Philosophy 235
Political Philosophy
Fall 2021

Click here for the syllabus.
Also, Expanded Course Outline

Scroll to bottom for newest entry.  Please check this page frequently for announcements, additional reading assignments and videos, web links of interest, and so on.

To begin with, here are some sites you ought to get to know.  Our department web site includes this list of student research tools (with some amusements at the bottom). 

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No course in political philosophy would be complete without this.

Optional additional reading:  The Essential Locke (PDFs and short videos)

Weekly response prompt #1 - you'll recall the syllabus includes this item: "Weekly response: each week, with one or two exceptions, I will ask you to respond to some question or reflect on some problem.  You will reply via email not later than Sunday at noon.  Your reply need not be more than a paragraph, but must demonstrate critical reflection and real engagement with the material."  This one is due Sept. 12th, and remember it must come from your @bridgew email account.   No fancy document formatting needed, just open a new mail message to me and write your brief reply.  Watch this short video on social cooperation - do you think that social cooperation can arise organically, or that, as Hobbes says, this is impossible?

Good explanation of useful concept from econ which we'll be needing.  Margins and Thinking at the Margin

Watch these short videos: More on the different senses of "value."  More on the football helmets example.  More on incentives and why they matter, and how unintended consequences may be a factor.

Weekly response prompt #2 -- Read this short parable by economist Russ Roberts.  Given the two senses of "rational" we discussed in class, explain how the woman at the opera who spoke to Prof. Roberts might be considered rational or irrational.  What sort of behavior is incentivized by the phenomenon Prof. Roberts describes?

Bonus short videos on property rights: one here, another here

Weekly response #3: your thoughts on Prof. Gregory's talk.

Regarding the division of labor and the coordination of dispersed knowledge, see the following two videos First is a video about a sandwich (this is a short version, but it contains links to longer versions), which is apparently another thing no one can really do, at least not without spending thousands of dollars. Then, similarly, a video about someone trying to make a toaster from scratch. These, like the essay "I, Pencil" in your book, demonstrate something not only about Smith's discussion of the division of labor, but also something about Hayek's point about dispersed knowledge. Keeping those in mind, here's
Weekly response prompt #4 -- While we primarily think of markets as competitive, and we often hear these words together, Smith more often offers cooperation as the central feature of market exchange. Can you explain why?

This is helpful. Pin Factory

Optional Additional Reading:
The Essential Smith (PDFs and videos)
The Essential Hayek (PDFs and videos)

First Paper Assignment:
No weekly response this week; get started on your first paper assignment.
First paper assignment: Even though this will be submitted electronically, the paper should be formatted as if for printing: 2-3 pages, double-spaced, in Times New Roman, 12-point, with 1-inch margins on all sides. Do not submit incorrectly formatted papers. Put your name, date, and "PHIL235" on the top right of page 1, and number the pages. Submit via Blackboard. If you have trouble doing that, you may email it as, as an attachment in Word sent from your bridgew.edu email account. This is due in my inbox NLT 9:00 am Thursday October 28.
Topic: Revisit Weekly Response #1 in light of this week's readings and whatever you have said for Weekly Response #4. Do you now have a different understanding of social cooperation as an organic phenomenon? How do the readings from Smith, Hayek, and Read relate to your understanding of social cooperation?

Bonus short videos on the "concentrated benefits/dispersed costs" problem: one here, another here.

Here's the video from Prof. Munger on rent-seeking (you should coordinate this with his essay in chapter 10, p. 449) and  Prof. Thomas on the median voter theorem (this is discussed in the essay by Downs in chapter 10).  In addition to the concepts of "log-rolling" and "rent-seeking," there's also the concept of "regulatory capture."  I started talking about this and we'll continue next week, but here's some reading on how regulatory capture is facilitated by voter ignorance.  Also: not only is there corn in Coke, but there's corn in gasoline also.

Optional additional reading to supplement ch. 10 - e-text at this link:  https://iea.org.uk/publications/research/public-choice-a-primer

For weekly response this week (5): your thoughts on Prof. Jaworski's presentation.

My short column on occupational licensure.  (Related column here.)   And here's a longer, well-sourced article on occupational licensure.

Optional additional reading: The Essential Nozick (PDFs and videos)

WR 6: One way to think about Nozick's criticism of Rawls is the idea that Rawls' attempt to distinguish economic liberties from political or civil liberties is not satisfactory. What are your thoughts on that?

