Politics, Ethics and Practice
Class 1 - introduction
Specialty: validity of research, estimates of feasibility, strategy for creating the right kind of
support/legitimacy is important. In all use of power and influence, what matters is not just winning
but ‘deserving to win’, not legitimacy as support but also as ‘being in the right’, moral grounding,
justifiability. Where: government, lobby groups, consultancy, private sector, NGOs, scientific
bureaus and think tanks, under-organized protest resistance movements
Elsberg (the original whistleblower)– pentagon papers: including secret and incriminating
information about the Vietnam war, military miscalculations > bad for US government, Elsberg
leaks information to the new York times and the Washington post because he believes people are
being lied to, government didn’t make a strong enough case to restrict the press
How to apply your knowledge (codes of conduct): APSA (American Political Science Association)
NKWP (Dutch version, show research methods, collection of data, etc.)
When advising, what doesn’t work? Wolff: top down advice/ ideal theory doesn’t work
Popper: ideal theory of utopian engineering, look at the world as if all factors in the world
can be controlled perfectly without error
Wolff: philosophy is academic extremism and outrageous ideas (Lock: strong positions, Sen:
ideal theory), ideal theory works only as a lab experiment under ideal conditions:
o Inspiration, direction (De Geus on utopianism)
o Mirror (of princes) of both motives and behaviour
o ‘dark universe’: discover unwanted implications
Ideal theory doesn’t work in the real world (3): no room to agree to disagree, bias for the
status quo, support trumps morality (legitimation trumps legitimacy)
What works – overlapping consensus (≠Rawls): politics is there not to create a consensus on values/
principles but on the way to work around those values: the practices
Not too explicitly mentioned in Wolff:
o Rawls & Habermas: reflective equilibrium & hersschaftsfreier Diskurs
o Deliberation (reflection to find out what we all want) vs reason
o ‘deep’ consensus: not just agreement but reasonable agreement
Understand before you criticize: what created the current practice & what has made it
relatively stable? > wisdom of ancestors/conservatism even in revolutionary moments
Identify causes of moral difficulties and differences
Then test all parties’ positions on possible changes
How to test positions: not just for weaknesses but also for strengths, respecting the ‘burdens
of judgement’ (the demands of the reasonable), can any party, you included, ‘reasonable
reject’ anything?
Then and only then can we construct consensus on course of action: only then formulate
arguments in support (= squaring legitimation and legitimizing), bottom-up consensus
building
critical footnote: there are limits to how far you want to go in compromising
There are limits to what can be proven (burdens of judgment), to be reasonable is to respect those
limits, to be reasonable is tough:
Not reject ideas as unproven/unprovable but accept them as potentially sensible
Not expect others to make room for your ideas but make room for their ideas yourself
Wolff - Introduction
In public life, policy is needed. Start from where you are and move forward by drawing people into a
consensus view. In the public policy arena, debate differs from abstract moral argument in at least
3 ways: 1) little space for ‘agreeing to disagree’: some policy is needed 2) inevitable bias towards
the status quo 3) the view being widely shared is most important (not if it’s right)
, Public reason
The burdens of judgment (Rawls): the many risks involved in the correct exercise of our powers of
reason and judgment in the ordinary course of political life, examples:
empirical and scientific evidence is often complex and conflicting/contradictory
we may reasonably disagree about the relative weight of different considerations
concepts are vague and subject to hard cases (e.g. tracking apps for corona)
Class 2 – Ethics: the basics
Ethics and non-ethics: facts do not exits, the truth is not out there > facts are constructed, which is
where philosophy comes in (ontology-what is, epistemology-how can we know?, ethics-what to do?)
