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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Jeremy Bentham

How neo is neoliberalism?

13 Sunday Mar 2022

Posted by Amod Lele in Economics, Pleasure, Politics, Work

≈ 4 Comments

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20th century, academia, David Harvey, Friedrich Hayek, Jeremy Bentham, Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, Ronald Reagan, utilitarianism, Wendy Brown

The terms neoliberal and neoliberalism have become ubiquitous in left-wing discourse of the past few years, ranging from discussions of government policy to critiques of mindfulness meditation. They merit a closer look.

Credit for the terms usually goes back to Michel Foucault, in his lectures collected as The Birth of Biopolitics. What is extraordinary about these lectures is that they took place in early 1979 – before Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher would take office and implement the sweeping right-wing libertarian-capitalist economic reforms to which the term “neoliberal” is now most often applied. So while 21st-century writing about neoliberalism aims to describe an ideology that shapes the actions of government and social institutions, Foucault was merely writing about an ideology found in the writings of mid-20th-century German and American economists (most notably Friedrich Hayek). For this reason, Foucault now comes to look prescient – but his writing on the subject takes on a very different cast from 21st-century writers, since he is only describing a theory, and they aim to describe a practice.

There are many things to be said about the concept of neoliberalism. First off, it is an unfortunately confusing term, in the North American context at least. It probably makes sense in Australia, where the Liberal Party is the right-wing party. And the ideas and practices described as “neoliberal” do occur on both sides of the political spectrum. But the opposition to neoliberalism comes largely from people on the political left, people whom the vast majority of ordinary Americans and Canadians would still describe as – liberal.

Still, the term is in widespread use on the left now, and however confusing the term is, the bigger question is the phenomenon the term claims to describe: a phenomenon which is supposedly a new (neo) transformation of the market-oriented political ideas that have in the past gone under the name “liberal”. So we may ask of neoliberalism: is it liberal – at least in the broad sense in which Reaganite right-wingers are liberal? And is it neo – what about it is new?

Continue reading →

On natural law and positive law

03 Sunday Jul 2016

Posted by Amod Lele in Foundations of Ethics, God, Hermeneutics, Islam, Morality, Politics, Protestantism, Reading and Recitation, Roman Catholicism

≈ 1 Comment

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fundamentalism, Jeremy Bentham, law, Martin Luther, modernity, rights, Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham

In the previous discussion of why intellectualism and voluntarism are important, I left out what I think may be the most important aspect of all, one which leaves its mark on our thought today in the modern West. Namely: whether God is an intellect or a will bears directly on the way we think of morality – at least when we understand morality in terms of law, as the Abrahamic traditions all have to some degree.

If God is a will, then that will makes morality: morality is whatever God’s will commands. Continue reading →

The four puruṣārthas across cultures

15 Wednesday Sep 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Christianity, Confucianism, Consciousness, Daoism, East Asia, Epics, Epicureanism, Epistemology, Flourishing, German Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Pleasure, Social Science

≈ 34 Comments

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Aristotle, Augustine, Confucius, Epicurus, Jeremy Bentham, John Rawls, Mahābhārata, Max Weber, Mozi, Plato, puruṣārthas, Stephen Walker, utilitarianism

In private messages, Stephen Walker recently came back to points he’d made before about the three basic ways of life I had identified before (asceticism, traditionalism and libertinism). He noted, correctly I think, that that scheme as it stands is Indo-Eurocentric; many Chinese thinkers (especially pre-Buddhist ones) do not fit it comfortably.

The problem is not merely a matter of some thinkers lying between ways of life – if, say, Mozi lies between traditionalism and libertinism, as Aquinas lies between traditionalism and asceticism. Schemes like this are (and probably must be) Weberian ideal types: the possibility that real-world examples will fall somewhere in between the categories is not just anticipated, it’s intended. The point is to have a universal heuristic to understand the particulars better, not to have a classification where one can file everything neatly into one folder or the other. (There is something rather Platonic about the ideal-type method, in that one never expects to encounter a perfect or exact manifestation of the category in the real world.)

