Two approaches to justice: by model theory vs. by natural history

Transcription

1 Course description (Joseph Almog, Lund University, 4-8 February 2013) Two approaches to justice: by model theory vs. by natural history This project belongs ostensibly in a segregated academic box, political philosophy. But like the early enlightenment Universal Nature theorists we will consider Hobbes, Spinoza, (at one point: Kant) etc. the present proposal aims to remove the segregative boxes and regain a sense of human nature as part of cosmic nature. The project outlined below is no doubt very ambitious, with many ramifications in well developed and sophisticated sub domains of political philosophy. Aware of this variety of sophisticated modern tools, we still seek to submit a new picture that regains a place for man in Nature, and with it perhaps a deeper sense of man than the glories and shine promised by the segregative modern abstract-away-from-nature constructed autonomous rational self individualistic conceptions.. There is one direct way in which we may encapsulate the differences in the methodologies of studying man of Spinoza and Hobbes; the difference spills over to contemporary studies of man and his political modes of being (see our dissection of Rawls in a moment). We need to look at the contrastive approaches of Hobbes and Spinoza to the famous 1789 slogan Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite ( Liberty, Equality, Fraternity ). We trace below how this contrasts leads in modern times to two orthogonal approaches to the theory of justice-- the descendant of the individualist local-to-global Hobbesian-Kantian approach being Rawls's theory (in its many phases) contrasted with a global-to-local approach to justice we would like develop following Spinoza's universal anthropology blueprints. Implicit in the classical 1789 slogan is a view the primality of individual-self freedom submitted by Hobbes and stated very clearly by J.J. Rousseau. The view (as set out in Du contrat social ) primes each individual's innate and inherent freedom; He who dares to undertake the making of a people's institutions ought to feel himself capable, so to speak, of changing human nature, of transforming each individual, who is by himself a complete and solitary whole, into part of a greater whole from which he in a manner receives his life and being; of altering man's constitution for the purpose of strengthening it; and of substituting a partial and moral existence for the physical and independent existence nature

2 has conferred on us all. He must, in a word, take away from man his own resources and give him instead new ones alien to him, and incapable of being made use of without the help of other men. The more completely these natural resources are annihilated, the greater and the more lasting are those which he acquires, and the more stable and perfect the new institutions; so that if each citizen is nothing and can do nothing without the rest, and the resources acquired by the whole are equal or superior to the aggregate of the resources of all the individuals, it may be said that legislation is at the highest possible point of perfection. This then is the elementary particle the rational thinking unit operative in modern individualistic foundations of the chemistry of the state viz. from Hobbes' state of nature to Rawls, with his individuals in the original position Big-Bang moment. The elementary particle of human-communal existence is a disembodied-from-his human-bondage man if man it could still be called that is an abstract point of rationality, a man without natural history. And so is Hobbes' earlier hypothetical model, the state of Nature. This title is a misnomer, for it posits a state that, at least on a universal unfolding Nature cosmology, is not even a logically possible state of Nature for the species of humans (in the plural!). The state from which Hobbes artifactually stipulates the construction of his contract is impossible in the deepest sense for the universal Nature human anthropologist. The one approach kicks away the very human bondage that is necessary for an individual human to exist (and have any existence-preserving conatus) on the dual picture. The constructed humans (in the plural) of Hobbes are not possible humans for Spinoza. In the Hobbesian fictive set-up, and a setting-up of man this arrangement is, social equality comes only after liberty (readers familiar with Rawls' theory will recall the reflection of this point in the lexical priority given in his system to the liberty principle over the difference principle). There is no promise of equality-among-men in one's individual sheer intellectual and cognitive freedom to think-and-will. Some non humans who can reason well will be equal with the properly cognitively skilled humans; some humans who are only partially capable of such reasoning and willing may not be invited to the assembly. Surely humans of 100,000 years ago, with no language and rational gaming strategies would be kept out. As is well known, Kant had his ideas about red copper hair and black African races as not belonging in the assembly, in the midst of preparing a soi disant universal charter of human rights; universal for the equals by all means but some humans are more equal. The key is one's cognitive profile, this last understood to isolate the elixir in some idealized form of rationality.

