One of Adam Smith's contributions to the study of philosophical ethics is his book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. It is an interesting work, one part descriptive moral psychology, one part theory of the emotions. Here is the opening paragraph (link): How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his …
Rawls on Marx; December 1973
John Rawls taught a course on the history of political philosophy throughout much of his career at Harvard University. The course contained his description and analysis of the most important figures in modern political philosophy, including Mill, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Marx. The course evolved over time; the final version from 1994 is edited in …
Essentializing race?
PBS is running a program this month called "Faces of America" (link), hosted by distinguished African-American Studies professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The program focuses on a handful of celebrity guests, a genetic profile for each, and then a variety of "surprising" discoveries about the genealogies of various of the guests. What I found surprising and …
Appearance and reality in public life
So what kind of democracy do we have? Do our institutions do a great job of establishing the public interest over the medium term, or have our institutions been captured by private interests, leaving essentially no real power in the hands of citizens? The way it is supposed to work, according to Civics 101: Elected …
Democracy and agency in development ethics
Development ethics is an area of applied ethics that attempts to explore the moral issues involved in global social and economic transformation. Key to the urgency of the field is the fact of massive global poverty, hunger, and inequality. The current situation of the world's poor -- in Egypt, India, Mexico, Sudan, or Brazil, for …
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Rawls and decision theory
John Rawls's A Theory of Justice was a strikingly original contribution to political philosophy upon its appearance in 1971. Against the prevailing preference for "meta-ethics" in the field of philosophical ethics, Rawls made an effort to arrive at substantive, non-tautological principles that could be justified as a sort of "moral constitution" for a just society. The theory …
Business interests and democracy
The central ideal of democracy is the notion that citizens can express their political and policy preferences through political institutions, and that the policies selected will reflect those preferences. We also expect that elected officials will act ethically in support of the best interests of the public. This is their public trust. The anti-democratic possibility …
Equality and violence in Alabama, 1960s
image: Ben Shahn photo of Arkansas sharecropper Creating civil and political rights for African Americans in the 1960s required courage and persistence by hundreds of thousands of ordinary people. The system of Jim Crow assured subordination in fundamental rights and needs for millions of rural southern black people -- the right to vote, the right …
What do we want from sociology?
Let's say we've absorbed the anti-positivism argued many times here -- sociology should not be modeled on the natural sciences, we shouldn't expect social phenomena to have the homogeneity and consistency characteristic of natural phenomena, and we shouldn't expect to find social laws. What remains for the intellectual task of post-positivist sociology? What do we …
Scientific realism for the social sciences
What is involved in taking a realist approach to social science knowledge? Most generally, realism involves the view that at least some of the assertions of a field of knowledge make true statements about the properties of unobservable things, processes, and states in the domain of study. Several important philosophers of science have taken up this …
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Understanding Society 