Ethics for Broken World: Imagining Philosophy after Catastrophe 9780773594746

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Ethics for a Broken World

Ethics for a Broken World Imagining Philosophy After Catastrophe

Tim Mulgan

McGill-Queen's University Press Montreal & Kingston lthaca

O Tim Mulgan, 2011 ISBN 978-0-7735-3944-0 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-7735-3945-7 (paper) Legal deposit fourth quarter 2011 Bibliothequenationale du Quebec This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. No reproduction without permission. All rights reserved. Published simultaneously outside North America by Acumen Publishing Limited McGill-Queen's University Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its activities. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Mulgan, Tim Ethics for a broken world : imagining philosophy after catastrophe/ Tim Mulgan. Co-published by Acumen. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7735-3944-0 (bound).--ISBN 978-0-7735-3945-7 (pbk.)

1.Political science--Philosophy. 2. Ethics. 3. Global environmental change. I.Title.

Printed and bound in the UK by MPG Books Group.

Contents

Acknowledgements

vii

Preface: imagining a broken world

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Introductory lecture: ~ h i l o s o in ~h the ~ age of affluence Part I: Rights

Lecture 1.Nozick on rights Lecture 2. Self-ownership Lecture 3. The Lockean proviso Lecture 4. Nozick in a broken world Lecture 5. Nationalism Part II: Utilitarianism

Lecture 6. Act utilitarianism Lecture 7. Rule utilitarianism

CONTENTS

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Lecture 8. Well-being and value Lecture 9. Mill on liberty Lecture 10. Utilitarianism and future people Lecture 11. Utilitarianism in a broken world Part Ill: The social contract

Lecture 12.Hobbes and Locke Lecture 13. Rawls Lecture 14.Rawls and the future Lecture 15. Rawls in a broken world Part IV: Democracy Lecture 16. Democracy Lecture 17. Democracy and the future Reading list Bibliography Index

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

I wrote this book during my time as a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellow at the Princeton University Center for Human Values (UCHV) in 2010-11. For their fellowship throughout that year, and for many conversations about this project, I am especially grateful to my fellow UCHV visitors: Corey Brettschneider, Tom Christiano, Gerry Mackie, Adrienne Martin, Colleen Murphy, Kristi Olson, Jon Quong and John Seery. For providing the perfect sabbatical environment, I thank Charles Beitz, Erum Syed, Susan Winters and everyone else at UCHV. I am also grateful to the School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies at the University of St Andrews for supporting my leave. I have presented earlier versions of the ideas in this book in seminars, conference talks and public lectures at the universities of S t Andrews, Auckland, Dundee, Edinburgh, Nottingham, Otago, Princeton and Rennes, and the Open University. I am very grateful to audiences at all these venues for their comments and suggestions. I have also learnt much from conversations with Sarah Broadie, Melissa Lane and Janet McLean.

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I first suggested the idea for this book to Tristan Palmer in October 2008. His encouragement and wise counsel have resulted in a much better book than I would otherwise have produced. Finally, I am very grateful to the four anonymous readers for Acumen for their insightful comments.

viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Preface Imagining a broken world

This book asks how the central themes and questions of political philosophy might change if we were living in a broken world: a place where resources are insufficient to meet everyone's basic needs, where a chaotic climate makes life precarious and where each generation is worse off than the last. To make that thought experiment vivid, I imagine a history of philosophy class in the broken world, studying classic texts from a past age of affluence in the early twenty-first century. Apart from this Preface and the Reading List, the book consists of transcripts from that imaginary future class. Climate change is a topical issue, and the broken world is one possible future. However, this book is not primarily about climate change. The device of the broken world serves insteadto highlight the contingency of our moral and political ideals, asking us to see our society and its ideals from the outside. Reimagining contemporary philosophy for a broken world offers the same benefits as studying past political philosophers in their historical context. At times, I do touch indirectly on what moral and political philosophy might have to say about climate change. And I do hope that reflecting

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on how our descendants will see their world, and how they might view our legacy, may lead us to rethink our way of life. However, I defend no particular theory, nor do I offer any concrete advice. My aim is to prompt readers to think about their relations to future people, rather than to tell them what to think. The Introductory Lecture outlines the main differences between the broken world and our own "affluent" age. As will become clear, I do not imagine a standard post-apocalyptic scenario where civilization has broken down completely and only a handful of the present population survive. Organized societies still exist, and each has found some way to negotiate life in the broken world. While I do not assign a definite date to the broken world, I assume we are talking about a time in the next fifty to a hundred years. Readers are invited to think of the broken-world dwellers as (at most) their own great-great-grandchildren, rather than as more remote descendants. Similarly, while I do not wish to give the imaginary class a definite geographical location, I do imagine it taking place among the remnants of a Western developed country somewhere in North America, western Europe or Australasia. Aside from these very general stipulations, I do not specify the details of life in the broken world. This is a work of theoretical philosophy, not an exercise in speculative fiction. I do not say that the broken world will happen. The range of possible human futures includes many that are much brighter, along with some that are much worse. The uncertainty surrounding the global climate system (and the human response to it) is too great for anyone to predict anything with much confidence. I claim only that something like this is one possible future. This book assumes no previous acquaintance with philosophy. It introduces, in a novel way, many of the topics traditionally covered in an introductory undergraduate political philosophy course. The lectures are designed to introduce the key texts to the book's actual readers, as well as to imaginary future students. However, I have endeavoured to include enough original material to interest readers already familiar with contemporary philosophy. Three lectures in particular ( 4 , l l and 15) are more speculative and more challenging than the rest. These lectures apply affluent philosophy directly to the broken world. In the context of a real-life course, they might best be assigned as optional reading. The

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Reading List includes all the primary sources discussed in the text, as well as selected secondary sources. The inhabitants of the broken world use the adjective "affluent" in the same way that we might use "medieval" or "ancient". It denotes a period of human history: the age of affluence. An "affluent philosopher" is a philosopher from - and characteristic of - that age. I have chosen this term because Ibelieve it captures what would strike someone in a broken world as most distinctive about our society and its values. In addition to the framing device of the broken world, this book differs from standard introductory texts in three ways. Two differences are substantive. First, I devote far more space to intergenerational issues than in a standard introduction. As I argue several times throughout the book, the spectre of a broken future greatly increases the moral significance of this neglected area of ethics. Therefore, people in the broken world will emphasize this aspect of affluent thought. Given the space devoted to future people, and to the broken-world framing device itself, there is not room in a book of manageable size to cover as many thinkers or theories as one would expect in a standard survey course. The book aims to be representative rather than comprehensive. My selection principle has been to ask: what strands of contemporary philosophy would strike someone in the broken world as most representativeof our affluent age?Accordingly, I have disproportionately chosen defenders (or at least sympathetic critics) of contemporary capitalist liberal democracy. While it may seem odd to sideline the myriad more radical critics of the Western way of life, I believe my selections bring the differences between the affluent and broken worlds more sharply into focus. Furthermore, the premise of the book is that, however much they may have talked about radical change, the internal critics of affluent society failed to avoid a broken future. They are thus unlikely to be remembered as representativeof our age. (Readers who want a more "balanced" account of affluent philosophy will find some suggestions in the Reading List.) A final distinctive feature of this book is its tone. I do not picture my imagined future students as dispassionate observers looking back to some quaint affluent past. They see us as the self-obsessed breakers of their world. Perhaps they will think of us as we think of those past

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generations who practised slavery or burnt heretics. These people are angry, and sometimes I allow that anger to seep into the text. My fictional future students and their teacher are sometimes unsympathetic, perhaps even unfair. Their knowledge of our situation is, after all, very incomplete. Then again, if you broke somebody's world, how much sympathy would you expect?

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Welcome to "Ancient Philosophy Ill: American and European philosophy in the age of affluence". I shall be your facilitator for this module. Today, Iintroduce our topic, and situate it in historical time and logical space. Before we look at the philosophy itself, we first explore its historical context. The age of affluence lies immediately before the dark times from which our present global civilizations are still emerging. It was a brief period, lasting only some two or three centuries, but a crucial time in human history. This was the time when humans caused catastrophic climate change: the age of the breaking of the world. Although not so distant in purely temporal terms - ending only a handful of generations ago - the affluent age seems very remote from our own. Affluent people do seem to live in another world. This most recent historical epoch is also the most inaccessible. Our task is to understand affluent philosophy, and to apply it to our own times. We must imagine the affluent world, and ask how an affluent philosopher would see our world. I will employ two imaginary timetravellers: one who travels back from our own time to the affluent age, and an affluent traveller transported forward to our world.

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As this is not a course in history or comparative anthropology, we focus on very general differences between the age of affluence and our own world. We can explore these under two main headings: natural abundance and social affluence.

1. Natural abundance

If we were magically transported back to the affluent age, the first thing to strike us would be the abundance of natural resources. Edible food and drinkable water were readily available and constantly replenished. Affluent societies had more than enough nutrients and fuels to meet all the basic needs of the entire population, with much left over for extravagant leisure pursuits. They threw away vast quantities of food and squandered enormous quantities of water, and one of their most popular leisure activities was to drive extremely inefficient carbon-fuelledvehicles around in circles. In the words of the affluent philosopher John Rawls, affluent societies enjoyedfavourable conditions: a situation of such abundance that all basic needs could be met without any compromise to basic liberties. This abundance was not limited to food and fuel. The age of affluence stood at the brink of the last - and most severe - great mass extinction. If our first time-traveller were an expert botanist or zoologist, she would find 95 per cent of mammals, 80 per cent of other animals and 60 per cent of plant species in the affluent world completely unfamiliar. All these forms of life, abundant up to the age of affluence, have disappeared, along with a wide diversity of stable, thriving ecosystems. If our time-traveller saw a map of the affluent world, she would hardly recognize it. Sea levels were an astonishing twenty metres lower than today. All that water was locked up in giant sheets of ice (known as "glaciers") that dominated the polar regions. Global average temperature was some five degrees colder than today, with much greater variation at the poles. Many human beings lived in the tropics, which were then habitable and fertile. Many of our starkest desert regions were lush forests. The now-lost Amazon rainforest, for instance, was home to many more species than now inhabit the entire globe.

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INTRODUCTORY LECTURE

If our time-traveller lingered in the affluent world, then perhaps its most striking ongoingfeature would be the stable climate. Despite a few fluctuations, weather patternsand seasonalvariations were remarkably constant, giving rise to a level of agricultural planningthat is unimaginable today. Predictable patterns of wind and wave, together with abundant fuel, made global travel both safe and easy. Affluent people would often fly all the way around the world carbon-fuelled, of course - simply for a holiday! The New Zealand archipelago (now the northern outpost of the informal confederation of the Great Southern Land) and the Australian desert (now a barely habitable penal colony for the Indonesian provinces) were favourite destinations. Some even travelled out of a desire to "explore the natural world", whose wonders they destroyed as they went.

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2. Social affluence

Our time-traveller would also notice many strange social features in the age of affluence. One question that fascinates historians- and which will interest us as well - is whether these differences are an inevitable result of natural abundance, or whether affluent people could have lived differently. If our time-traveller were a student of global politics, she would be immediately struck by two things. The first is that the affluent world was rigidly divided into nations or states. These concepts are hard to translate into our political vocabulary. For political purposes, people in this age saw themselves not simply as humans, nor as members of some large pan-globalconfederacy. Nor did they identify primarily with smaller groups such as tribes or families. Instead, they thought of themselves first and foremost as citizens of a particular nation, as "BritishJ', "American", "Chinese" and so on. Each nation was linked to a specific land area: a national territory. These territories were separated by national "boundaries". Movement of people across those boundaries was highly restricted. Most people spent their entire lives in the territory where they happened to be born. The second fact that would strike our time-traveller would be the enormous inequality between these nations. Although global resources were

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more than sufficient to meet all basic needs, there was much material poverty and even starvation - in the affluent world. We might say that the nations of the affluent age operated a very crude (and unnecessary) survival lottery, where tickets were allocated on the basis of accidents of birth, especially the accident of where a person happened to be born. While stable climate and ecological diversity were global features, the abundant social conditions characterizing the affluent age were not spread equally across the whole world. Instead, they were concentrated in two main areas: Europe and North America. This was an age of pockets of affluence. From now on, when I mention "affluent society" or "affluent people", I refer to these pockets, as this is where all the philosophers we shall study lived. Living in a world of such abundant resources, it is no surprise that affluent people developed a wasteful and inefficient economy, known as a consumer society. Everything was organized around the production and consumption of increasing quantities of material goods. Instead of being satisfied with what they had, people were exhorted to strive for ever greater levels of material "prosperity". It was assumed that economic growth was always both possible and desirable, that production could increase without limit and that any natural obstacles would always be overcome by technological innovation. Although some philosophers emphasized the importance of equality, it appears from the historical record that enormous inequalities in material prosperity were accepted within every affluent society, as the price of affluence itself. These are the features that would immediately strike our time-traveller. Delving deeper, she would find affluent societies very chaotic and decentralized. These societies were capitalist liberal democracies. All three terms require explanation. Capitalism is a mode of economic organization based on the free market. The means of production are privately owned by capitalists, who employ workers to turn resources into products. The invisible hand of the market mechanism sets prices according to aggregate supply and demand. A liberal society is one where people are free to practise their own religion, express their own opinions and make their own lifestyle choices. Democracy is a mode of politicalorganization where leaders are periodically elected, usually via a secret ballot where each adult citizen has a single vote.

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INTRODUCTORY LECTURE

In practice, things were not so simple. In their pure form, all three of these ideals are hopelessly unworkable. Of course, every society uses markets to allocate some resources, values some freedoms and gives its citizens some voice in government. But no government allows markets free rein, respects every possible freedom or gives all citizens an equal say. The same was true in the affluent age. Markets were regulated and distorted in various ways; liberty was often curtailed, especially in times of "national emergency"; and real political power was never equally distributed, not least because capitalists always had more influence than workers. But capitalism, liberalism and democracy were the ideals of the affluent society: ideals that its most prominent philosophers sought to expound and defend. In the affluent age, survival bottlenecks were unknown. Affluent people could plan ahead to meet all needs, and respond quickly to any temporary disaster. There was nothing that we would recognize as a survival lottery. When affluent philosophers spoke of a "survival lottery", they considered it only as an abstract possibility, or as a solution to very isolated questions such as the allocation of scarce medical technology. The philosophers we shall be studying took it for granted that everyone can survive. In their societies this was, for a time, not an unreasonable assumption. Our biggest challenge in this course is to imagine a social world devoid of survival bottlenecks and survival lotteries, a world where the basic needs of all can always be reliably met for the foreseeable future.

3. Affluent philosophy

Like any group of human thinkers, the philosophers of the affluent age were shaped by their natural and social environment. In this section, we examine some key features of their philosophy. Tradition Like any philosophers worthy of the name, the philosophers of this age saw themselves as belongingto a tradition, one that stretched back over 2,000 years. This tradition goes by a variety of names: Western philosophy, European philosophy, Anglo-American philosophy, anglophone

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philosophy and analytic philosophy. Affluent philosophers often referred back to their predecessors, and we shall occasionally have reason to do so ourselves. In particular, we may find some pre-affluent philosophers more accessible, as their situations and attitudes are more familiar. Specialization In the affluent age, philosophy became a professional specialized activity, pursued largely by university teachers writing for their peers. The subject split into a bewildering array of sub-specialisms that seldom spoke to one another. Two of these splits are especially striking: between theoretical and practical philosophy; and, within the latter, between moral and political philosophy. While these divisions partly reflect increasing specialization - and a peculiar cultural obsession that led humanities academics to distort their subjects into parodies of the natural sciences - they also reflect the broader values of affluent society. Instead of building practical philosophy on the solid foundation of theoretical enquiry - instead of deriving ethics from metaphysics, as their most illustrious predecessors had done - many affluent philosopherssought to construct an ethics that embraced theoretical uncertainty. Rather than turning to metaphysics to resolve disputes, affluent ethics took continuing metaphysical disagreement- often called "religious pluralism" or "reasonable pluralism" - as its starting-point. Ethics tells us how to live with disagreement, rather than how to remove it. The division between moral and political philosophy similarly reflects both the retreatingambitions of philosophyand the relativism of affluent culture. Pre-affluent philosophers saw a tight connection between the good life for an individualand the good of society. The individual's highest good comes in service to the common good, while the funtion of government is to mould individualsto serve. Affluent philosophy separated individual good from common good, and treated the former as prior to the latter. This priority takes several distinct forms. We see it in the myth of the social contract, where individuals are pictured as existingfully formed before they enter society; in the assumption -common to many affluent philosophers -that the common good must be some function or aggregate of the goods of individuals; in the utilitarian claim that we should judge the health of a society by adding up the happiness of individuals;

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and in the liberal assumption that the greatest virtue of government is to leave individuals alone to pursue their own private ends. For the affluent philosopher, moral philosophy was the ethics of a private realm distinct from (and superior to) the public world of politics. These two philosophical divisions shed light on a puzzling historical fact. Even after evidence that affluent behaviour was causing dangerous climate change became incontrovertible, affluent society still allowed individuals both to express and disseminate dangerous falsehoods (the work of the notorious "climate change sceptics"), and to continue their individual climate-destroying behaviour. Affluent society simply lacked any mechanism for translating a change in theoretical knowledge swiftly and effectively into a shift in individual behaviour; and affluent philosophy lacked the conceptual resources even to recognize this disastrous lack as a moral failing. individualism In the age of affluence, individualism took many different forms. It could be metaphysical: the belief that only individual humans have real existence, and that society is merely a construct. (As one minor late-affluent provincial leader starkly put it, "There is no such thing as society".) Or it could be moral: only individual humans are ultimately valuable, and the value of the collective is merely the sum of the values of its parts. Or individualism could be pragmatic: a belief that individual choices, uncoordinated by any central authority, produce the best results. The common good emerges, in some not well-specified way, from the uncoordinated actions of individuals. Faith in this emergence was a defining feature of the age of affluence. Atomistic method Affluent philosophers often engaged in the "analytic method", focusing on simple thought experiments, and often leaving the context unstated. We must be especially wary of this technique when the unspoken background context includes many assumptions that do not carry over to our own world. Another striking methodological feature of affluent philosophy was its faith in intuition, especially individual intuition. We shall often find our philosophers appealing not to the consensus of the wise, nor

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even to the uninformedjudgements of the many, but rather to their own individualjudgement. Temporal myopia

The philosophers of the affluent age were astonishingly myopic. They focused on the present, secure both in their own sense of superiority to the past, and in the belief that they would leave their descendants better off than themselves. They assumed that if they looked after themselves, the future would take care of itself, principally because they pictured the natural world as stable, permanent, abundant and largely unaffected by human activity. Cultural myopia

Confident in the superiority of their own way of life, the affluent philosophers displayed a scarcely credible lack of interest in the wisdom to be found in other philosophicaltraditions. Reading affluent philosophy, you would hardly know that it shared the world with two other intellectual traditions that were more venerable and more populous (namely, those arising in the ancient lands of China and India). While their rhetoric was universal, their actual concerns were highly parochial, applicable only to an unattractive and unsustainable way of life that flourished briefly in small pockets and then was gone. It is little wonder that the affluent philosophers are the least studied members of a largely forgotten tradition.