Standards: there are no standards for the truth of philosophy (goodness, rightness,
correctness, adequacy, decency, plausibility, beauty etc.), standards are the/an object of
research in philosophy
o Baron Münchhausen as the ultimate philosopher: fictive person that tells stories
about amazing adventures > constructing standards without having standards to fall
back on
When is a fact a fact?
o Correspondence theory: something is a fact if what I say about it corresponds with
what is happening, proposition p corresponds to phenomenon f, presumes a prior p’
and/or f’ (all you see and experience is constructed)
o Coherence: something is true when it fits in with previous propositions, p is more or
less likely to be true the more/less it is logically consistent within a set P of
propositions, we’ve lost our hold on reality (find truth in terms of consistency)
Logic:
o Classical logic: true/false (all sorts of subtypes, syllogistic, propositional etc.)
o Fuzzy logic: there can be truth in multiple answers (the end of all pub quizzes)
o Citizen’s logic (no law against it)
Ethics: just as fuzzy as logic/”facts”
o historically slow movement away from ontology, tao, homologonmenoos tè phusei
(harmony with nature), gods determined human/animal divide
o 1700-1750 - virtue (Greek/Chinese): capacity that is both useful for you and for
society, allows you to flourish in your own context, is implies ought
o Sein und sollen, is and ought, anything goes (Kant/ Hume/ De Sade): just because it is
a sort of way doesn’t mean it should be, facts and norms are different things, but
note to continuation of naturalism in non-deontology
2 levels in ethics: theories of the good vs theories on the measures of the good:
o theories of the good (three schools of virtue ethics):
Aristotle, Plato, Greeks & Romans: the natural, society and context determine
virtues
Augustine, Thomas, the Church: the divine, virtues became absolute, virtues
were frozen
Machiavelli: back to nature onto utility > virtues unfroze, consequentialist
virtues are means to an end
Foot & Nussbaum: virtues as flourishing in life and society,
o theories on the measures of the good: relativism and absolutism (main positions),
tactical compromise (Habermas & Rawls)
Rejection of relativism (‘your feeling of pain is a sheer fact’): leaves us with no
reason (except circular reasoning) to minimize suffering – makes maximizing
just as rational
But also a rejection of absolute standards (unrealistic)
Habermas – hersschaftsfreier Diskurs
Rawls - Reflective equilibrium: finding principles for civil society to keep our
differences while living together in this diversity, never permanent (e.g. in the
past it would say the men should work and women cook)
,Consequentialism: do what is necessary to life by your own definition of a good life, things are good
because they are a means to an end (can’t justify this end though), countless schools
Happiness, eudaimonia: more than the short joy, it’s a state of being, everlasting
Enlightenment revolution (Helvetius, Bentham) utilitarianism: the sum of pleasure and pain
> Mill’s reformed utilitarianism: distinction between higher and lower pleasures, harm
principle (do whatever you want as long as you don’t hurt others), freedom & experience,
room for nudging (Thaler & Sunstein): try to make people make the choices you want them
to > e.g. healthy foods in supermarkets are on eye-level and unhealthy foods are more
unreachable/ unsee-able
Deontology:
Duty-based deontology (Kant): remove goals, what remains is duty (deon), the intrinsically
good, the universalizable, the categorical imperative. e.g.: capital punishment, something
that everyone universally accepts
Rights-based deontology (Rawls & Nozick): foundation of human rights, duty vs
supererogatory duty (doing things beyond duty, e.g. giving a beggar money in a welfare
state)
Humans are autonomous & there is a genuine is/ought gap (dirty hands lecture)
The mantra: intention – act – result / virtue – deontology – consequentialism
real word: all three are used (most of Wolffs cases)
Capabilities and virtues:
Rawls states that justice must be measured by primary social goods > Beyond Rawls:
o Sen: primary social good does not adequately represent the meaning or worth of a
thing, e.g. a euro doesn’t have the same worth to a disabled person
o Nussbaum: Rawls’ theory only works under conditions of sufficiency – limited idea of
justice, not just measure justice when there is “enough” but also when this is not the
case
Required for a life worth living (flourishing):“Capabilities” allowing “functionings”, link to
classic virtue; capacity enabling flourishing.
Virtue back with a vengeance
McNaughton & Rawling – deontological ethics
Consequentialism claims people have a moral duty to do as good as possible (agent-neutral).
Deontology denies this, and asserts that there are several distinct duties, not all of which depend
for their status as duties on considerations of value alone (Humans as a goal not as a means to it).
