into account history, if you don't take into account the person, the individual, the agent, their situation, their circumstance, how can we possibly even attempt to build a world that's fair or just without any contextual information at all? Now, rules and sort of rulesian apologists try to get round this because he does add an element, I don't know how far you read, Jack, but he does sort of touch on class.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:40

Okay, I didn't get that.

SPEAKER_06 1:12:42

Um he does sort of touch on class, and a lot of apologists for rules will say, like, oh well, race and gender kind of are incorporated into his idea that you know, like there are certain like class-based issues that we'll have to address if we want to redistribute and sort of like work out, but it does feel like he sort of forgets that we really do have a level of differentiation in the world that even if we withdraw to try and make a better world, it's still going to be in the vision of someone's idea of a good world, and I think that's part of the issue that Sandel raises, and ironically, it's also part of the idea that very, very left-wing uh scholars um raise as well about rules. Um and yeah, I don't know if you would have anything down there, Jack.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:31

You mentioned apologies for me interrupting, apologies for me going a little bit off topic here, but you mentioned how um obviously you know Abraham and Garrett rules like having no context. Yeah. Do you reckon there'll be any link there between things such as like colonialism and having that sort of Western influence on sort of colonial countries and it not working because you have no context of their sort of background, their culture? Do you think there'll be any link there or by just being completely?

SPEAKER_06 1:13:57

Oh, definitely, and this is the great return of universalism. So this is again a passionate topic of Jack's, but this is the first time that someone's actually taken can, you know, high because taken can and really pushed it into the political mainstream um with what Rules is doing about this universalism about trying to apply it to all circumstances. So definitely um it's a massive issue because can faces a lot of issues when it comes to who is a person, what counts as you know, an active citizen within the kind of like categorical imperative. There's lots of flaws, and and Charles, I I can't recommend it enough, particularly for what you're doing, Michelle, in terms of your PhD. Charles Mills, the racial contract would be a fantastic text for you, but it's not that long, um, and it goes through a lot of the thinkers that we've addressed, and the fundamental flaws of where they start at, and therefore what's echoed through, and he finishes with rules, and he says, as much as rules is out of all, he still falls down at the same place that 18th-century scholars were falling down. Um, but yeah, definitely. Um, and I mean within the context of the day, obviously, he's seeing the atrocities in um in Vietnam, and that's influencing a lot of political ethical kind of figures. You have Joseph Fletcher in his situation ethics, you know, coming directly out of the um out of the Vietnam War, and Joseph Fletcher, another another state-side scholar, is saying that he's a he's a full-on utilitarian, and he's saying that everything needs to be based on agape, universal love. Um, and I think I think colonial conflict, I think these things are fundamental to how these scholars are framing their ideas. And and I think it's unfair to criticize them fully for not being aware of kind of like racial and and and gender differences, because I do think that Rawls is genuinely, you know, his core principle is to try and address those, you know, immediately. But a little step further, and how far are those issues actually addressed outside of him being a kind of optimist? How far would the political class ever actually address those issues? How far can you actually get beyond what you know, what the political class is operating within? He doesn't really address the kind of fundamental core issues of how the state would transform to be able to do this, um, which, if if if we um criticize utilitarianism, it's the fundamental issue of utilitarians throughout. They don't really have an idea of how the state would actually do it. And maybe at some point we can do a series of.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:35

The thing is, the thing is utilitarianism, though, the way I see it is it's just an ethical sort of principle. It doesn't they don't unless on apart from things like the greatest good for the greatest number, etc., there's no real sort of massive links that you can apply it to running the state. Yeah, because for me it feels as though it's sort of like a one-size-fits-all approach. Whereas, yeah, ideally on paper it works, but like in reality, it's really hard to sort of implement something like the greatest good for the greatest number. And also I think the issue is for utilitarianism.

SPEAKER_06 1:17:08

And if you want to get very post-colonial about it, in the back of his mind, rules is still, you know, what what is he actually suggesting? Let's look at this in the practicalities of his day. He's still suggesting that it will be America who redistribute for everyone else. It's still very much a western, you know, northern hemisphere view of the world, that it will be the West leading to benevolently give this kind of worldview to the rest of that uncivilized world. So, you know, he's not really moved on from 18th century scholars if you're taking it from that lens. I mean, he has, obviously, he's a he's a compassionate man. The whole reason he's coming up with this is because he cares. But functioning-wise, practicalities-wise, has it changed much from the age of enlightenment? I'm not sure that it has.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:57

Possibly not. Um, I was interested, um, as you were thinking, as you were thinking as you were saying about this, um, I think we mentioned this on Tuesday, Hayek does a bit better on this question. Although most um Hayek and roles are in their own ways, um, applying Kantian universalizable ethics, um, the way they seem to exercise it is quite different. Um, I'm still quite to understand precisely why, but for the the consequences of the differences that we're on roles in advocating a like a universalizable ethic sort of in a common reason, which I think is much more Kantian. Um for Hayek, it's it's what is universalizable um in a in a in a negative way. So so it's always about can laying out the conditions where if a future situation arises, but it's always done in the background of I don't know fully the the principles underlying the tradition I've inherited. You know, that's why the legislature to try and make those explicit and revise our explications of it. Um yeah, it's it it's always ignorance in the background, where I don't think Rawls has that. I think does that even does that save Hayek, even if that's efficient?

SPEAKER_06 1:19:20

Um I think rules really picks up on that. Is it is it what's their first clause of the categorical imperative? Is it the mere mere means or is it the um universalisable in all circumstances? It's either the first or the second.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:35

From memory, it's the second one you said isn't it's that it has to be universalisable. Because I think the using people that never the means completely.

SPEAKER_06 1:19:46

Um well, whether it's the second or the first, this will be a nice point maybe to round up, but um rules says utilitarianism does not take seriously the distinction between persons, it permits treating individuals as means to the greater welfare rather than as ends in themselves. So very much drawing on that on that tradition, and that's clearly where he's getting that element. Now, yeah, as you say, whether higher core rules deals with it better, I suppose. But then I guess Sandale Trumps Them All. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Sandel Trumps Them All, a lovely way to end our Liberty series, six sessions on Liberty. Um, thank you, Michelle, for being here in person. Um, thank you to everyone online for joining us. I don't know, we haven't had any questions or comments. Nice marvelous well. We'd just like to say thank you for joining us for these six sessions. And um over the next couple of weeks, Jack and I will be trying to comprise the next six sessions. Yes, heritage, heritage and tradition. Um, so we're very excited to delve into that. Um, but in the meantime, yeah, we wish you a nice couple of weeks, and um and uh thank you very much for joining us. But well done, Jack, for that session. So yeah, and well done to everyone.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:10

Right.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:11

Right. Um how do you turn off Twitch up? Right. I don't know, use it.

SPEAKER_06 1:21:19

Thank you, everyone online. Goodbye.