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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: John Rawls

The return of Justice

27 Sunday Oct 2024

Posted by Amod Lele in Morality, Politics, Prejudices and "Intuitions"

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

academia, autobiography, Harvard University, Immanuel Kant, John Locke, John Rawls, justice, Michael Sandel, pedagogy, trolley problem, utilitarianism

I was delighted to hear that this fall Michael Sandel has returned to teaching his Justice course at Harvard. He’d gone many years without teaching it, which I think was a shame, because that course does a better job than just about anything else I can think of at introducing people to philosophy. So it’s great to hear that it’s back.

I was twice a TA – or “TF”, for Teaching Fellow, as Harvard calls them – for Justice, now twenty years ago during my PhD. When Sandel interviewed me for the position, it was my favourite job interview I’ve ever had: the only interview where I was grilled on the finer points of Kant and Rawls. It was a proud moment for me because Sandel was skeptical about whether, as a religionist, I’d have the competence to teach the course, but I showed him how much moral and political philosophy I knew.

In those days at least, Justice was the most popular course at Harvard. It was held in the beautiful Sanders Theatre, Harvard’s largest audience space, and was so popular that the students who wanted to take it wouldn’t even fit in that space. That occasionally put us TFs in the position, not exactly standard for graduate students, of being bouncers: I told one student “I’m sorry, you’re not allowed in at the moment”, and she tried to go in anyway so I had to physically block her. Its popularity often made it a target for funny student pranks (see the picture).

A still from a video of Sandel teaching Justice twenty years ago. That’s me in the blue shirt in the back. (But I’m not the prank).
Continue reading →

In defence of bullshit Marxism

08 Sunday Sep 2024

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Dialectic, Economics, German Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Philosophy of Language, Politics

≈ 14 Comments

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Ben Burgis, Brendan Larvor, Erik Olin Wright, G.A. Cohen, G.W.F. Hegel, John Rawls, Joseph Heath, Karl Marx, nescio13, Plato, Thomas Kuhn

There’s been a lively discussion on Substack recently about a school of thought called analytical Marxism – which also likes to style itself as “no-bullshit Marxism”. This school (whose most prominent members are the sociologist Erik Olin Wright and the philosopher G.A. Cohen) call themselves the No-Bullshit Marxism Group. What makes them supposedly “no-bullshit” is their adoption of precise and formal methods within their respective disciplines, attempting to exorcise vagueness above all.

The discussion was triggered by Joseph Heath’s “John Rawls and the death of Western Marxism”, which argued that John Rawls had basically already accomplished everything the analytical Marxists were trying to do, enough that the analytical Marxists eventually stopped being Marxists and just became Rawlsians.

Nescio13 agreed with the overall frame that analytical Marxists became Rawlsians, but laid the blame more on weaknesses in the analytical Marxist position than strengths in Rawls’s. By contrast Ben Burgis, who is something of an analytical Marxist himself, thinks that the core of Heath’s argument makes little sense – but in part because he sees no contradiction between being a Marxist and being a Rawlsian.

I’ve read very little of the analytical Marxists’ work to date, so I’m not going to weigh in on specific supposed problems in their work, or on the story of what happened to it. What I do want to do is defend the non-analytic style of Marxism – the kind that I think is actually found in Marx’s work, and which the analytical Marxists implicitly describe as bullshit.