Certain acts are intrinsically right and others are intrinsically wrong, agent-relative
moral theory. Example: pornography, as long as not disadvantages are proven its good vs it abuses
women so it is bad
Two types of duties withing deontology:
Constraints: we treat others regardless of our relationship with them, some ways of treating
people are ruled out (torturing > prevent this)
Duties of special relationship: actions towards those we stand in a special relationship with,
one is required to do certain things for friends even if you could make the world better by
not doing this
When to do good, 2 opinions
There is a requirement to do good whenever there is no other duty more pressing.
We only have to do some good in addition to fulfilling our other obligations. There is no
moral requirement to do good, and claim that provided we breach no duty we are permitted
to live as we see fit.
Some deontologists justify the various duties they propose by appealing to some more fundamental
and unifying principles while other claim that such justification is not available. Deontologists can
agree about surface features, such as the extent of our duties, while disagreeing about the
possibility of an underlying rationale.
, Deontology provides no procedure to settle conflicts of duty, one’s duty does not rest (wholly) on
the goodness or badness of the results of acting in that way.
Mill – utilitarianism
Intuitive vs inductive schools of ethics: both believe in general laws, the morality of an action is not
a question of direct perception but of the application of a general law to an individual case, morality
must be deduced form principles (“science of morals”)
differences: evidence and the source from which they get authority:
Intuitive school of ethics: principle of morals are evident, one only has to understand the
meaning of the concepts
Inductive school of ethics: right and wrong are questions of observation and experience
Utilitarianism/ happiness theory: actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness
and wrong when they produce the reverse of happiness, happiness is made up by pleasure with the
absence of pain
There is a qualitative difference between different forms of pleasure, otherwise it would be
a philosophy of swine’s in which humans are the same as animals
o Mental over physical pleasure > difference in quality of pleasures: looking at the
preference of those who have experienced both and thus have means for
comparison
o Creativity and intellect lead to more happiness than hapiness based on human
senses (eating, sex etc.) > rather an unhappy wise man than a happy fool > wise
man can see more than just his own side
Ultimate end: existence exempt as far as possible from pain and as rich as possible in
enjoyments, both in quantity and quality
Objections: what right does someone have to be happy? Happiness should not be the end of
morality or any rational conduct. If humans are thought to think of happiness as the end of
life, how could they ever by satisfied by such a moderate amount of it?
Poverty in any sense of suffering can be completely extinguished by the wisdom of society
and the good sense and providence of individuals > all great sources of human suffering
are in great degree conquerable by human effort
Utilitarian morality does recognize in human beings the power of sacrificing their own
greatest good for the good of others > greatest virtue: loving the neighbor as oneself
Nussbaum – capabilities as fundamental entitlements: sen and social justice
Sen: capabilities theory is the superior approach for explaining gender injustice, it’s very close to
Rawls’ social contract, the core of the political conception is for political purposes only > gives
citizens space to pursue own value conceptions, citizens should be given a choice in each area of
functioning, creating a sphere of noninterference is not enough
Criticizing other approaches that measure well-being by… :
Growth: fails to show how deprived people are doing
Utility: inadequate to measure the heterogeneity and equivalence of development, women
have different preferences in life that are influenced by their second-class position in society
> in favor of the status quo, understates the importance of agency and development by
having a condition of satisfaction as end goal
Resources: a higher GNP doesn’t really show anything as it doesn’t include the distributional
inequalities that are a key point of gender inequalities, individuals need differing levels of
resources if they are to come up to the same level of capability to function
The capabilities approach will help in the pursuit of sex equality when a definite list of most central
capabilities is used (tentative and revisable)
Central human capabilities (10): life, bodily health, bodily integrity (free to move & free from
assault), sense imagination and thought (literacy, religion), emotions, practical reasoning
(planning life & conception of good), affiliation (interaction and equal worth), other species,
play, control over one’s environment (political and material ownership)
The list is: open-ended, abstract to suit different contexts, free-standing “partial moral
conception”, protecting pluralism (by putting things like freedom of speech/ association/
Class 1 - introduction
Specialty: validity of research, estimates of feasibility, strategy for creating the right kind of
support/legitimacy is important. In all use of power and influence, what matters is not just winning
but ‘deserving to win’, not legitimacy as support but also as ‘being in the right’, moral grounding,
justifiability. Where: government, lobby groups, consultancy, private sector, NGOs, scientific
bureaus and think tanks, under-organized protest resistance movements
Elsberg (the original whistleblower)– pentagon papers: including secret and incriminating
information about the Vietnam war, military miscalculations > bad for US government, Elsberg
leaks information to the new York times and the Washington post because he believes people are
being lied to, government didn’t make a strong enough case to restrict the press
How to apply your knowledge (codes of conduct): APSA (American Political Science Association)
NKWP (Dutch version, show research methods, collection of data, etc.)
