Philosophy
Question:
Dropbox Assignment Assignment 2: Philosophy and Justice: What is a Just Society? The goal of this assignment is to explore the meaning of justice. In a 3–4-page paper, address the following: Choose one of the following identities that may be the basis for discrimination in contemporary society: race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual identity, or socio-economic class. Explain at least one social philosophy from the textbook that attempts to address injustice on the basis on the identity you choose in Part 1. For instance, you might discuss utilitarianism, Rawls, Marx, Nozick, Du Bois, Cornell West, Beauvoir, Chavez, and/or Lorde. If the theory has a clear correlate, please discuss it as well. Try and illustrate your understanding of the ideas with concrete examples and to remember to support your account of the theory with citations to the textbook and online lectures in correct APA format. Use this APA Citation Helper as a convenient reference for properly citing resources. Contrast the social justice theory discussed in Part 2 with the intersectional approach. Try and illustrate the points of contrast with a relevant example. READING: Like many philosophical ideas, utilitarianism is a theory that will probably seem like a familiar type of thought. While John Stuart Mill wasn’t solely responsible for it, his name is most often associated with utilitarianism. Simply put, the theory of utilitarianism holds that the right action is the one that will go the farthest toward increasing happiness for the community as a whole. This approach has both a political and an ethical dimension. We’ll look more closely at how we might draw upon utilitarianism next week. In the political context, the political structure/policy that is right is the one which produces the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. If this sounds somewhat open to interpretation, it is supposed to. While Mill did not explicitly discuss his social philosophy in terms of a social contract, his position involves a similar idea. Mill’s idea was that human beings desire happiness first and foremost. We orient our lives to try to increase our own general happiness as much a possible. Because happiness is our goal, he reasoned, it makes sense to evaluate the goodness of an action based on its general effect on happiness. Further, as social beings, we shouldn’t be concerned only with our own happiness. Therefore, when we are evaluating the impact of an action on happiness, we should be concerned with the happiness of people in general. Thus, if we are faced with a choice between action A and action B, we should ask ourselves “how would each of these actions impact human happiness?” Then, we choose the action that increases human happiness the most. Conversely, we should avoid actions or choices that affect human happiness adversely. Perhaps a concrete example would help with clarification. You may be faced with the (somewhat trivial) dilemma of whether you should have another bowl of ice cream after you’ve already had a large bowl just before. Applying utilitarianism, you would ask yourself what sort of impact the action would have on human happiness. You would probably find that the immediate effect on your happiness would be positive: You like ice cream, and eating some more would probably make you happy. However, what distinguishes utilitarianism from egoism is that you must also consider the impact of your actions on the happiness of other people. Thus, you might reason that the gluttony of eating more ice cream amounts to taking up more than your share of things in the world. Perhaps you also know that eating too much ice cream has health implications that may end up being a problem for other people, too. For instance, if you develop diabetes or heart disease from too much sugar and saturated fat, you may contribute to higher healthcare costs for other people in your insurance pool or die earlier than you would if you lived a healthier lifestyle. This would also negatively impact the happiness of your family and friends and should be taken into consideration. After thinking it over, you might conclude that even though your personal happiness might get a little bump from that extra bowl of yummy dessert, the overall impact on human happiness is negative. Thus, to choose the ice cream would be wrong. Of course, many of the political and ethical choices we actually agonize over are more complex than this, but the general process of reflection is the same. Astute philosophy students will often quickly notice that it seems as if utilitarianism would have us all simply seeking the simplest pleasures, because they are the most direct method of increasing happiness. For example, psychoactive drugs might be the shortest path to immediate happiness. However, when we consider the long-term impact of such an act, we see that human happiness would quickly suffer if we all spent our lives getting high. For example, who would take care of us when we were sick or work to pay for our drugs? In addition, Mill thought that acts that produce a higher quality of happiness are more valuable than others. He thus argued that we should balance various human goals in relation to human happiness, and he was famous for having noted that we’d be better as Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied. In