values the preservation of established
Hamdan, Johanna B.
PHIHUM - A
Axiology - Branch of philosophy is
sometimes referred to
- The overall question we will be
asking is, By what values shall I live
in the world?
The Issue Defined
State - a formal word for what we mean
when we say “the government.” It is the
ruling political power within defined
borders.
Some philosophers have argued that the
state exists to serve and to protect the rights
of the individual; others have insisted that
(in part for the individual’s own good) the
individual exists to serve the state.
- Totalitarianism- the political belief
that power to rule must be given
exclusively to the state.
- Anarchism- the political belief that
all forms of government should be
abolished because they interfere with
the rights of individuals
Natural law- a rational principle of
order, often the logos, by which the
universe was created or is organized
- Natural rights- rights such as those
to life, liberty, and property, with
which an individual is born
- Liberal- one who believes in the
primary importance of individual
freedoms conservative one who
traditions
Theories of the Right to Rule
Sovereignty - describes where political
authority does or should reside. In a
totalitarian dictatorship, the state is supreme
and sovereignty resides in a single tyrant.
The Philosopher-King: Plato
● Plato’s image of what the ideal
society might be like begins with the
recognition of a harsh political
reality, and his analysis anticipates
contemporary urban problems.
● Plato believed, clearly understanding
the role of the expert and making
important choices only after
consulting with someone
knowledgeable and experienced in
the field. In the utopia described in
Plato’s Republic, the most promising
toddlers would be taken from their
parents and raised by the state.
Natural Law: The Stoics, Aristotle, and
Thomas Aquinas
- Heavenly bodies move through the
cosmos in an orderly progression,
while here on Earth season follows a
season with a comforting regularity.
Both the natural and human domains
are governed by reason, by what the
Stoics and other early Greek
philosophers called logos.
- Aristotle described the human
person as a “political animal,”
meaning that by nature we will
organize ourselves into political
 structures. The important thing for
Aristotle and others who follow in
the natural law tradition is to
discover the preexisting proper order
and put this order into practice.
Thomas Aquinas Hierarchy of Laws
- Eternal law-the law or reason of
God, according to Aquinas
- Divine law- that portion of eternal
law applicable to human beings,
according to Aquinas
- Human Law- created by civil
society
Aquinas called the rather self-evident
principles deduced from the eternal
law, the natural law.
- Claiming the obligation to obey a
“higher law” has led many people to
break civil laws by taking actions
called civil disobedience.
- What Malcolm X concluded is that
the government and the people have
an implied contract; if the
government does not uphold its end
of the contract (by protecting the
people), the people are free to
disregard their obligations (to remain
law-abiding citizens) as well.
Social Contract Theory
The Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes
- During the seventeenth century, as
Europeans developed national states,
they came to view the government
power to which citizens owed
political obligations as a secular
state.
- Social contract - an agreement
among citizens or between the ruler
and the rule that defines the rights
and duties of each party
The Natural Rights of Citizens: John
Locke
- Locke’s concept of natural rights
assumes that anyone consulting the
law of reason will recognize the
God-given rights of others to life,
health, liberty, and property.
- For Locke, the state exists only at the
pleasure of the citizens who have
created it. The bargain is that we
give up certain rights in exchange for
others.
- Locke believed the contract between
the individual and the state to be
conditional; individuals
- retained the option to withdraw their
consent and preserve their natural
rights.
The Value of the State of Nature:
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Aphra Behn, and
Clarisse Coignet
Rousseau - idea that perfect freedom exists
only in the state of nature. For him pure
freedom and civilization are incompatible
concepts; only in the state of nature can we
hope to be truly free.
Clarisse Coignet - human beings could
look to discover their freedom— the basis of
the independent morality she and others
advocated.
Natural Rights and Feminism
Gender Equality: Mary Wollstonecraft
- Like Plato, Wollstonecraft believed
that the only differences between the
genders are that men beget and
women bear children and that men
are, generally, physically stronger
than women.
- Adults of both sexes must be treated
as rational creatures
“Declaration of Sentiments”: Elizabeth
Cady Stanton
- Elizabeth Cady Stanton- the
principal nineteenth-century
