Ideas

• We are simply habit-forming creatures
• It has become our habit to seek reason in what is actually chaos #
• We must establish rules of justice #

Context

• He reacts to Hume
• Creates a reasoned framework of Philosophy
• Determine that reason must exist outside of us, by looking at the way we think
• says Locke's Empiricisim doesn't allow for experience & knowledge
• A series of perceptions is not enough to create knowledge #
  #

In your role as a servant you must obey, but it your role as a citizen you must use your own rationality to criticise

• 'Internal order' & "world peace"

Human freedom gives us a hypothetical right to own anything

• this is a problem for Kant, it brings us conflict
• therefore, freedom must be regulated but in a universal manner
  

For freedom we need the law

• therefore, we have no right to resistance (Agrees with Hobbes, disagrees with Lock & Rousseau)
• The right to resistance is inconsistent with a constitution

Global trade & international law will bring peace

• "even a nation of reasonable devils must come to the conclusion of lawful obedience" #

Hegel

• Kant's morality provides no content, just a rule
• This rule is evidently sometimes flawed:
  

  • If everyone gave money to the poor, there would be no poor.
  • This rule becomes rationally impossible and so immoral in Kant's eyes. Yet surely giving to poor is not immoral?

• Kant's ethics force people into a conflict between reason & desire
  

  • For Hegel ignoring desire is unnatural. By not recognising the tension between desire & reason you fail to give people a reason to be moral that is based on their own desires.

Arendt:

• Obedience in Kant's terms is oxymoronic
  

  • He states that simply following order's is not enough but that rationalises that through reason everyone should obey the same ideas
  • ME: His flaw is that he assumes everyone's thinks in the same way or even with the same system of morals #

Jacques Lacan:

• Formalising his subject means that everything is procedural, which means you can be the opposiet of what Kant wants
• Willing a universal assumes good intent #

ME:

• If a space is created where you are allowed dissent, i.e. as a citizen, in your head, with your friends, does that count as dissent?

The Impartial Spectator: Self-interest is constrained by our desire to be approved

• We are able to reflect and imagine
• We develop moral rules be experiencing pain
• We regulate our own behaviour
• We judge ourselves from others POV
• This allows us to judge ourselves impartially

Division of labour

• Leads to greater efficiencies
• Unequal Commercialism is better than egalitarian savagary
• It is a direct result of trading
  

  • Once we are trading, it makes more sense to do one thing well and trade

• Constrained by the size of the Market
  

  • It makes us dependent on others
  • Dependent on Market prices
  • Which is dependent on cost
    

Foucault

• Smith moves the argument of grain from a moral register to the epistemological register
  

  • The moral argument becomes irrelevant if we solve the problem

• The "subject of interests" is an original concept
  

  • It gives people the justification for doing things for themselves
  • but also brings about the "subject of rights"

• Smith diminishes our vision of what Politics should be - This is Arendt's argument about politics as merely the "Global management of household duties"

Wolin

• His model of the impartial spectator has been simplified to just self and other
  

  • What about being viewed by our id, ego, society, different groups... #

ME:

• Clearly he did not foresee that a rich person can eat much more than a poor person
• He doesn't foresee that we will be actively wasteful and produce unproductive "trinkets"
• Whilst the market is neutral to gender, race etc... the market will not overcome existing biases, you need politics for that
  

  • this is similar to the argument around algorithms #

Context

• 18th Century
• France is beginning to take up Lockean ideas of humans gainign knowledge of the world through experience
• France is debating where civility comes from, nature or nuture?
• Rousseau takes opposite view to Smith
  

  • He thinks the civilisation of humans is barbaric

• Rousseau is held up as an example of supporting republics & participatory democracy
  

  • He says you cannot divest your part to play, morally, you must be involved.
    

Humans in their natural state are simple but noble

• We are driven to look after ourselves but guided by reason & compassion
• We have simple needs and pains
• We are not naturally cruel #

The Vices of Culture occur through society, not nature

• Increase contact with others makes us care about what they think
  

  • vanity
  • competition based on self-image, not survival

• Then we build families
• Then agriculture & property introduce inequality and dependencies on society
  

  • The pain of lack of comfort becomes greater than the initial relief it brought

• War is formed through society, not nature
  

  • He agrees with Locke & Kant
  • Disagrees with Hobbes & Smith

Humans are malleable, so maybe we are perfectible

• The Social contract needs to create a 'new person'.
  

  • Everyone must give everything to everyone at the same time as giving to nobody (not state or sovereign)

General Will

• Not just the aggregate of all individual wills
• We need to overcome our individual will and want the good of all
  *
• Is this what Habermas tries to create via discourse?

Rousseau requires a 'Law Giver' to make everything work

• A perfect, compassionate authority
• Lock & Hobbes require something almost identical
• Rousseau praises religion for how effective it was at making people obey rules
• ME: Godel's incompleteness theorem

Arendt

• There is a paradox - you need a people to form a constitution, but you need a constitution to determine the people #