When advising, what doesn’t work? Wolff: top down advice/ ideal theory doesn’t work
Popper: ideal theory of utopian engineering, look at the world as if all factors in the world
can be controlled perfectly without error
Wolff: philosophy is academic extremism and outrageous ideas (Lock: strong positions, Sen:
ideal theory), ideal theory works only as a lab experiment under ideal conditions:
o Inspiration, direction (De Geus on utopianism)
o Mirror (of princes) of both motives and behaviour
o ‘dark universe’: discover unwanted implications
Ideal theory doesn’t work in the real world (3): no room to agree to disagree, bias for the
status quo, support trumps morality (legitimation trumps legitimacy)
What works – overlapping consensus (≠Rawls): politics is there not to create a consensus on values/
principles but on the way to work around those values: the practices
Not too explicitly mentioned in Wolff:
o Rawls & Habermas: reflective equilibrium & hersschaftsfreier Diskurs
o Deliberation (reflection to find out what we all want) vs reason
o ‘deep’ consensus: not just agreement but reasonable agreement
Understand before you criticize: what created the current practice & what has made it
relatively stable? > wisdom of ancestors/conservatism even in revolutionary moments
Identify causes of moral difficulties and differences
Then test all parties’ positions on possible changes
How to test positions: not just for weaknesses but also for strengths, respecting the ‘burdens
of judgement’ (the demands of the reasonable), can any party, you included, ‘reasonable
reject’ anything?
Then and only then can we construct consensus on course of action: only then formulate
arguments in support (= squaring legitimation and legitimizing), bottom-up consensus
building
critical footnote: there are limits to how far you want to go in compromising
There are limits to what can be proven (burdens of judgment), to be reasonable is to respect those
limits, to be reasonable is tough:
Not reject ideas as unproven/unprovable but accept them as potentially sensible
Not expect others to make room for your ideas but make room for their ideas yourself
Wolff - Introduction
In public life, policy is needed. Start from where you are and move forward by drawing people into a
consensus view. In the public policy arena, debate differs from abstract moral argument in at least
3 ways: 1) little space for ‘agreeing to disagree’: some policy is needed 2) inevitable bias towards
the status quo 3) the view being widely shared is most important (not if it’s right)
, Public reason
The burdens of judgment (Rawls): the many risks involved in the correct exercise of our powers of
reason and judgment in the ordinary course of political life, examples:
empirical and scientific evidence is often complex and conflicting/contradictory
we may reasonably disagree about the relative weight of different considerations
concepts are vague and subject to hard cases (e.g. tracking apps for corona)
Class 2 – Ethics: the basics
Ethics and non-ethics: facts do not exits, the truth is not out there > facts are constructed, which is
where philosophy comes in (ontology-what is, epistemology-how can we know?, ethics-what to do?)
