The moral significance of nations

Nations were a very significant feature of the affluent moral landscape. As one affluent philosopher put it, “A nation is a community constituted by shared belief and mutual commitment, extended in history, active in character, connected to a paricular territory, and marked of from other communities by a distinct public culture”. Most affluent people believed that co-nationals had special obligations to one another; that national identity was a vital part of each individual's identity; and that nations themselves had special rights, privileges and obligations. Every affluent state was a nation state, claiming authority over specific people within a particular territory.

Not everyone agreed. (Affluent philosophers were seldom unanimous about anything.) Cosmopolitans (“citizens of the world”) denied the moral significance of nations altogether. They argued that all moral obligations are universal and the only significant “community” is humanity as a whole. But most affluent philosophers were pragmatic. Nations were a fact of (affluent) life. If you wanted to talk about justice, the nation state was the only game in town. Justice was a virtue of political instituions, and such instituions existed only within nations, as did the solidarity needed to generate obedience to anything beyond Nozick's minimal state.

Affluent philosophers lived in liberal democracies. They also largely approved of this form of social organization. Both their experience and their attitude were historical anomalies. Pre-affluent societies were resolutely undemocratic. And while pre-affluent political philosophy was dominated by the question of who should rule, virtually no one defended anything remotely resembling affluent-style democracy. Hobbes and Locke disagreed over the best system of government. But they both distanced themselves from radical democratic ideas such as the notion that men without property (or any woman) should be allowed to vote. By Rawls's time, these once-radical ideas were almost universally accepted.

In this lecture, we explore the affluent justification of democracy. We also draw together themes from all previous parts of the course. Democratic assumptions and ideals permeated affluent philosophy. Libertarians, utilitarians and social-contract theorists each had their own story about democracy's value and legitimacy.

If we were to follow our earlier practice, we would close this part of the course with questions such as the following. Does democracy have any lessons for our broken world? Is majority rule only appropriate in favourable conditions, or could voting be legitimate today? If so, under what constraints? Affluent people were tragically unworthy of their democratic responsibilities.

teacher: Today, instead of a regular lecture, three graduate students who are studying a. uent utilitarianism will present a short philosophical debate. Each is playing a role, and should not be held accountable for the views they express. (You will recognize the parti cipants, but I shall anonymize them for the transcript.) Let me set the scene. Imagine three inhabitants of our broken world, each a proponent of one utilitarian traditi on. act favours act uti litarianism, hedonism and total utilitarianism. rule favours moderate rule utilitarianism. institution concentrates on the utilitarian evaluation of institutions. They are familiar with debates from the affluent world, but they focus today on the applicati on of utilitarianism to our broken world. The debate opens with rule posing a challenge for act.

rule: I admire the simplicity and directness of your theory. But isn't it extremely demanding in our broken world?

act: Yes. Act utilitarianism is extremely demanding. But that is old news. It was extremely demanding even in the most favourable of human situations. Every agent, on every occasion, must perform the one action that best promotes aggregate human happiness. This demand remains constant. No one who accepted act utilitarianism in the affluent world would have any reason to abandon it now. Quite the reverse. Act utilitarianism is more plausible now.

The broken future

Nozick's proviso was not straightforward in an affluent world with a bright future. But we now know that the unconstrained exercise of property rights caused dangerous climate change. So we should imagine a free society with a broken future. Suppose I am an initial acquirer in that world. To satisfy Nozick's proviso, I must now be confident that no one in the broken future will be worse off than in a world without property. This is a tall order. In our (real-life) broken world, many people now argue that we should abandon our faltering at empts to resurrect industrial civilization and return to primitive ways of life. These people would certainly prefer Stone Age life in an unbroken world, but that option is lost. They insist that past acquisition has harmed them. Given his objection to paternalism, how could Nozick have disagreed?

Nozick wrote before humans understood climate change. Suppose he had realized that his world had a broken future. How might he have defended his theory? He might have simply denied that his free society could ever have a broken future. Climate changing behaviour either is irrational or violates property rights. This is not how free rational agents behave. (This would obviously have made the gulf between Nozick's fantasy world and affluent reality even wider.

Affluent act utilitarians said that individuals should choose the act that maximizes human well-being. Rule utilitarians sought rules and institutions to maximize human well-being. Both had to decide what human well-being is, how it is measured and how we compare one person's well-being to another's. utilitarians were not alone here. Most affluent philosophers gave well-being some moral significance. Consider Nozick's proviso, where we ask whether his institution of property leaves future people better off. We can't answer this question unless we know what is good or bad for people.

We first introduce some terminology. Affluent philosophers often used other terms, such as “welfare” and “happiness”, but these had distracting connotations. Happiness suggested a preoccupation with pleasure, while welfare suggested a focus on money or health. Some went to the other extreme and spoke of “whatever makes life worth living”. That would prolong our lectures unnecessarily. As a compromise, I suggest the neutral term “well-being”.

While particular affluent views about well-being may be alien to us, the basic idea is familiar. We all think about well-being all the time: when we ask whether some parti cular experience will be good or bad; when you look back on your life and list the things that made it go well or badly; when you meet two people and ask who is better off ; when a friend seeks your advice on a major life choice, and you wonder what would be better for her; when you ask whether your life will go better if you become a lawyer or a philosopher.

Welcome to “Ancient Philosophy III: American and European philosophy in the age of affluence”. I shall be your facilitator for this module. Today, I introduce our topic, and situate it in historical ti me and logical space.

Before we look at the philosophy itself, we first explore its historical context. The age of affluence lies immediately before the dark times from which our present global civilizations are still emerging. It was a brief period, lasting only some two or three centuries, but a crucial time in human history. This was the time when humans caused catastrophic climate change: the age of the breaking of the world. Although not so distant in purely temporal terms – ending only a handful of generations ago – the affluent age seems very remote from our own. Affluent people do seem to live in another world. This most recent historical epoch is also the most inaccessible.

Our task is to understand affluent philosophy, and to apply it to our own times. We must imagine the affluent world, and ask how an affluent philosopher would see our world. I will employ two imaginary time-travellers: one who travels back from our own time to the affluent age, and an affluent traveller transported forward to our world.

As this is not a course in history or comparative anthropology, we focus on very general differences between the age of affluence and our own world.

The main affluent alternative to utilitarianism was the social-contract traditi on, where justice was modelled as a bargain or agreement between rational individuals. Affluent courses in political philosophy often began with two pre-affluent philosophers who both lived three centuries earlier, at a crucial time in the development of affluent political institutions. To understand affluent contract theory, we begin in the same place.

Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes lived through a destructive civil war that caused the deaths of 800,000 people in a population of five million. For Hobbes, civil war was to be avoided at any cost; it not only caused great loss of life, but also made everyone insecure. Hobbes used his experience of civil war to imagine a state of nature. It was a grim place.