Alternatives to capitalism

Methodology, ideal theory etc.

 * What does ideal theory do for us?
 * Helps us to answer what counts as morally permissible
 * It helps us judge because it gives us a standard of comparison
 * Helps us to locate where we are at the moment

Rawls

 * What are the correct principles of justice?
 * His method is reflective equilibrium (of ethical & political convictions)
 * Sth. is just because it would be chosen by hypothetical persons behind the veil
 * The Veil is only a help for us to get better intuitions
 * A systemic response (i.e. what ideal theory provides) leads to the perfectly just

Geus

 * Social interaction is not given by nature but daily reproduced. Politics is social coordination. Agents of action; the natural social context that enables/constraints them; the timing (temporality of priorities) of politics.
 * Ethics first: The view that politics is applied ethics often refers to ideal theory. The latter assumes that one can complete the work of ethics first, attaining an ideal theory of how we should act, and then in a second step, one can apply that ideal theory to the action of political agents. As an observer of politics one can morally judge the actors by reference to what this theory dictates they ought to have done. The empirical details of the given historical situation enter into consideration only at this point
 * Don’t look just at what they say, think, believe, but at what they actually do, and what actually happens as a result.
 * The opposite of reality or the correct perception of reality is in any case not the imagination but illusion; however, even illusions can have effects.
 * Accepting that religious practices, beliefs, and institutions in the world can have motivational power does not imply that the cognitive or normative claims made by religious believers have any plausibility whatever.
 * Politics is in the first instance about action and the contexts of action, not about mere beliefs or propositions. Knowing other agents' beliefs can be relevant if one wants to anticipate their action but sometimes agents do not immediately act on beliefs they hold. In either case the study of politics is primarily the study of actions and only secondarily of beliefs that might be in one way or another connected to action.
 * Locution is what was said; illocution is what was meant; perlocution is what happened as a result
 * Politics is historically located: it has to do with humans interacting in institutional contexts that change over time, and the study of politics must reflect this fact.
 * Statements have clear meaning at all only relative to their specific context, and this context is one of historically structured forms of action.
 * There are always extreme exceptions to the rule, but how is one to know beforehand that a given situation with which one is confronted is not extreme?
 * Politics is more like the exercise of a craft, or art, than like traditional conceptions of what happens when a theory is applied. It requires the deployment of skills and forms of judgment that cannot easily be imparted by simple speech, that cannot be reliably codified or routinised, and that do not come automatically with the mastery of certain theories.
 * A skill is an ability to act in a flexible way that is responsive to features of the given environment with the result that action or interaction is enhanced or facilitated, or the environment is transformed in ways that are positively valued. One of the signs that I have acquired a skill, rather than that I have been simply mechanically repeating things I have seen others do, is that I can attain interesting and positively valued results in a variety of different and unexpected circumstances.
 * Asking what the question is, and why the question is asked, is always asking a pertinent question
 * Is/ought, fact/value, descriptive/normative → It is the misleading focus on artificially simple, invented examples that seems to give the distinction its hold over us.
 * Coordination of action in our societies, either of a negative kind (that I don’t act so as to thwart your plans) or of a positive kind (that I act so as to maximise the attainment of some goal that can be reached only by joint effort) is always a social achievement, and it is something attained and preserved, and generally achieved only at a certain price
 * Coordination of action in our societies, either of a negative kind (that I don’t act so as to thwart your plans) or of a positive kind (that I act so as to maximise the attainment of some goal that can be reached only by joint effort) is always a social achievement, and it is something attained and preserved, and generally achieved only at a certain price

Williams

 * Wants to dismiss the politics as applied ethics approach (first theorize principle, then apply them through politics)
 * For Williams, the state is a necessary condition for politics
 * For him, politics is tied up with states and their legitimacy which in turn requires that the state fulfilss the basic legitimation demand
 * Utilitarianism regards politics as simply the executive instrument of the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Contractualism, offers moral conditions for co-existence under power
 * Utilitarians are addressing an undifferentiated public that is undefined by anything but its aggregated desires. Rawls appears to be addressing a set of founding fathers, “just off the boat.” Dworkin is addressing a somewhat idealized Supreme Court, reflecting above and apart from the politics of the society for which it is pronouncing.
 * Critical Theory Principle: This is that if a story is told to justify the advantage of a more powerful group over a less powerful, if the story is professedly believed by the more powerful, and if it is accepted by the disadvantaged only because of the power that the advantaged have over them, then the fact that the disadvantaged accept it does not make it legitimate.
 * Liberal PT tends to represent the priority of the moral over the political. Under the enactment model, politics is (very roughly) the instrument of the moral; under the structural model, morality offers constraints on what politics can rightfully do → a moral doctrine of justice, general in scope, is not distinguished from a strictly political theory of justice. The supposedly political conception is still a moral conception, one that is applied to a certain subject matter under certain constraints of content
 * A (genuine) demand for justification arises when A coerces B and claims that B would be wrong to fight back: resents it, forbids it, rallies others to oppose it as wrong, and so on. By doing this, A claims that his actions transcend the conditions of warfare, and this gives rise to a demand for justification of what A does.
 * A political decision does not in itself announce that the other party was morally wrong or, indeed, wrong at all. What it immediately announces is that they have lost
 * Primitive freedom (i.e. negative freedom) is a ratio concept: it is a matter of the ratio between what people desire to do and what they are prevented by others from doing. This implies that there are two ways to increase people’s freedom. I may remove the forces or obstacles that prevent them from satisfying their desires. But equally I may bring it about that they do not have desires that cannot be satisfied. In this case, the absence of a desire for freedom may be diagnosed as itself a product of coercion: it is precisely because of the way in which they are treated, prevented from hearing of other options and so on, that the state of their desires is as it is.
 * Between opponents who share a polity and neither of whom wants to destroy it, they will agree on an authority or process which decides what will happen, but this is not at all equivalent to the authority’s deciding that one or another claim in liberty is rightful.
 * The reasons for which an agreed political authority decides what will happen are various but the decision is not itself an announcement of what is a rightful claim in liberty.
 * CTP: We can say that human beings in general might be expected to have some desires. I the state of their desires is identifiably a product of that regime, a regime, moreover, which would not be responsive even if they had the desires in question, the CTP rejects this. Hence, the presence of frustrated desire is not a necessary condition of a cost in liberty (because of the happy slave)
 * Williams presupposes that politics involves coercion and requires a state, the task is to mainly talk about their legitimacy; political values must be possibly provided by the state