3 And there are more sharp contrasts on the potent theme of the 1789 trio of ideas. For the localist/individualist, Liberty precedes human fraternity. Fraternity does not have a clear meaning at the outset inside the atomized individualistic framework. Surely, the free thinkers are not a brotherhood in the biological sense (of the cosmic tree of human-life). Some who are our biological brothers may not be intellectually free; some who are not our biological brothers may be as intellectually free as we are. What is more, if the fraternity alluded to is the subsequent placing in a brotherly group, surely there is nothing in one's free thinking-and-willing that entails that one must accept one's membership in any brotherhood, human or otherwise (e.g. the brotherhood of the inter-species rational thinkers). On the methodology of individualistic rational selves, fraternity, even more than equality, is a late and optional add-on. For Spinoza, the metaphysically right order is rather the inverted Fraternity, Equality, Liberty. We begin with fraternity, because this is where we individually- each have to start with this branch of Nature, the human species and it attendant natural manner of staying in existence, by way its vital organs, or social sub-organizations, the states (tribe, polis, etc.) of men. We emerge in history necessarily by way of the human fraternity and one of its state (polis) sub-units, at a certain point in space and time to be is to be an unfolding of humanity and one of its sub-units (see sec 2 of Spinoza's Political Treatise and Ethics IVP37). It is only inside this species-ecology and its natural species-protective sub-units (e.g. a lions' pride, our human polis) that we can contemplate (ii) equality and (iii) liberty. Equality is now built into the humanfraternity--as the species' agents, this is how all of us with no exception come to be. And the message applies further down the cosmic tree--we are not alien to the animals and trees and lakes, etc. and that is something to remember as we live by them. This cosmic fraternity is not a matter of subsequent choice, contract-making or other imposed equal-izing procedures. Furthermore, as advised in the well known Jesus' (Spinoza's-hero) motif of brotherly love to all, the ground is not one of subsequent elective choices but a natural historical fact of common origin, as brother indicates. And finally, what of liberty, our quintessential primitive freedom? For the universal cosmologist turned universal anthropologist that Spinoza is, to be free is to act freely, to act from one's nature. Nothing acts freer or could act freer than Nature(-God), the locus of all action-power (see the natural power=natural right axiom immediately below). We humans are free only when we act, like Nature itself, from and through our nature (itself a development of Nature), and not, as urged by some, against our nature. The

4 more we act-by-nature and join forces inside our natural human fraternity the more powerful in the image of Nature/God itself-- we become. Turning to 'practical plans' on this unified political anthropology front, I will suggest that Rawls' very abstract and powerful account in TJ (and later amplifications) as a testing ground for contrasting (A) the methodology of abstract individualistic essence/conceptual analysis, conducted local to global, versus (B) the global to local universal anthropology methodology of Natureembedded mankind (and Man-kind embedded individual man). Five key questions are on the my blackboard: -1- In his 1974 critique of Rawls, Nozick's Anarchy, State, Utopia laments the abstraction from natural history, from the growth of justice mechanisms in history. As is well known, Nozick' picture leads to an extremely individualisticatomistic theory, way beyond Rawls'. The present approach, also calling for an onto- genesis of man's state, leads to the Nozick-orthogonal deeply communitarian and by necessity ecology of individual human existence. Is a natural historical account of justice by nature libertarian or community bound? -2- Spinoza proposes in his Tractatus Politicus the ground axiom: Natural Power=Natural right. As always, he starts with the ur case of Universal Nature(God), where this identity is axiomatic and then, by the global to local methodology, he shows this applies to each local being (be it a state, a city, a family, an individual). This has been said to support a bully-like Might is Right approach to justice. Yet in Spinoza and in our blueprints, it leads exactly to the opposite viz. a bully is power..less(!) anthropology. Thus, e.g. Hitler is not regarded as eminently naturally powerful; from a universal perspective, not just from a short snapshot, he presents a paradigm of disintegrating self destructive conatus, whereas Spinoza's hero, Jesus, even when plastered on the cross, is mightily naturally powerful. How so? -3- In Rawls' account, justice needs logically! an institution as its cementer; the cement of justice is the state. Without a super state or other kinds of Sovereign unifying all states, how is one to have global justice? On our account (which departs not only from Rawls but also from Nagel's 2005 insightful attenuation of Rawls to get global justice for the plurality of all humans predates any state administered justice. The primary notion of natural right is for the humans-as-such; it merely utilizes as causal enablers local counters states, but also sub-states (as in the USA, with the federal vs. local state) to carry out justice for the original subject of justice, mankind. Thus justice percolates on the Spinoza method, global to local (and not the

5 other way round, local to global, from local states by merely constructed laws (as in Rawls' laws of people ) to laws of a super-state or united nations). -4- In Rawls' own development, there are deep tensions between (i) the (famous) individualistic and thus merely constructivistic local to global principles (magnified in A Theory of Justice theoretical part I) and (ii) his rather global to local... religious sentiments, whereby all humans are united at the outset by being beings from and before God (this has been stressed very beautifully by Jorgen Habermas). We would like to argue that this less known universalist theistic or naturalized thread in Rawls leads to a human anthropology, sometimes hinted in the historically sensitive part III of A theory of Justice and distant from the model theoretic (models for axioms) abstractions of the a-historical original position of part I. -5- Rawls as well as Hobbes and Kant (if not necessarily Locke!) argue that their project is one of justification of principles (or practices or rules). Spinoza, on our understanding, suggests there is no such epistemology of justification to be had (let alone, to lead the charge) anymore that one can have a justificationtheory determine the gravitational principles of the motion of planets. The latter is part of a (as it were) descriptive anthropology of heavenly bodies, viz. how these natural bodies cluster and act on each other. In the same way, the former is again a universal anthropology of these other natural bodies, men, how they orbit each other and cluster together. On this Spinozistic account, a theory of natural historical justice is a human cosmology taken as a branch of universal cosmology. We plan to explain in what way a depiction of just lives (in the plural) in historically just states (again in the plural) is a descriptive anthropology, not a normative constructed ideal theory.