Standards: there are no standards for the truth of philosophy (goodness, rightness,
correctness, adequacy, decency, plausibility, beauty etc.), standards are the/an object of
research in philosophy
o Baron Münchhausen as the ultimate philosopher: fictive person that tells stories
about amazing adventures > constructing standards without having standards to fall
back on
When is a fact a fact?
o Correspondence theory: something is a fact if what I say about it corresponds with
what is happening, proposition p corresponds to phenomenon f, presumes a prior p’
and/or f’ (all you see and experience is constructed)
o Coherence: something is true when it fits in with previous propositions, p is more or
less likely to be true the more/less it is logically consistent within a set P of
propositions, we’ve lost our hold on reality (find truth in terms of consistency)
Logic:
o Classical logic: true/false (all sorts of subtypes, syllogistic, propositional etc.)
o Fuzzy logic: there can be truth in multiple answers (the end of all pub quizzes)
o Citizen’s logic (no law against it)
Ethics: just as fuzzy as logic/”facts”
o historically slow movement away from ontology, tao, homologonmenoos tè phusei
(harmony with nature), gods determined human/animal divide
o 1700-1750 - virtue (Greek/Chinese): capacity that is both useful for you and for
society, allows you to flourish in your own context, is implies ought
o Sein und sollen, is and ought, anything goes (Kant/ Hume/ De Sade): just because it is
a sort of way doesn’t mean it should be, facts and norms are different things, but
note to continuation of naturalism in non-deontology
2 levels in ethics: theories of the good vs theories on the measures of the good:
o theories of the good (three schools of virtue ethics):
Aristotle, Plato, Greeks & Romans: the natural, society and context determine
virtues
Augustine, Thomas, the Church: the divine, virtues became absolute, virtues
were frozen
Machiavelli: back to nature onto utility > virtues unfroze, consequentialist
virtues are means to an end
Foot & Nussbaum: virtues as flourishing in life and society,
o theories on the measures of the good: relativism and absolutism (main positions),
tactical compromise (Habermas & Rawls)
Rejection of relativism (‘your feeling of pain is a sheer fact’): leaves us with no
reason (except circular reasoning) to minimize suffering – makes maximizing
just as rational
But also a rejection of absolute standards (unrealistic)
Habermas – hersschaftsfreier Diskurs
Rawls - Reflective equilibrium: finding principles for civil society to keep our
differences while living together in this diversity, never permanent (e.g. in the
past it would say the men should work and women cook)
,Consequentialism: do what is necessary to life by your own definition of a good life, things are good
because they are a means to an end (can’t justify this end though), countless schools
Happiness, eudaimonia: more than the short joy, it’s a state of being, everlasting
Enlightenment revolution (Helvetius, Bentham) utilitarianism: the sum of pleasure and pain
> Mill’s reformed utilitarianism: distinction between higher and lower pleasures, harm
principle (do whatever you want as long as you don’t hurt others), freedom & experience,
room for nudging (Thaler & Sunstein): try to make people make the choices you want them
to > e.g. healthy foods in supermarkets are on eye-level and unhealthy foods are more
unreachable/ unsee-able
Deontology:
Duty-based deontology (Kant): remove goals, what remains is duty (deon), the intrinsically
good, the universalizable, the categorical imperative. e.g.: capital punishment, something
that everyone universally accepts
Rights-based deontology (Rawls & Nozick): foundation of human rights, duty vs
supererogatory duty (doing things beyond duty, e.g. giving a beggar money in a welfare
state)
Humans are autonomous & there is a genuine is/ought gap (dirty hands lecture)
The mantra: intention – act – result / virtue – deontology – consequentialism
real word: all three are used (most of Wolffs cases)
Capabilities and virtues:
Rawls states that justice must be measured by primary social goods > Beyond Rawls:
o Sen: primary social good does not adequately represent the meaning or worth of a
thing, e.g. a euro doesn’t have the same worth to a disabled person
o Nussbaum: Rawls’ theory only works under conditions of sufficiency – limited idea of
justice, not just measure justice when there is “enough” but also when this is not the
case
Required for a life worth living (flourishing):“Capabilities” allowing “functionings”, link to
classic virtue; capacity enabling flourishing.
Virtue back with a vengeance
McNaughton & Rawling – deontological ethics
Consequentialism claims people have a moral duty to do as good as possible (agent-neutral).
Deontology denies this, and asserts that there are several distinct duties, not all of which depend
for their status as duties on considerations of value alone (Humans as a goal not as a means to it).
