Reflective Essay #2 for peer review:  Liberalism & Historicism

What is the just way to regulate gun ownership?  Is it morally right for you to own and use a gun for self-defense? Is it politically right to limit gun ownership? Provide an answer from the perspectives of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hegel and Marx.  You only need to take the perspective of 3 out of the 5.  Critically evaluate these answers by reflecting on “Apocalypse Now.”  Who do you think has the best answer, and why do you think that?

Make sure you use and cite textual evidence extensively.  You are mainly graded on your ability to use the texts to support your arguments and analysis!  You should plan on 2-4 pieces of textual evidence (either quotes or paraphrases) for each paragraph.  If you don’t give me significant evidence, the best you can get is a C-.

Your essay will be graded using this rubric:

Ethical Reasoning Rubric

Ethical Self-Awareness: An ability to articulate core ethical beliefs, the origins of those beliefs, and do so with depth and clarity.

2. Ethical Perspective-Taking: An ability to explain various ethical theories in detail.

3.  Recognize Ethical Issues: An ability to recognize the ethical issues involved in a practical context, including relevant facts, competing values, competing interests and alternative points-of-view.

4. Apply Ethical Perspectives: An ability to explain how a given ethical perspective would deal with an ethical issue and explore the full implications of that application.

5.  Evaluate Ethical Perspectives: The ability to synthesize conclusions about ethical perspectives and issues based on an analysis of competing ethical perspectives and complex issues.

Basic Outline

1. To see an example using this outline, see my mentor text.

Introduce the issue of gun control in such a way that you demonstrate that you recognize the full spectrum of interests involved.

Demonstrate your ethical self-awareness by reflecting on what you thought about the issue before reflecting on it, the ethical theory you have used and where that theory comes from. Make sure you distinguish between guns as a political issue and guns as a moral issue. That might include discussing whether you have ever distinguished between the political issue of justice and the moral issue of goodness.

Explain and apply three of the five theorists.

Do them in any order.

Explain a thinker first. Cover both their political theory and explain what ethical theory would be consistent with their political theory.

Then apply that thinker’s politics and ethics to the gun control issue.

Repeat 2 and 3 two more times for a total of 6 paragraphs.

Evaluate the ethical theories and draw some implications, applications, or consequences of what you learned for your own thinking about gun control. Again, consider whether what is just and what is moral concerning guns is identical.  Here you might want to consider Josefson’s critiques of liberalism and historicism in Political Philosophy in the Moment.

Help on Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hegel and Marx

Liberalism in Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hegel and Marx

All five thinkers roughly agree that human beings are free and equal rational individuals. These are the fundamental principles of liberalism.  So, all three thinkers are liberals, but of different kinds.  Hobbes and Locke think people are naturally free and equal.  Rousseau, Hegel and Marx think that people only become free and equal rational individuals through the progress of history.

Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau agree that the origin of government is a social contract. That is, we create government by transferring our natural rights to the state.

Hegel and Marx think that the state reflects the development of human beings at a particular point in time

They disagree about the ontology of human beings:

1. Hobbes: Human beings are rational machines, which act to maintain their function (life).
2. Locke: Human beings rationally sense moral truths just as they can sense scientific truths. They only need to be free from authority to use their senses. They intuitively know that there is a God and that it is our duty to serve Him by serving ourselves.  But there are a few bad apples who seem to lack this basic rationality.

Rousseau: Human beings have a natural pity towards other human beings and a capacity for self-perfection.

1. Hegel: Human beings are self-conscious (spirit).  This self-consciousness develops through dialectical interactions with other beings.  Human being wants to be free (an independent consciousness that is conscious of the truth of itself), but it can only be free at the end of history, when it is conscious of the identity of its own particular will and a universal will.

Marx:  Human beings realize their freedom through exercising their “species being” (proving their self consciousness by having an idea, realizing that idea in production, and owning the product of their work).  This can only happen under the economic/ political system of communism, as, in other systems, class exploitation interferes.

They disagree about the state of nature:

1. Hobbes: the state of nature is a state of war, where life is “nasty, poor, brutish and short.”
2. Locke: the state of nature is a state of peace where individuals create property through their labor (both their bodies and material goods) and freely exchange it in order to increase property. Markets and money create inequality, but people consent to this inequality, since they make everyone better off. Enforcing the laws of nature (protecting property) is inconvenient, because we lack neutral judges and executioners.
3. Rousseau: the state of nature is one of peace, harmony and equality in which human beings are perfect and free. Hobbes’ “state of nature” is not natural but the result of the creation of artificial social goods and ideas that corrupt natural virtue. In other words, the war of “all against all” is what Hobbes’ and Locke’s social contracts create.
4. Hegel:  The state of nature is negation, nothingness at the very beginning and antagonistic relationships between the individual (particular) and others (universal) thereafter until the end of history.

Marx: There is no state of nature, only different artificial modes of production that establish different relations of production or systems of class antagonism.  If anything, the true or natural human state is accomplished at the end of history, after the withering away of the state.

