Whenever I encounter discussions of academic political theory, it feels like cosplay. Mills is going to win the fight about ideal theory!?!? Who cares? You have to tell me one example of when this stuff had the slightest impact on the world for me to believe it's real.
Good article, really I agree with the post below, this article seemed like a lot of work and was well done. Interesting to hear a bit about Mill's and his critique.
One point that seems important to follow up on is how critiques of liberalism deal with the problem of uncertainty. Uncertainty is often invoked to support free market institutions by liberal thinkers (e.g. Hayek) and seems like it could also justify a more deontological approach to political philosophy. In essence, because it is not clear how to bring about a perfectly just society we should just decide who we count a citizens (hopefully in a very broad way) and protect some well defined set of rights for those individuals (e.g. life, liberty and property).
It is certainty fair to say that this would be insufficient to bring about racial justice in a place like the US where black and indigenous people have not been extended those rights. However, rather than saying that racial liberalism has failed, we should think of it as a necessary (but not sufficient) condition.
When it comes to Rawls, why say that the theory of justice 'sweeps away' racial oppression? I would rather say the original position rules out white supremacy as impermissible-- that is, as unjust. Is the issue just that Rawls didn't draw this conclusion explicitly in the book? Ok-- but the list of unjust systems forbidden by the principles of justice is probably infinite.
An 'ideal theory' doesn't merely imagine what perfectly just society would look like-- that's just fantasy. It argues for why that vision would count as just (or at least tries to). Further, I think it's easy to build a contractarian case for reparations. After all, liberal regimes have paid reparations. The obstacles to doing so in this country, in the case of victims of, eg, Jim Crow systems, don't seem to me deep problems of principle, but surface problems of practical politics.
I don't think this holds up as a reading of Kant. The claim that every rational being has an inviolable, 'categorical' dignity arising from its free co-legislation of the moral law just doesn't imply that there is exist humans who fall below that dignity. Another way to put this is that Kant's theory *isn't* based on an outsider versus insider distinction: the existence of persons does not require the existence of 'sub-persons'-- this latter is Mills' imposition on Kant, and I don't think Kant ever uses the term. Kant does rely on a distinction between persons and 'things.' But things aren't 'outsiders' whose interests can be morally discounted. Rather, according to Kant, things (eg, animals) have no interests at all, since only a rational agent can take an interest. The notion that humanity is owed special ethical regard obviously isn't particular to Kant-- you see this in the Bible, and in many ancient authors. What is particular is Kant's account of why this regard (he calls it 'respect') is owed, and race just isn't part of that account. The credential you need to belong to the realm of moral agents is not racial, or even biological, but merely rational. Kant goes out of his way to insist that even non-human rational agents (he's thinking of something like angels) belong to this realm.
So the interpretation that the thousands of pages of moral theory, in which race is never mentioned, are secretly undergirded by the racism in the anthropology (which wasn't 'pioneering', by the way) isn't persuasive to me, either philosophically-- because they don't imply one another--, nor historically-- because Kant never suggests that they do.
If I read this correctly, MattY is citing Mills as saying that the hypocrisy of a philosopher in living up to his/her ideals inherently discredits the philosophy. Am I wrong about that? Because I disagree with it. "All men are created equal" is true and good in spite of Jefferson's failure to live up to it in his personal life. We should judge Jefferson (and Kant) harshly, but not the Declaration of Independence (not that part of it anyway). This what MLK says in the "I have a dream" speech.
Whoops... dumb me, I thought it was Charles Wright Mills, but its a guy named Charles WADE Mills (An entirely different person). Does anyone know Charles Wright Mills view on all this? Would it be more in line with the times he lived in, would it be possibly more radical?
I can see the moral case for reparations, but I much prefer a broader effort to rectify economic injustice.
In the first place, it would do more good.
In the second place, it would make more sense even as race-based policy, since it would benefit all victims of Jim Crow including African immigrants. I'm assuming that what reparations advocates have in mind is only for descendants of the victims of slavery. If I'm mistaken, someone please correct me.
In the third place, it would be politically sane. I don't know whether reparations are supposed to be means-tested or not, but if not, you'd have wealthy, privileged people getting them while the majority of the nation's poor got none. Even with means testing, it would be something that the non-qualifying poor would find cruel. And this is presupposing a society so altruistic that most non-poor taxpayers, at least, would be content to see their money spent on a conscientious gesture (as opposed to a pragmatic economic strategy).
Of course, this is only a small part of the post. Matt has got me interested in reading Charles Mills, which is more to the point.
Matt claims he was a below average student at Harvard?!?!? This seems preposterous. Or was it just in the philosophy department, which would self select for higher capability students? Where are the bloggers/writers/public intellectuals of his cohort that are doing better, aside from Douthat?
Another thought: the way people talk about Kant's undeniable racism lacks rigor. It is true that Kant contributed a bit to the formation of scientific racism, but his anthropological writings really aren't a very important or influential part of his corpus. They are interesting *to us* because (like the racist remarks in Hume's essays) they reveal that Kant was racist in a pretty unreflective way. This casts his universalism in an unfavorable light. Still, the utilitarian tradition has similar skeletons in its closet. Mill's writings on India justify colonialism in a way that should make us squirm just as much as anything in Kant.