theoretician of feminism in the
United States
- She based her arguments on
Enlightenment principles of
rationality and equality.
The Struggle for Suffrage: Susan B.
Anthony
- Neither Anthony nor Stanton lived
long enough to enjoy the privilege of
voting
The Right to Govern
The Absolute: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel
- His philosophy is the very antithesis
(opposite) of the natural rights
positions of Locke, Rousseau,
Wollstonecraft, Stanton, and
Anthony.
- He focused on the sweep of history.
- A thesis, or idea, gives rise to its
opposite, or antithesis. From the
tension between the two a new
reality emerges, a synthesis, which
contains the best elements of both
the thesis and the antithesis.
- Hegel’s dialectic - the progress of
ideas through opposition and
resolution in the form of
thesis-antithesis-synthesis
- For Hegel, the important questions
are those of metaphysics (reality),
rather than those of epistemology
(knowledge theory). In the process of
the dialectic, Hegel saw the
Absolute, or Reason, working itself
out, thinking itself more fully real.
- He disputed what Kant said that we
could not know noumena (things as
they are in themselves) but only
phenomena (things as they appear to
us).
- Cunning of reason -the method by
which the Absolute, in Hegel’s
philosophy, uses the talents and
ambitions of world-historical
individuals to advance its own ends
- Formal freedoms - freedom from
search and seizure; freedom from the
interference of the state in the free
practice of speech, the press, and
religion
- Substantial freedom- the
destination when individual moves
through three dialectically related
stages—from the family where love
creates a unit, to civil society where
 individuals relate to one another
through their work, to the moral
perspective of the state
The Mandate of Heaven: Rule in
China
- In Hegel’s system, even the Absolute
(like Chi’en) is not real until
expressed in the world (like K’un).
- According to Chinese political
philosophy and metaphysics, other
restraints on the power of the ruler
exist in the natural order. In classical
Taoist philosophy, the only way to
rule is to dance the dance of ch’i, to
observe how things are going in their
own Tao-inspired way and let them
fulfill their nature. wei-wu-wei (or
sometimes wu-wei), which literally
means “doing without doing.”
The Divine Right to Rule
Royal Families in Europe
- In Europe, hereditary rulers
claimed the right to rule as a
mandate from God.
- Divine right of kings -
influential in France and
England
- The great Bourbon kings of
France — Louis XIII and
Louis XIV (known as the Sun
King)—and the first two
Stuart kings of England —
James I and Charles I
Royal Families in Africa
- The king ruled through the
council of heads of clans and
the whole structure of
subheads and chiefs down to
the level of the village.
- The king was obliged to
behave benevolently toward
the people God had given
him.
Political Theory - addresses the balance of
power between the people and the state.
Liberalism and Conservatism
- liberals favor individual freedom,
whereas conservatives advocate
respect for tradition and established
institutions.
- laissez-faire economics - the
economic theory that if government
stays out of the economy, market
forces will regulate it in a
harmonious and productive manner
that will benefit all
- Adam Smith believed the market
forces of supply and demand would
regulate the economy, and
competition would keep prices
reasonable.
American Constitutional Theory and
Civil Rights
- James Madison, its chief architect,
insisted on a system of checks and
balances to prevent the federal
government from becoming
tyrannical or falling completely
under the influence of a particular
interest group, rather than
representing the interests of all the
people.
- checks and balances- the system by
which each of the three branches of
 the U.S. government restrains the
power of the other two, keeping any
one from becoming too powerful

Three branches of government: executive,

the president and the cabinet agencies;
legislative, the two houses of Congress; and
judicial, the system of courts, culminating
with the Supreme Court.

The U.S. Government and Human Rights

- unjust imprisonment, no protection

of individual rights, torture

• The Constitution reflects the

Enlightenment

- respect for the

individual—advocated by Locke,
Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Stanton,
and Anthony—and balances it with
protection for politically sacred
traditions in the same way that Plato,
Aristotle, Hegel, and Burke wished
to do. A sense of natural law, or the
way things are meant to be, is
blended with respect for natural
rights that belong to citizens from
birth.
- The Republic begins with the
question “What is justice?” and
looks for the answer to this societal
question by examining the nature of
the individuals that make up the
society. A society, the Republic
concludes, is what it is because the
individuals who make it up are what
they are.