Professor Shapiro guides the class through some practical applications of his theory of democratic justice. As applied to governing children, a sphere in which power-based hierarchy is inevitable, he circumscribes the role of the state as the fiduciary over children's basic interests and the role of parents as the fiduciaries over children's best interests. In other words, the state ensures the provision of the resources necessary for survival while the parents provide the resources to enable...

Professor Shapiro takes up again Schumpeter's minimalist conception of democracy. When operationalized as a two turnover test, this conception of democracy proves far from minimalist, yet people often expect other things from democracy, like delivering justice. Although people experiencing injustice under other types of governments often clamor for democracy, they become disillusioned with democracy when a particular regime fails to ensure greater justice for society. However, societies are...

Majority rule and democratic competition serve as the focus of this, second lecture on the democratic tradition. What is it about majority rule that confers legitimacy on collective decisions? Is there any validity to a utilitarian justification, that catering to the wishes of the majority maximizes the happiness of the greatest number? Does majority rule reflect what Rousseau called the general will? What is the general will? Does Arrow's paradox indicate that the results of voting are...

Professor Shapiro transitions today to the third and final section of the course, an in-depth look at democracy and its institutions. According to him, democracy is the most successful at delivering on the mature Enlightenment's twin promises to recognize individual rights as the ultimate political good and to base politics on some kind of commitment to objective knowledge. And interestingly, democracy as a tradition was not made famous by its champions, but rather by its critics. Today,...

The final Enlightenment tradition left to be explored in this course is social contract theory, for which we must return to Locke and somehow secularize his views and reconcile them with the refutation of natural rights. Modern social contract theorists replace natural rights with Kant's categorical imperatives, and accept the Aristotelian notion that there is no such thing as pre-political man. They approach the social contract as a hypothetical thought experiment, asking, if there were no...

We previously established that the reality of scarcity invalidates Marx's core idea of superabundance, and mortally wounds his theory. Certainly, his historical predictions about worker-led socialist revolutions around the world were off-mark. Today, Professor Shapiro presents more of the shortcomings of the Marxian tradition. These include Marx's failure to account for the ability of the state to buttress capitalism and stave off the conditions needed for its self-destruction, the lack of a...

Today, Professor Shapiro continues his discussion of Enlightenment theory of Karl Marx, focusing on the foundations of his theory of capitalism. The central question is, how is wealth created under capitalism at the micro level? For Marx, Adam Smith's invisible hand is not entirely benevolent. His labor theory of value stipulates that living human labor-power is the only way to create new value, and therefore capitalists who shift toward capital-intensive production cannot actually create new...

Exploitation is an important technical--not normative--concept in the theory of Karl Marx. Although we are dealing with voluntary Pareto transactions, under capitalism, exploitation occurs whether or not an individual is better off. Capitalism is destined to fail, says Marx, because of (1) the possibility for liquidity crises, (2) the nature of capitalist competition inducing declining marginal profit on the industry-wide level, (3) the fact that capitalist competition eliminates competitors...

Although the harm principle as introduced in the last lecture seems straightforward at first glance, today Professor Shapiro discusses its ambiguities. If it "must be calculated to produce evil to someone else," who will be doing the calculations? Second, what does "calculated" mean? Does committing harm imply mens rea, or should strict liability be observed? The class discusses such issues as prostitution, free trade, same-sex marriage, statutory rape, Good Samaritan laws, marital rape,...

Marxism is the second Enlightenment tradition upon which the course will focus. Contrary to popular belief, Marx did not hate capitalism but derived from economic analysis that it would self-destruct and lead to socialism. It is also a myth that Marx did not care about freedom; he was only egalitarian in the sense that he wanted everyone to have freedom. Ergo, Professor Shapiro asserts that Marx's dialectical materialism is as committed to the two principles of the Enlightenment--basing...

John Stuart Mill's synthesis rights and utility follows naturally in the vein of neoclassical utilitarianism, and it attempts to compensate for many of the shortcomings of Bentham's classical utilitarianism. In the end, it turns out to be a doctrine that does not look very similar to Bentham's at all. An important component of Mill's doctrine is his harm principle, which states that the only purpose for which one can interfere with the liberty of action of another individual is...

In addition to the traditionalist-conservative view covered last time, the other anti-Enlightenment school the course explores is contemporary communitarianism. While Burke and Devlin appealed to tradition as the basis for our values, communitarians appeal to the community-accepted values as the basis for what should guide us. Communitarian Richard Rorty criticizes the Enlightenment endeavor of justifying philosophy from the ground up from indubitable premises as a fool's errand and a...

In this lecture, Professor Shapiro delves into the nuances of MacIntyre's argument, focusing specifically on his Aristotelian account of human psychology. It has two features: (1) man's nature is inherently teleological or purposive, and (2) human behavior is fundamentally other-directed, in that a person's happiness is conditioned upon the experience of others as it relates to him, particularly on the feeling of being valued by someone he values. MacIntyre's account of human psychology...