Oddly, Enlightenment figures who clearly *weren't* racist like Montesquieu and Herder contributed more to the development of scientific racism. That is because Montesquieu and Herder were innovative theorists of cultural diversity, and their work was twisted by later theorists who believed that some cultures or "peoples" were superior to others and who began to use biological arguments to justify their position.
Also Kant is peripheral to the social contract tradition (in spite of the Metaphysics of Morals), and belongs to a German liberal tradition that just wasn't nearly as involved in justifying imperialism as French and English liberals like Locke and Voltaire were. Many of Rawls's blind spots are inherited from Locke IMO, not from Kant.
IMO one reason "deontology" won out over utilitarianism / consequentialism in philosophy is because it is a bit closer to how people actually think. That is, people believe in something like human dignity, although they often lack clearly articulated *reasons* for these beliefs (of the sort you find in Kant). It is very hard to say what is supposed to motivate a person to be a utilitarian.
Now: the grounds we have for belief in human dignity are often religious or pseudo-religious ones. (Rawls's own position was clearly strongly influenced by his Episcopal upbringing, not that there's anything wrong with that.) Even if you think you believe in human dignity for secular reasons, you probably don't think that you can prove this belief scientifically, on the basis of a rigorous demonstration. Basing an ultra-rigorous moral theory argument on a vague starting point does not give you rigorous results.
So it makes more sense to articulate this belief in terms of history, tradition and (to use an ugly philosophy phrase that's escaped into the wild) "lived experience" than in terms of the sort of rigorous thought experiments that both deontologists and utilitarians love. You don't meet something like the trolley problem in the wild, the real moral / political problems you meet in life are "overdetermined" and much less clear. Should I marry this person? Who should I vote for in the presidential primary? You will probably get more insight into real moral dilemmas from a novel or a history book than from John Rawls. You get insight from somebody like Mills because he talks about the Black experience in a philosophical but concrete and historically informed way.
I was assigned Mills in a philosophy class in undergrad. "Liberal Theory and Its Critics" was the course. A guy who wore a don't tread on me hat to every class used to constantly fight with a guy who wore a DSA sweatshirt to every class. Good stuff
That concluding paragraph was the conclusion of a Phil major if I’ve ever seen one lmao
As a Cornell grad, did you really need to use Cornell as your example of a safety school? :p
How is consequentialism different from utilitarianism?
Still want you to read “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.”
Whenever I encounter discussions of academic political theory, it feels like cosplay. Mills is going to win the fight about ideal theory!?!? Who cares? You have to tell me one example of when this stuff had the slightest impact on the world for me to believe it's real.
Good article, really I agree with the post below, this article seemed like a lot of work and was well done. Interesting to hear a bit about Mill's and his critique.
One point that seems important to follow up on is how critiques of liberalism deal with the problem of uncertainty. Uncertainty is often invoked to support free market institutions by liberal thinkers (e.g. Hayek) and seems like it could also justify a more deontological approach to political philosophy. In essence, because it is not clear how to bring about a perfectly just society we should just decide who we count a citizens (hopefully in a very broad way) and protect some well defined set of rights for those individuals (e.g. life, liberty and property).
It is certainty fair to say that this would be insufficient to bring about racial justice in a place like the US where black and indigenous people have not been extended those rights. However, rather than saying that racial liberalism has failed, we should think of it as a necessary (but not sufficient) condition.
When it comes to Rawls, why say that the theory of justice 'sweeps away' racial oppression? I would rather say the original position rules out white supremacy as impermissible-- that is, as unjust. Is the issue just that Rawls didn't draw this conclusion explicitly in the book? Ok-- but the list of unjust systems forbidden by the principles of justice is probably infinite.
An 'ideal theory' doesn't merely imagine what perfectly just society would look like-- that's just fantasy. It argues for why that vision would count as just (or at least tries to). Further, I think it's easy to build a contractarian case for reparations. After all, liberal regimes have paid reparations. The obstacles to doing so in this country, in the case of victims of, eg, Jim Crow systems, don't seem to me deep problems of principle, but surface problems of practical politics.
I don't think this holds up as a reading of Kant. The claim that every rational being has an inviolable, 'categorical' dignity arising from its free co-legislation of the moral law just doesn't imply that there is exist humans who fall below that dignity. Another way to put this is that Kant's theory *isn't* based on an outsider versus insider distinction: the existence of persons does not require the existence of 'sub-persons'-- this latter is Mills' imposition on Kant, and I don't think Kant ever uses the term. Kant does rely on a distinction between persons and 'things.' But things aren't 'outsiders' whose interests can be morally discounted. Rather, according to Kant, things (eg, animals) have no interests at all, since only a rational agent can take an interest. The notion that humanity is owed special ethical regard obviously isn't particular to Kant-- you see this in the Bible, and in many ancient authors. What is particular is Kant's account of why this regard (he calls it 'respect') is owed, and race just isn't part of that account. The credential you need to belong to the realm of moral agents is not racial, or even biological, but merely rational. Kant goes out of his way to insist that even non-human rational agents (he's thinking of something like angels) belong to this realm.