4. Forward to the broken world

We now adopt the perspective of our second imaginary time-traveller. What would an affluent philosopher make of our world? In contrast to the abundance of his own world, he would find a world where breathable air, drinkable water, arable land and fuel of all kinds are scarce resources that must be conserved and rationed. Rather than ecological abundance, he would find that most familiar species have disappeared; that many regions that once housed vast civilizations have either sunk beneath the waves or become too arid and hot to sustain human life; and that human beings live only in higher latitudes, far from the tropics.

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Perhaps most striking of all, our traveller would find that the destruction of the global climate system caused by carbon emissions in the age of affluence has left us without regular or predictable weather patterns. Rainfall levels and sunshine hours are largely unpredictable, while extreme weather events such as floods, hurricanes and tidal waves are much more common. But our affluent time-traveller would also not find the total devastation foretold by affluent writers of speculative fiction. Many people in the age of affluence knew that their way of life was unsustainable, and much of their fiction dealt with possible apocalyptic scenarios. That fiction imagined a single one-off global catastrophe that would destroy civilization and devastate the population, but after which the tiny remnants of humanity would rebuild in a world not unlike what had gone before. In these apocalyptic scenarios, the emphasis was on short-term individual survival, or on building rudimentary institutions from scratch. Life in our world is more complicated. If our affluent traveller sought a model from his own time, he would look not to speculative fantasy, but to the real lives of hunter-gatherer societies living on the edges of the affluent world. One of these, the Eskimo or Inuit, was acknowledgedeven by the affluent philosopher Rawls as one of the few contemporary exceptions to his general presumption of favourable conditions. Before they were incorporated into the institutions of affluent society, these people's lives were marked by two striking features. First, food supplies were often not sufficient to keep everyone alive until stocks could be replenished. At the start of each winter, the community had to decide who would remain alive until next summer. Second, great uncertainty surrounded future food supplies, as the community never knew whether the next harvest or hunting season would be good or bad. Our situation is somewhat like this, only on a much larger scale. Like the Eskimo, we often lack the food to keep everyone alive, and we must also keep some food aside to meet future needs and to guard against future emergencies. Unlike the Eskimo, our collective decisions often involve large societies with very complex and sophisticated systems of food production and distribution, rather than small family-based groups. Also, our uncertainty is much greater than theirs, as the global climate no longer has a regular pattern. When the climate is favourable, we

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expand production (and many societies rapidly expand population) to make the most of the good times, without knowing whether they will last for months or decades or days. In bad times, food productionfalls far below what is needed to meet the needs of even a minimal population. As we have seen many times in recent history, when times are bad any "grasshopper" society that failed to save and build up a surplus of food is swept away. Our affluent visitor might initially refuse to believe that our plight represents the future of his affluent world. Drawing on the affluent faith in technology, he might be sure that human ingenuity must always outweigh the negative impact of climatic variation and uncertainty. We can only reply that, while this might have happened in a different possibleworld, it did not actually happen. While there have been many advances in agricultural technology, fuel efficiency and climate prediction, these are simply no substitute for drinkable water, fertile soil and the countless benefits of regular seasons. In our world, whether in good times or bad, we must constantly choose between present and future needs, and between the lives of present and future people. Instead of apocalyptic chaos, our traveller would thus find functioning societies carving out a living in an unstable, hostile world. The most striking feature of our societies, for an affluent visitor, would be that survival bottlenecks are an ongoing fact of life. We often find ourselves in a place where we cannot all survive. The central questions of our political philosophy are: how do we preserve society through those bottlenecks; and what do justice and ethics require in such extreme circumstances? These are the questions that our philosophers struggle with today. In practice, every society in our world institutes some "survival lottery". For instance, many societies distribute food partly on the basis of age or health, so that people are not kept alive once they can no longer make a productive contribution, or when they have little chance of survival even if they are fed. These lotteries, and their accompanying systems of entitlement, sanctions and rewards, are so central to our social life that we can barely imagine their absence. By contrast, our affluent visitor would initially regard any survival lottery as both morally repellent and absurdly impractical. A survival lottery is a bureaucratic procedurethat determines who lives and

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who dies. No affluent society operated such a procedure, and any attempt to institute one would have encountered fierce resistance. I said earlier that our biggest imaginativechallenge is to picture a social world where the basic needs of all can be reliably met into the foreseeable future. Conversely, the biggest challenge for our affluent visitor would be to come to terms with the ubiquity of survival bottlenecks, and the resulting need to devise a credible survival lottery. He might begin by noting two places where survival lotteries did operate in his own world. Before they were integrated into affluent society, the Eskimo practised both infanticide and euthanasia as ways to ration food in harsh times, as did many other pre-affluent peoples. And every affluent society faced the problem of distributing comparatively scarce life-saving medical treatment. The pace of technological "improvement" was never going to be sufficient to keep everyone alive forever. However they chose to ration their medicine, the result was always that some lived while others died. An affluent philosopher seeking to design a survival lottery might draw on these examples. As a philosopher, our affluent traveller might characterize our present world as broken in several key ways. Our world is absolutely broken. We do not enjoy favourable conditions. We cannot meet all basic needs while respecting basic liberties. Indeed, our world is more broken than that, as we cannot meet all basic needs at all. Our world is broken relative to its own past. We know that, whatever we do, we cannot enjoy the quality of life taken for granted by our affluent ancestors. Our world is broken relative to its own future. We also know that, whatever we do, our descendants cannot hope to enjoy even the quality of life that we ourselves take for granted. This is partly due to natural causes: the climate is becoming more unpredictable, sea levels continue to rise and the world becomes ever hotter. But it is also due to our collective social failings. Although we show far greater concern for our descendants than affluent people did, we still tend to keep a disproportionate share of resources for ourselves, sacrificing our descendants to save our contemporaries.

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Our affluent visitor would thus identify two key assumptions of affluent philosophy that do not hold in our broken world: the assumption of favourable conditions; and the optimistic assumption that, owing to economic, social and technological progress, future people are bound to be better off than present people. We shall see that these two assumptions played a key role in affluent philosophy. That philosophy must therefore be radically rethought for a broken world.

5. Why study affluent philosophy?

You may well ask what we hope to learn by studying these smug, insular representatives of the most dangerous civilization in human history. Your fellow citizens might be shocked at our attempt to enter into the warped minds of these breakers of worlds. My superiors took some convincing as well. For several reasons, I think these philosophers are worth studying. All knowledge of the human past extends our understanding of human nature. It is too easy to dismiss the affluent people as evil monsters: inhuman abominations who gleefully sacrificed our planet and its inhabitants on the altar of their own greedy indulgence. The truth is more complex and more interesting, but also more unsettling. The affluents were human beings much like ourselves, with the same broad range of foibles and potentialities. What was possible for them is possible for us. If we are to ensure that their way of life never recurs, we need to understand why it seemed so natural to them. As the deepest thinkers of their age, the affluent philosophers can help us to understand how their world looked from the inside. I also hope that exploring the contrast between the age of affluence and our own broken world, through the lens of affluent philosophy, may shed some light on our own questions, both practical and philosophical. Of course, the modes of social organization of the affluent age are not realistic options for us, any more than we can choose to live in a world of abundant resources and stable climate. But these philosophers were not fools. They were intelligent, thoughtful people whose perspectives and experiences were radically different from our own. If we make the effort

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to see our world as they might have seen it - to imagine a visitor from the affluent past magically reappearing in our midst - we may see ourselves and our world, both social and natural, in a new light. You may even find, as you continue your study of contemporary philosophy in other courses, that some of the ideas and concepts of affluent philosophy help you to avoid the parochialism that threatens all philosophicaltraditions. Finally, studying the affluent philosophers may help us to re-evaluate their society, and its role in human history. Of course, no one could deny that their actions broke the world. And we naturally assume that they must have known what they were doing. How could such evil practices be so dominant in a society and go unnoticed?Of course, in one obvious sense, they did know what they were doing. But there is another deeper sense in which we can still ask if they could have known any better. We may wonder whether the individualist modes of thought that dominated affluent philosophy contained the resources to conceptualize the behavioural changes that would have been necessary to avoid disaster. In a physical sense, of course, the necessary actions were possible. The affluent people could have done what needed to be done. But could they have imagined it? Suppose we sent our imaginary visitor from the past back to his own time, knowing where the affluent lifestyle would lead. Armed only with his own intellectual resources, could he have taught his fellows what they needed to know?Our answer to this question may tell us whether we should regard the inhabitants of the age of affluence as morally culpable adults, or merely as bewildered children.

6. The course

Affluent philosophy produced a vast literature of texts, articles and commentaries. Virtually none of this survives today. Pre-affluent writers preserved their thoughts using durable media such as stone, wood, papyrus or paper. Affluent people, confident in their own technological superiority, dispensed with all these and transferred everything to electronic media. During the internet collapse that heralded the end of the affluent age, almost all the accumulated wisdom of humanity thus disappeared forever.

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Our central text is translated from fragments of affluent philosophy recently recovered from the sunken cities of the western Atlantic: the famous Princeton Codex. Each week we read a portion of that text: either a passage from a leading affluent philosopher or a commentary written at the time. I shall then present a brief overview of the philosophical topic. In the assessment for this class, your task is to demonstrateyour understanding of affluent philosophy by applying it to our broken world. Your term paper should be an exercise in hypothetical empathic philosophy. Try to see the world from the perspective of an affluent philosopher. You should attempt to base your discussion on two elements only: (i) the basic facts of life in our broken world; and (ii) philosophical ideas drawn from the age of affluence itself. Please refrain from appealing directly to our modern philosophy. We want to know how affluent philosophy could adapt to our world, not how it could be replaced by our philosophy.

7. Problems of translation

The affluent philosophers all wrote in the archaic dialect we now know as old English, so we shall encounter problems of translation. To take one central example, the key concept of affluent political philosophy is translated as "justice". Given the differences in situation and conceptual framework, you may wonder if "justice" is the right term, or, indeed, if any term in any modern language could capture what they had in mind. Translating across the vast cultural divide of the dark times is a notoriously tricky business. Even simultaneous translation between cultures is not easy. I believe "justice" is the right translation, although we must be careful when applying it. The affluent philosopher Rawls, drawing on the preaffluent thinker David Hume, identified justice as a response to three "circumstances of justice": moderate equality, moderate egoism and moderate scarcity. Let us take these in turn. Because human beings are moderately equal, no one can simply impose her will on others. Social cooperation is necessary. If people were perfectly altruistic, their interests would never conflict, and cooperation would just be a matter of

14 INTRODUCTORY LECTURE

coordination. If people were completely egoistic, their interests would almost never coincide, and they would have no motivation to find genuinely fair terms of cooperation. The first two circumstances of moderate equality and moderate egoism apply to our own broken world, as much as to the affluent age. These features of human nature remain unchanged. The third circumstance of justice is where the difference lies. To us, it seems absurd to describe the affluent age as one of "moderate scarcityf'. What Rawls and Hume meant is this. If resources were so abundant that everyone could have everything they wanted, then cooperation would be unproblematic. On the other hand, if resources were so scarce that survival was threatened, then people would naturally do whatever they could to survive, and thereforejustice would not enter their thoughts. For the affluent mind, justice arose when all needs could be met, and it dealt with the allocation of resources beyond that minimum point. Our broken world is not one of 'moderate scarcity' in this benign sense. Hume's circumstances of justice no longer apply. Specific affluent conceptions of justice have no place here. We could simply abandon their concept of justice. Alternatively, we might reconceptualize justice, isolating some essential notion that does translate to our broken world. In affluent political philosophy, a just society was one that met all needs. In a broken world, this is never possible. But perhaps a just society is one that fairly protects everyone's needs as far as possible. Equal chances to survive might replace guaranteed survival as the minimum requirement of justice. We see this conceptual shift most clearly with the survival lottery. Affluent people saw the protection of innocent life as a primary function of any just state, and believed that a state that threatens my life has no claim on my loyalty. So they would regard any survival lottery as unjust. But it does not follow that a survival lottery is unjust in a broken world. In the transition from affluence to brokenness, humanity moved from moderate scarcity (where all needs can be met) to extreme scarcity (where they cannot). Survival lotteries have emerged as the most just response to extreme scarcity. So we can see a family resemblance between affluent concepts of justice and our own. As we proceed, we shall ask whether similar

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reconceptualization is possible for other key affluent notions, such as rights, property, liberty, nations, well-being and democracy. Our discussion of justice has already introduced another key affluent concept that is difficult to translate. Affluent philosophers often spoke of the duties and limits of the state. A state was an administrative entity claiming a monopoly over the use of force in a given territory. In one colourful phrase: a state was "a bureaucracy backed by tanksff. As we shall see in Lecture 5, this affluent concept was closely allied with another: that of the nation. Enough of preliminaries. We now begin our examination of affluent philosophy with the libertarian property rights of Robert Nozick.

16 INTRODUCTORY LECTURE

P u t1

1. Introducing Nozick

Robert Nozick was a late-affluent academic philosopher, who spent his entire career at one institution of learning. His Anarchy, State, and Utopia is one of the few affluent works to survive intact. Nozick's topic was rights. His approach was called libertarianism, because it emphasized freedom. (A quite different view of freedom was liberal egalitarianism, our topic in Part Ill.) Affluent people were obsessed with rights. They claimed rights to do and say things, rights over their bodies and life choices, rights over external things, and rights against one another. Almost any dispute in affluent society was eventually expressed in the language of rights. This persistent rights-talk raises many questions. Who (or what) has rights? What is a right? What rights are there? What is the function of rights? Where do rights come from? What makes something a right, rather than a moral claim of some other sort? How do we know what rights there are?

18 LECTURE 1

Nozick was perhaps the staunchest affluent defender of rights. He represents, in an exaggerated form, the preoccupations and presuppositions of his age. Nozick began with a deceptively simple claim: Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights). So strong and far reaching are these rights that they raise the question of what, if anything, the state and its officials may do. How much room do individual rights leave for the state? (Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, ix) For Nozick, rights were held by individual human beings: more precisely (and more controversially)by individual persons. Persons are sentient and rational. They feel pain and pleasure, respond to reasons, and can lead meaningful lives. By Nozick's definition, we (in this class) are all persons. But most non-human animals - as well as human infants, young children and some disabled or elderly human beings - are not. We are now persons, but each of us was once not a person, and many of us will cease to be persons before we die. Nozick did not grant rights to groups of humans. Although each of you has rights, this class has no rights beyond the individual rights of its members. Enough about you; let's talk about me. I am an individual. Nozick would have said I have the following rights. I have rights over my body. I can decide whether to raise my arm, where to walk or what to say. No one may use my body without my consent. I have a right not to be assaulted, and to decide with whom I engage in intimate physical activities. I also have a right to decide when to discuss those activities, so let us move on. More abstractly, I have rights over my person. This includes my body, but also my labour, my talents and my thoughts. Nozick also gave people rights over things outside themselves, often called property or ownership rights. I might own this writing implement or this apple. For affluent philosophers, property was not a single right, but a complex bundle of rights. Affluent philosophers disputed the content of this bundle, as well as its scope and ground.

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Although rights in the person were Nozick's official foundation, rights over external things provided his conceptual (and intuitive) stating-point. Nozick talked of "self-ownership", and of "an individual's property in herself". Lecture 2 interrogates these metaphors. Why were rights so important to affluent philosophers?What is a right? My rights grant me liberties, and create moral duties for others. I decide what happens to my body or my apple. Others must not interfere with me - and they must also prevent third parties from interfering. If A has a right to x, then B has a duty not to interfere with A's x-ing, and C has a duty to prevent B from interfering with A. Rights must be protected and enforced, as well as respected. Affluent rights were moral guarantees. Affluent rights-talk is alien to us, in part, because it evolved in a world where something morally significant really could be guaranteed to everyone. To translate this discourse into our broken world, we might ask what we would insist on. What are our "rights"? For Nozick, rights were natural, intrinsic, absolute, negative, moral and exhaustive. Each term captured a key affluent distinction. Natural rights depend on human nature, and are discovered. (The alternative view was that rights are constructed or invented by human beings. We do not discover our rights. Instead, we agree what rights we will have. Rights are social, not natural.) The doctrine of natural rights was developed by pre-affluent philosophers who saw human beings, along with the rest of the physical universe, as the creation of an omnipotent benevolent God. Human morality and rights flowed from a natural law that God had ordained. Affluent philosophers such as Nozick avoided God, or any other supernatural or religious foundation for rights. (Other affluent philosophers doubted whether natural law and natural rights really could survive without God. If God is not the foundation of rights, what is?) Nozick's rights were intrinsic rather than instrumental. lnstrumental rights depend on something else that has value in its own right. For instance, utilitarians, who attached intrinsic value to human welfare, regarded all rights as instrumental (see Part 11). Instrumental rights are contingent. If circumstances change, then our rights might change. Intrinsic rights are more secure, but also less flexible. In particular, intrinsic rights are less likely to alter in the transition to a broken world.

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Nozick's rights were absolute side constraints. They set limits to the promotion of the common good, the activities of government and the search for agreement. For Nozick, interference with rights was never a moral option. His rights carved out a protected sphere around each individual. If I thought that others might violate my rights, then I would live in constant fear that my apple will be taken away. (Most affluent philosophers defended less extreme accounts of rights. And, as we shall see, even Nozick allowed some exceptions.) Nozick's rights were negative, rather than positive. With a positive right, Ican require others to assist me, while a negative right only prevents interference. Suppose I have a right to climb this wall. A negative right only means that others must allow me to try to climb. But suppose I am disabled: I cannot succeed unaided. With a negative right, others can simply watch me fail. If my right is positive, then others must help me. Positive rights are obviously much better to have. But they are problematic. Which others are obliged to provide which assistance? Is everyone in the world obliged to drop everything and assist my climbing, at whatever cost? Or does some specific person have this obligation? If so, who? And what if they refuse?Are others then obliged to take up the slack? Nozick avoided all these problems. He largely rejected positive rights, and insisted that individualsonly have negative rights of qon-interference. However, Nozick did allow three exceptions. One exception was that positive rights can arise through agreement. If you promise to help me, then I have a right to your assistance. Another exception was enforcement. Suppose I have a negative right to use my apple as I please, and someone interferes. Third parties now have a duty to protect my right. My negative right thus gives me a positive right. Nozick's third exception was rectiflcation, considered below. But these were very specific exceptions. Nozick recognized no general positive rights. In particular, he denied any right to be given food, water, health care or other assistance. In Nozick's imaginary free society, it was possible to starve to death without any violation of your rights. Nozick rejectedany principle grounding rights in human need. You cannot acquire rights over something just because it is necessary for your flourishing, your goals, your dignity or even your survival. By contrast, many affluent philosophers saw need as the basis of the most important rights.

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Affluent philosophers distinguished between moral, political and legal rights. Moral rights are enjoyed by all moral agents; political rights are enjoyed by citizens; and legal rights are created by an established legal system. Nozick's rights were moral. But he focused on their political and legal implications.