In this economics-oriented lecture, Professor Shapiro introduces neoclassical utilitarianism as it was formulated by economist Vilfredo Pareto and further described by Francis Edgeworth, examining such concepts as indifference curves, transitivity, the Pareto principle, and the Edgeworth box diagram. It is revealed that the main departure of neoclassical utilitarianism from classical utilitarianism was that it did away with Bentham's troublesome interpersonal comparisons of utility. However,...

Professor Shapiro continues his examination of Jeremy Bentham's formulation of classical utilitarianism, with a focus on the distributive implications of the theory of "maximizing the greatest happiness of the greatest number." He engages students in a discussion of a guiding principle of classical utilitarianism, the principle of diminishing marginal utility, and some traditional critiques of this principle. Professor Shapiro examines the capacity of classical utilitarianism as a radically...

The mature Rawls departed quite a bit from his earlier theory of justice, choosing instead an overlapping consensus, or political, not metaphysical approach. Professor Shapiro argues that this is a significant departure from the Enlightenment tradition. In a wrap-up of the class's examination of the Enlightenment, Professor Shapiro charts its evolution from Locke to Bentham to Mill to Marx to contemporary theorists. As for the Enlightenment commitment to science and reason as the basis for...

Edmund Burke was an English politician who wrote his Reflections on the Revolution in France to express his disdain for the destructive havoc wrought by the French Revolution. As a traditionalist-conservative, he thinks about social change in a cautious and incremental way and characterizes the social contract as binding on those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born. Studying the anti-Enlightenment differs from the study of the Enlightenment because traditional...

Before exploring the three Enlightenment traditions in particular, Professor Shapiro examines the Enlightenment holistically, using John Locke as the foundation for the discussion. The first tenet of the Enlightenment is a commitment to science as a way of ordering politics, and Professor Shapiro introduces the Cartesian philosophy of science and segues into an elucidation of the workmanship ideal, a central feature of Enlightenment thinking. Corollary to the workmanship ideal, the second...

Jeremy Bentham's formulation of classical utilitarianism is the first Enlightenment tradition that the course will cover in depth. In his Principles of Morals and Legislation, Bentham outlines the principle of utility; that is, the principle that all men are pleasure-seeking and pain-avoiding. Professor Shapiro presents the case that classical utilitarianism has five characteristics: (1) it is comprehensive and deterministic, (2) it is a pre-Darwinian naturalist doctrine, (3) it is egoistic...

The trial of Adolf Eichmann, as presented in Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, is the topic of discussion. Professor Shapiro asks students what made them uncomfortable, not only about Eichmann's actions as a Nazi officer, but also the actions of Israel in capturing, extraditing, trying, and executing him. This begs the questions, what makes a government legitimate? And more specifically, was the Third Reich illegitimate and was Eichmann breaking some kind of higher law? After class...

Professor Shapiro explains the format and structure of the class during this opening session. He reviews the syllabus, and asks the central question of the course: What makes a government legitimate? He briefly explains the five ways to answer this question that he will focus on throughout the semester. The first three traditions are those of the Enlightenment: utilitarianism, Marxism, and social contract theory. The fourth and fifth overarching ways to answer the central question in this...

The next and final Enlightenment tradition to be examined in the class is that of John Rawls, who, according to Professor Shapiro, was a hugely important figure not only in contemporary political philosophy, but also in the field of philosophy as a whole. The class is introduced to some of the principal features of Rawls's theory of justice, such as the original position and the veil of ignorance, two of Rawls's most important philosophical innovations. Rawls channels Kant's categorical...

The main focus of today's discussion is Rawls's third, and most problematic, principle is the difference principle, which states that income and wealth is to be distributed "to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged individual." This stems from the logic that what is good for the least advantaged individual will be good for the second-least advantaged, and the third, and so on. But what if slightly benefiting the least advantaged person comes at a huge cost to others? Professor Shapiro...

Professor Shapiro dives more deeply into Robert Nozick's theory of the minimal, or night watchman, state. This formulation is not redistributive, nor does it consider rights as goals, but rather as side-constraints on what we can do. In other words, Nozick's is a deontological, not teleological, approach. However, the Achilles' heel of this formulation is the incorporation of independents, based on a system of compensation. Some people will opt not to enter into our hypothetical social...

The class's examination of Nozick's minimal state has raised a number of important questions, most of which are rooted in his troublesome model of compensation. Nozick would respond with his threefold account of justice: (1) justice in acquisition, (2) justice in transfer, and (3) rectification of past injustices. Nozick brilliantly demonstrates that "liberty upsets patterns"--even though we can originally start off with any just distribution, allowing voluntary transactions creates an...