Hamdan, Johanna B.
of school, black/white/brown- be
PHIHUM - A
Political philosophy - focuses on the
relationship between the individual and the
state and considers where the rights of one
end and the rights of the other begin.
Social philosophy - we look at a related set
of questions that arise out of the tension (or
lack of it) between the individual and the
community
The Issue Defined
- 1980 - In Japanese culture, it is the
group that matters, and the success
of the team that makes the well-built
car is shared. You cannot build a car
by yourself, but you can do your job
as well as you possibly can.
- 18th century - In Europe and
England, it was the family and the
village that mattered; their survival
was the goal, and each individual
had a part to play.
Communalism - one-for-all, all-for-one
village or workgroup, tribe, or team. In
communal society, the poor and the mentally
and physically ill are the community’s
responsibility.
- The primary philosophical issue of
social philosophy is rooted in
whether we see our own welfare and
the welfare of others as connected or
separate.
- “Am I my brother’s or my sister’s
keeper?”- is someone else’s
misfortune also my problem as a
fellow human being, or is it that
person’s problem, which I am free to
ignore?
- Should everyone- male or female,
rich or poor,
employed or unemployed, in or out
subject to an involuntary military
draft, or should the future mother,
the wealthy person who can pay for
the substitute, or the person with
special talents be exempt?
Doing philosophy (Freedom versus
Tradition)
- Excesses of individualism in our
own society have caused some to
fear that we are losing touch with
valuable traditions. Where does the
balance lie? At what point must the
power of the state, and when must
they bow to the enduring value of
respected tradition?
Classical Theories of Justice
Justice in the Polis: Plato
- Plato argued that we must begin by
looking at how individuals are
constituted. If we can decide what
makes an effective individual, we
will be well on the way to knowing
what makes an effective society.
- In book 2 of the Republic: Socrates
suggests that justice may be easier to
grasp when observed on a larger
scale, in the life of the city. Justice in
the polis will also be justice for the
individual.
- Polis – “city-state” but for Plato,
Aristotle, and their contemporaries, it
was much more than a political
entity, much more than what we
mean today by the word state.
- It was the source of culture as well as
government, and it was where
citizens received training virtue.
Aristotle - claimed that to live apart from
the polis, one would have to be either a beast
or a god.
Pericles - “We make our polis common to
all”
- he meant much more than outsiders
might live in the city; he offered the
gift of the common cultural life of
Athenians and non-Athenians alike,
and he invited all to share in the
development of mind and character a
well-formed society provides
Chapter 9: Social Philosophy - Am I My
Brother’s or my Sister’s Keeper?
Socrates - argues that justice is not the right
of the stronger but the effective harmony of
the whole. In other words, justice is having
and doing what is one’s own. Each person
must do what he or she is fit to do so that
both the individual and society will prosper.
- further explained that the three
elements of a person correspond to
three classes in society, each
governed by one of the three
qualities.
1. Producers who desire to enjoy the
fruits of their labor.
2. The farmers and artisans in the
Republic provide for the bodily
needs of all, and their function
corresponds to the desiring element
in a person.
3. Soldiers perform the function that
corresponds to the spirited element
in the person; they live a spartan life
and guard the safety and security of
the city.
According to the argument in the Republic,
society is just only when each person does
what is proper for him or her to do, what he
or she is suited by nature to do.
the good of the community because each
assumes that like people will be treated
Molding Citizens for Society: Aristotle
- found harmony to be the key to
happiness.
- “golden mean” between two
extremes that forms the core of the
Nicomachean Ethics finds its
counterpart in Aristotle’s Politics
- ‘For if what was said in the Ethics is
true, that the happy life is the life
according to virtue, live without
impediment, and that virtue is a
mean, then the life which is in a
mean, and in a mean attainable by
everyone, must be the best.”
- very critical of Plato’s Republic
because of its radical proposals and
because it set out to describe the
ideal state. For Aristotle, what really
matters is not what state is best in
theory, but what kind of state is
possible in practice.
- agree with Plato that the key to good
government was the type of
education the state afforded its
citizens. Plato’s elaborate system and
shaping the philosopher-king is
echoed in Aristotle assertion, “The
citizen should be molded to suit the
form of government under of
different sorts of people, makes a
state system of education not only
desirable but also necessary; only by
such a system can a plurality be
made into a community.
- contented that is not the desires of
the individual but the needs of the
state that should dictate the content
and methods of public education.
“Neither must we suppose that any
one of the citizens belongs to
himself, for they all belong to the
state.”
Both Plato and Aristotle focus on
similarly, we might say that they conceive of
justice in terms of merit, but neither assumes
a completely egalitarian society in which
natural rights might determine how a citizen
interacts with government. Both assume a
hierarchical society in which some will rule
and others will be ruled. They agree that a
kind of benevolent dictatorship would be the
most ideal form of government because the
ordinary mass of people is simply not to be
trusted with important decisions; people
cannot rely upon act rationally.
System of justice based on merit - people
get what they deserve commensurate with
their innate abilities and their status in
society.
In Plato’s Republic
- the guardians are allowed and
expected to rule but are prohibited
from owning private property and