2. Reading Nozick Anarchy, State, and Utopia is a puzzling book. Nozick did not proceed by

carefully laying out his arguments, or explaining his conclusions. His style was informal, almost chatty, with frequent asides, digressions and rhetorical questions. This makes the book fun to read, but hard to summarize. How are we to read Anarchy, State, and Utopia? Consider three interpretive puzzles. How did Nozick justify his premises? What was the role of Nozick's hypothetical histories? What did Nozick claim about the real world? Nozick made very strong claims about rights. How did he justify them? The short answer is that he didn't. Here is a longer answer. Nozick used a method of thought experiments or micro-examples. He told a simple story, made a claim about that story, and then used rhetorical questions to elicit the reader's agreement. Nozick's simple stories were supposed to generate principles. The reader was then to apply those principles to new stories, even if she found those new verdicts ven/ counter-intuitive. Nozick used some intuitions to undermine others. We might wonder - as did many of Nozick's contemporaries - whether this is a legitimate philosophical method. Nozick's intuitions often relied on unstated features of his cases. As these features may be foreign to our broken world, we need to tread especially carefully. For Nozick, the first task of political philosophy was to rebut the anarchist claim that no state is legitimate. Nozick defended a minimal state that upheld moral rights. Moral rights exhaust the legitimate activity of the state; they are the only legitimate basis for political and legal rights. The resulting society contains a free market and a capitalist economy. Nozick called it a "free society". Any more extensive state is morally unacceptable, as it would violate rights. Other affluent philosophers defended

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a more expansive state because they either believed in more extensive moral rights or saw a role for the state beyond the protection of rights. Nozick defended the minimal state by sketching a history where a minimal state emerged from a "state of nature" without any violation of rights. Nozick never claimed that this actually happened. (Just as well, as it never did!) His history was not actual, but hypothetical. It showed that a minimal state could arise justly. This is a strange method of justification. What is the moral relevance of a purely hypothetical story? Wouldn't it be better to show that some real-world minimal state actually did arise justly? Indeed, wouldn't that be necessary if we were trying to justify some actual state? The answer is that Nozick was not seeking to justify any actual state. His minimal state never existed. All actual affluent states were more extensive. So Nozick's aim was to show that, while no actual state was legitimate, his minimal state at least could have been legitimate. (Nozick himself conceded that even the most extensive state could be given a just hypothetical history. Any state could have arisen without the violation of rights. But the minimal state was much more likely to arise justly. And no actual affluent state did so arise. So, by Nozick's lights, every actual affluent state was illegitimate.) Nozick's use of hypothetical history brings out the central interpretive puzzle: was Nozick defending the rights claimed by his contemporaries? Many of his readers - especially impressionable affluent college students - thought he was defending their property rights. (This was one major source of his popularity, and explains why his works have survived.) But this readingcannot be sustained. Once Nozick laid out the conditions for property rights, the only conclusion available to anyone with the slightest acquaintance with affluent history was that no one had ever owned anything. This conclusion was so obvious that Nozick never bothered to spell it out. Anarchy, State, and Utopia is perhaps most consistently read as a sustained and unrelenting reductio ad absurdurn of its own opening clause: "Individuals have rights [No, sorry, they don't]". The free society is purely imaginary. Any resemblance to any actual society - living or dead - is entirely coincidental. This interpretation of Nozick will emerge gradually, as we work through his account of how rights could arise.

...

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3. The acquisition of rights If Nozick's theory is correct, then it really matters who owns this apple. How could I come to own it? Nozick's answer was historical. Whether I have a right to my apple entirely depends on how I came to possess it. Rights depend on history. Nozick judged history according to three principles: justice in acquisition, justice in transfer and justice in rectification. We begin with just acquisition. Nozick recognized two ways to acquire something: to make it, or to appropriate it. I own anything that I make using something I already own. Nozick began with self-ownership: I own myself. Therefore, I own anything I make using only myself. Sadly, as I am not a god, this will not get me very far. To make useful things, I need to use, transform or destroy external things. In everyday affluent life, Iwould have got these things from someone else who already owned them. But we want to know how property rights began. How could external things come to be owned? Suppose I want to use things that are unowned. I might be an explorer on a desert island, or a new planet, or an uncharted land. I am hungry from exploring my new home, but I forgot to bring any food with me. I want to eat, but I don't want to behave unjustly. Can I justly acquire the ingredients for my meal? If so, how? My question is not merely whether I can use things, but whether I can acquire them, and claim rights to limit their use by others. (I don't want other hungry explorers eating the food I have just prepared.) How do things come into individual ownership, rather than remaining a common resource? Why not simply say that anyone can use anything whenever they want? How can I justly acquire unowned external things? One obvious answer is that my acquisition requires everyone else's consent. Nozick rejected this as impractical. I would starve if I had to consult everyone before I could eat! Another obvious answer is that I can acquire only what Ineed. Nozick rejected this as insufficient. Unless people can acquire more than they need, we cannot generate the surplus for trade and exchange that will drive Nozick's free society. But there must be some limit. I cannot simply turn up and acquire ownership of a whole planet, an entire uninhabited island or an unexplored continent. Ican take more than I need, but

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not everything. To set that limit, Nozick borrowed from the pre-affluent philosopher John Locke: I can justly acquire only if I leave enough and as good for others. Lockets proviso was a cornerstone of Nozick's theory, and one that raises many fascinating questions in our broken world. We return to it in Lecture 3. For now, suppose I have justly acquired some property. Perhaps I have a plot of previously unowned land, and I grow some apples. (In Lockets memorable phrase, I have "mixed my labour" with the land, and thus am entitled to its fruits.) I have more apples than I can eat. What can I do with them?

4. Justice in transfer

Nozick's second principle-justice in transfer - was disarmingly simple. If I own something, then I can transfer any one of my rights to anyone else. I might sell the whole bundle, or parcel out the rights and sell only some. Nozick's controversial claim was that this is the only way that property rights can be justly transferred. Any transfer effected by any third party is necessarily unjust. (The only exception Nozick allowed was rectification, considered below.) For Nozick, all rights could be transferred, including rights of selfownership. I can sell you my apple, my pen, my labour or my body. But exchanges must be voluntary. If you want my apple and I refuse, you cannot simply put a gun to my head and coerce me. That would be unjust, and so I retain my original rights. (HISTORICAL NOTE: This was Nozick's example. A gun was a popular private weapon. Astonishingly, the possessionof private weapons was tolerated - and sometimes celebrated - in affluent democracy. Some people even claimed a right to carry them!) However, Nozick used a broad definition of "voluntaryJt.You can legitimately exploit the fact that my options are very limited. Suppose I am starving, and you are the only nearby person with food. You have no enforceable duty to give me food. If you drive a very hard bargain - offering me food only in exchange for all my worldly goods - then our agreement is still voluntary. Nozick's topic was justice, not morality. His question was what others (especially the state) can make you do. Does the rich man have an

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obligation of charity or benevolence to assist the poor? Nozick did not say. Is the rich man morally vicious or blameworthy if he leaves the poor to starve while food lies rotting in his larder?Nozick did not say. Does that rich man deserve to burn for all eternity for his callousness? Nozick did not say. Can the poor man take the food without permission?Nozick did say: no. If he does, must all law-enforcement officials rally to the rich man's defence, whatever they may think of his character?Nozick did say: yes. Over time, the voluntary transfer of property rights could produce an extremely unequal distribution of ownership. In theory, one person might end up owning everything. Perhaps we are all addicted gamblers, and you are just very lucky. Nozick's answer was: so what? For him, justice was about history, not about patterns of distribution. This was a radical answer. Many affluent philosophers thought justice was all about patterns. The mark of a just society is a just distribution of resources, and the main task of the just state is to maintain such a distribution. (One prominent exponent - and Nozick's main target here - was Rawls, the principal character in Part Ill of this course.) Against this, Nozick offered one of his most striking appeals to intuition.

How liberty upsets patterns

"Wilt Chamberlain is greatly in demand by basketball teams. He signs the following contract: In each home game, twentyfive cents from the price of each ticket goes to him. People cheerfully attend the team's home games: they buy their tickets, each time dropping a separate twenty-five cents into a special box with Chamberlain's name on it. In one season, one million people attend his home games, and Wilt Chamberlain winds up with $250,000, a much larger sum than the average income and larger even than anyone else has. Is he entitled to this income?" (Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 161) (HISTORICAL NOTE: Basketball was a popular indoor entertainment. Wilt Chamberlain may have been a historical figure, but we know him only through Nozick's text. $250,000 was apparently a large sum in Nozick's day.)

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Nozick's final question was rhetorical. He thought it was obvious that, if the spectators are entitled to the money they spend on their tickets, then Wilt is entitled to his income. What should we make of this tale? Does it translate to our broken world? Nozick's example was carefully constructed. Affluent readers would naturally make many background assumptions. Basketball games were attended by relatively well-off people, who would not impoverish themselves or their children to get tickets. And real-life affluent "property rights" were hedged around by a raft of caveats, restrictions and institutions designed to lessen both the power of the rich and the vulnerability of the poor. For many of Nozick's original readers, the intuitive appeal of his tale would have depended on these assumptions. (This is ironic, as those constraints would all be absent in Nozick's imaginary free society!) Even affluent readers who shared Nozick's intuition might not have agreed that Wilt enjoyed unfettered Nozickian property rights. To test the robustness of your own intuitions, consider some variant tales. Suppose Wilt is an affluent drug dealer, selling harmful narcotics to desperate addicts willing to steal food from their own children to gain their next fix. Or suppose Wilt intends to use his new-found wealth to raise a private army, buy votes to win public office at the next election, take over a television station to spread false beliefs beneficial to his business empire, enslave his impoverishedfellow citizens (with their "voluntary consentJ', of course) or corruptly purchase immunity from criminal prosecution. Finally, suppose Wilt lives in our broken world and plans to waste his wealth on frivolous excess while his fellow citizens starve. Nozick would have said that, in all these other tales, Wilt enjoys the same property rights as in the original tale. Do you agree? Although many disagreed, many of Nozick's affluent readers did find his intuitions compelling. So let us explore the edifice he built on this lessthan-entirely-solid foundation. Nozick claimed that his Wilt tale shows that legitimate voluntary transfers can upset any pattern of distribution. But then justice cannot be about patterns. Nozick admitted that some individuals might care about patterns. They should be free to arrange their voluntary transfers to preserve their preferred pattern. But if others do not care about patterns, no one can make them.

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To see the radicalness of Nozick's position, consider an example. (In the actual affluent world, this tale would not have been purely imaginary.) Suppose Betty runs a brothel. She is very successful, and has a surplus of food. Mary has no food to eat. Betty offers Mary food, in exchange for Mary working as a sex slave in Betty's brothel. Betty predicts that, when she realizes what the work is really like, Mary may change her mind. (Betty does not deceive Mary. She just knows that people unacquainted with this work cannot imagine how degrading it really is.) So Betty adds a clause that Mary cannot unilaterally end their agreement, even by killing herself. Because her only alternative is starvation, Mary agrees. Nozick would have said that Mary has justly transferred her rights over her body. Those rights now permanently belong to Betty. Suppose Mary escapes, and reports Betty to the law-enforcement officials. They must capture Mary and return her to Betty. Otherwise, they fail to uphold Betty's property rights. (Recall that, as law-enforcement officials, upholding rights is their only legitimate role.) Mary has no property rights left, as she voluntarily gave them all to Betty. Or suppose we travel to a distant land, and observe that all property is owned by one group, and that this group even owns all members of another group. Perhaps all blue-eyed people own themselves, while each brown-eyed person is owned by some blue-eyed person. Can we infer that injustice has occurred? Nozick would have said no. This pattern could arise by legitimate transfers. So we must examine the actual history and learn how these people came to be slaves. (We return to slavery and selfownership in the next lecture.) Did Nozick really think these things? Well, his theory did have these implicationsin theory. But in the real affluent world things were less much clear, as Nozick's conditions for justice in acquisition and transfer were never actually satisfied.

5. Justice in rectification

In a perfect world, acquisition and transfer would exhaust rights. But Nozick acknowledged that actual history was very unjust. He introduced a third element: rectification. Even in a society that is generally just, there

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will always be some rights violations. Suppose you take my apple without my permission. Obviously, you should give it back, and others should make you give it back. But what if you have eaten my apple? (Logically, I still own the molecules that my apple comprised. So I should have an absolute right to remove those molecules from your body. If you don't like the consequences, you should have thought of that before you stole my apple. For some reason, Nozick never drew out these implications of his own theory.) You must compensate me. If you have another apple of equal value, things are simple. But what if I particularly liked my apple? Or what if you only have oranges, and I don't like oranges? Even if I do like oranges - indeed even if I prefer them to apples - can you simply take my apple without my permission, and compensate me with an orange? (Could wealthy Wilt simply take whatever he wants, trailing money behind him as he goes?)What if I would never have given you my apple? Perhaps I have a moral objection to exchanges; or maybe Ijust don't like you. What if I say that I would only have exchanged my apple for all your worldly goods, or your life, or on the condition that you become my slave? For Nozick, these would all have been legitimate voluntary exchanges. Who decides what the apple was worth to me?Who decides if your compensation is sufficient?And what about self-ownership? Would theft, rape and murder still be wrong even if compensation was paid? Rectificationis problematic even in a reasonably just world. But actual human history (up to Nozick's day) was a tale of continual injustice, dominated by conquest, slavery, genocide and ecological devastation. Some people appropriated too much, violating Lockets proviso; most actual "transfers" consisted of theft, conquest, fraud or enslavement; and previous injustices were almost never rectified. (Lest we get too smug, we should note that, in these respects, human history has not demonstrated any noticeable improvement since the affluent age.) This sordid history had very radical implications for Nozick. Recall that all rights are historical. Unless I can back up my claim with a history that begins with a just initial acquisition, continues through a series of just transfers and culminates in my just possession, I have no right to this apple. Who does own it? I have no idea. Probably no one. But I certainly don't. Nozick's hypothetical histories showed how rights could have arisen. But they could never justify any actual rights. Only actual history

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could have done that. And actual affluent history was too unjust to justify anything. Despite all these problems, Nozick still talked as if some people had rights. When pressed, he offered two replies. First, even without rights in external things, we would still have self-ownership. My rights over my body do not rest on any historical claims. Second, even where there is injustice, rights over external things can arise by rectification. I might be owed this apple as compensation for some past wrong. Unfortunately, both replies are dubious. As we shall see in the next lecture, Nozick could not defend his claims about self-ownership. And rectification never actually occurred. (What specific past injustice would justify my possession of this apple?) Rectificationwas especially problematic for real-life affluent injustices. Imagine deciding who owned disputed land in a war zone! Or consider any actual affluent artefact. Was it created using justly acquired materials? Would it even have existed in a just world? If so, what about the person. who would have owned it in a just world? Did she exist in the actual world? In Nozick's imaginary free society, one set of things would have been owned by one set of people. The actual affluent world contained different things owned by different people. These problems are compounded if we shift from Nozick's affluent day to our broken present. In our world, even land is not constant across different possible histories, either in its value or its very existence. Some previously prime real estate is now unproductive, uninhabitable or sunk beneath the waves. Suppose that, in a just world where climate change was averted, some group would have owned a productive island. This island no longer exists. What is that group (assumingit still exists today) owed as rectification? And by whom? (This assumes, of course, that a just society would avert climate change. We return to that question in Lecture 4.) Nozick said virtually nothing about the details of just rectification. (Details, you may have noticed, were not his thing.) He offered only vague hints. Nozick conceded that it was impossible to calculate actual rectification. We must use some proxy for just rectification. Nozick even suggested that pattern-basedtheories of justice might be the best possible approximation. Nozick usually objected that pattern-basedtheories redistribute

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property that someone already owns. But if we have no idea who owns what, then perhaps we can only seek a fair pattern of distribution. As there is no reason to favour any specific individuals, the obvious solution is an equaldistribution. Once equality is established, we could then apply Nozick's principles of acquisition and transfer. In affluent real life, Nozick may thus have been more egalitarian more redistributive- than almost any affluent pattern-basedtheorist. (Even Rawls, as we shall see, allowed some initial inequality.) In affluent political jargon, Nozick was perhaps the most "left-wing" political theorist we shall encounter in this course. (HISTORICAL NOTE: The division of political views into "left" and "right" was commonplace in affluent society, but both the origin and the precise meaning of these terms remain obscure.) Nozick's tentative solution like any egalitarian view - is highly problematic in a broken world where an equal share of resources is insufficient for survival. We return to that issue in Lecture 4, where we also explore another possible proxy for rectification, based on Locke's proviso. No proxy for just rectification could have legitimized actual affluent property. No matter how we define it, rectificationdid not take place. The clear implication of Nozick's theory is that no one has ever owned anything. Nozick's theoretical foundation was a set of intuitions about property rights drawn from his own society. The Wilt Chamberlain example, for instance, was meant to be familiar and morally unproblematic for Nozick's readers. But the theory built on those foundations then undermines all affluent intuitions about rights. Did Nozick intend to be radically subversive - to point out to his contemporariesthat their seemingly rocksolid moral rights rested on sand? Rights over external things are only half of Nozick's story. Each person also has rights over herself. As we shall now see, even self-ownership rights are not as secure as Nozick made them seem.

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1. Nozick on self-ownership

Nozick built his theory on self-ownership. He argued that each person has rights over her own body and person. But what did he mean by this? What is self-ownership? Why was it so important for Nozick? Is ownership the right metaphor? For Nozick, the "self" included body, organs, talents, will, personality and identity. It combined features that distinguish one individual human being from another and features common to all human beings. We can best explain Nozick's notion of the "self" via some specific self-regarding rights. The right to bodily integrity: A doctor has five patients. Each needs

a different organ transplant to stay alive. A healthy person walks by, who is a match for all five patients. The doctor kills the healthy person, and uses his organs to save five lives. (Don't worry: this is an imaginary tale! Nozick's target was utilitarianism, the subject of Part II of this course.) Nozick said the doctor's a t i o n is wrong because

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she violates the healthy person's self-ownership rights. His organs belongto him, so he should decide how they are used. Bodily integrity also explains what is wrong with rape, torture and murder. The right to freedom of movement: I can put my body where I wish, just as I can place my apple anywhere I wish (so long as I don't thereby violate anyone else's rights; for instance, I cannot legitimately place my knife inside your body). This right was crucial for Nozick. Without it, no one would ever have the right to do anything. The right tofree speech: On one level, this was simply a special case of the previous right. If I control the movement of my body, then I control my own speech. But affluent people had a peculiar obsession with freedom of speech. They linked it to the expression of the self. If I am not free to speak, then I cannot express my ideas, ideals or thoughts. (We shall return to this particular freedom - and its limits - many times.) The right to freedom of labour: For Nozick, this was another corollary of the rights to freedom of movement and bodily integrity. A person's labour is a commodity, and she alone must control its use. In the affluent market economy, labour was the only thing most people had to sell, so this freedom was vital. The right to the fruits ofmy labour: For Nozick, this was an essential corollary of the previous right. If I do not get all the benefits of my labour, then Ido not really own it. All affluent moral philosophers recognized these rights to some degree. Nozick's novel move was to treat them all as cases of self-ownership. I own myself, just as I own my apple. This move had three key implications for Nozick's philosophy. Self-ownership rights are absolute, like other property rights. They cannot be overridden by the common good, and must be enforced by the state. All self-ownership rights have equal moral status. Self-ownership rights are fully alienable, just like rights over external things. This means that any person can transfer any of her rights

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to anyone. Any voluntary contract for services or servitude - up to and including lifetime slavery - must be respected by third parties, and enforced by the state. Nozick's affluent critics raised several key questions about his account. Is self-ownership the right metaphor? When is a contract truly voluntary? Does everyone have a right to all the fruits of their labour? Do people own their own talents? Do women own the children they make? How do people come to own themselves?

