Week 8 post 1

Lecture 22:

The dilemmas of loyalty

1. Communitarianism

2. How would a communitarian respond to the claim that our loyalties to family and country are contingent attachments that should carry no moral weight?

1. Although I inherit my family and country by chance, such loyalties are parts of a meaningful narrative and, in this sense, not contingent.

3. Video from documentary Eyes on the Prize

1. 1950s South

2. This land is composed of two different countries, a white country and a colored country. And I live close to them all my life. But I’m told now that we’ve mistreated them and that we must change. And these changes are coming faster than I expected. And I’m required to make decisions on a basis of a new way of thinking, and it’s difficult. It’s difficult for me. It’s difficult for all Southerners.

4. Sandel’s Defense

1. Professor Sandel defends the narrative conception of the person as against the voluntarist conception. He defends the idea that there are obligations of solidarity or membership. To suggest that there being such obligations lends force to the idea, when we turn to justice, that arguments about justice can’t be detached, cannot be detached after all, from questions of the good.

2. A truly virtuous man would come to the aid of the most distant stranger as quickly as to his own friend. If men were perfectly virtuous, they wouldn’t have friends., Montesquieu

3. The deeper problem is that such a world would be difficult to recognize as a human world. The love of humanity is a noble sentiment. But most of the time, we live our lives by smaller solidarities. This may reflect certain limits to the bounds of moral sympathy. But more important, it reflects the fact that we learn to love humanity, not in general, but through its particular expressions

5. It’s important to distinguish two different ways in which justice can be tie to good.

1. One is relativist way. That’s the way that says to think about rights, justice, look to the values that happened to prevail in any given community, at any given time. Don’t judge them by some outside standard but instead conceive justice as a matter of being faithful to the shared understandings of a particular tradition. 

1. But the problem is that it makes justice wholly conventional, a product of circumstance. This deprives justice of its critical character. Sandel suggests this is insufficient.

2. non-relativist view, the case for recognizing a right depends on showing that it honors or advances some important human good

1. The second way of tying justice to the good is not, strictly speaking, communitarian if by communitarian you mean just giving over to a particular community the definition of justice.

6. How can we reason about the good?

7. What about the fact that people hold different conceptions of the good, different ideas about the purposes of key social institutions, different ideas about what social goods and human good are worthy of honor and recognition? People disagree about the good.

1. Is it necessary, is it unavoidable, when arguing about justice, to argue about the good? Yes. It’s unavoidable. It’s necessary.

Lecture 23

Debating same sex marraige

1.  to define people’s rights in a way that doesn’t require the society as a whole to sort out those moral and religious disputes, that would be very attractive

2. There’s a powerful incentive to embrace a conception of justice of the rights that doesn’t require the society, as a whole, to pass judgement, one way or another, on those hotly contested moral and religious questions about the moral permissibility of homosexuality, about the proper ends of marriage as a social institution. 

1. Those who argued against same sex marriage on the grounds that the purpose, or telos, of marriage is at least in part procreation, the bearing and raising of children. 

2. Those who defended same sex marriage contested the telos we don’t require as a condition of hetersexual marriage that couples be able or willing to procreate. 

3. Third position is government get out of the business of recognizing any kind of marriage.

3. Goodridge v.s. Dept. of Public Health (2003)

1. Many people hold deep-seated religious, moral, and ethical convictions that marriage should be limited to the union of one man and one woman, and that homosexual conduct is immoral.

2. Many hold equally strong religious, moral, and ethical conviction that same-sex couples are entitled to be married, that homosexual persons should be treated no differently than their hetersexual neighbors. Neither view answer the question before us.

3. What is at stake is respect for individual autonomy and equality under law. At stake is an individual freely choosing the person with whom to share an exclusive commitment., Massachusetts Supreme Judicial court

4. This stance on this issue is not the moral worth of the choice, but the right of the individual to make it. The one that emphasizes autonomy, choice, consent. But the neutral case doesn’t get you all the way to recognize same sex marriage. 

5. Michael Kinsley

6. In his disestablishment of religion he points out that the reason for the opposition to same sex marriage is that it would go beyond neutral toleration and give same sex marriage a government of approval. That’s at the heart of the dispute.

1. Let churches and other religious institutions offer marriage ceremonies. Let department stores and casinos get into the act if they want to. Let couples celebrate their union in any way they choose and consider themselves married whenever they want.

2. And if three people want to get married, or if one person wants to marry himself or herself, and someone else wants to conduct a ceremony for them and declare them married, let them. If you and your government aren’t implicated, what do you care? Michael Kinsley

7. the court waxes eloquent about marriage one of our community’s most rewarding and cherished institutions and then it goes to extend the definition of marriage to include partners of same sex.

1. In a real sense there are three partners to every civil marriage: two willing spouses and an approving State. Civil marriage is at once a deeply personal commitment, and also a highly public celebration of the ideals of mutuality, companionship, intimacy, fidelity, and family, Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court

8. This is celebrating and affirming marriage as an honorific form of public recognition

9. Not procreation, but the exclusive and permanent commitment of the partners to one another is the essential point and purpose of marriage., Justice Marshall

Lecture 24

The conclusion, Justice and the good life

1. Rawls moral reasoning, reasoning about justice, that he calls reflective equilibrium

2. It’s moving back and forth between our considered judgements about particular cases, and the general principles we would articulate to make sense of those judgements

3. not just stopping there, because we might be wrong in our initial institutions

4.  Not stopping there and sometimes revisiting our particular judgements in the light of the principles once we work them out. So sometimes we revise the principles, sometimes we revise our judgements and institutions in the particular cases.

1. A conception of justice cannot be deduced from self-evident premises. Its justification is a matter of the mutual support of many considerations, of everything fitting together into one coherent view.

2. Moral philosophy is Socratic. We may want to change our present considered judgements once their regulative principles are brought to light. John Rawls

5. Rawls applies to only questions of justice, not to questions of morality and the good life. That’s why he remains committed to the priority of the right over good.

6. Sandel says he doesn't believe there is any difference between the fact of reasonable pluralism in the case of justice and rights and the case of morality and religion. 

7. the respect of deliberation and engagement, seems to Sandel a more adequate more suitable ideal for a pluralist society. And to the extent that our moral and religious disagreements reflect some ultimate plurality of human goods, the politics of moral engagement will better enable us to appreciate the distinctive goods our different lives express

8. “We began with the thought of Kant, that skepticism is a resting place for human reason, where it can reflect upon its dogmatic wanderings, but it is no dwelling place for permanent settlement. To allow ourselves simply to acquiesce in skepticism or in complacence, Kant wrote, can never suffice to overcome the restlessness of reason. The aim of this course has been to awaken that restlessness of reason, and to see where it might lead.”