Continue reading →

On the very idea of Buddhist ethics

17 Sunday Jan 2016

Posted by Amod Lele in Action, Analytic Tradition, Early and Theravāda, Foundations of Ethics, Free Will, Greek and Roman Tradition, Hermeneutics, M.T.S.R., Metaphilosophy, Modernized Buddhism, Morality, Self

≈ 27 Comments

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Aristotle, Buddhaghosa, Christopher Gowans, Damien Keown, David Chapman, John Rawls, Maria Heim, Peter Harvey, virtue ethics

I’ve recently been reading Christopher Gowans’s Buddhist Moral Philosophy: An Introduction. It is an introductory textbook of a sort that has not previously been attempted, and one that becomes particularly interesting in the light of David Chapman’s critiques of Buddhist ethics. While Gowans and Chapman would surely disagree about the value and usefulness of Buddhist ethics, they actually show remarkable agreement on a proposition that could still be quite controversial: namely, that the term “Buddhist ethics” or “Buddhist moral philosophy” names above all a Yavanayāna phenomenon. That is: the way that Gowans and Chapman use the terms “Buddhist ethics” and “Buddhist moral philosophy”, what they name is a contemporary Western (and primarily academic) activity, even if it is one conducted primarily by professed Buddhists. Continue reading →

What’s wrong with rights

01 Sunday Mar 2015

Posted by Amod Lele in Foundations of Ethics, Morality, Politics

≈ 11 Comments

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Alasdair MacIntyre, Jacques Maritain, John Rawls, law, rights, Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Few concepts are more ubiquitous in our political vocabulary today than rights – human rights, civil rights, equal rights. It is a widespread concept even in non-Western thought about politics, let alone Western. We could try to reject the concept, but that would require great effort, intellectual as well as political – for it would necessarily be reactionary, an innovation through conservatism. A literal conservatism would have to accept the idea of rights, given how intricately woven it is into the fabric of our political discourse. We cannot do without it lightly.

Yet few concepts are also so difficult to defend. Rights-based arguments often get nowhere, because the rights asserted are typically in obvious diametrical contrast: the fetus has a right to life, the pregnant woman has a right to control her body, now what? Rights are typically supposed to be something different from utility; they are not the sort of thing one can trade off and weigh. (That is the role they play in the thought of John Rawls, for example, where protecting individual rights takes “lexicographic” priority – that is, always comes first – over maximizing the welfare of the worst off.) So when competing rights are asserted, too often it leads not to reasoning but to combat. Sometimes the combat is judicial, as over the rights declared in the American Constitution; but those only happen to be the rights articulated by one country’s laws at one point in time. The force of the concepts of civil rights or human rights can only derive from them being something higher, truer, than what happens to be one existing state’s law. Continue reading →

The very young Marx

17 Sunday Feb 2013

Posted by Amod Lele in Biology, Epicureanism, German Tradition, Natural Science, Pre-Socratics

≈ Comments Off on The very young Marx

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atheism, Charles Darwin, Democritus, Epicurus, G.W.F. Hegel, John Rawls, Karl Marx, Paul Schafer, religion

In scholarship on Karl Marx it is a commonplace to draw a distinction between the “early Marx” or “young Marx” on one hand, and the “late Marx” (or “mature Marx”) on the other. There is considerable debate about whether Marx changed his opinions from the early phase or the late phase; many argue that they were constant. But there is little doubt that he changed his emphasis. The young Marx – the Marx of the Paris Manuscripts and Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right – writes a great deal about Hegelian philosophy and the criticism of “religion”. For whatever reason, the late Marx – the Marx of Capital – largely leaves that topic behind, at least in what he says explicitly. He turns his attention instead to economics and politics, to the details of capitalism’s functioning.

Readers of this blog will not be surprised to find that I much prefer the writings of the young Marx. (It is humbling to realize that I am now older than he was.) And indeed I recently had a chance to go further: to the works of the very young Marx. Continue reading →

Slouching towards intimacy

26 Sunday Aug 2012

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, East Asia, Family, Greek and Roman Tradition, Happiness, Virtue

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

autobiography, consequentialism, intimacy/integrity, John Rawls, Julia Annas, mathematics

I have noted that those modern Westerners who learn from South Asian philosophy are usually looking for Ascent while those who learn from East Asian are usually looking for intimacy. Given that my own doctorate was specialized in South Asia, with little East Asian component despite my eventual focus on Buddhism, you might easily guess what my own orientation has been on this score – and you’d be right. I’ve often insisted on correcting those who portray Buddhism as an intimacy-oriented tradition – not just to set the historical record straight, but because I think it’s important to emphasize the value of integrity. When I was thinking in terms of three ways of life, the integrity-oriented “ascetic” and “libertine” approaches, for all their contrasts with each other, both appealed to me far more than the intimacy-oriented “traditionalism”.