2. Nozick's metaphor of self-ownership

Two historical legacies lay behind Nozick's provocative metaphor of selfownership: the historical fact of slavery and the philosophy of lmmanuel Kant. Unlike most other communities in human history, affluent societies did not themselves practise slavery. But in Nozick's day this was a comparatively recent development. The most prosperous economic activity in the pre-affluent period - the activity that gave affluent societies their initial wealth -was an international trade involving sugar, manufacturedgoods and human beings. The leading pre-affluent powers confined slavery to colonies on distant continents. But some affluent societies arose in those distant colonies. Nozick's own society was one of those. Slavery was a distant memory for some affluent people, while others were confronted by its legacy every day. Nozick's compatriots could often discern, just by looking at someone, whether she was the descendant of slaves or of their masters. The legacy of slavery shaped all constitutional, political and social institutions. This bleak history explains both why the idea of human beings as property was not as strange for Nozick's readers as for us, and why Nozick's negative comparisons with involuntary slavery had such rhetorical force. Involuntary slavery was a paradigm of evil for affluent people, much as deliberate climate destruction is for us. Slavery treated people as objects (like land or apples) in two ways: people could be owned, and that ownership was acquired and transferred

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without reference to the person's own wishes or interests. Nozick embraced the first but rejected the second. Slavery is wrong, not because it treats people as property, but because it treats them as unowned property, and then applies standard principles of acquisition and transfer. Nozick agreed that people are owned, but he insisted each person is owned by herself. For Nozick, self-ownership best captures what is morally significant about people. His affluent opponents replied that he did not really appreciate what was wrong with slavery. They insisted that human beings are simply not property at all. Nozick's second inheritance was from Kant, an earlier philosopher associated with a pre-affluent movement known as the Enlightenment. Kant argued that rational beings must be treated as ends-in-themselves. It is wrong to treat a person as a means without his consent. From Kant, Nozick inherited a will theory of rights. The significant feature of human beings what distinguishes us from animals or apples - is our rational freedom: our ability to choose our own ends. The will theory held that rights protect choice. Organ transfer, slavery and rape all violate rights. But the physical acts they involve would all be morally unobjectionable if the person consented. (Recall our imaginary doctor who kills one patient to save five. On Nozick's view, if she first obtains the informed consent of her healthy patient, then she does nothing wrong.) Consider a possible alternative history of slavery. Suppose some affluent revisionist historian discovered that, prior to being shipped over the ocean, the first slaves had "voluntarily" sold themselves into slavery. Perhaps their crops failed, and they sold themselves to a neighbouring tribe in exchange for food. For Nozick, slavery with this history would be morally unproblematic. (What about children born into slavery? You might well ask. As we shall soon see, Nozick was logically committed to the view that all children are born into slavery.) As with external objects, any possible distribution of self-ownershiprights could arise by legitimate transfer. A society where one person owns everyone else is not necessarily unjust. Everything depends on what has actually happened. In affluent philosophy, the main alternative to the will theory was the interest theory. Rights protect the individual's key interests, such as health, dignity, bodily integrity or freedom. Rape and slavery are wrong because they violate the person's central interests.

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One way to choose between the two theories is the question of alienability. On the will theory, all rights are alienable. You can sell yourself into slavery - or indeed sell yourself as an ingredient for a cannibal feast - so long as you do so voluntarily. On the interest theory, some choices conflict with the individual's true interests. Individuals who make those choices are necessarily irrational, and must be protected from themselves. Most affluent interest theorists would have said that Betty and Mary's contract is unenforceable. Mary's future right to decide how her body is used is not something she can sell now. By not enforcingthe contract, we protect Mary's true freedom, promote her good and respect her dignity. Interesttheorists denied that all rights must fit a single unified schema such as Nozick's self-ownership model. Different rights protect different interests, and may have a different logical structure. Many affluent philosophers rejected commodification: the idea that everything is a commodity to be bought and sold. Consider sexual relations. Nozick saw rape as a form of theft: taking from someone what she has a right to give or sell. By contrast, prostitution is perfectly legitimate, so long as it is voluntary. Other affluent philosophers replied that, if we treat human sexuality as a commodity, we fail to appreciate its real value. Rape is not morally comparable to theft; and when a person separates this aspect of herself - so that it can be traded or sold - she loses something essential to her humanity. Another key affluent question was whether labour is a commodity. A familiar criticism was that capitalism was unjust precisely because it alienated the individual from a vital part of himself, forcing him to see his labour as merely an input to the production process. This criticism was especially associated with two influential affluent movements. Marxists argued that capitalism was inherently unjust. Capitalists - owners of factories or land - had too much power. Workers were forced to commodify their labour and accept unreasonable wages just to survive. Feminists argued that affluent society was also structurally unjust to women, forcing them to accept subordinate roles and limited opportunities. Will and interest theories often coincided. Affluent people saw freedom as a vital human interest, so interest-based rights typically tracked consent. And many will theorists agreed that some rights are inalienable in practice. If no rational agent would give up a particular right, then no

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actual transfer could ever be truly voluntary. The very fact of transfer is evidence of injustice. What made Nozick unusual was his very broad definition of "voluntary" - and his consequent acceptance of many actual contracts that his contemporaries dismissed as exploitative and unjust.

3. The voluntariness of labour

Nozick argued that if a worker chooses to sell his labour, or a woman chooses a low-paid job that leaves time for her domestic obligations, then each has a right to do so. Mary's contract with Betty is voluntary. Any attempt to restrict it would be paternalistic: treating an adult like a child. It is for Betty and Mary to agree the terms of their contract. Nozick added that reducing a person's options leaves her worse off. On Nozick's theory, Mary's only legitimate options are starvation or slavery. If some well-meaning state outlaws slavery, Mary's only legitimate option is to starve. In effect, that state is now forcing Mary to behave unjustly. She must steal to stay alive. Nozick's opponents replied that Mary's situation is itself unjust. If neither of her options is sufficiently good, then she has a right to a better option. Marxists argued that individuals can be exploited, alienated or treated unjustly not only by their specific interactions with others, but also by the social and economic system within which those interactions take place. (As we shall see, many non-Marxist affluent philosophers notably Rawls - made similar objections.) If a young woman sells herself into sexual slavery, or a worker sells his labour to a factory owner at a bare subsistence wage, then neither makes a truly voluntary choice. Each would have preferred a better option: a career as a non-slave, or a life of meaningful work at a decent wage. Nozick replied that everyone always wants better options. I would like you to volunteer to become my slave for life, and I would like everyone to give me all their money. So what? Is it unjust that I lack these options? Surely not. The bare fact that someone would prefer a better option tells us nothing about justice. Nozick's objection is a powerful one. When does the lack of better options constitute injustice? In reply, some of his opponents appealed

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to the interest theory of rights. People have basic interests. These correspond to essential options. An exchange is only truly voluntary if all essential options are available. People are then free to choose slavery or alienation, but few will do so. Other affluent philosophers expressed the same thought using a moderate will theory. Rights only protect voluntary choices; and a truly voluntary choice requires a reasonableset of options. Nozick disagreed. The right to self-ownership is purely negative. No one may interfere with my response to my situation. But if my situation happens to be desperate, that is just my bad luck. I have no positive right to a better situation. The world does not owe me a living. Nozick's opponents argued that a self-ownership right that is truly valuable for human beings must be positive. People have the right to live a meaningful life, not merely to make the best of a bad situation. In theory, there was a vast gap between Nozick and his Marxist opponents. In practice, things were less clear. We must be wary of contrasting Nozick's ideal society with a Marxist (or any other) critique of actual affluent society. (Marxists and feminists had their own ideal societies, often as bizarre and unrealistic as Nozick's own.) Nozick's claims were all conditional. If Mary's desperate situation arose without any injustice, then her choice is voluntary and her rights are not violated. But, in affluent society, this condition was never met. Indeed, part of the Marxist critique was that capitalists did not deserve their present holdings, nor workers their lack of them. Nozick had to agree, for two reasons. First, most actual affluent holdings resulted from fraud, theft or conquest: clear violations of his own principles of justice in transfer. Second, even when transfer was just, actual holdings invariablyflowed from unjust initial acquisitions. After all, if Lockets proviso had been respected in the past, then wouldn't affluent workers have been able to acquire their own property?We return to this issue in Lecture 4.

4. Talents and unearned rewards

Many affluent philosophers regarded human equality as the foundation of all moral and political principles. All people are equally valuable and deserve equal rights. Nozick said that each person owns herself. His

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theory of self-ownership thus seems perfectly egalitarian, just as if he had given each person an equal amount of land. However, as Nozick's opponents pointed out, people are unequal in many ways. Just like plots of land, some people are more valuable - more worth owning - than others. If some get very productive land, while others get only useless desert, the distribution of land is not equal. What matters is the value of the land, not the amount. Similarly, people have different levels of natural talent - different abilities or disabilities - simply due to genetic or environmental luck. If each owns her own talents, then self-ownership is very unequal in its value. Nozick's opponents argued that, as no one deserves her natural talents, justice demands that the more able should compensate their less talented fellows. Nozick's reply was emphatic. No individualdeserves her natural talents, but it does not follow that she is not entitled to them. Entitlements need not be deserved. Suppose we give each individual a random plot of land. Some lucky people find valuable minerals or fossil fuels on their land. This good fortune is entirely undeserved. But these lucky people still own those minerals. Similarly, the "natural lottery" of genetic endowments is unfair, but that does not make it unjust. (We set aside, for the moment, as most affluent philosophers did, the disturbing idea that it was "good" for affluent people to discover more fossil fuels.) In affluent society, many other undeserved factors affected an individual's worldly success. The children of rich, influential or attentive parents typically enjoyed much better education and encouragement than those whose parents were poor, powerless or neglectful. Things were even more unequal at the global level. The single most significant determinant of a person's life chances was the accident of where she was born. (Another very significant accident of birth was when a person was born. A child born into affluent society enjoyed far more opportunities, and far greater security, than a child born either a few centuries earlier or into our own broken world.) For Nozick, these inequalities all flowed from the legitimate transfer of the property rights of parents, not from the rights of children. No child is born with the right to be rich. (Indeed, as we shall see, no child is born with any rights.) But rich parents have the right to lavish their wealth on their own children, or on anyone else. (This assumes, of course, that the

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parents have justly acquired their wealth. This would be true in Nozick's imaginary free society. But, as we have seen, by Notick's own lights, it was never true in the actual affluent world.)

5. Minimal state and welfare state

Nozick defended a minimal state. In the real (affluent) world, his primary opponents were not anarchists (who rejected any state), but the defenders of a more extensive state: the welfare state. Notick's strong views about the ownership of talents were the foundation of his argument against the welfare state. Affluent welfare states guaranteed basic services to all citizens: housing, education, health care and a minimum income. They combined a capitalist economy with redistributive taxation to fund welfare services. Some welfare states provided these services to everyone, while others provided them directly only to those who could not afford them. While Nozick's minimal state existed only as fantasy, welfare states were real. Nozick regarded redistributivetaxation as theft. lndividuals can choose to fund welfare service by charitable donation, but no one has the right to confiscate property. lndividuals have a right to their (pre-tax) income, while no one has a right to receive welfare. Nozick likened taxation (even at modest levels)to the most heinous violations of rights. If a government takes some of the income I derive from my labour-perhaps to feed those unable to feed themselves - then it is as ifthe government were forcing me to work. And that is morally equivalentto enslaving, rapingor murdering me. The unity of the self was central to Nozick's argument. If I own myself, then I must own my talents. Conversely, if Idon't own my talents, then I don't really own myself at all. For Nozick, the only alternative to full self-ownership was slavery. Defenders of the welfare state offered many replies to Nozick's provocative argument. (What follows is just a sketch. We return to specific defences of the welfare state several times in Parts II and Ill.) Some defended positive rights. Human beings cannot live without certain basic necessities: food, water, shelter. These interests

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ground positive rights. Borrowing Nozick's vocabulary, some spoke of a positive right of self-ownership. Without access to food and shelter, negative self-ownership is of no use to me. I need the substantive opportunity to live a good life, not the merelyformal right to be free to try. Other affluent critics denied that modest redistributive taxation, as practised in actual affluent societies, violates any property rights. Both utilitarians and liberals offered more limited accounts of individual property, thus removing Nozick's moral barrier to taxation. Some argued that talents are collectively owned, either because they are a natural common resource, or because the community has invested in them. (This reply was especially associated with Rawls.) This conceptual possibility may be especially compelling in our broken world, where collective self-ownership of essential resources is so often the norm. Many affluent philosophers objected that Nozick's broad notion of "self-ownership" illicitly brings together a range of quite distinct rights. While some are absolute, others are not. An absolute, exceptionless right not to be raped, tortured, enslaved or arbitrarily deprived of all your property does not imply an equally strong right to keep all the fruits of your labours. We can imagine an affluent critic employing Nozick's own method of argument by rhetorical italics. Did Nozick really think that, by taxing me, the government makes itself a part-owner of me? What would that mean? Are torture, slavery, rape, theft, confiscation and taxation-by-automaticpayroll-deduction phenomenologically identical? Do they feel the same? Did the experience of paying tax give affluent people insight into the sufferings of torture victims? (Did victims of atrocities use this comparison to explain their ordeal to others: "It was so horrific. I felt as if I'd been taxed"?) Or was Nozick saying that the moral harm of tax is equivalent to that of torture or rape? Or that a rational person should be indifferent between being taxed, raped or tortured? Surely Nozick meant none of these things. But, then, what did he mean? What moral insight is gained by insisting that tax and torture violate the same kind of right? Is the metaphor of self-ownership more than just an empty pun?

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Nozick presented slavery and full self-ownership of talents as the only possibilities. Opponents replied that, in actual welfare states, individuals still enjoyed freedom of movement, expression and lifestyle. If a welfare state respected individuals' most significant interests, then perhaps it gave them all the rights that really mattered. The choice between these alternative conceptions of rights will occupy us many times throughout this book. Many of Nozick's contemporaries felt the need for something more solid than his mix of rhetoric and intuition. But could they do any better?

6. Does my mother own me? A striking feature of affluent society was its strong commitment to reproductive freedom. Affluent people believed that everyone should be free to choose whether or not to reproduce. There is no obligation to have children, nor any obligation not to. Nozick agreed. Every woman has an absolute right to control what happens within her own body. She controls her own fertility: deciding when, with whom, and whether she will reproduce. All third parties, and especially the state, must respect these rights. In a striking argument, Susan Okin, an affluent feminist philosopher, took Nozick's commitment to reproductive freedom to its logical conclusion: [Tlhere is nothing about a woman's production of an infant that does not easily fulfil the conditions of the principleof acquisition as Nozick specifies them. "Whoever makes something," he says, "having bought or contracted for all other held resources used in the process ... is entitled to it." Pregnancy and birth seems to constitute a paradigm of such processes. Once she is freely given a sperm (as usually happens) or buys one a fertile woman can make a baby with no other resources than her own body and its nourishment. (Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family, 82-3)

...

Why would it matter if mothers owned their children? Within Nozick's libertarianframework, Okin's conclusion had three very troubling implica-

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tions. First, if a mother owns her child, she has the same rights as other owners. She can treat her child as she pleases, and the state must uphold her right to do so.

...

Nozick argues explicitly that the producer is entitled to determine the purpose of his activity. Thus he would appear to have no valid objection to a woman's producing a child for whatever purpose she chooses: to keep it in a cage to amuse her, perhaps, as some people keep birds, or even to kill it and eat it, if she were so inclined. (Ibid.: 84) (HISTORICAL NOTE: Barbaric as it may sound, some affluent people did indeed keep birds trapped in cages for their own sadistic amusement.) The second implication of Okin's conclusion was that no mother has any positive duties. Having given birth, she is free to walk away, leaving her child to starve. A mother owes her child only what is voluntarily agreed. Recall our tale of Betty and Mary. Suppose Betty is Mary's mother, and Mary is too young to survive on her own. Betty has no obligation to feed Mary, and Mary's agreement to become a slave is still voluntary. In a free society, many people will be the "voluntary" slaves of their parents. If you cannot find a willing slave, just make one, purchase one from someone with surplus children or acquire an "unowned" orphan. Perhaps, in time, a few very powerful individuals will literally own everyone else. This was a very radical conclusion. Affluent people believed that all parents are obliged to feed, clothe, house, educate, nurture and love their children, meeting all their basic needs and preparing them for a flourishing life. You might think that, if Mary is too young to fend for herself, then she is also too young to agree to slavery. However, this natural reply raised a dilemma for Nozick. Consider any human being who is either too young (or too disabled, or simply too unskilled)to fend for himself. Is he a person for Nozick's purposes? If not, then he has no rights. But if he is a person, then he can enter into voluntary agreements, perhaps consenting to be someone's slave forever in exchange for food today. The third difficulty was that Okin's argument created a troubling regress for Nozick. We have assumed that my mother owns me because she owns

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herself. But, of course, everything we said about my mother and me also applies to her mother and her. My mother didn't come into the world unowned, any more than I did. And neither did her mother, and so on. We might now wonder whether Nozick's story is even coherent. How could self-ownership ever begin? Even if it did, how could anyone possibly know who owned who? If I lived in Nozick's free society, where property rights had always been respected, then I might be confident that my mother owned herself. But could any actual affluent person be so confident? Did self-ownership have a more respectable history than any other affluent property-holding?Did any affluent person know who really owned him? Wouldn't it be the most remarkable coincidence if Nozick or any of his contemporaries- turned out to own himself? Nozick did not embrace Okin's conclusion. How did he escape it? Nozick's predecessor Locke had faced an objection very similar to Okin's. Locke had replied that our real creator is God, not our parents. God creates out of nothing, and fully understands the creation process. By contrast, human parents are only partial creators who understand very little. For Locke, self-ownership was a free gift from God, our original owner. God might have retained ownership, but chose not to. Nozick rejected both Locke's appeal to God and his argument that parents do not own their children. He pointed out that, on Lockets own criterion, no farmer would own the produce of his lands unless he perfectly understood all the biological processes involved. Given our limited understanding, no human would ever own anything. Unfortunately, having rejected Locke, Nozick offered no alternative. He asserted that parents do not own their children, but never said why. His only pertinent comment was the claim, in another context, that people in a free society would find this suggestion "absurdJJ.This was a weak response, for two reasons. First, Nozick didn't worry that many of his contemporaries - not to mention his own colleagues - found his claims equally absurd. (Indeed, he clearly revelled in his iconoclasm.) Second, Nozick explicitly argued that people who had been raised within a free society would have different (better) intuitions than his contemporaries, because they would lack the envious egalitarianism fostered by the welfare state. Following Nozick's lead, we can imagine a free society evolving an entirely new conception of parenthood, together with new rites

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of passage. Once we do so, we see that Okin's conclusion was not farfetched at all. Picture the scene. On coming of age, fortunate children are gifted self-ownership by their parents. Some parents make the gift conditional, requiring the child to care for them in their old age, to vote for a certain political party, to become a lawyer, to not marry a philosopher and so on. Other, more generous parents gift full self-ownership. But some gift nothing at all. They retain full ownership for themselves, or sell their children to the highest bidder - to the delight of those with no children of their own. Everyone agrees that, whatever their fate, none of these children has any right to complain, and no third party has any right to interfere. Is this fair? No. Is it equal? No. Is it just? Yes. In Nozick's free society, as in any real human society, most parents will want what is best for their children. Hardly any mother will choose to sell her own child into slavery. And we must remember that Nozick's official topic was justice, not morality. He never denied that parents have very strong moral obligations to their children. However, in any human society, some parents will not care about their own children. In Nozick's own real-life affluent society, although resources were abundant and there was simply no excuse for such behaviour, some parents still neglected, abused or exploited their children. And, whatever their moral opinion of such behaviour, people in Nozick's free society would never allow the state - or any well-meaning third party - t o interfere. Even the most monstrous parent violates no rights. Indeed, Nozick's view has the odd implication that the worst offenders are the least culpable. Human beings are not born persons, not in Nozick's sense. They begin as non-persons, and then hopefully become persons. But some parental abuse is so severe that it prevents children from ever becoming persons; either their powers of rationality never develop, or they die young. This most extreme abuse is no business of the state, as it could not possibly violate rights. Affluent parents who abused their children were regarded as paradigms of moral evil; and state agencies that failed to protect those children were roundly condemned. All affluent philosophers agreed that parents had enforceable duties to care for their children. To accommodate such duties, Nozick's followers sought to sidestep Okin's conclusion, while his opponents developed alternative conceptions of justice.

