Hobbes, Smith, and modern economoics.

 



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Does the social reality imply a natural reality?

I’m very interested in understanding where the boundary between what we might consider the (or a) ‘natural’ reality and our ‘social’ reality occurs. Professor Toole offers a compelling account of how the ideology of the ruling class shapes the body of knowledge and the conceptual tools available to understand social reality. Professor Toole’s account seems to imply the impossibility of social structures as being ‘natural.’ That is, the term natural social structure or formation would be an oxymoron. She writes, “social structures are…constituted by our choices and actions,” (4) which seems to indicate that social structures are the result of human choices and actions, and so they cannot exist in the absence of them. This also seems to suggest a division between our ‘social’ reality exclusively defined by and dependent on human action and choice and a ‘natural’ reality of things not affected by humans, say the ocean and uranium. I am interested in the boundary and relationship between t...
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Three liberties are no liberty at all

 In this blog post, I want to partially echo Zac and Frank in their discussion of the three types of liberty Anderson identifies. Anderson lays out compelling examples as to why incomplete possession of the forms of liberty results in a circumstance that doesn’t seem to resemble ‘genuine’ freedom. This seems to imply that the state of actual human freedom is, at least partially, defined by the possession of all three forms of liberty. That is, it is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a free person to possess positive, negative, and republican liberty. Thus, it seems there are, or may be, other considerations that allow a person to attain a state of freedom—or will allow us to determine tradeoffs between each of the three types of liberty. However, it seems we run into a problem. Liberty seems to be a value that must supersede many other values, but perhaps not all of them. For example, economic utility cannot supersede liberty because that could allow for the possibility ...
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Oh Poland, why are you the country of civil disobedience?

  As I was reading through section 55 of Rawls on civil disobedience one thing that I kept thinking of was Poland. However, not about the civil disobedience seen with individuals which happened a myriad of times in the last five years. The women strikes, the protests of law-abiding citizens about the proposed constitutional changes, mine workers, public transport workers, private firms’ owners, and many more have taken the streets of big and small cities in the past few years after a right-wing part Law and Justice gained majority in the legislative and won presidential elections. (Poland is a parliamentary republic.) That was not my main concern but rather what if it is the government that is acting in line of civil disobedience?   Rawls acknowledges that we must have a democratic society and we do have a democratic society in Poland with citizens who “recognize and accept the legitimacy of the constitution.” I would rather say that is the government that does not acknowledge...
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