other words, some types of happiness (such as intellectual pleasures) are better than others (such as the happiness of a good sugar rush). Mill believed that society is a group of people who gather to share their own particular abilities and talents, as well as the goods gleaned from other members of society. It should be noted that Mill’s social philosophy is something of a fulfillment of his ethical philosophy, as we will see next week. One of the chief problems the utilitarian position encounters is that of basic human rights. While sacrificing a healthy person may make ten people in need of organ transplants happy, we still think there is something inherently wrong in trading one life for ten. We tend to think that some individual rights are so intrinsic and important that they cannot be outweighed by the needs of a majority. While at first glance an emphasis on individual rights seems at odds with the idea of the greater good, Mill’s social philosophy actually holds that human rights are necessarily part of a just society. That is, for a society to truly seek the greatest well being for the greatest number of its members, it must protect certain basic rights essential to human happiness. This is not only beneficial in the immediate sense of preserving one individual’s rights; it may also turn out to be better for society as a whole. For instance, Mill was deeply committed to gender equality both because he was concerned about the negative impact of gender discrimination on women and because he felt that gender equality was better for society as a whole. The family, Mill argued, is the basis for a society. A child who grows up in a family in which the father rules by virtue of gender privilege alone will learn that “might makes right” rather than developing a belief in equal rights and just treatment for all, and will be a bad citizen as a result. Similarly, Mill’s wife and fellow philosopher Harriet Taylor Mill argued that educating women and allowing them to develop their intellectual talents helps men to develop and maintain good character and intellectual virtue by providing partners who could challenge and foster their intellect. While the conclusion that gender inequality is unjust is the same as that drawn by Mary Wollstonecraft and American suffragists, the Mills reach the conclusion by relying wholly on utilitarian principles rather than natural law. In other words, we should work to achieve gender equality not because people are inherently equal but, rather, because doing so is for the greater good of society. Mill’s belief in individual rights and his emphasis on the quality of pleasure is what distinguished him from his friend Jeremy Bentham. Bentham did consider the long-term consequences and intensity of the pleasures generated in his quantitative calculus, but he did not give us a way of considering the quality of happiness generated or a justification for preserving individual rights. Gender; Sex; and Sexuality The term “feminism” is generally traced back to the late 19th century, beginning in France and rapidly adopted throughout Europe and North America. The term initially referred to the social and political movements to secure the right to vote and other forms of social and political equality. It has become common parlance to refer to these early feminist movements and ideas as liberal feminism. Philosophers like Mary Wollstonecraft and suffragists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were concerned with challenging essentialist ideas about women. Remember the avocado and artichoke from Week 2? Well, essentialism is a version of the avocado self, and gender essentialism assumes that women’s essential or fixed nature is determined by their biological function and serves as justification for their subordinate position in society. Because they are focused on overcoming the basic oppression of women and emphasize the essential sameness of all people regardless of sex, liberal feminists fail to critique the basic assumptions of the avocado idea of the self. Critics of liberal feminism acknowledge the importance of political, legal, economic, and educational equality, but also recognize that liberal feminism erases sexual difference altogether. Simone de Beauvoir is an important critic of liberal feminism, and her book The Second Sex is arguably the most important feminist treatise of the twentieth century. Beauvoir famously introduced a distinction between sex and gender when she claimed that despite biological differences between the sexes, there is no difference so marked as to legitimate gender hierarchies. Beauvoir entered into the project of writing a book on woman not as a feminist per se, but rather as a philosopher, and an existential one at that. Her idea was to write a book in response to the backlash against her partner and fellow existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre by writing a semi-autobiographical justification of the existential ideas laid out in Being and Nothingness. But she found that doing so required her first to recognize herself as a woman; thus, she decided to write a book on woman. The central claim of The Second Sex is that biology is not enough on its own to make someone a woman. Furthermore, all human characteristics are dependant upon situation. Beauvoir is not making any universal claims about sex or gender; rather, she