1. And they disagree about the terms of the social contract:

Hobbes: Human beings agree with one another to transfer all of their rights to the King or state in order to get out of the state of nature. Since the state is not a party to the contract, it cannot violate it. Only individuals violate the social contract by claiming to limit the power of the state in their own self-interest.  Government power is unlimited.

Locke: Since the only problem in the state of nature is the inconvenience of protecting property, individuals only give the government (not just a King but a constitutional government with a separation of powers, checks and balances and equality before the law) the right to protect property and keep all their other rights.  This consent to the creation of state property-protection is ongoing through elected representatives.  Government is limited by the social contract.  We call the social contract a constitution, so the resulting form of government is a constitutional republic.  Constitutionalism limits government by establishing the rule of law or due process.  Laws are made according to the process outlined in the Constitution (e.g. elected representatives make laws in a Congress, an executive implements the laws, a judiciary ensures the laws are followed) and only for the limited purposes outlined in the Constitution (laws cannot be made that violate individual rights (rights are trump cards)). 

Rousseau: There are three social contacts. The first is genuine.  The second is corrupt.  And the third restores a genuine social contract.

First: Individuals create private property on the condition of rough equality.  The only reason why I would recognize your property is yours is if you recognize my property as well.  Property is political rather than pre-political.

1. Second: Government establishes formal equality (equality before the law), a set of supposedly neutral laws that treat everyone the same.  However, since people are substantively unequal and so contracts are also unequal (e.g. an employer has more power than an employee does), equality before the law only protects inequality.

Third: Individuals give all of their rights to the state, but since the state is simply all the individuals together, individuals lose no freedom and gain the benefits of society.  Laws are made according to the general will, which is synonymous with reason.  The general will replaces the rule of self-interest with a return of the laws of nature (just as the laws of nature are true, the laws made through the free and equal participation of all is also true), so people are as free as they were in the state of nature, only they can now exercise their capacity for self-perfection (autonomy).

Hegel: There are different social contracts (forms of recognition) that correspond to different levels in the development of self-consciousness.

1. Marx: There are different social contracts (forms of recognition) that correspond to different levels in the development of the mode of production.
2. Ethics in Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau

All five thinkers talk about their theories being based on the Lawes of Nature, which suggests they hold deontological ethical theories. Again, that means what is good to do is determined by rules that are right or true.  Some of these ethical theories were developed by the thinker, and others were developed by those influenced by them.

1. Hobbes: It is both irrational and evil to break your promise to abide by the social contract, as that will return us to the state of nature (war). What is just is determined by the grace of the king (his consent).  What is moral between individuals is determined similarly, by consent.
2. Locke: The truth about human beings is that they are free and equal rational individuals. Ethical rules respect the equal rights of individuals to pursue rationally their own conceptions of the right and good.

Rational people understand that it is unreasonable to act in a way that harms the ability of other rational people to exercise their own rights (the J.S. Mill’s harm principle).

1. Rational people agree to the maximum individual freedom that is consistent with a like freedom for all (civil rights and civil liberties: equality before the law, due process, freedoms of speech, press, assembly, religion (the Rawls’s liberty principle)).

Rational people understand that in a country with diverse religious and philosophical beliefs, it is unreasonable to use the state to legalize your own religious or philosophical beliefs (separation of church and state, Rawls’s public reason principle).

1. 3.  Rousseau: True ethical principles express our highest order interests in charity towards other and the development of individual capacities.

1. The truth is what we would discover after an infinite period of open and free rational deliberation (C.S. Pierce/John Dewey’s deliberative principle).

1. 2.Do only those things that you will to be a universal law, where it would be rational to choose a world in which everyone did you do (Kant’s categorical imperative).

3. Since natural capacities are unearned, moral persons would pick principles of justice that would be to their advantage no matter their abilities/ characteristics. The resulting principle: All inequalities should be to the advantage of the least well-off person in society (John Rawls’s Difference Principle).

1. 4.  Hegel:  The state evolves over time to reflect the synthesis of particular and universal at a particular historical time in the history of self-consciousness.  This is broadly consistent with Rousseau.

5.  Marx:  Justice is unalienated work, which would require workplace participatory democracy.  This is broadly consistent with Rousseau.

1. However, all three of these thinkers can be interpreted as leading to a consequentialist ethics, one that evaluates the goodness of actions based on their consequences. This may be because from the beginning in Plato, truth was associated with techn?, a craft that achieved a certain end.

Hobbes: The state creates incentives that make it rational to be moral and cooperate by threatening you with death if you defect. It is wrong to challenge the authority of the state, because that returns you to evils of the state of nature.  Right is what the law says.  The law says whatever the most powerful interest says it is.

1. Locke: All moral/ ethical issues are private. The state only deals with issues of political rights in order to maintain the good of peace and prosperity.  For instance, if you murder someone the state punishes the harm to the community, the political wrong of disturbing the peace.  It also may judge that you have violated a contract by taking someone’s property (a civil suit).  