Certain acts are intrinsically right and others are intrinsically wrong, agent-relative
moral theory. Example: pornography, as long as not disadvantages are proven its good vs it abuses
women so it is bad
Two types of duties withing deontology:
Constraints: we treat others regardless of our relationship with them, some ways of treating
people are ruled out (torturing > prevent this)
Duties of special relationship: actions towards those we stand in a special relationship with,
one is required to do certain things for friends even if you could make the world better by
not doing this
When to do good, 2 opinions
There is a requirement to do good whenever there is no other duty more pressing.
We only have to do some good in addition to fulfilling our other obligations. There is no
moral requirement to do good, and claim that provided we breach no duty we are permitted
to live as we see fit.
Some deontologists justify the various duties they propose by appealing to some more fundamental
and unifying principles while other claim that such justification is not available. Deontologists can
agree about surface features, such as the extent of our duties, while disagreeing about the
possibility of an underlying rationale.
, Deontology provides no procedure to settle conflicts of duty, one’s duty does not rest (wholly) on
the goodness or badness of the results of acting in that way.
Mill – utilitarianism
Intuitive vs inductive schools of ethics: both believe in general laws, the morality of an action is not
a question of direct perception but of the application of a general law to an individual case, morality
must be deduced form principles (“science of morals”)
differences: evidence and the source from which they get authority:
Intuitive school of ethics: principle of morals are evident, one only has to understand the
meaning of the concepts
Inductive school of ethics: right and wrong are questions of observation and experience
Utilitarianism/ happiness theory: actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness
and wrong when they produce the reverse of happiness, happiness is made up by pleasure with the
absence of pain
There is a qualitative difference between different forms of pleasure, otherwise it would be
a philosophy of swine’s in which humans are the same as animals
o Mental over physical pleasure > difference in quality of pleasures: looking at the
preference of those who have experienced both and thus have means for
comparison
o Creativity and intellect lead to more happiness than hapiness based on human
senses (eating, sex etc.) > rather an unhappy wise man than a happy fool > wise
man can see more than just his own side
Ultimate end: existence exempt as far as possible from pain and as rich as possible in
enjoyments, both in quantity and quality
Objections: what right does someone have to be happy? Happiness should not be the end of
morality or any rational conduct. If humans are thought to think of happiness as the end of
life, how could they ever by satisfied by such a moderate amount of it?
Poverty in any sense of suffering can be completely extinguished by the wisdom of society
and the good sense and providence of individuals > all great sources of human suffering
are in great degree conquerable by human effort
Utilitarian morality does recognize in human beings the power of sacrificing their own
greatest good for the good of others > greatest virtue: loving the neighbor as oneself
Nussbaum – capabilities as fundamental entitlements: sen and social justice
Sen: capabilities theory is the superior approach for explaining gender injustice, it’s very close to
Rawls’ social contract, the core of the political conception is for political purposes only > gives
citizens space to pursue own value conceptions, citizens should be given a choice in each area of
functioning, creating a sphere of noninterference is not enough
Criticizing other approaches that measure well-being by… :
Growth: fails to show how deprived people are doing
Utility: inadequate to measure the heterogeneity and equivalence of development, women
have different preferences in life that are influenced by their second-class position in society
> in favor of the status quo, understates the importance of agency and development by
having a condition of satisfaction as end goal
Resources: a higher GNP doesn’t really show anything as it doesn’t include the distributional
inequalities that are a key point of gender inequalities, individuals need differing levels of
resources if they are to come up to the same level of capability to function
The capabilities approach will help in the pursuit of sex equality when a definite list of most central
capabilities is used (tentative and revisable)
Central human capabilities (10): life, bodily health, bodily integrity (free to move & free from
assault), sense imagination and thought (literacy, religion), emotions, practical reasoning
(planning life & conception of good), affiliation (interaction and equal worth), other species,
play, control over one’s environment (political and material ownership)
The list is: open-ended, abstract to suit different contexts, free-standing “partial moral
conception”, protecting pluralism (by putting things like freedom of speech/ association/