from marrying and raising their own
children individually. People are
unable to “earn” or “achieve” their
way to a higher social status.
Although people are treated fairly
because each person gets what he or
she merits.
Utilitarianism as a Measure of Justice
- Utilitarianism - the theory that
action is right or just actions are
those that ordinarily produce the
greatest amount of happiness and the
least amount of unhappiness in the
world at large.
- Utilitarians argue that the social
good or the good of society is what
really matters.
- Utilitarians believe that we should be
honest about seeking pleasure and
trying to avoid pain, rather than
dressing up those desires in abstract
language and pretending they are
divinely decreed.
- Utilitarianism is a sort of social
hedonism.
Plato and Aristotle - What is most useful,
or utilitarian? Their answer was “more
pleasure and less pain for the greatest
number of people.
Ludwig Feuerbach - humans have a strong
tendency to project their own human
characteristics, including their needs and
wants, onto God.
Hedonism - the individual hedonist seeks
pleasure for herself or himself, whereas the
social hedonist seeks pleasure for the
society.
British political theorists, their concept of
justice focuses on the distribution of
pleasure and pain.
Jeremy Bentham
- The first modern utilitarian had in
mind exactly this kind of
mathematical conception of pleasure
over pain.
- A British critic and a supporter of
sequent revolt in 1776, declared the
U.S the only existing one that upheld
utilitarian principles.
- Bentham’s theory- moral dilemmas
can become a sort of arithmetic
exercise in which we add up the
units of pleasure and pain and
subtract one from the other.
- The quantity of pleasure mattered
most; the greater quantity of
pleasure, the more desirable and
useful the result.
- Hedonic calculus, Bentham’s method
of calculation offers a guide to what
is good and what is bad both for the
individual and for society
John Stuart Mill
- Nineteenth-century utilitarian
philosopher
- quality of pleasure over mere
quantity of pleasure
- only those who have experienced
both are
competent to judge which is better
- applied the principle of quality over
quantity
- saw the family as the prototype for
society
Harriet Taylor Mill
- Women, although intelligent, were
often so limited in their concerns by
societal restrictions that they could
not help but drag their husbands
down morally and intellectually.
- “if they associate only with
principles”
- Equality of rights for women
Mills - pleasure over pain Justice Expressed
as Fairness
Mary Wollstonecraft and Elizabeth
Candy Stanton - argued from a belief in
natural rights and from the Enlightenment
presupposition of the inherent natural
quality of all human persons.
The Alienation of Workers: Karl Marx
Alienation - the estrangement of workers
from their work, their fellow citizens, and
ultimately themselves as the direct result of
capitalism’s
exploitative nature.
- A just society would be one in which
people were
not alienated from their work and
their lives because of the destructive
relations flowing from capitalism.
- By selling your labor, you became a
kind of wage slave. Capital, or
money, became the only means of
exchange and a kind of god.
- He rejected the idea that individuals
can be made happy without
transforming the structures of the
society in which they live.
1. The Equal Liberty and Difference
Principles: John Rawls
- He is a social philosopher that shares
the belief that fairness or equality is
the true test of justice
- A theory of Justice- rejects the
utilitarian of justice as inherently
indifferent to the fate of
Individuals
- Equal liberty principle- primary
condition of
justice that insists people must be
treated equally and be guaranteed
minimum natural rights
- Difference principle- permission to
treat people differently as long as the
least well-off benefit from different
treatment
- Original position- a hypothetical
situation in which “no one knows his
place in society, his class position or
status, nor does anyone know his
fortune in the distribution of natural
assets and abilities, his intelligence,
strength and the like.
2. The Theory of Entitlement: Robert
Nozick
- Entitlement theory - justice should
be conceived in terms of entitlements
rather than in terms of fairness or
equality.
- fairness does not lie in wealth
redistribution, as Rawls seems to
 suggest, but rather in safeguarding
what people have legitimately
acquired and are entitled to keep.
- values liberty over equality, so he is
concerned about protecting the rights
of individuals
Justice in Buganda
- Justice to operate according to
societal norms, rather than according
to an elaborate code of laws.
- Fairness was defined within the
context of societal norms rather than
individual rights.
- Philosopher E. Wamala- in a
traditional society
the individual and the community are
more closely intertwined than in a
large industrial and technological
nation.
Consensus - a meeting of minds after
rational discussion and the give and take of
dialogue.
good from our idea of others and
their own good.
- Diane Glancy- Who thinks of justice
unless he knows injustice?
- Mary Delariviare Manley- Justice
waist upon the great, Interest holds
the scale, and Riches turns the
balance.
- Mohandas K. Gandhi- We must be
the change we wish to see in the
world.
- Martin Luther King Jr.- Freedom
is not free.
- Fannie Lou Hamer- Nobody’s free
until everybody’s free.
- Ethics considers individual moral
decision-making.
- Justice can be secured and a healthy
state established only if individual
citizens act in an ethically sound
manner.

- Justice was that which would enable

the values of the community to
continue, and a stable society was
both more important than and
inseparable from the needs of
individuals.

Marx and Rawls both insist that overall

social good is achieved at the expense of
fundamental rights, justice has not been
served. They understood that fairness begins
with human rights and that only after human
rights are secured can we move on to a
discussion of the social good.

- John Dewey - We cannot think of

ourselves as to some extent of social
beings. Hence, we cannot separate
the idea of ourselves and our own