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7. What about population policy? Before we conclude our examination of reproductive freedom, I must mention one omission that will have puzzled you all. For us, any discussion of reproductivefreedom takes place under the shadow of population policy. Every human community must determine its optimal population range, and stay within it. But, like most affluent moral philosophers, Nozick simply ignored this topic. He assumed that reproductive freedom was consistent with any reasonable population goal, and did not imagine that human survival might one day require population fluctuations that cannot be achieved through voluntary changes alone. Any coercive state population policy would be unthinkable in Nozick's free society. This illustrates the impact of social context on philosophers' intuitions. As we all now know, once a survival lottety is in place, curbs on reproductive freedom seem much less intrusive. When there is not enough to feed all those already living, it is much harder to believe that anyone has a right to have as many children as she pleases. (We return to these issues in Lecture 10.)

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To set the limits of just acquisition, Nozick appealed to Locke's proviso.

Locke's proviso: I can justly acquire only if I leave enough and as good for others. This proviso looks both backwards and forwards. My rights rest on a history of just acquisition and just transfer. But my acquisition must also satisfy Locke's proviso, and that depends on itsfuture impact. To evaluate claims about rights, Nozick's affluent readers had to study both the history of their society and its future. This is why Nozick offers the perfect lens through which we can examine relations between affluent philosophy and the broken world. The oflcial role of Locke's proviso is to determine who owns what. But haven't we just seen not only that affluent holdings rested on a history of flagrant injustice, but also that Nozick's principle of self-ownership is internally incoherent? Don't we already know that no affluent person owned anything? If so, why bother with Locke's proviso?

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As philosophers, reality is not our main concern. Nozick never claimed to defend existing property rights, and he cannot be blamed for those inattentive affluent readers who thought that he had. We can explore his ideal theory of justice even if it does not match reality. Locke's proviso plays a crucial role in that ideal, and may render it more appealing. This is one reason to study Locke's proviso. But there are others. Locke's proviso may play a role in just rectrpcation. In a reasonably just society, rectification requires us simply to locate the rightful owner, and either return her property or compensate her. Actual affluent history made this impossible. No one had any idea who owned what. The counterfactual world of just acquisition and transfer was too distant. So the first task of real-worldjustice was to approximatejust rectification. Nozick suggested that theories of distributive justice - such as those supporting a welfare state - might play this role. But Locke's proviso is another contender, one that is both easier to apply and closer to the spirit of Nozick. As rectification never occurred, it was always required. The question of how to approximate just rectification arose anew in each generation. In any generation, libertarians could have recognized the injustice of current holdings and instituted a new order. We are interested in the affluent age and our own broken world. Suppose we stop the clock at those two times. Could Nozick's own affluent readers have used Locke's proviso to approximate just rectification?And could we do the same? We begin with Nozick's original discussion. Nozick replaced Locke's proviso with a new test of his own. Even in an affluent world with a bright future, this test had its own problems. In our broken world, it has many more. After exploring these problems over the next two lectures, we return to Locke's own proviso and ask whether it can play a different role.

1. From Locke's proviso to Nozick's

Locke's original proviso was simple: I must leave "enough and as good" for others. Locke pictured a pioneering frontier world of inexhaustible resources. His model was land. Each person takes as much as he can productively farm, but always leaves enough for later arrivals. Call a resource abundant if it fits Locke's model, and scarce if it does not.

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Pre-affluentthinkers saw land, fossil fuels, water, breathable air and food as abundant. No body could think himself injured by the drinking of another man, though he took a good draught, who had a whole river of the same water left him to quench his thirst: And the case of land and water, where there is enough of both, is perfectly the same. (Locke, Two Treatises on Government, Second Treatise, ch. 5) Unfortunately, the line between abundance and scarcity is fluid. Land was no longer abundant in Nozick's time; water is now scarce in our broken world; and the extinction of so many oxygen-producing plants may soon make breathable air scarce too. Nozick offered a neat argument that Lockers proviso fails for any scarce resource. Suppose each person needs one unit of a resource. People outnumber units. The resource is scarce. Last Person wants the last unit. She cannot justly acquire it, as she cannot leave enough for others. Penultimate Person took the second-to-last unit. She left one unit, but she did not leave Last Person anything the latter could justly acquire. So Penultimate Person also violates the proviso. The argument "zips" back to First Person: her acquisition is also unjust. No one can acquire any amount of a scarce resource. Nozick wanted to make just acquisition possible. So he reinterpreted the proviso. Nozick's proviso: I can acquire an unowned resource only if I leave others no worse-off than they would otherwise have been. Nozick's provisoseems straightforward. Each act of acquisition must leave everyone else no worse off. This suggests that acquires must compensate those who miss out. But this would be very onerous. And Nozick wanted unconstrained property rights, not rights encumbered by potentially limitless positive obligations. So he applied his proviso, not to isolated acquisitions, but to the institution of property, including rules of selfownership, transfer and rectification, as well as acquisition. You cannot

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complain about my acquisition, because the rules allowing it benefit you overall. This shift opened a can of worms. Locke's original proviso evaluates the impact of particular acquisitions on specific individuals. That impact is comparatively easy to assess. I know I have met Locke's proviso if everyone else can still acquire equally good land. But how can I tell whether the institution of property leaves you worse off?

2. Leaving the future no worse off

Nozick's proviso was supposed to constrain the actions of initial acquirers: people who first took ownership of resources. Suppose I am an initial acquirer, and you are one of the people affected by the institution of property that permits my acquisition. I want to know whether that institution leaves you worse off. My first question is: who are you? You might be someone in my own time who misses out on the resource I acquire. But you might also be someone in my future: perhaps an inhabitant of Nozick's affluent society, or even a person in a still-more-future broken world. (For many vital resources, the time of initial acquisition would have been long before Nozick's day, let alone our own.) It should not matter whether you come along tomorrow, or in a hundred years, or in ten thousand years. Nozick himself included future people in his argument against Locke's proviso. (Nozick was happy to admit future people, because he was confident that his institution of property would benefit them. But what if that institution yielded a broken future? Are we (in our broken world) better off thanks to the acquisitions of previous generations?) For now, we follow Nozick's optimism. Suppose I am an initial acquirer living in a (pre-affluent) world with a bright future, not a broken one. I want to satisfy Nozick's proviso. My first task is to measure the impact of Nozick's proposed institution of property. This is where things start to get complicated. Rights, by themselves, have no practical effect whatsoever. What matters is how people respond to rights. Nozick imagined a free society where rights are generally respected. For now, once again, we follow his optimism. (Don't worty, we shall return to grim reality soon enough.)

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Suppose my initial acquisitiontakes place within a free, rights-respecting society, where Nozick's institution of property is firmly established. To determine whether I have satisfied Nozick's proviso, I must now ask how that institution affects the people in my future. I immediately encounter several difficulties. Indeterminacy. Nozick's institution of property is designed to maxi-

mize freedom. It does not prescribe individual behaviour, and leaves people largely free to do as they please. So its impact depends not only on the rights individuals have, but also on how they exercise those rights. I need to know what intervening generations will do. But if human beings are genuinely free, there may be no fact of the matter for me to discover. Perhaps, when I make my initial acquisition, it is metaphysically indeterminatewhether Nozick's proviso is satisfied. Unknowability. Even if there are facts about what intervening people will do, I cannot hope to discover them. I have no idea whether Nozick's proviso is met. Uncertainty. At best, I can only hope to know the probabilities of different possible futures. But I must then decide how to respond to this uncertainty. Must I be certain that future people will be better off, or can I acquire even though they might be worse off? If so, how much can I risk on their behalf? Inequality. Our earlier discussion vividly illustrated the variety of individual fates in Nozick's free society. Some people are very wealthy, while others are starving or enslaved. Nozick's proviso is individualist. It is not sufficient that most people are better off; I must be sure that no one is worse off. But this is much less likely to be true, and much harder to know. (This individualism was one of Nozick's strongest commitments. The few cannot be sacrificed for the many. His target here was utilitarianism, discussed in Part 11.) Taken together, these problems are almost certainly insuperable. But then no one can apply Nozick's proviso. As an initial acquirer, I certainly cannot know that my actions are just. (And even a much later person, looking back from Nozick's affluent age with all the benefits of hindsight,

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would still lack the information to judge my acquisition. People in the affluent age could not possibly have been confident that their own property holdings had a just origin.) Affluent philosophers tended to skate over such problems. (They dismissed their own empirical ignorance as a "merely epistemic issue".) To continue our exploration of Nozick's proviso, let us simply stipulate that I do know both exactly how each future person fares in each possible future and how likely each future is. As an initial acquirer, my next task is to evaluate those possiblefutures. Nozick's official view was that the best judge of both value and risk is the individual who is affected. To decide how the institution of property affects you, I should defer to yourjudgement. You are worse off if you think you are. A risk is worth taking if you think it is. Therefore, I violate Nozick's proviso if any future person would have preferred life in a world without property. But individuals disagree wildly about both value and risk. Someone will always be upset. How can I hope to satisfy Nozick's proviso? The alternative is to adopt an objective measure of well-being and rational risk: you might think you are worse off, but you are not. But, as we shall see in Lecture 8, affluent philosophers offered many competing accounts of human flourishing. Which one should I apply? Who am I to say what is good for you? Nozick criticized the welfare state (and its philosophical supporters)for paternalistically imposing one controversialview on everyone. But could his own theory avoid paternalism? Nozick sidestepped all these complexities by comparing his free society with a clearly undesirable alternative: permanent stagnation. If no one can acquire, then there is no incentive to improve anything, and human beings remain forever in Stone Age poverty. Nozick thought this result was so obviously bad that no one would prefer it. Unfortunately, Nozick's comparison is open to several objections. To explore these objections, we shall imagine a variety of possible scenarios. In each case, you are one of the future people affected by my initial acquisition. Some people in Nozick's own affluent society, rejecting the stress of affluent life, would have preferred a world without property. Suppose there are some people in Nozick's imaginary free society who feel the same. Now imagine that you are one of those people. You think you are worse off because of the institution of property. Nozick would have

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dismissed you as an irrational sentimentalist with a historically inaccurate and rose-tinted view of pre-industrial life. But so what? If you were exercising your property rights, Nozick would have respected your preferences, however silly. (He always objected when other philosophers overruled preferences that did not fit their theories.) So shouldn't I also respect your preferences when I am applying his proviso? (Or did Nozick simply assume that everyone in his free society would love its property rules? If so, his fantasy world was even further from affluent reality.) Even if virtually everyone prefers a free society, Nozick's proviso requires that no one is worse off. Now imagine you are the worst-off person in Nozick's free society. Perhaps you are a disabled and talentless beggar who cannot even find someone to make you her slave. Surely you are worse off than you would otherwise have been. How has Nozick's institution of property benefited you? Nozick would have replied that you are not worse off,as you would have fared no better in a world without property. Nozick asked his affluent readers to imaginejust how bad that world would be. The productionand distribution of food -and other essentials - would be much less efficient without property. Famine would be more common and more devastating. Without patents to stimulate research, scientific and medical research would be virtually non-existent. At this point, proponents of the welfare state replied that, whatever your fate in a world without property, you would survive in a welfare state, because everyone survives there. Many affluent philosophers rejected Nozick's narrow comparison. Why compare only his particular scheme of property rights and a world with no property rights? Why not also consider other institutions of property, such as collective ownership or individual (positive) welfare rights? Nozick replied that because his institution of property was the most efficient, any alternative must leave some people worse off. But his opponents offered a symmetrical objection. For all its efficiency, Nozick's institution would still leave some (other) people worse off than the welfare state. This suggests that, when I try to apply Nozick's proviso to my initial acquisition, Iwill go round in circles. Ifirst imagine that you are the worstoff person in Nozick's free society. Won't you say that you would have been better off in a welfare state, where at least you would have been

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fed? So I reject Nozick's property rules. But I then imagine that you are a rich, talented person stuck in a welfare state, your life hedged around with taxes and regulations. Won't you now say that you would have preferred Nozick's free society? So I reject the property rules of the welfare state. But then I remember the disabled beggar. I can only conclude that every conceivable institution has winners and losers relative to every other, and therefore no institution satisfies Nozick's proviso. Future people introduce a further puzzle. The existence of any specific human individual is contingent on a host of factors, including the free decisions of others. (This was especially true in mobile affluent societies, where different life choices would have meant that an individual's parents never even met.) The individuals who exist in a free society would probably not have existed at all in a world without property. But how can we then ask whether property makes them worse off? When different futures contain different people, does Nozick's proviso even make sense? (We return to these puzzles in Lecture 10.)

3. Constraining Nozick

Locke was less keen on unconstrained individual freedom than Nozick. Locke defended two general restrictions on an individual's just exercise of her property rights. Locke's productivity constraint: I only acquire property on the condition that I use it "productivelyJJ.(Some of Locke's compatriots used this constraint to legitimize their own acquisition of land that was already inhabited. They argued that the original inhabitants had no property rights, because their way of life was not "productiveJJ.) Locke's charity constraint: The poor are owed a living from the surplus of the rich.

These constraints are requirements of justice. So the state can confiscate the property of those who are unproductive, or tax the rich to feed the poor. If these constraints operated in a free society, then everyone would be quite well off. Nozick's proviso could then be satisfied. (Both Locke and

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Nozick were confident that capitalism was so productive that the surplus of the rich would always suffice to meet the needs of the poor.) Nozick rejected Locke's constraints. He worried that they would give the state too much power. Productivity and charity might be admirable virtues, but a free society must allow people to use their property as they see fit. However, Nozick did recognize two other limits on individual property rights. Nozick's catastrophe exception: The side constraints generated by rights "may be violated in order to avoid catastrophic moral horror" (Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 30). Nozick's scarcity constraint: "A person may not appropriate the only water hole in the desert and charge what he will. Nor may he charge what he will if he possesses one, and unfortunately it happens that all the water holes in the desert dry up, except for his. This unfortunate circumstance, admittedly no fault of his, brings into operation the Lockean proviso and limits his property rights" (ibid.: 180). Nozick was confident that these two exceptions would only rarely come into play, because catastrophe and scarcity would both be extremely rare in his free society. But how would they operate in a broken world, where catastrophe and scarcity are the norm?

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1. The broken future

Nozick's proviso was not straightforward in an affluent world with a bright future. But we now know that the unconstrained exercise of property rights caused dangerous climate change. So we should imagine a free society with a broken future. Suppose I am an initial acquirer in that world. To satisfy Nozick's proviso, I must now be confident that no one in the broken future will be worse off than in a world without property. This is a tall order. In our (real-life)broken world, many people now argue that we should abandon our faltering attempts to resurrect industrial civilization and return to primitive ways of life. These people would certainly prefer Stone Age life in an unbroken world, but that option is lost. They insist that past acquisition has harmed them. Given his objectionto paternalism, how could Nozick have disagreed? Nozick wrote before humans understood climate change. Suppose he had realized that his world had a broken future. How might he have defended his theory? He might have simply denied that his free society could ever have a broken future. Climate changing behaviour either is

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irrational or violates property rights. This is not how free rational agents behave. (This would obviously have made the gulf between Nozick's fantasy world and affluent reality even wider. But that would not have bothered Nozick. As we have seen, he is best read as a critic of that reality.) Unfortunately, this first defence is implausible. Much damage to the environment occurred before anyone understood the science of climate change. Even once the science became well known, climate change resulted from rational individuals using their own property for their own ends. Given what we know about climate science, the utility of fossil fuels and human psychology, it seems very likely that any Nozickianfree society would have a broken future. Of course, free people could opt to conserve. But why would they? Nozick's free society is not peopled by saints. Its inhabitants respect rights, but otherwise have typical human motivations. This suggests they care for their friends and their children, but are unlikely to care for distant future people. Alternatively, Nozick might have argued that a free society - even with a broken future - is still better than a world without property. The latter is either a stagnant place where many people die, or it too has a broken future. (To support the second disjunct, Nozick could have cited empirical evidence from his own time to show that industrialized societies without individual property had the worst environmental records.) Either way, the free society is better. This second defence is also inadequate. If the efficiency of capitalism is both the justification of property and the cause of climate change, then won't a free society become broken more quickly? And won't that leave some people worse off? In desperation, Nozick might have turned to Locke. Could Lockets productivity and charity constraints have enabled Nozick's free society to avoid a broken future? Unfortunately, Locke's constraints would be very demanding in any world facing a broken future. If a "productive" use is one that leaves all others no worse off, and if capitalism inevitably produces a broken future, then Locke's productivity constraint would rule out all capitalist acts. And the demands of Locke's charity constraint would surely be overwhelming if "the poor" included people in a broken future. Indeed, in any world with a broken future, even Nozick's own catastrophe exception and scarcity constraint would both constantly interferewith

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property rights. if a broken world is not a "catastrophic moral horror", then what is? And, to use Nozick's own example, waterholes are very scarce in our broken world, along with all other sources of drinkable water. If scarcity in a brokenfuture constrains present property rights, then it is hard to see what remains of Nozick's much prized individualfreedom. Locke and Nozick both focused on the individual's use of her own property. But we now know that the broken world resulted from the unintended consequences of very large-scale patterns of resource use. Only constraints that operated at a societal level could have averted climatic disaster. But that would have involved state intervention far beyond the reach of Nozick's minimal state.

2. Back to Locke

As an initial acquirer, I am starting to get very worried as I imagine all these grim possible futures for my world. Iwant to do the right thing, but I really do want to acquire some property. Nozick's proviso looked bad even before I knew about the broken future. It now seems hopelessly unworkable. Perhaps I should take another look at Locke's original proviso. But didn't Nozick prove that Locke's proviso fails too? Locke tried to guarantee an equal sufficiency for all, and that simply is not possible when resources are scarce. I must choose between equality and sufficiency. Suppose a philosopher from Nozick's era were to travel back in time to offer me advice about initial acquisition based on affluent philosophy. What might she suggest? My time-traveller's advice will depend on her school of affluent philosophy. Some schools privileged equality. I leave as much for others by taking only an equal share of a resource. With a fixed population and a non-renewable resource, the equation is simple. (It is also simple for a non-renewable resource and an infinite population. But then my share is zero.) Renewable resources and indefinite populations make things trickier. A useful conservative rule of thumb might be: first calculate the total resource use consistent with non-depletion (so that the resource is fully renewed for each new generation), and then divide that total by the current population. This would give me my fair share.