Valentini

 * A conceptual cartography of the methodology of PT
 * Ideal-theory vs. non-ideal theory as signifying three clusters of questions
 * 1) Ideal-theory as full-compliance and non-ideal theory as partial compliance theory: what duties and obligations apply to us in situations of partial compliance as opposed to situations of full compliance
 * 2) Ideal-theory as utopian or idealistic theory and non-ideal theory as realistic: whether feasibility considerations should constrain normative political theorizing and, if so, what sorts of feasibility constraints should matter
 * 3) Ideal theory as end-state theory and non-ideal theory as transitional theory: whether a normative political theory should aim at identifying an ideal of societal perfection, or whether it should focus on transitional improvements without necessarily determining what the ‘optimum’ is
 * In situations of partial compliance, individuals ought to do what is reasonably within their power to respond to existing injustice. What counts as reasonable, in turn, depends on the particular situation at hand (i.e. might be to do more/less than or exactly one's fair share)
 * Principles of justice are typically seen as particularly stringent, and as giving rise to rights.
 * Realists and Rawlsian liberals are not in disagreement about how to answer the same question. Rather, they seem to be more aptly seen as answering different questions.
 * The prescribed moves in a theory of transition have to be both morally permissible and likely to be successful. But without an ideal theory telling us (i) what counts as permissible; and (ii) what counts as success we cannot establish whether our transitional recommendations fulfill these requirements
 * The analysis of transitional ‘constraints’. First, there are ‘feasibility’ constraints, to do with physical, psychological and social facts. Second, there are moral constraints, to do with the ‘moral costs of transition’ (civil war to achieve justice?) from the current state of affairs to the ‘desired’ one.
 * Assuming full compliance in your ideal-theory is not very useful. What we ought to do if everyone complied isn't very useful
 * Sen: identify the social problems (and not the ideals), evaluate the available alternatives
 * How do you compare alternatives without the ideal standard?

Freedom

 * To be negatively free means simply to be in a state in which one has unobstructed opportunities for action, but to be positively free means actually to live and act in a certain way.
 * It does not follow from such independence of positive freedom that the former colony will be internally self-governing in the sense of being one’s own master as extended and internalized, giving rise to notions of (positive) freedom as self-control, autonomy, self-realization,
 * The concept of freedom has suffered from a kind of “inflation” - people have tried to build more and more of the components of a fully good and satisfactory human life into the concept of freedom itself.
 * So distinguish between what belongs to the content of the concept of freedom itself and what properly belongs only to the conditions under which freedom can effectively be utilized (e.g. power → freedom is an opportunity for action, not a power to act or action itself)
 * Even positive freedom is conflated with conceptions of happiness, rationality
 * Note, though, that positive freedom need not be an exercise concept. Freedom in a positive sense might designate the possession of a faculty or capacity which may or may not be exercised.
 * Assume that
 * 1) If freedom is a way of life, someone else might know better than I do what constitutes that way of life.
 * 2) There is a social agency (for instance, the State) who is really me (or: who is “the real me”) and thus all of whose actions are really mine so that none of its actions against me can even in principle count as coercion.
 * Totalitarian state?
 * Berlin’s whole discussion of freedom is structured by his interest in the limits of permissible social coercion
 * We're looking for a conception of freedom which is a development of something rooted in everyday usage and practice which can serve to give clarity and focus to individual human aspirations but which is neither a police-concept nor so inflated as to be indistinguishable from the concept of the indeterminate sum of all human satisfactions, nor so thoroughly moralized that it is an analytic truth that anyone acting freely is acting morally.
 * In one sense I am doing something I really want to do if my action is motivated by a desire that is genuinely or authentically mine. I’m free then, in this sense, if I am acting on a genuine or authentic desire.
 * Distinguish between first-order and second-order desires (and correspondingly first-order and second-order volitions). I identify with a given desire, roughly speaking, when I will that desire to be the one which moves me to action.
 * Humboldt's free as being the bearer of power and capacities: I’m free on this view to the extent to which I am engaged in a course of action in which I am exercising my powers and capacities in such a way that these powers and capacities are also at the same time being further developed. To the extent to which the exercise of a given capacity (play the piano) is at the same time the development of that capacity, the course of action is free


 * What counts as hindrance (physical obstruction vs. inability to do sth. vs. facing social consequences)
 * Social/legal punishment can be construed constricting negative liberty, too
 * What counts is not only whether others obstruct or not but also whether they have the ability to enable your freedom
 * Freedom requires internal and external possibilities/conditions - and the two must match (if your math textbook is in another language, you don't really have the ability to learn)
 * Participatory freedom: have freedom to the extent that you are affected

Democracy

 * What many people confuse: for people to have equal right to vote, does not mean that they have equal power
 * If democracy is defined as self-rule of those decision that affect you - suffrage does not necessarily follow