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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Is cancel culture democratic (with a small "d" even though it is also Democratic with a big "D")?

Regarding Kara's Post: I want to try and tease out how Kara's blog post fits the college into Anderson's image of a private government. It seems like Kara's suggesting that the college itself is the private government. The professors are the governors and the students are the governed. The college constitutes a government because a government "exists wherever some have the authority to issue orders to others, backed by sanctions" (Anderson 42). Professors can issue orders by assigning tasks students must perform, and professors can sanction students who fail to complete these tasks or fail to do them successfully by giving them poor or failing grades in courses. The college is a private government because the "governed are kept out of decision-making" (45). The students do not, for the most part, come up with their own assignments or come up with grading rubrics for those assignments.  I agree with Kara, based on the image of the college as a private...
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Better Model?

     On page 54, Beitz says that human rights are like natural rights in that they are "critical standards" not determined by legal rules, but unlike natural rights in that they do not presuppose one view about their justification. He seems to be basing this off of Maritain's conclusion that human rights are a common ground for action despite different reasons for justification for different people. He uses this to say that human rights are not "out there" as natural rights are and continues the argument on 57. He argues that there seems to be no good reason for why we should  conceive of human rights as natural ones.      Beitz points to natural rights theorists like Locke, conceived of natural rights " formulate constraints on the use of a government’s coercive power in circumstances of religious and moral diversity" (57). While I suspect that Locke would argue that he had other reasons for posing these as natural rigthts and this was a just a desira...
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