Project Summary

I have not had a lot of opportunities to explain what exactly my research project is about. Here is a basic summary on what my topic is. There is more to say on these issues than just what I say here, but this is supposed to be a brief summary

Broadly speaking I will be writing on ethics and political philosophy. These are really parts of the same topic. Ethics is the study of human normative judgments. It is a normative study in the sense that it is not focused on what people actually believe or do, these descriptive matters are more topics of social science. Ethics as a philosophical discipline is concerned with how people should act and believe.

Political philosophy is a study of social political structures and practices. Again this is not a descriptive study, like political science. Political philosophy is a normative study, concerned with explicating justice. Justice is a normative concept, and a natural extension of ethics. Thus, political philosophy is usually considered to be a sub-discipline of ethics.

My project is, basically, to argue in favor of a alternate view of justice. My alternative is a rehashing of a very old idea, found at least as far back as Plato. I intend to argue that justice is a feature of societies that is analogous to virtue for the individual. So, a just society is not a function of specific laws or policies. Instead justice is a quality of the whole social system.

This is an ambitious argument. There are a number of controversial components. The first is a view of ethics called virtue ethics. This view holds that character traits are the most basic units of ethical evaluation. The more popular competitor to this view is an action based view that holds that human actions are the most basic unit of evaluation. In order to argue for my view I need to attempt to prove that character traits are theoretically basic.

I then plan to argue for a functional agency held by political states. This is an anti-atomistic view of political philosophy. Anatomists hold that individual interests, as opposed to collective interests are important to justice. Collectivism holds that collective interests are important to justice above and beyond mere collections of individual interest. I hold a collectivist view, and argue that the collective interests of the state can be understood to be a pseudo-ethical agent.

The pseudo-agency of the state, coupled with the virtue ethics view means that the most natural evaluation of a just collective agency is a virtuous one. The virtuous state is just due to its instantiation of specific qualities of the collective character. So, the just state will involve state character evaluations above and beyond the mere stewardship of individual concerns.

The practical fallout of this meta-ethical view I reject liberalism. Liberalism is a view of political philosophy that is atomistic, and sees the state as a protector of individual rights, traditionally life, liberty, and property. As well, liberalism has been married to a view of state-neutrality. This holds that the state should be neutral between competing conceptions of the good life, leaving individuals free to adopt their own conceptions of the good. Liberalism is a foundational view of western democracies, particularly the American system.

However I am driven to reject is based on problems with state-neutrality, conception of individual atomism, and negative freedom. Instead I adopt a modified republican view. Republicanism happens to coincide with what I hold to be the appropriate views of justice and ethics. Note: the common uses of liberalism and republicanism as used in our current American popular discussions on politics have very different meanings to the ways I am using the terms here.

Well here is a very basic summary of my project. I kno9w that this is an ambitious attempt, maybe too ambitious. I might need to scale it back at some point. Also there are a lot of holes in my description. Some of those holes are due to the quick treatment on this format, others are still holes in my argument that is not fully worked out.