So the interpretation that the thousands of pages of moral theory, in which race is never mentioned, are secretly undergirded by the racism in the anthropology (which wasn't 'pioneering', by the way) isn't persuasive to me, either philosophically-- because they don't imply one another--, nor historically-- because Kant never suggests that they do.
If I read this correctly, MattY is citing Mills as saying that the hypocrisy of a philosopher in living up to his/her ideals inherently discredits the philosophy. Am I wrong about that? Because I disagree with it. "All men are created equal" is true and good in spite of Jefferson's failure to live up to it in his personal life. We should judge Jefferson (and Kant) harshly, but not the Declaration of Independence (not that part of it anyway). This what MLK says in the "I have a dream" speech.
Whoops... dumb me, I thought it was Charles Wright Mills, but its a guy named Charles WADE Mills (An entirely different person). Does anyone know Charles Wright Mills view on all this? Would it be more in line with the times he lived in, would it be possibly more radical?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_W._Mills?wprov=sfla1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._Wright_Mills?wprov=sfla1
I can see the moral case for reparations, but I much prefer a broader effort to rectify economic injustice.
In the first place, it would do more good.
In the second place, it would make more sense even as race-based policy, since it would benefit all victims of Jim Crow including African immigrants. I'm assuming that what reparations advocates have in mind is only for descendants of the victims of slavery. If I'm mistaken, someone please correct me.
In the third place, it would be politically sane. I don't know whether reparations are supposed to be means-tested or not, but if not, you'd have wealthy, privileged people getting them while the majority of the nation's poor got none. Even with means testing, it would be something that the non-qualifying poor would find cruel. And this is presupposing a society so altruistic that most non-poor taxpayers, at least, would be content to see their money spent on a conscientious gesture (as opposed to a pragmatic economic strategy).
Of course, this is only a small part of the post. Matt has got me interested in reading Charles Mills, which is more to the point.
Matt claims he was a below average student at Harvard?!?!? This seems preposterous. Or was it just in the philosophy department, which would self select for higher capability students? Where are the bloggers/writers/public intellectuals of his cohort that are doing better, aside from Douthat?
So sick of this Gen Z click bait
What I look for in a moral philosophy is one that's deontological in the streets and consequentialist in the sheets.
Another thought: the way people talk about Kant's undeniable racism lacks rigor. It is true that Kant contributed a bit to the formation of scientific racism, but his anthropological writings really aren't a very important or influential part of his corpus. They are interesting *to us* because (like the racist remarks in Hume's essays) they reveal that Kant was racist in a pretty unreflective way. This casts his universalism in an unfavorable light. Still, the utilitarian tradition has similar skeletons in its closet. Mill's writings on India justify colonialism in a way that should make us squirm just as much as anything in Kant.
Oddly, Enlightenment figures who clearly *weren't* racist like Montesquieu and Herder contributed more to the development of scientific racism. That is because Montesquieu and Herder were innovative theorists of cultural diversity, and their work was twisted by later theorists who believed that some cultures or "peoples" were superior to others and who began to use biological arguments to justify their position.
Also Kant is peripheral to the social contract tradition (in spite of the Metaphysics of Morals), and belongs to a German liberal tradition that just wasn't nearly as involved in justifying imperialism as French and English liberals like Locke and Voltaire were. Many of Rawls's blind spots are inherited from Locke IMO, not from Kant.
This is well said.
IMO one reason "deontology" won out over utilitarianism / consequentialism in philosophy is because it is a bit closer to how people actually think. That is, people believe in something like human dignity, although they often lack clearly articulated *reasons* for these beliefs (of the sort you find in Kant). It is very hard to say what is supposed to motivate a person to be a utilitarian.
Now: the grounds we have for belief in human dignity are often religious or pseudo-religious ones. (Rawls's own position was clearly strongly influenced by his Episcopal upbringing, not that there's anything wrong with that.) Even if you think you believe in human dignity for secular reasons, you probably don't think that you can prove this belief scientifically, on the basis of a rigorous demonstration. Basing an ultra-rigorous moral theory argument on a vague starting point does not give you rigorous results.
So it makes more sense to articulate this belief in terms of history, tradition and (to use an ugly philosophy phrase that's escaped into the wild) "lived experience" than in terms of the sort of rigorous thought experiments that both deontologists and utilitarians love. You don't meet something like the trolley problem in the wild, the real moral / political problems you meet in life are "overdetermined" and much less clear. Should I marry this person? Who should I vote for in the presidential primary? You will probably get more insight into real moral dilemmas from a novel or a history book than from John Rawls. You get insight from somebody like Mills because he talks about the Black experience in a philosophical but concrete and historically informed way.
I was assigned Mills in a philosophy class in undergrad. "Liberal Theory and Its Critics" was the course. A guy who wore a don't tread on me hat to every class used to constantly fight with a guy who wore a DSA sweatshirt to every class. Good stuff