Political and Social Philosophy
Political philosophy questions test whether you can connect a conception of the person to a principle of legitimacy and then to an institutional conclusion. Marks go to answers that state the link explicitly.
Social contract and legitimacy
- Hobbes: the state of nature as war of all against all; authorisation of the sovereign for security.
- Locke: natural rights to life, liberty and property; government as trust, revocable on breach.
- Rousseau: general will versus will of all; forced freedom as submission to a law one gives oneself.
- Rawls: original position, veil of ignorance, two principles - equal basic liberties first, then fair equality of opportunity with the difference principle; reflective equilibrium as method.
- Nozick: historical entitlement, self-ownership, the minimal state; patterned principles violate liberty.
Liberty, justice and obligation
- Berlin's two concepts: negative liberty as non-interference, positive liberty as self-mastery; republican freedom as non-domination (Pettit).
- Mill: harm principle, liberty of thought and expression, fallibility and truth-seeking arguments.
- Distributive justice: utilitarian, egalitarian, prioritarian, sufficientarian, luck egalitarian; the levelling-down objection.
- Marx: alienation, exploitation and ideology critique. Communitarian critique (Sandel, MacIntyre): the unencumbered self ignores constitutive attachments.
- Civil disobedience: Rawls's publicity, nonviolence and fidelity to law; King on unjust law.
Worked example
Why accept the difference principle? Behind the veil nobody knows their talents or starting position, so bargaining advantages cannot justify a distribution. Inequalities are permitted only if they maximise the share of the worst-off group. Contrast Nozick: if a distribution arose by just acquisition and transfer, it is just however unequal, so the difference principle wrongly treats freedom as a resource to be patterned. Show the premise about the person each side relies on.
Traps that cost marks
- Treating the veil of ignorance as a claim about actual ignorance or as a device for predicting outcomes.
- Equating negative liberty with the absence of all constraint, including coercion by others.
- Reading Locke's state of nature as Hobbesian scarcity and war.
- Treating Mill's harm principle as absolute rather than as a presumptive limit.