is making the phenomenological assertion that we do distinguish two sexes, and that these distinctions influence all aspects of our daily lives. For Beauvoir, sexual difference is a biological fact, not a feature that is impacted by human culture and history. However, the factual reality of biological sex is not in and of itself significant enough to determine the essence in human beings. The problem with “equality in difference” is that it still maintains the opposition of the one and the two, hence the standard is still male. Furthermore, while biology is not destiny, if one is treated as inferior one will in fact become so. Thus, The Second Sex is thought by many to have put the final nail in the coffin of gender essentialism, and Beauvoir is credited with introducing the sex/gender distinction when she argued that female biology in no way determined socio-cultural differences. As we have seen, this means that we have to inquire into the different historical, cultural, and social factors that have contributed to the practical and theoretical oppression of women. While Beauvoir does make some general comments about the status of women, she always falls back against the existential principle that “existence precedes essence”; therefore, while her attempts to speak for all women might fall short, there is nothing in her philosophy of difference that excludes the possibility of women experiencing their oppression in a multitude of ways, or not at all. Feminists who recognize sexual difference argue that recognizing differences between women, and between women and men, is not necessarily oppressive; it is only when differences are understood as hierarchical that they become tools of social and political oppression. Consider, for example, the way in which bodies (particularly those of women) are defined and categorized according to reproductive capabilities. The capacity to become pregnant and bear children is not necessarily possessed by all women; infertile or post-menopausal women, for example, are considered to be biologically sexed as female and, yet, the general consensus is still that biological sex is defined according to reproductive capacity. Gender norms (that is to say, contemporary ideas about what it means to grow up properly as one’s biological sex, which is equated in this context with gender) enforce, reinscribe, and are sustained by what some feminist and queer theorists refer to as “compulsory heterosexuality,” or the idea that heterosexuality is the only proper or normal expression of sexual desire. Race and Ethnicity The vast majority of Americans are descended from people who immigrated after the founding of the United States. Thus, it is fair to say that ethnic history is American history. Despite this, we tend to group all Caucasian people into a single group of “white” Americans, and similarly erase the very different experiences and histories of people of color. The very idea that all whites comprise a single race is in fact a recent concept, in that whiteness as a unifying concept was enacted to resolve class conflicts between land-owning, mostly British Americans and Irish immigrants. While racial difference has historically been used as a tool of racist institutions such as slavery, class also plays a role. It is worth noting that the Human Genome Project proved human beings are fundamentally the same at the level of our genes. While there are subtle biological differences between the races, the vast genetic similarity of human beings suggests that race is at least as much of a social category as a biological one. We live in a country with a complicated history of racial oppression and human rights. The contrasting approaches to race-based oppression in the 19th century can be seen in dialogues between Martin Delany and Fredrick Douglass. Delany argued that the racist beliefs about natural racial differences that were used as a justification for slavery were too deeply engrained in American culture to be overcome through mere persuasion or political protest, and advocated for a separatist position. Douglass, on the other hand, believed assimilation was a more pragmatic and appealing solution, evoking Locke’s account of natural rights and the Declaration of Independence as the basis for his position. This dialogue continued well past the dissolution of slavery as a legal institution, as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. occupied similar opposing positions. Of course, racism does not only occur in the context of slavery, as we see in the farmworker’s movement spearheaded by figures like César Chávez. Chávez took an approach of peaceful resistance similar to that of Martin Luther King, Jr. This movement also illustrates the reality of intersectionality, in that ethnicity and socio-economic class were both used as sites of oppression. Both separatism and assimilation recognize that racism is not merely a matter of personal, or even communal, prejudice but, rather, a system of oppression that is sustained and maintained both by individuals and by institutions. Thus, any attempt to confront racism in one’s own mind must also involve active systematic change and thinking through the seeming neutrality of the various privileges we may enjoy. Please use Roots of Wisdom 7th edition 2015. Please quote and paraphrase using APA style and include page number.