If everyone makes free contracts, then the outcome must be a greater good for everyone. People would not agree to the exchange if they did not judge themselves to be better off (Pareto Equilibrium, positive sum game, libertarian principle of free exchange).

1. If government keeps its hands out of the economy (laissez faire) and everyone pursues their own selfish interests, the economy will be guided by an invisible hand to create the maximum national wealth (Adam Smith’s neo-liberal economics.)

Rousseau: Actions are just if they create progress, the development of human beings towards their true end.

1. The greatest good for the greatest number (Mill’s utilitarianism)

Hegel: Actions are just if they facilitate the further development of self-consciousness.

1. Marx: Actions are just if they facilitate the harmonizing of relations of production with an underlying mode of production.  Actions to move from liberal capitalism to communism are just.

Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hegel and Marx  in “Apocalypse Now”

1. Consider whether the depiction of war in “Apocalypse Now” reveals what human beings are really like in the state of nature.

Hobbes: people are free and equal rational individuals who come into conflict.

1. Locke: people are free and equal rational individuals who live in peace and pursue property, except for a few bad apples.

Rousseau: people are free and equal rational animals living in peaceful disinterest with one another.

1. Hegel: people are self-consciousness, struggling to be free and independent.

Marx: people are creative workers.

Consider whether “Apocalypse Now” is consistent with the fundamental analysis of each philosopher.

1. Hobbes: Does the depiction of war in the film reveal that Hobbes is right about rationality (that it leads to irrational violence and chaos)?   “Apocalypse Now” suggests a journey back into nature.  They go up the river to its source, into the dawn of time.  On the surface, when we get there we find a primitive tribe in a state of internecine violence.  But when Willard goes behind this appearance he doesn’t find nature.  He finds Colonel Kurtz, a modern man who has gone insane over the following paradox: the rational thing to do in the Vietnam War is whatever it takes to win, but in order to win Kurtz must abandon all morality and humanity.  That is, the movie suggests the Hobbes is right about reason, but it is skeptical about Hobbes’ solution (the powerful state), either because that solution is impractical in the international system or it requires a level of violence (“drop the Bomb!”) that is destructive of our very humanity.

Locke: Or does the depiction of war in the films support Locke’s idea that people can be truly rational and free if government takes care of the few bad apples who threaten property and government itself is limited only to that small chore? That is, does the movie show what happens when goes outside the strict bounds of protecting property?

Rousseau: Is the state of nature (war) actually not natural at all but the product of a class conspiracy? Does the film illustrate how society corrupts people and pulls them away from their natural pity and capacity for self-perfection?  Instead of being directed by the general will, government gets appropriated by people who say they are protecting property and rights, but they are really protecting their own selfish interests and inequality.

1. Hegel:  Just as in Hegel’s day Napoleon represented reason on horseback, smashing the feudal system of states to produce modern nation states that are more consistent with modern self-consciousness, Colonel Kurtz is reason in a B-52 bomber, an atom bomb.  The movie suggests that with the atom bomb the resulting synthesis is not the destruction of the old order and the creation of a new more rational one, but the destruction of us all.

Marx:  What looks like a state of nature is actually just a system of class conflict.  The Vietnam War was just about money, the expansion of capitalism.  Colonel Kurtz is a tragic figure of the past, who mistakenly thought the war was about truth and honor, a mistake that destroyed him.

Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hegel and Marx and Gun Control

Hobbesian Realism: Islamic state or anyone that threatens us with a gun places us back in the state of nature.  In the state of nature there is no right and wrong because there are no rules.  The only way out of the state of nature is through the overwhelming power of the hegemonic “Leviathan.” Only the state or the UN/ or the USA should have guns.

Lockean Neo-Liberalism: in order to address the inconveniences of the international state of nature, states must give up limited amounts of their sovereignty to some kind of international order or institutions.  These institutions create international laws and norms and a way to coordinate collective actions (coalitions) against actors that defy these norms.  The absolute best way to create international peace and order is by getting everyone to participate in a global free trade economy that will be in the long-term interests of everyone.  It is rational to make social contracts giving up weapons, while reserving a right to self defense.

Rousseau and Constructivism: conflicts are created when relationships are driven by self-interest or ideology instead of true justice.  Identities that create conflict are not natural or true but “constructed” by social, historical, economic and ideological forces.  We can use reason to understand these forces and so reduce their power over us.  We can use reason to establish genuinely mutual relationships.  Once we understand this we will rationally move from relations based on force (e.g. solving problems with guns) to ones based on enlightened reason (law).

1. Hegel: Violence (use of weapons) is rational part of the development of self consciousness until you reach the higher levels.  Then, those with developed self consciousness should monopolize weapons until they are unnecessary.

Marx: Violence may be necessary for the proletariat to defeat the bourgeosie.