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On this model, equality and scarcity together define sufficiency. I must limit my ambitions to projects that are within my (legitimate) means. Suppose, as an initial acquirer, I inhabit a simple world with two resources: water and fish. I want water to bathe and grow decorative flowers, and I regard fish heads as a delicacy. But these activities are unsustainable. I may take only what Ineed, using water only to drink, and consuming this whole fish before I catch another. So far, so good. But what if my equal share is insufficient for survival? Does Lockets proviso oblige me to starve to death? If this is a universal obligation, then everyone in my generation will die, there will be no future people, and the water and fish will be left unconsumed (nice for the fish, but they are not our current concern.) Some affluent philosophers would have said that I have now left the realm of justice. Hume's circumstances of justice no longer apply, and it is each person for herself. I have a natural right to take a sufficiency. But so does everyone else. If there is not enough to go around, the result is a war of each against all. (If my time-travelling advisor belonged to this school, she would offer me no further advice and leave as fast as she could.) Other affluent philosophers sought principled ways to distribute resources unequally. As we saw with self-ownership - and especially the ownership of individual talents - Nozick distinguished justice from both fairness and equality. An unequal (and unfair) distribution can still bejust. In the case of talents, Nozick allowed a natural lottery based on accidents of birth. If my world of initial acquisition has an abundant present, then I might consider something similar for renewable resources. Everyone in my generation can acquire enough to survive, leaving only future people to miss out. This avoids war. (Fortunately, my time-travelling advisor is just a literary conceit. Future people cannot actually travel back to fight for their fair share of resources, just as we cannot visit the affluent age to get our share.) On this proposal, future scarcity would still have a very significant impact on my share of resources. I would be allowed to use only what was strictly necessary for survival. And I might also incur positive obligations to help renewable resources recover. Luxuries would be forbidden, as would any failure to conserve. This is a far cry from Nozick's free society

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where people dispose of their property as they please, or from the behaviour of actual affluent people. But even this demanding proposal still faces serious objections, some practical, others moral. Once we accept that my generation can collectively take more than our equal share, we open the floodgates t o everexpanding conceptions of "necessary use". The pre-affluent philosopher Adam Smith said that humans have a basic need to "appear in public without shame". In affluent society, this required clean new clothes, unnecessarily frequent bathing and an excessive exercise regime (itself leading to unnecessary water consumption and yet more bathing). Even in my simpler world of initial acquisition, some people might have extravagant notions of what is necessary. Who will set the boundaries of human need? A second problem is that this proposal does not avoid war, but merely postpones it. We are supposing that my benign world of initial acquisition has a broken future. In some future generation it will no longer be possible for everyone to survive. What does my time-travelling affluent advisor think will happen then? The moral objection, as with any natural lottery, is that this proposal is unjust. Contra Nozick, many affluent philosophers saw a tight connection betweenjustice and fairness. Why privilege accidents of birth? Why should some people starve just because they were born too late? Suppose I am convinced by these objections. I believe that scarce resources should be distributed fairly. I could imagine a lottery across all generations: a timeless random selection of favoured individuals. But this imaginary lottery is not a practicalsuggestionfor me, as an initial acquirer. How do I know who would win? (Imight assume that God draws the tickets, but then I have to discern the will of God.) And would this timeless lottery really be any better than the natural lottery that favours those who are born earlier? Moreover, the timeless lottery is metaphysically incoherent. It treats future people as fixed. But, as we shall see in Lecture 10, the allocation of resources in earlier generations will determine the number, identity and existence of those future people. (What if too many people in one generation draw losing tickets, so that humanity dies out in that generation?) A more coherent alternative is a lottery within each generation. Instead of starting with individuals, suppose I first calculate the collective

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entitlement of my generation. How much can my generation legitimately consume, subject to leaving enough and as good for each subsequent generation?The share of each generation must then be divided among its members. If Iam lucky, my generation's share will be enough for everyone to survive, and perhaps even to flourish. I can then take what I need. (In an affluent world with a bright future, every generation would be lucky.) If I live in an unlucky generation, whose share is not sufficient for us all to survive, then I must decide how our generation's insufficient share of resources should be allocated. Perhaps the fairest solution is a social survival lottery: some deliberative process that both determines the content of individual shares and allocates them. (Or does this only seem fair to us because we naturally interpret Locke's proviso in light of our own social institutions?) Whatever its intuitive appeal, the present interpretation of Locke's proviso cannot be used to justify initial acquisition. As an individual pioneer in an empty land, I can hardly institute a social lottery, and Nozick (of all people) would not have wanted my rights to depend on any process of social deliberation. (And, of course, we - the members of this class - know that social lotteries were never instituted, either at the time of initial acquisition or in the affluent world. So no story like this could ever have justified any real-world initial acquisition.) You might now wonder why we have bothered reinterpreting Locke's proviso. The answer is that its original role is neither the only possible role for Locke's proviso nor the most important. Having learnt from Nozick that all actual property holdings are illegitimate, later generations in the real world (either in Nozick's own affluent age or in our own broken world) could instead use Locke's proviso to redistribute property from now, as the best approximation of just rectification. To illustrate this use of Locke's proviso, wefirst imagine ourselves into the mind of an afluent libertarian. Our model is Nozick's own imaginary tale of the emergence of the minimal state. The idea of a social survival lottery seems anathema to Nozick's libertarian individualism. Our challenge is to show how such a procedure could emerge in a moral landscape containing only equal individual property rights.

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3. A libertarianfantasy You are an affluent person: one of Nozick's contemporaries. You have read Anarchy, State, and Utopia, and found its arguments compelling. But you have also studied the history of your own society, and the science of climate change. A train of reasoning, not unlike that presented over the last four lectures, leads you to the following views. All current property rights (including self-ownership) are illegitimate. Just restitution is impossible; there is no way to know who "really" owns what. To approximate restitution, property must be redistributed. The natural distribution of ownership in persons is that each person owns herself. (Okin provided good reasons why you should not think this, but our tale is much simpler if you do.) The new distribution of externalresources must meet Locke's proviso. It would be unjust to privilegethe members of your own generation. Once we factor in future people, the world is already broken; resourcesare scarce relative to all (presentand future) needs. (We might say that your generation, while afluent, is morally unlucky.) In this situation, you decide that the only feasible interpretation of Locke's proviso first allocates each generation its fair share of renewable resources. Then, within any given generation, the default distribution is equal shares. You thus begin with the following property rights. You own yourself, together with an equal share of the resources available for consumption within your generation. As your generation is unlucky, your combination of property rights is insufficientfor your own survival. What should you do? You could, of course, simply violate the rights of others. Too smart to antagonize your contemporaries, you could steal from future people, so that your generation appropriates more than its share of resources. (Ex hypothesi, there are enough resources for everyone in your generation to survive, if you are all willing to steal from the future.) But suppose - as Nozick does in his tales -that you are a libertarian of principle. You will not violate the rights of others just to avoid starvation. Things look hopeless. Then you meet the entrepreneur: the deus ex machina of any good libertarian tale. Here is her pitch: We are each in the same boat. Individually, no one has enough to survive. But our collective property is enough to enable most

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of us to survive. My company - Lotteries are Us - will sell you a ticket in a survival lottery. It is very simple. You sign over to the company your rights over your share of resources. In return, we give you the chance to win enough resources to survive. What do you have to lose? (Terms and conditions apply. Lottery tickets not refundable.) Being rational, you can see that this offer is better than your present situation. You are about to sign up, when a second entrepreneur appears. Here is his pitch: Don't sign up for that inferior lottery. It is so inefficient. If you lose, you still own yourself. Big deal! What use is self-ownership when you are starving? Think of all those wasted resources. Our company - Cannibals are Us - runs a much better lottery. You sign over all your property, including your body. In return, because our winners have an additional source of nutrition, we offer a higher chance of survival. Maximize your chances and sign up today! You are weighing your desire to survive against a nagging feeling that something is wrong here, when a third entrepreneur rolls up. Here is her pitch: Don't be so timid. Those other companies offer nothing more than bare survival. What kind of life is that? Our company Luxuryville - offers a chance at a life of luxury, with far more resources than you need. Imagine coming home after a hard week's work to enjoy your weekly bath, and a dinner of fish heads. (Of course your chances of winning are a bit lower than on some other lotteries, but let's not get hung-up on numbers.) Aim high: don't settle for less than you deserve! And then a fourth entrepreneur has an even more enticing offer. "Don't run the risk of not surviving; you deserve much better than that. Our company - Libertyville- guarantees everyone a life of luxury. (Over-educated

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liberal elites will tell you our numbers don't add up - but why listen to them?)" Other entrepreneurs pour into the market. Some offer variable lotteries, where you can purchase either a good chance of surviving as a worker or a slim chance of a life of privilege. One even offers a lottery with only one winner, who owns everything. ("I bought a ticket last year, and now I own the company!") As in any marketplace, some lottery companies inevitably fall by the wayside. Perhaps one will come to dominate. Indeed, there is very good reason to expect this result. A key practical problem for any lottery company is enforcement. How do you get the losers to pay up? Companies that are already in the rights-enforcementbusiness thus have a significant competitiveadvantage in the lottery business. (Just as, in the real affluent world, protection rackets, contract killing and gambling often went hand in hand.) And, as Nozick predicted, a single "protection agency" is likely to dominate the market for the enforcement of individual rights, as larger agencies are better placed to protect their members' rights. In time, a single protection/lottery company may be the only game in town. You might then decide to call it the State. Agenuine state-like monopoly is, in fact, more likely here than in Nozick's original case. Like many affluent philosophers, Nozick was obsessed with the principled anarchist: the person who will not accept any authority or recognize any state, and who insists on retaining the right both to enforce her own rights and to judge when they have been infringed. This obstinate person was a real problem for Nozick. No organization has any rights of its own. It has only the rights that individuals choose to give it. The dominant protection agency has a right to defend its members, but only because each member gives it her own right to self-defence. And it has rights to the obedience of its members, but only because they agreed to this. But it has no right to the obedience of any non-member; and no one can be coerced into joining any agency. In Nozick's original tale, the anarchist is irrational, but not suicidal. She would be well advised to join the dominant protection agency. Life would be safer and less stressful. (Keeping your own weapons up to date is so time-consuming.) But life on the outside is still possible. The anarchist can retreat to the hills and eke out a living.

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Like many affluent philosophers, Nozick constructed his political philosophy against a background assumption that individuals are autarkic: they may derive benefits from cooperation, but each can survive on her own. But the inhabitants of a broken world are not autarkic. (This was one reason why the possibility of our world was so disturbingfor affluent philosophers.) In our new tale, for instance, your alternatives are more limited: choose a lottery or die. No one can force you to sign up. You are perfectly free to try to survive outside a lottery. But you cannot succeed. Ex hypothesi, your individual resource entitlement is insufficient for survival. However- as we learnt from Notick's own discussion of slavery and labour relations -this does not make your decision to join a lottery any less voluntary. No one is coercing you. You are free to choose. But every rational individual will join. However, suppose you are just very stubborn, and not very rational. Or suppose you do not believe in climate change, so you do not see the need for lotteries. You retreat to the hills and survive by catching fish and drinking springwater. Things go fine for a while. Then the dominant protection and lottery agency (the DPIA) sends its agents to find you. (Did you think they wouldn't find you?They're a dominant protection agency: that's what they do.) Imagine the ensuing conversation. You have no jurisdiction over me. I'm not a member, and I haven't violated any of the rights of your members. DPLA: YOU have consumed scarce renewable resources that are not your property. We have a right, on behalf of our members, to seek compensation. YOU: But I didn't steal from your members. If anything, I stole from future people. Your members can still consume as much as they were going to. That's how Iinterpret Locke's proviso. And anyway, I don't believe all that newfangled climate science. It's all a government plot. DPLA: First, you have stolen from our members. The correct interpretation of Locke's proviso clearly grants entitlements to consume, in the first instance, to generations. By consuming more than your equal share of our generation's entitlement, you have placed our entire generation in debt to future people. Our members - as principled libertarians - are now bound to repay that debt. They are thus entitled to seek

YOU:

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compensation from you, a right they entrust to us. Second, we don't care what you think. Each of our members has a right to decide for herself what her obligations are. This includes a right to interpret Locke's proviso. Our members delegate those rights to us. And we say that Locke's proviso does distribute obligations by generations, and that climate change is real. (Of course, you also have a right to seek to enforce your rights as you see them. But that wouldn't be wise.) Third, we are not a government. This is a free society. There is no government. We are a purely voluntary association. We are simply here to collect a debt on behalf of our members. We have all and only the rights they have delegated to us. Once the debt is paid, you are free to go. YOU: Alright then. What do I owe? DPLA: AS of last Tuesday, you have exceeded your consumption entitlement by an amount precisely equal to the current market value of your self-ownership rights. So, if you'll just hand over your body, we'll be on our way. YOU: Surely there is some alternative. Can't I join a lottery? DPLA: Unfortunately, each of our lotteries has a price. As you now have no legitimate property rights, you can't afford any of them. Once it became common knowledge what lay in store for any nonmember who managed to survive on her own, I think we can assume that everyone would join.

4. Locke in our broken world

This is how affluent people would have behaved ifthey had been libertarians of principle. But they weren't, and they didn't, leaving us with a broken world. Might we now use Locke's proviso to distribute resources, and to legitimize our own survival lotteries?In many ways, Locke's proviso can play this role more easily in our broken world than in Nozick's affluent age. We are not so worried by renegade climate change deniers, and we cannot avoid hard decisions altogether by stealing from the future. (Of course, the temptation to steal is still there, if only to reduce the severity of our current lotteries. But the knowledge that affluent people stole

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from us reinforces our moral scruples about intergenerational theft.) A libertarian DPLA might well include obligations to make a productivecontribution to society, to preserve resources for future people and to raise your children to do likewise. It might even include collective ownership of talents and their fruits, coercive centralized direction of labour, other mechanisms calculated to maximize the productivity and efficiency of food production, and strictly enforced rules about individual reproductive freedom designed to enable the present generation to meet its collective obligations to future people. Indeed, any of our existing survival lotteries - and our broader patterns of social organization - could have arisen within a free society without violating any Nozickian rights. Our social arrangements could have had a just libertarian history. But, of course, they didn't. (In libertarian terms, recent history has been no more just than what went before.) And, as ever, a hypothetical tale does not offer any real justification. After all, as Nozick himself demonstrated, the free exercise of individual rights could, over a number of generations, produce almost any possible social arrangement: from pure anarchy, through a plurality of competing protection agencies, to a minimal state, and then (perhaps) on to a fully developed welfare state; from individual self-ownership, through corporate part-ownership of persons, and then (perhaps) on to either a slave society where the few own the many, or to collective (state?) ownership of all persons. You simply cannot tell, just by looking at its pattern of rights and responsibilities, whether or not a social situation is just. With a just history, any pattern can be just. But, conversely, without a just actual history, no pattern is just, ingenious hypothetical tales notwithstanding. The libertarian must therefore conclude that our existing institutions are illegitimate. If we are principled libertarians, and we seek a just lottery, we must start again. We must calculate our generation's share of resources, divide that share equally among ourselves, and then let Nozick's free market work its magic. And here we encounter yet another crucial difference between our world and Nozick's: the availability of time. Our libertarian fantasy borrowed Nozick's confidence that, given enough time, the market will deliver a single, efficient survival lottery. But the market forces that would lead us from a world of individual propertyholders defendingtheir own rights, through the emergence of protection

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agencies, to the comparative security of the minimal state, might take decades, if not generations. Because the ultimate result depends on the myriad small decisions of individuals with varying priorities and unequal reasoning powers, it cannot be predicted. So we cannot jump to the end, all agreeing in advance to join the lottery that is most "rational". As Nozick always insisted, there are no pattern-based short cuts. There is no alternative to the slow and erratic progress of the market. (Indeed, it is because it requires this sort of impossible prediction that Nozick's own proviso cannot usefully play any role.) Perhaps this delay was fine in the affluent world. By definition, autarkic individuals are not in any urgent hurry to develop their minimal state. But, for us, time is as scarce as any other resource. The price of adopting an inefficient survival lottery - or, worse, of going several generations without any viable lottery at all - is death. Can we afford to wait while unscrupulous entrepreneurs peddle unsustainable products, and principled anarchists stand on their dignity? Or to run the risk that the pressure to find some solution will lead individuals to sign up to lotteries that are clearly inefficient, discriminatory or corrupt? Do we have time for freedom? Or do we need, instead, to find some way to select a survival lottery without waiting on the exercise of individual property rights? If so, we must look beyond Nozick.

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1. The moral significance of nations

Nations were a very significant feature of the affluent moral landscape. As one affluent philosopher put it, "A nation is a community constituted by shared belief and mutual commitment, extended in history, active in character, connected to a particular territory, and marked off from other communities by a distinct public culture". Most affluent people believed that co-nationals had special obligations to one another; that national identity was a vital part of each individual's identity; and that nations themselves had special rights, privileges and obligations. Every affluent state was a nation state, claiming authority over specific people within a particular territory. Not everyone agreed. (Affluent philosophers were seldom unanimous about anything.) Cosmopolitans ("citizens of the world") denied the moral significance of nations altogether. They argued that all moral obligations are universaland the only significant "community" is humanity as a whole. But most affluent philosophers were pragmatic. Nations were a fact of (affluent) life. Ifyou wanted to talk about justice, the nation state was the

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only game in town. Justice was a virtue of political institutions, and such institutions existed only within nations, as did the solidarity needed to generate obedience to anything beyond Nozick's minimal state. What else could motivate people to assist the worse off, sacrifice for future people, or risk their lives to defend some collective political endeavour? Affluent critics dismissed as pure fantasy the cosmopolitanvision of global institutions delivering global justice. In subsequent lectures, we explore the boundaries between national and global justice several times in our discussions of particular affluent theories of justice. But first we turn to the prior question of national legitimacy. We approach this issue via Nozick. This might seem odd. As you will have noticed, Nozick said nothing about nations. His rights belonged exclusively to individual human beings. However, the affluent discourse of national territorial rights -the foundation of national legitimacy- was very much in the spirit of Nozick. This is ironic. Many affluent philosophers who rejected Nozick's account of individual rights happily presupposed something very similar at the national level.

2. National territorial rights Every affluent nation claimed special rights over some geographical area: its national territory. These rights were strikingly similar to Nozick's individual property rights. Indeed, affluent people often spoke as if a nation were a moral individual, with agency, rights, interests, identity and obligations. This is why the affluent term "nation" is so hard to translate. Affluent nations were not fluid groups or collectives who traded and bargained. They were treated as real entities whose natural rights were enshrined in a mystical moral code known as international law. Affluent international law granted each nation absolute Nozick-style ownership of any resourcesfound in its territory. To take one central affluent example, a nation could use its oil as fuel, sell it to the highest bidder or refuse to exploit it at all. Indeed, national rights were closer to Nozick's ideal than any actual regime of individual rights. All affluent individuals were taxed and regulated by states. But no world state regulated the nation's exercise of its rights.