Two more short videos on Rawls and Nozick  here and here. 

Weekly response #7: We've considered several perspectives on justice and inequality.  Some room for economic inequality seems advantageous (Rawls contra Marx), but what should our response be to extreme levels of inequality?  Frankfurt argues that we should be concerned with poverty, not inequality per se.  Either way though, one response is redistribution: policies that transfer resources from the higher quintiles to the lower.  Two sorts of objections arise to that: one is a rights-based objection that such redistribution, if non-consensual, violates rights (Nozick contra Rawls); and the other is a pragmatic objection about how certain redistributive mechanisms create disincentives to productivity, as illustrated in this short video.   The other response was to note that there are often structural barriers to economic advancement.  (More here.)  Note that in some cases, the barriers were deliberately designed to be disempowering to minorities, while in other cases they were not designed to be so but neverthless have that effect.  Still others do not track race or sex but nevetheless make it difficult for lower-income people to become higher-income.
What are your thoughts on entrepreneurship and inequality?

Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility:

Two short videos on mobility, here and here.

Also, see this article by Prof. Roberts

Decrease in global poverty.  Global poverty was 94% in 1820, 34.8% in 1990, and 9.6% by 2015.   (Or visualize it this way.)  That's quite amazing.  

Here is Prof. Deirdre McCloskey on global poverty and the "hockey stick" graph:
"What…caused this Great Enrichment? Not exploitation of the poor, …but a mere idea, which the philosopher and economist Adam Smith called “the liberal plan of equality, liberty and justice.” In a word, it was liberalism, in the free-market European sense. Give masses of ordinary people equality before the law and equality of social dignity, and leave them alone, and it turns out that they become extraordinarily creative and energetic. …we eventually need capital and institutions to embody the ideas, such as a marble building with central heating and cooling to house the Supreme Court. But the intermediate and dependent causes like capital and institutions have not been the root cause. The root cause of enrichment was and is the liberal idea, spawning the university, the railway, the high-rise, the internet and, most important, our liberties. "
 

That's the segue: We will begin the unit on democracy and freedom on Thursday.

That story about IBM and Microsoft I keep mentioning: Here's a clip from a movie about this that explains what I was telling you about.  Strictly speaking, I should have posted this weeks ago, but just in case you're still interested, here it is.

Shipping Containers: These two  videos.  (The 2nd link is the one we saw in class; the first is different.)

Additional Material on Democracy and Voting:
Prof. Brennan on cognitive biases affecting voter behavior and  why he opposes compulsory voting

Also: Majoritarian voting seems quite simple, but turns out to engender a variety of paradoxes, independently of Brennan's argument and Plato's criticisms.  Here are some short videos on voting paradoxes.  Gray on "First Past the Post" voting, Prof. Thomas on the Condorcet Paradox, Prof. Munger on majority rule.

RE Brennan's argument concerning cognitive bias and other irrationality in the formation of our political beliefs, here's the video from class  How Not to Be Ignorant About the World 

Here's the Gapminder foundation quiz we looked at.

While we're here, one more video by Hans Rosling. This is a very moving illustration of ways to help (or not help) with problems of global poverty.

WR 8: After you've gone through the material above: what are some suggestions you might have as to the various problems with democratic voting? You probably don't favor a return to monarchy, but these problems seem quite real. What are your thought on this?

WR 9: As Munger mentioned in the video above, democracy can be at odds with a robust conception of rights, at least if we think of democracy as majority rule.  See this parable from philosopher Robert Nozick: The Tale of the Slave.  What's your response to Nozick's question?  How can rights be reconciled with majoritarian democracy?