But then in recent months and years I’ve been reading significantly more East Asian thought myself – and I’ve also been a bit startled to find myself leaning more toward an intimacy orientation. Continue reading →

MacIntyre against Wilber’s worldcentrism

12 Sunday Feb 2012

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Confucianism, Foundations of Ethics, Metaphilosophy, Morality, Psychology, Self

≈ 5 Comments

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Alan Gewirth, Alasdair MacIntyre, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean Piaget, John Rawls, John Stuart Mill, Ken Wilber, Lawrence Kohlberg, modernism, modernity, Thomas Aquinas, Zhu Xi

While recently poring over Ken Wilber‘s works, I’ve thought repeatedly about his ideas in relation to Alasdair MacIntyre‘s. Wilber, ever since he identified the pre-trans fallacy, has been an arch-modernist: the world from the Enlightenment onwards has been far better than the traditional world that preceded it. His most recent phase has taken a more postmodern, relativistic turn, but even as a postmodernist he is still a modernist: for Wilber the pluralism of a postmodern worldview is a clear advance, a development, and a pretty unambiguous one.

This is not the worldview one finds in MacIntyre. Continue reading →

The ancients in New York

30 Sunday Oct 2011

Posted by Amod Lele in Economics, Epics, Flourishing, Food, Greek and Roman Tradition, Happiness, Place, Virtue

≈ 10 Comments

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Aristotle, Barry Schwartz, Bhagavad Gītā, consequentialism, Ethan C-F (commenter), Herbert Simon, Jack Layton, John Rawls, Julia Annas, New York City, utilitarianism

A month or so ago I started reading Julia Annas‘s excellent The Morality of Happiness – while visiting family in New York City. Because of the New York setting, I was particularly drawn to this passage:

It is also not surprising that ancient ethics, with one marginal exception, never develops anything like the related consequentialist idea of a maximizing model of rationality. If my ethical aim is to produce a good, or the best, state of affairs, then it is only rational to produce as much as possible of it. But ancient ethics does not aim at the production of good states of affairs, and so is not tempted to think that rationality should take the form of maximizing them. Rather, what I aim at is my living in a certain way, my making the best use of goods, and acting in some ways rather than others. None of these things can sensibly be maximized by the agent. Why would I want to maximize my acting courageously, for example? I aim at acting courageously when it is required. I have no need, normally, to produce as many dangerous situations as possible, in order to act bravely in them.

Why is this passage particularly striking in New York? Because as I discussed before, New York life is all about maximizing. Continue reading →

Sudden liberation in pessimism

01 Sunday May 2011

Posted by Amod Lele in Buddhism, Christianity, East Asia, Epicureanism, External Goods, Free Will, Happiness, Hope, Humility, Politics, Psychology, South Asia, Stoicism, Supernatural, Virtue

≈ 73 Comments

Tags

Augustine, Canada, Chan/Zen 禪, James Maas, Jim Wilton, John Rawls, Karl Marx, Phineas Gage

Judging by the comments, many readers found my diagnosis-prognosis post to be dark and pessimistic. Going back to the post, it’s not hard to see why. I endorse there the dark view of our existing human problems shared by Augustine, Marx and the Pali suttas; and yet I don’t think any of their solutions work. The essay effectively ends with a rejection of hope. The logical conclusion to draw from the essay might seem to be “life sucks.”

The understandable reactions to the essay’s pessimism nevertheless surprised me. For as I wrote it, I felt light, happy, life-affirming. Why? 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

Tags

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 →

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