No, the serious problem is more particular to the scheme, with its third category of “libertinism” encompassing those thinkers who do not embrace asceticism and whose critiques of tradition are relatively radical. Chinese tradition features many such thinkers – but, contrary to my category of “libertinism” as defined in the earlier post, almost none of them highlight pleasure as a (let alone the) central feature of a good life. Continue reading →

The three basic ways of life

20 Sunday Dec 2009

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, Cārvāka-Lokāyata, Christianity, Confucianism, Early and Theravāda, East Asia, Epics, Epicureanism, Epistemology, Family, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, German Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Jainism, Judaism, Metaphysics, Monasticism, Pleasure, Roman Catholicism, South Asia, Vedānta, Work

≈ 6 Comments

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academia, Aristippus, Augustine, autobiography, Bhagavad Gītā, Confucius, David Hume, dharmaśāstra, Epicurus, Friedrich Nietzsche, G.W.F. Hegel, intimacy/integrity, Jeremy Bentham, Mozi, Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha), Thomas Aquinas, Thomas P. Kasulis, utilitarianism, Yoga Sūtras

One reason I turn back to premodern philosophies so much is that they often show us questions larger than those generally asked in philosophy today. Especially important among these: “what kind of life should I live?” What sorts of major life decisions should I make? It still surprises me how rarely academic philosophers concern themselves with these questions, when we spend so much time teaching people in their late teens and early twenties – for whom these questions are in the foreground.

Lately in my mind I’ve been tossing around the hypothesis that the answers to the question “What kind of life should I live?” roughly boil down to three – and that each of the three is tied to some sort of metaphysics, a theoretical as well as a practical philosophy: Continue reading →

Stumbling on happiness

30 Thursday Jul 2009

Posted by Amod Lele in Family, Flourishing, Happiness, Psychology

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Aristotle, Daniel Gilbert, Immanuel Kant, Jeremy Bentham

Rare is the philosopher who doesn’t give happiness a significant place in the good life. Even Kant, often caricatured as making no room for happiness, still says both that it is a duty to secure one’s own happiness in this world, and that one needs to hope for happiness in the afterlife. Happiness, then, is a topic of key philosophical importance, whether by “happiness” we mean the pleasant mental state aimed at by Bentham or the broader conception of human flourishing in Aristotle’s eudaimonia; and most accounts of the latter include some element of the former.

We would do well, then, to pay attention to the burgeoning field of psychologists’ empirical research on happiness. The field faces a number of methodological problems, but comes to interesting insights in spite of these. One deservedly popular book in the field is Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness, a well written and engaging summary of current research. Gilbert does a good job of summarizing many psychologists’ counterintuitive findings about happiness.

The problem is that some of Gilbert’s conclusions contradict not only common sense – which isn’t a problem, because contradicting common sense is the point – but each other. He concludes at the end that we are not as different from other people as we think we are, and that therefore in order to be happy we should ask other people what makes them happy. Yet elsewhere in the book he acknowledges that people don’t themselves know what makes them happy. The most obvious example is children: ask anyone who has children and they will tell you their children are their key source of joy, yet every study on the subject concludes we get less happy when children are born, and happier again when they leave. Which is to say that according to Gilbert’s own data, other people’s self-report is not the best place to find out what will make you happy.

Rawls the utilitarian

19 Sunday Jul 2009

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Economics, Happiness, Morality, Politics

≈ 1 Comment

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Jeremy Bentham, John Rawls, John Stuart Mill, justice, Richard Layard, rights, utilitarianism

John Rawls is widely recognized as one of the most important critics of utilitarianism. In some respects he is; utilitarianism per se became much less popular in analytic philosophical circles after the publication of Rawls’s work. Yet in another respect, Rawls’s work is fundamentally a continuation of the utilitarian project – softening John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism in something very much like the way that Mill had softened Bentham’s. Continue reading →

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