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To justify their exclusive rights, affluent nations offered founding myths, emphasizing their past connections to this land. These myths often recounted a people's original occupation of their territory, a clear appeal to a Nozick-style principle of initial acquisition. Could Nozick himself have accommodated national rights? Nozick did not speak of nations. Only individual persons have rights, and nations are not persons. They cannot literally have rights. On the other hand, individuals can agree to anything. Nozick's own minimal state was clearly modelled on the affluent nation state. And we can see why a minimal state might limit itself to a specific national territory. Perhaps the same geographical barriers that fixed actual affluent national borders would also constrain the effectiveness of dominant protection agencies; or perhaps transnational agencies would flounder because people would rather deal with their own group. Each island or valley would then have its own local monopoly. Nozick's individual rights thus could lead to something resembling a world of nation states. What rights would those nations have? In Nozick's moral universe, all territory belongs to individuals who have full ownership rights. Collectively, the people within each nation have full territorial rights. Their state - their dominant protection agency - has whatever rights they choose to transfer to it. Relations between nations must then respect individual rights across nations - avoiding conquest, promoting trade and establishing mechanisms to deal with disputes. (What if a person living in one nation wanted to join the dominant protection agency of another territory? In principle, Nozick allowed for the possibility of states with non-continuous territories. But could this ever work in practice?) Of course, Nozick's free society was a fantasy. Could nations' rights have emerged justly in the real world? And did they ever so emerge? Was any affluent nation morally legitimate?

3. Were national rights legitimate?

Most affluent founding myths were no more historically accurate than Nozick's hypothetical histories. (Remarkably, many affluent people seem

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to have believed these vainglorious self-serving tales. At least Nozick never pretended to believe his fantasies.) Almost no affluent territory was ruled either by its original inhabitants or by people who had justly acquired it. Territories were seldom exchanged voluntarily, even by NozickJsbroad definition. Instead, virtually every affluent nation had a history of conquest, enslavement or genocide. The illegitimacy of individual property holdings often resulted not from individual crimes, but from these wider atrocities. Indeed, most places had such convoluted histories that, by Nozick's day, it would have been impossible to locate their "original" inhabitants. Some defeated nations were brutally annihilated. For most others, the loss of territory gradually obliterated national identity. Thanks to migration, intermarriage and assimilation, subsequent generations no longer identified themselves as belonging to that nation. Even if we could identify initial acquirers, we would still have to ask whether their acquisition was itself legitimate. Would even the virtuous ancestors of affluent national myth have satisfied Lockets proviso? Did they leave enough and as good for other nations? Lockets proviso would have been especially hard to apply here. The needs of nations varied more than those of individuals. Nations differed in population size, way of life, mode of production and aspirations. Could nations with small populations claim as much territory as more populous ones? Could hunter-gatherers claim larger areas than agricultural peoples? Could people accustomed to national parks, large homes and expansive gardens justly acquire enough land for their way of life? Who would decide what each nation needed?And what about a nation's future needs? What if some nations wanted more land to expand? Territories were also very unequal in value. Some contained valuable fossil-fuel deposits, fertile soil or abundant water, while others were barren deserts. Could a nationjustly acquire good territory, and still leave enough equally valuable land for others? (What if the value of land changed through time? In pre-affluent times, agricultural productivity and access to international trade routes were the key; while affluent nations prized minerals and fossil fuels.) By the affluent age, all territory belongedto some nation. Wasn't this itself an injustice?What if a new nation emerged and claimed some territory of its own?

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In our own day, of course, water has become the primary source of territorial friction. The ownership of water has always been a philosophical and practical puzzle. In the affluent world, a river often began in one state and then flowed through several others. Each state needed the river to flourish, and even to survive. Could upstream states dam the river to provide electricity, reducing the downstream flow? Was it sufficient to leave enough for downstream people to live, even if their luxury export crops withered? What if upstream irrigation stopped the river from reaching the sea? Or what if one state's industrial production poisoned the river, leaving it unfit to drink or fish downstream? Was the river a common resource owned by all, or did each state own a part? If so, did they own the river bed only, or also the water flowing through it? Consider a mid-stream nation that received ample water owing to upstream moderation. Was that nation then obliged to be similarly generous to those downstream? The national analogue of Locke's proviso seems impossible to apply. Would Nozick's proviso have been any better? Prosperous affluent nations argued that, although they failed to leave enough and as good for others, the system of national rights was legitimate because it left everyone better off. Was this claim any more plausible for nations than for individuals? Did all nations - let alone all individuals within them - benefit from the regime of national territorial rights? What if some would have preferred a different, more egalitarian, allocation of rights? And, of course, could any claim of universal benefit survive into our broken world? As with individual property, the national territorial rights of the affluent age lacked a respectable history. Nozick would have said that justice demanded rectification. As in the individual case, an egalitarian distribution might be the best proxy for just rectification. Defining an "equal share" would be even more difficult for nations than for individuals. And, in any event, no attempt at rectification was ever made. If he had addressed the question, Nozick would surely have concluded that, just as affluent individuals owned nothing, no affluent nation had any legitimate territorial rights. What about the improvements that people made within their territories? Even if initial acquisition was unjust, weren't affluent people still entitled to their movable property, knowledge, buildings and public

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institutions? We can imagine Nozick's response. Do you own what you made using things you did not own, especially when you knew they were stolen? (Surely no affluent citizen honestly believedthat her nation's territory had beenjustly acquired?) Suppose I erect a building on stolen land, and the rightful owner shows up. Isn't he entitled to retake his land, along with my building? Haven't I simply squandered my labour? How did affluent philosophers justify their acceptance of the nation state? We simply don't know. No plausible moral argument for nationalism has come down to us. Many affluent people seem to have thought that, over time, historical injustices ceased to matter, and that nations founded on conquest, deceit, genocide or slavery could eventually acquire legitimate territorial rights. We can only guess how they defended this (very un-Nozickian) view.

4. Nations in the broken world

As students of recent history will recall, the transition to our broken world stretched the very idea of national territorial rights to breaking point. Most affluent philosophers recognized some national duty to assist others in times of crisis. They hoped this duty would be undemanding. In a broken world, that hope was vain. Recall Nozick's example of waterholes in the desert. Imagine a world where each nation has i t s own waterhole. Initially, water is plentiful. Then some dry up. Nozick would have said that those who still possess functioning waterholes must share. (Of course, their responsibility is much greater if, as actually happened, they have knowingly caused the other waterholes to fail!) One vexed affluent political question was immigration. Each affluent nation claimed the right to exclude non-nationals from its territory. (Ironically, some individuals who defended this right were themselves descended from "founders" who, when immigrating to already inhabited lands, had definitely not asked permission!) Although the restriction of immigration was a universal practice, some affluent philosophers notably cosmopolitans - wondered whether it was just. In this debate, Nozick's example had potentially radical implications.

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Picture a scene during the transition from Nozick's affluent world to our broken one. As the descendants of an affluent nation struggle to survive in some comparatively less broken part of the world, refugees arrive from an uninhabitable land: perhaps a Pacific atoll sunk beneath the waves, or an African desert that is simply too hot to bear. Now imagine a conversation between these two groups. REFUGEES: We

have a right to an equal chance to survive. The resources of the earth are the common property of all. You have more than your share, while we have nothing, through no fault of our own, and no merit of yours. To borrow an analogy from your own Professor Nozick, our "waterhole" has run dry, while yours still flows. You must share it with us, even if there will then not be enough for us all to survive. AFFLUENTS: That is not a reasonable demand. The resources of this land are ours; we justly inherited them from our ancestors. We would share them if there was enough to go round, but we are already struggling to feed ourselves, and things are only going to get worse. We have a right - indeed a duty - to look after ourselves first. We cannot help you. Go home. REFUGEES: DOnot speak to us of our beloved homeland. We would love to go home. But we cannot. We have no home. Through their profligate lifestyle and their failure to avert a broken world, your ancestors destroyed our home. They are responsible for our plight. If your ancestors were still alive, they would have an obligation to either fix our home, provide a new one or share their home with us. If you honour their memory, then you should honour that debt. Unless you can rebuild our homeland, or you have some unused territory lying around, you must share. AFFLUENTS: Perhaps our ancestors did harm you. But let's not harp on about the past. Why should we apologisefor things we didn't do?That is not our debt. We are not our ancestors. We are separate autonomous individuals. We do not recognize the inheritance of debt. REFUGEES: We are now confused. If you do not recognize the inheritance of debt, then how can you consistently affirm the inheritance of territorial rights?What makes this your land?If your link to your ancestors is strong enough to give you inherited rights, then it is also strong

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enough for you to inherit their debts. If you renounce the debt, you have no right to turn us away. You cannot have it both ways.

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These refugees - sadly not imaginary had a point. In fact, it was claims like theirs that finally overwhelmedthe nation-statesystem and destroyed its moral credibility. We now leave Nozick behind and continue our exploration of affluent philosophy with one of his main rivals utilitarianism.

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1. Nozick and utilitarianism

Nozick wrote for an optimistic affluent world, where human productivity outweighed any scarcity of resources and each generation would always be better off than the one before. His philosophical methodology was built on intuitions tied to that world. Perhaps we need a theory that does not rest on affluent intuitions, is not reliant on affluent optimism and has the flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances. In affluent philosophy, the obvious candidate was utilitarianism, one of Nozick's targets in Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Utilitarianismwas a broad social and intellectual tradition, not a single principle. That tradition - associated with the pre-affluent philosophers Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill and Henry Sidgwick - placed human well-being centre stage. Utilitarians judged everything - actions, moral codes, political and legal institutions, and even beliefs - by its impact on human flourishing. Utilitarianism was also completely impartial. As Bentham put it, "each is to count for one, and none for more than one". Utilitarians counted all human happiness equally, wherever and

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whenever it occurred. We begin with some contrasts between utilitarianism and Nozick. Utilitarians rejected absolute or natural rights. Bentham regarded natural rights as dangerous fictions. Such rights claim to be written into the moral fabric of the universe, and to take precedence over the laws or customs of any particular country. Yet the very idea of a right can be analysed only in terms of a particular system of law that actually exists. Natural rights make no sense. Bentham was especially opposed to "imprescriptible natural rights" that cannot be overridden by a utilitarian legislator. They are "nonsense upon stilts", and one of the principal barriersto political and legal reform. Utilitarians replaced piecemeal appeal to specific intuitions with derivation from a single, foundational moral principle. Mill provided a very succinct statement: Mill's utility principle: "Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasureJ1(Mill, Utilitarianism, ch. 2). Utilitarianism was explicitly context-dependent. Moral assessment is based on the actual impact of our actions on human well-being. Utilitarians belonged to the empiricist philosophical tradition, where all knowledge must ultimately be traced to impressions made on our senses by physical objects. They applied this empiricist principle to human actions and human society. The same type of action may be forbidden in one situation and yet permitted or even obligatory in another. Utilitarians were thus open to the possibility that affluent morality may need to change as it enters the broken world. Utilitarianism began as a radical critique of common-sense morality, and especially the political and legal institutions of the pre-affluent world. Utilitarians offered many specific recommendations for law reform, and they also imagined a much broader positive role for

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the state than almost all their contemporaries. The utilitarians' ideal state was much more extensive than Nozick's. At a time when public institutions were controlled by small elites, early utilitarians were also radical democrats, arguing that the franchise should be extended to all men and even to women. (This last suggestion made utilitarianism the object of public ridicule.) Nozick ignored, or at least marginalized, future people. In this respect, he was typical of affluent philosophy. Utilitarians were one notable exception. While early utilitarians did not often discuss future people explicitly, the affluent philosophical literature on future people was driven by later utilitarians. While others questioned whether intergenerational justice was even conceptually coherent, utilitarians offered a clear rationale for taking future people into account. If human happiness is what matters, then surely future people are as morally significant as present people. Utilitarianismthus has the resources to offer a radical critique of affluent values and institutions, based on the needs of people in a possibly broken future. Utilitarianism seems ideally suited to our broken world. However, things are not so simple. Although the utility principle itself easily translates to a broken world, many affluent arguments for that principle, and many specific affluent applications of it, may not. In particular, affluent utilitarians often played down their radical inheritance, arguing instead that utilitarianism supported many of the institutions and values of affluent liberal democracy, and that it offered a moderate and reasonable morality rather than one that was excessively demanding. (On the other hand, to complicate matters further, the shift to the broken world might also support utilitarianism, by undermining objectionsto utilitarianism based on intuitions tied to the affluent world.)

2. Two schools of utilitarianism

The utilitarian tradition encompassed a bewildering variety of themes and theories. Mill's deceptively simple principle hides several key questions. Do we evaluate acts, decision procedures, moral rules, moral codes,

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social institutions or political systems? Do we look at the impact on individual agents, on whole societies or on humanity as a whole? What is human well-being, and how do we measure it? Utilitarians disagreed about all these matters. Any manageable discussion must simplify enormously. Idivide utilitarians into two main groups: act utilitarians and rule utilitarians. These were familiar names in affluent philosophy. But I use them more broadly, to designate two composite positions that capture the main divides in affluent utilitarianism. Act utilitarians developed a purely impartial moral theory. They evaluated individual actions solely by their impact on aggregate human pleasure; they accepted the resulting verdicts, however extreme or counter-intuitive. Rule utilitarians favoured a moderate morality. They evaluated moral codes and political institutions by their ~ o l l e ~ impact ve on human well-being, measured in a more nuanced way; the resulting code included many non-utilitarian prohibitions and permissions. Unsurprisingly, given their substantive differences, utilitarians also differed in their styles of argument, and especially in the ways they defended utilitarianism. Act utilitarians, having embraced a radical critique of affluent practice, could not then cite the intuitive appeal of their own particular pronouncements. Instead, they offered more abstract arguments, deriving the utility principle from general moral ideals such as impartiality or universalizability. (A moral statement is universalizable if it applies equally to all agents in all circumstances.) Act utilitarians also drew analogies with individual rationality. Just as a rational agent should maximize her own well-being, a moral agent should maximize everyone's well-being. Where did these moral ideals or principles of rationality come from? Some utilitarians ambitiously sought to derive them from the meaning of moral terms; but others were content to rely on intuition here. In fact, many act utilitarians simply took the utility principle itself for granted. They focused not on defendingthe principle, but on applying it, on attacking alternative principles and on rebutting objections. Some rule utilitariansoffered their own abstract arguments, based on a picture of morality as a collective enterprise. But many also argued that, despite its austere impartial foundations, rule utilitarianism did the best job of tying together (and explaining) affluent people's considered moral

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judgements about both specific cases and general moral ideals. Affluent rule utilitarianssuggested that, on reflection, any sensible affluent person would realize that, whatever else she might have thought, she had really been a rule utilitarian all along. One enduring criticism of utilitarianism was that, because it needs precise calculations of well-being, it is simply unworkable. Consider a simple action such as giving an apple to a friend. What is the net impact on well-being? You may think this is obvious. Your friend gains pleasure, you feel good about yourself and your friendship is cemented. But suppose a passing stranger mistakes the gesture, and is offended. Or another friend is hurt that she did not get the apple. Or perhaps your friend chokes on the apple and dies. Bad for her, but now suppose she had bequeathed her estate to charity. Is her death then a good thing? Perhaps you should have donated the apple itself to charity? You might now be tempted to throw it in the river to escape all these questions. But perhaps a fish will eat the apple and be magically transformed into a ravenous monster. And so on. Utilitarians sought to avoid paralysis by limiting themselves to predictable and probable consequences. You never know exactly what will happen. But you often can estimate what is likely. I do not know exactly how things will turn out if I amputate your (healthy)arm, but I am confident this would not maximize happiness. As we proceed, we must always ask whether utilitarianism can meet the empirical challenges it inevitably sets for itself. Can it provide enough guidance in the real world?

3. Act utilitarianism Act utiiitarianismis straightforward. The right act is the act that maximizes human happiness. This seems reasonable. Happiness is good, and surely the more the better. What else would you want? Should we make people miserable? Opponents objected that act utilitarianism is unjust, unreasonably demanding, impractical and self-defeating. It requires things you ought not to do, forbids things that are permitted, and ultimately makes it impossible for anyone to be happy. Consider two famous affluent tales, "Sheriff and "Charity".

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Sheriff You are the law-enforcement officer in an isolated frontier town. A murder has been committed. Most people believe that Bob is guilty, but you know he is innocent. Unless you hang Bob now, there will be a riot in town and several people will die. You are powerless to stop the riot by lawful means. Utilitarianismsays you must hang Bob. (HISTORICAL NOTE: This tale relates to a lawless era at the dawn of the affluent age. Ironically, it is more relevant today than it was for affluent readers.)

Charity You have ten dollars in your pocket. You could buy a book, see a film or give it to a reliable charity that will use it to restore someone's sight. It is pretty clear which produces more happiness. So you make the donation, and go to the cash machine to get money to go to the film. But now you have ten dollars in your pocket. What should you do? You can see where this is going: no films for you. (HISTORICAL NOTE: Dollars were the most common affluent currency; a cash machine was an automatic dispenser of money, much as a tree dispenses leaves; a film was an extraordinarily expensivetechnological entertainment where moving images were projectedonto a screen.)