Chapter 13 mini-lesson and WR 10 prompt:
We have looked at several dimensions of analyzing policy making. Generally we see a stated intention and an observed effect. The effect might be what was intended, or not what was intended. In another range of cases, there's a stated intention, and a real intention, and the observed effect may be what was really intended, despite not aligning with the stated intention. So:
SI --> OE -- great
SI --> ~OE -- bad news
SI/TI --> OE that fits TI/~OE with respect to SI
So, recall the issue of hairdresser licensure - if the TI is "reduce competition," then OE is what it's just what it’s supposed to be! But that doesn't serve the general public; and the SI, with its public-safety rationale, may be satisfied, but with no way to tell whether the regulation was necessary for that, or if the trade-off is worth it.
Now: Consider minimum wage legislation.
*What is the stated intention? (Poorly paid workers in low-skill jobs need a higher wage.)
*Which groups are primarily affected? ((a) Workers who have those jobs, (b) people looking for jobs, (c) employers, (d) customers.)
*What are their incentives? (Workers’ incentives are to increase their own productivity so as to command higher wage; unemployed people’s incentive is to get a job; customers’ incentives are to save money; employers’ incentives are to pay workers enough so as not to lose them to other employers but also to make a profit (in other words, if the employee contributes 5 dollars in value, and I pay 4, I turn a profit, but if another employer pays 4.50, I lose the employee. If I pay above 5, I’m losing money on that employee.))
*Can you imagine a different intention other than the stated intention? (For group (c), one possible intention would be to make life difficult for their competitors – I have a large firm and can pay 15/hr, but my competitor, a small upstart, can barely manage to pay 14/hr, so a mandatory minimum wage doesn’t hurt me that much but is devastating to my rival. For group (a), one possible intention is to increase my value by keeping the people in (b) out of the labor market. For group (d), especially if they’re Candice-types, another possible intention would be to help people in (b).)
*What countervailing effects might result? (If the employee contributes 5 dollars in value, but I am legally required to pay 6, I might let that person go, or not hire someone in the first place. Remember the lawn-mowing example: at 200 bucks, I’ll do it myself, but if it were only 20 bucks, I’d certainly pay someone else to do it. Another countervailing effect is that the (a) group succeeds in keeping (b) group out of the work force.)
Thinking back to Prof. Jaworski's presentation, do you see how this model for analyzing problems applies to that one as well?Now, let’s consider the issues in chapter 13.
In general, it’s most helpful to think in terms of the following template:
What is the actual problem (P)?
What is the proposed solution (S)?
Now ask: will S actually solve P? Will S make P worse in some way? Will S create a new problem? In many cases, these questions can be answered empirically. This is a great advantage to doing political philosophy with a PPE methodology.
So, for example, the second section of chapter 13 deals with drugs. What is the problem (P)? (a) drugs used improperly can be harmful, and (b) some people regard intoxication as immoral. What is the proposed solution (S)? Ban drugs. Note first of all that there is a purely philosophical approach one might take here: one might invoke the principle “hey, it’s my choice whether to seek intoxication, no one else’s. As long as I don’t drive (etc) under the influence, it’s my own business. There’s a rights issue at stake here, so S is not a good solution.” Call this the first way.
True or not, though, this principle won’t be persuasive for people who hold some contrary principle, such as “it’s not a proper use of your freedom to harm yourself with intoxicating substances” or “the social disutility created by drug users is greater than the utility achieved by drug users” and so on. So it might be more productive to use the three questions in the template.
Now: what results do we observe in this case? Since people want drugs, banning them creates a black market. When a product is only available this way, we see prices go up, increased crime, and increased corruption. The price increases incentivize substitutions which tend to be worse (e.g., the transition from cocaine to crack to meth). So, people still use drugs, health outcomes are worse as the products become even more dangerous, and large-scale crime and corruption have been added on top. That sounds like S is not a good solution. Note that concluding “S is not a good solution” this way, call it the second way, has greater potential to be persuasive than the first way, even if the first way is true. Why? Because people who disagree about the first way are disagreeing about moral principles which it’s hard to get people to agree about (not impossible of course, much of philosophy is precisely about trying to figure out which principles we should have), whereas people who disagree about the second way should (if they’re being honest) be responsive to new facts. And then we can start to think of other possible solutions.
For WR 10 (last one!), run a similar exercise for another section in chapter 13: prostitution, organ sales, sweatshops, or price gouging. (For fun, try doing it before you do the readings, then after doing the readings, see if you have cause to rethink anything.) We'll discuss these on 12/2 and 12/7.

Second paper assignment:
You can also get started on your second essay assignment, which is due 12/13. Like the first paper, this should be 3 or so pages, formatted as if for print in Times New Roman 12-point font with 1-inch margins, page numbering on, your name, date, and "PHIL235" on the top right of page 1, and submitted electronically via Blackboard. This should be a WORD doc (meaning the file name ends in .doc or .docx), and if for some reason you cannot upload to BB, email it as an attachment. Most of you were able to upload last time with no trouble.
Topic: Thinking about what you wrote for WR 7 (4 might be relevant also), what policies and institutions will most effectively help people who aren't wealthy get more wealthy? Does your answer scale up to global poverty, or is it US-specific?