Opponents offered many similar thought experiments, where utilitarianism requires you to torture an innocent child, lie to your parents or murder your patients to harvest their organs; or where you must sacrifice not only all your money, but all your time, energy and talent as well. Utilitarianism makes you do monstrous things, and leaves no room for you to live your life. Why did utilitarianism have these results? Utilitarians were interested only in total happiness. They did not care how happinesswas produced, or whose happiness was at stake. So they saw no moral distinction between doing and allowing, and especially between killing someone and allowing them to die. A utilitarian sheriff sees only the results: one person dies or

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several people die. He cannot see that he is responsible for Bob's death but not for the riot, For the same reason, utilitarians also ignored moral prohibitions on murder or torture, special relationships (sheriffs, of all people, should not hangthe innocent) and the agent's permissionto give special weight to her own interests and projects. In Rawls's memorable phrase, utilitarianism "does not take seriously the distinction between persons" (A Theory oflustice, 24). One especially striking feature of act utilitarianism was its abolition of moral freedom. On each occasion, you must perform the act that maximizes well-being. There are no options, and no room for morally permitted choice. Just as you must sacrifice others, you must also sacrifice yourself. Many utilitarians who sought a more intuitive theory abandoned act utilitarianism. Those who remained had two basic replies. The first was denial. Utilitarianism does not really require that sheriffs murder the innocent, or that you donate everything to charity. We can never be certain of the (temporally or spatially) distant effects of our actions. Injustice is a risky strategy. You know that hanging Bob is bad for him, while the possible positive result is much less certain. Perhaps the riot will not happen even if Bob is not hanged, or it might happen even if he is. And suppose Bob is later found to be innocent. Public confidence in law enforcement is undermined, you lose your job and your family starves. Even if no one ever finds out, you might suffer psychological trauma or guilt for years afterwards, perhaps leading to a complete breakdown. A truly utilitarian sheriff would play it safe and not hang Bob. Similarly, I know that spending my money on myself or my friends improves our welfare, but I have my doubts about charities operating in distant countries. I should focus my efforts where I know they do good. Some utilitarians bolstered denial by distinguishing their criterion of evaluation from their decisionprocedure. The utilitarian criterion is maximum happiness. The obvious utilitarian procedure is: "Always maximize happiness". But some other procedure may yield more happiness in the long run. Opponents accused utilitarians of treating human agents as myopic calculating machines. Utilitarians replied that their theory acknowledges that humans cannot deliberate like that. A pure utilitarian calculator will unnecessarily execute innocent people, or starve to death because she donated too much to charity this week, or simply be

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paralysed by calculation. The best utilitarian policies might instead be: "Never hang innocent people", "Don't devote all your energy to charity", "Spend time with your friends and family". These policies would produce more happiness over a full life than constant maximization. Perhaps the best procedure is simply to follow the well-tested rules of thumb of common-sense morality. Opponents - and many utilitarians - were unconvinced. We can easily imagine cases where a more demanding or counter-intuitive procedure would still be best. Perhaps you could maximize welfare by becoming a very efficient (and undetectable) serial killer of unconvictedoffenders, or by cultivating an obsession with making money that you then donate to charity. (HISTORICAL NOTE: Serial killers were psychopaths who murdered large numbers of strangers in bizarre ways. Historical records suggest that serial killers accounted for a large percentage of all affluent deaths, although some historians suspect these records may be fictional.) Denial is an especially implausible response to the demandingness objection. Some late-affluent charities were very reliable, meeting distant basic needs at a very reasonable price. And if you have doubts about distant donation, why not devote your life to improving things in your own neighbourhood?The details might change, but there is no escaping the demand to sacrifice your life for the common good. The second utilitarian reply was to bite the bullet. We cannot reject moral demands simply because we find them unpalatable. If you really are sure that hanging an innocent person will save five equally innocent lives, then why not do it? Why not focus on results?Surely they are what really matters. Imagine having to justify yourself to the people who die in the riot, or to their grieving relatives. What would you say? That you could have prevented these deaths, but you were more interested in the precise details of your causal role? You kept your hands clean. But why should that matter? What is so special about you? Act utilitarians rejected the intuition that morality must be undemanding. They saw that intuition as clearly self-serving. If people (i) were better informed, (ii) reasoned more clearly and (iii) were better able to imagine what life is like for those who are destitute, then they would see that utilitarian demands are not unreasonable. Other non-utilitarian moral principles namely special obligations, prerogatives and prohibitions - are

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also self-serving, although less obviously so. When resource distribution is already unequal, these principles exacerbate inequality and benefit the wealthy, ensuring that their disproportionate share of resources is spent on one another, and that the status quo is not disrupted. Some act utilitarians also rebutted their opponents' arguments with intuitions of their own. Consider two classic affluent tales, "Pond" and "Rocks". Pond You are walking to work in the morningwhen you pass a small child drowning in a pond. You are not in any way responsiblefor the child's predicament. You can save the child, at the cost of a wet suit and the loss of a few minutes. What should you do? (HISTORICAL NOTE: A pond, another extraordinary affluent indulgence, was a body of fresh (drinkable!) water set aside for purely decorative purposes.)

Rocks Six innocent swimmers are stranded on two rocks: five on one rock and one on a second rock. Each swimmer will drown unless rescued. You are the only lifeguard on duty. You can reach one rock in your patrol boat and save everyone on it. Because of the distance between the rocks, and the speed of the tide, you cannot get to both rocks in time. What should you do?

Peter Singer, the utilitarian who introduced the "Pond" tale, argued that you have a clear obligation to save the child. He concluded that there is a general duty to prevent harm when you can do so at comparatively little cost to yourself. In a world where many people are in dire need, the iterative application of this principle is very demanding, as our original "Charity" tale shows. Opponents replied that alternative, less demanding, principles are also consistent with Singer's intuition. As ever, the road from example to principle is a rocky one. In "Rockstt, clearly you should go to the first rock, saving five lives rather than one. Utilitarianism explains why: saving five produces more

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happiness. Non-utilitarian moral theorists focused on your obligations to particular individuals. Yet you have the same obligation to each of the six people. So you have no reason to save the five. It was now non-utilitarians who could not accommodate affluent intuitions. Utilitariansthen applied this result to our earlier tales. If there is a general obligation to save the many rather than the few, then why not treat Bob as another unlucky innocent, just like the lone person on the second rock? Affluent utilitarians also discussed cases where murder (or torture or some other atrocity) is necessary to avoid a moral catastrophe. Even Nozick -the arch anti-utilitarian - was willing to contemplate an exception here. What if killing Bob is the only way to avoid a riot that will kill thousands, or a nuclear apocalypse, or a broken world? If killing is permissible here, then why not when it would prevent a smaller riot? Is there any principled non-utilitarian way to draw the line?

4. Act utilitarianism in a broken world

The application of act utilitarianism to a broken world may seem straightforward. We simply choose whatever action best promotes human wellbeing. A broken world presents no new theoretical difficulties for act utilitarianism. But consequences differ here, so act utilitarianism recommends different actions. Does this make it more or less plausible? Tales such as "Sheriff", "CharityJ1,"Pond" and "Rocks" are more common in a broken world. The best act will more often violate affluent common sense; and the best decision procedure is almost certainly very demanding by affluent lights. Denial is much less plausible in our broken world. But that would not have bothered most affluent act utilitarians. Denial was never particularly plausible, even in the affluent world. Most act utilitarians accepted a demanding and counter-intuitive theory. The transition to a broken world might also support act utilitarianism, in several ways. The injustice and demandingness objections rest on affluent intuitions. But why should we care what affluent people would have thought? Do these intuitions retain their force in our broken world?

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(Some of our broken-worldphilosophers argue that we share affluent intuitions in cases like "Pond" and "Rocks", but not in "Sheriff" or "Charity". They conclude that utilitarianism is more plausible today than in the affluent age. Do you agree?) Because it is not reliant on local intuitions, act utilitarianism can adjust during the transition from an affluent to a broken world. Suppose you are living in an affluent world, and you discover it has a broken future. We saw that Nozick would have had great difficulty responding to this unwelcome discovery. By contrast, act utilitarians could easily have acknowledged a broken future. They could simply have reasoned as follows. "Future people matter as much as present people. The needs of 'our world' include the needs of future people, and 'our resourcesJinclude its future resources. If, on this wider definition, our resources are insufficient to meet all our needs, if we must choose between present and future needs, then our world is already broken. Future people suffering in a broken world are like children drowning in a pond at my feet!' (Indeed, recent scholarship suggests that some affluent act utilitarians did follow this train of thought. Sadly, they were unable to bring their affluent contemporaries with them.) In a broken world, alternatives to act utilitarianism - especially other utilitarian theories - may become equally demanding or counter-intuitive. This would increase the comparative plausibility of act utilitarianism. Many affluent people saw act utilitarianism as a bracing, confronting and compelling guide to individual moral life. Others found its relentless demands unappealing, or its individualist focus naive and unpersuasive. Some abandoned utilitarianism, while others sought more moderate alternatives within the utilitarian tradition. We examine those alternatives in the next lecture.

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Act utilitarians imagined a single utilitarian agent, heroically maximizing human happiness in a non-utilitarian world. Unsurprisingly, her life is demanding, alienating and unattractive. Rule utilitarians pictured morality as a task given not to each individual agent, but to a community of human beings. We imagine ourselves choosing a moral code to govern our community, deciding what code to teach the next generation. Rule utilitarians' guiding questions were "What if everyone did that?" and "How should we live?" We first seek an ideal moral code. Acts are then assessed indirectly:the right act is the act called for by the ideal code. One leading affluent rule utilitarian offered this formulation:

Hooker's rule utilitarianism: "An act is wrong if and only if it is forbidden by the code of rules whose internalisation by the overwhelming majority of everyone everywhere in each new generation has maximum expected value in terms of well-being" (Hooker, /deal Code, Real World, 32).

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Rule utilitarianism covered all aspects of human life, from individual actions to large-scale institutions. Some affluent utilitarians were more modest. Following the priorities of Bentham, these institutional utilitarians sought to design public institutions (political, legislative or social) that maximized human happiness. The strength of utilitarianism, the problem to which it is a truly compelling solution, is as a guide to public rather than private conduct. There, virtually all its vices - all the things that make us wince in recommendingit as a code of personal morality - loom instead as considerable virtues. (Goodin, Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy, 8 )

1. Distinguishing act and rule utilitarianism

We begin with three simple objections. Collapse. Act utilitarians objected that the ideal code would contain

one single rule: "Always maximize happiness". Rule utilitarianism is not a distinct theory; it collapses into act utilitarianism. Partial compliance. Imagine a world of perfect compliance with an ideal code that includes familiar prohibitions on stealing, murder, breaking promises, lying, torture and so on. Everyone is perfectly honest and peaceful, and all public offcials are perfectlyjust. People never lock their doors, never check their change, always lend money to anyone who asks and so on. This behaviour is all very admirable. But anyone copying it in the real world will soon look pretty stupid. Impracticality. Rule utilitarianism was astonishingly ambitious. Suppose you begin with a simple practical question. You want to know how much money to give to charity, or whether to hang an innocent man. An affluent rule utilitarian would first ask you to imagine an endless string of different societies, each governed by a subtly different set of moral rules. (You need to do all this to find the best possible moral code.) You must then ask how someone who followed that code would act in your situation. Won't you simply be

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paralysed by uncertainty? How can rule utilitarianism give anyone practical advice?

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Rule utilitarians responded to these disparate objections by appealing to human fallibility. They conceded that act utilitarianism might be the ideal code for perfect calculating machines. But they sought instead a moral code for human beings, who are not perfect utilitarian calculators, and should not try to be. Imagine what life would really be like in a world of act utilitarians. Everyone feels free to murder, torture, lie or betray their friends whenever this would maximize well-being. And everyone knows this. So no one enjoys any safety or security. A lone sheriff hanging the occasional innocent person might create an isolated scandal. But if all sheriffs behaved like that, authority would break down completely. Rule utilitarians argued that this imaginary world of act utilitarians was worse than the actual (affluent) world. Act utilitarianism could not be the code that maximized happiness, because affluent people already had a better one: namely, their actual moral code. Now consider the second objection to rule utilitarianism. If it is chosen by imagining a world of perfect compliance, won't the ideal code be hopelessly idealistic?Again, human fallibility providedthe answer. Perfect compliance is not possible for human beings. We cannot really imagine a world where everyone always does the right thing. Instead, we should imagine that we teach a code of rules to the next generation. Not everyone will fully internalizeour code, and some will disobey it completely. So the code that maximizes well-being must include rules to deal with wrongdoing and other failures of compliance. Once again, affluent people already had one such code. Their existing moral practice coped with non-compliancebetter than a "perfect" code. The next generation would be happier if they were taught that existing code, and not some unrealistic ideal. Fallibility also gave rule utilitarianism a modesty that act utilitarianism lacked. This modesty helped address the impracticality objection. Rule utilitarianism need not be wholesale and radical. It can be piecemeal and conservative. We cannot determine every detail of the ideal code or the perfect utilitarian institutions. But that does not mean we know nothing. You might be confident that codes with robust prohibitions on torture do better than those without; or that basic freedoms improve well-being; or

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that democratic institutions promote welfare better than despotic ones. (As we shall see, affluent utilitarians made all these claims. Whether they are still plausible in our broken world is another story.) Modesty supports conservatism. Rules that have enabled our society to survive and flourish probably promote human well-being. We should adopt new rules only if we are reasonably sure they will do better. Return to our key question: what should we teach the next generation?The next generation will almost certainly be happier with a code based on our tried-and-testedexisting one than with any brand-new code designed by philosophers. Some opponents worried that rule utilitarianism was too conservative. Would it ever sanction departures from the existing moral code? In fact, utilitarians suggested many reforms. The trick was to find some reason why a rule or institution persisted despite its negative impact on well-being. Affluent rule utilitarianism faced a dilemma. On the one hand, to be true to its radical inheritance, it had to criticize existing institutions and practices. On the other hand, such criticism was in obvious tension with the claim that rule utilitarianism accorded with affluent intuitions. One solution was to hope that the same evidence that led rule utilitarians to recommend reform would also prompt people to revise their moral judgements. Everyone would then end up with moral judgements that were compatible with rule utilitarianism. Two features of affluent common sense that rule utilitarians especially wanted to preserve were its moderation and its liberalism. Affluent critics questioned whether rule utilitarianism really cohered with affluent intuition. Two obvious questions for us are: could rule utilitarianism hope to be moderate or liberal in our broken world; and could any broken-world rule utilitarianism match our considered moral judgements?

2. Ideal institutions

We can explore rule utilitarianism further using the injustice and demandingness objections. What is missing in the world of universal act

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utilitarianism?People lack personal security, stable rights and moral freedom. At the very least, rule utilitarians wanted their ideal code to prohibit arbitrary execution of the innocent, and to allow agents to avoid a life of unrelenting self-abnegation. But, as utilitarians, they could not just stipulate these results. They needed a justification based on the impartial maximization of human well-being. The trick was to build partiality on an impartial foundation. They began, as conservative modesty suggested, by asking what actually worked. How did affluent society avoid both constant injustice and extreme demands? Consider the most basic need: personal security. Institutional utilitarians noted that affluent society guaranteed personal security by institutional means. If my survival depends on the arbitrary decisions of powerful individuals, then I will never feel secure. Some human failings are so pervasivethey can be cured only by external (institutional) constraint. We think we know what is best for other people, and we are easily corrupted by power. So we must all be made to respect the autonomy of others, and our public officials must follow published rules. We naturally favour our own interests, and those of our nearest and dearest. So public officials must be made to act impartially. Institutional utilitarians had very strong replies to the injustice and demandingness objections. We want our political institutions to be public and accountable. The best judicial institutions will prevent sheriffs from hanging the innocent. Partiality to oneself and one's friends may be a virtue in private life, but it is a sign of corruption in public officials. Utilitarian impartiality may be a disadvantage in a theory of individual morality, but it is an asset when designing public institutions. Public institutions could also provide other goods that are not available in a world of act utilitarians. Recall Nozick's argument that his institution of property made future people better off. To make long-term plans, people need security of property. This creates a strong presumption in favour of the existing property system, even if an alternative system would be more efficient when considered in the abstract. Utilitarians often agreed with libertarians. Indeed, by the end of the affluent age, Bentham was known mainly as a supporter of the free market. People are the best judges of their own interests. Things go best overall if people are free to decide for themselves what to produce, what

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contracts to enter into and what to buy. More generally, public institutions should not interfere with the free choices of individuals. But utilitarians only valued freedom .when it contributed to human well-being. Utilitarian support for rights and freedoms was always contingent. Utilitarianshad an uneasy relationship with non-utilitarian claims about rights. Actual affluent property rights often supported an unequal and inefficient status quo. While obviously important, our basic liberties are not more important than our basic needs. Rights are not much use if you cannot stay alive. Utilitarianswere rightly suspicious that the rights of the rich would trump the needs of the poor. While Bentham himself was suspicious of rights-talk, some later utilitarians extended the language of rights, speaking of a right to have your basic needs met. Bentham imagined a much broader positive role for the state than almost all his contemporaries. The government must ensure that no one goes destitute, and that everyone has access to adequate education and health care. Bentham's critique had three key themes: a broader notion of security, including food and shelter as well as personal safety and property; an account of human motivation that explains why, given the chance, elites will design institutions that serve their own interests at the expense of overall well-being; and proposals to bring the incentives of lawmakers and institution-buildersin line with the common good. Subsequent utilitarian reformers borrowed these three themes. In his day, Bentham was very radical. The ideal "Benthamite state" was much more similar to the later affluent welfare state than to either the smaller state of Bentham's own time or the minimalist state of Nozick's affluent libertarian fantasy. Its modest conservatism did not destroy utilitarianism's capacity for radical critique. However, by the end of the affluent age, most affluent societies had already enacted many of Bentham's suggested reforms. As a result, unlike their radical utilitarian predecessors, later affluent utilitariansoften did favour the status quo of their own time.

3. Rule utilitarian individual morality

Most rule utilitarians applied their theory to individual morality, as well as to political institutions. But that brings us back to the collapse objection.

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Suppose we have ideal institutions that protect and respect life, property and freedom. Once those institutions are in place, won't things go best if everyone then follows act utilitarianism, maximizing human well-being within the framework of rights and freedoms established by law? Won't the ideal moral rules still be very demanding? Won't utilitarian sheriffs still commit some unjust acts, if they know they can get away with it? Even if you won't hang Bob in your role as sheriff, as a private citizen you are still obliged to give all your money to charity. No one else will make you do this, but it is still your duty. Doesn't utilitarianism still give you no moral freedom at all? Rule utilitarians replied that moral demands are limited, in practice, by the human capacity to internalize moral rules. Attempts to teach perfectly impartial moral rules - or anything approaching them -would be counterproductive. People could not live by such rules, and their failure to do so would bring the whole ideal code into disrepute. Extremely demanding rules are also not necessary to avoid great suffering. In the affluent world, small donations from each wealthy person would have alleviated all hunger and poverty. Things would then have gone best if people had devoted their resources to their own projects. Once all basic needs are met, the most effective way to promote human well-being is to leave people free to pursue their own personal goals. Some might choose to sacrifice everything for others, but no one will feel obliged to do so. A world of liberal institutions where people also follow modest principles of beneficence is thus happier than a world with the same institutions whose inhabitants are driven by the relentless urge to maximize happiness. Rule utilitarians used this double appeal to liberal institutions and moderate morality to defend many familiar affluent freedoms. Given our nature and situation, things go best if people are free to follow their own values and inclinations. In subsequent lectures, we shall discuss three prominent examples: freedom of lifestyle and expression (Lecture 9); reproductive freedom (Lectures 9 and 10); and democratic participation (Lectures 16 and 17). Any utilitarian "rights" are thus doubly contingent. They rest on both general claims about human nature and specific claims about our current situation. Some affluent philosophers - especially those influenced by

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religion - simply rejected any contingency in moral philosophy. Nozick needed no further information to know that it would be wrong to hang Bob and that you are not obliged to give up everything to help others. Some things are just wrong. Utilitarianism cannot deliver moral absolutes. Affluent utilitarians replied that a morality for human beings must depend on our nature and situation. On what else could it depend?On pure reason?On disembodied rationality?Utilitarianismis incompatible with the exaggeratedly pure rationalism of Kant or Nozick, but that is its strength, not its weakness. Why should we care what morality would have said about creatures completely unlike ourselves? Other affluent philosophers agreed that morality is tied to human nature, but they rejected utilitarianism's specific claims about human nature. History and anthropology taught them that human nature is incredibly plastic: people can internalize a vast array of very different cultures. Critics of rule utilitarianism argued that even if perfect impartiality is an impossible dream, surely people would not suffer psychological disintegration just because they were taught to be much more otherregardingthan rich affluent people. These critics pointed out that it would have been remarkable if affluent reality precisely tracked the limits of possible human goodness! (This argument has even more force today. Just think of all the forms of human life in our world that affluent people would have dismissed as impossibly demanding.) Even if affluent rule utilitarians were correct about human nature, perhaps they were mistaken about the human situation. In the affluent world, rule-utilitarian arguments for moderation exploited the relative numbers of rich and poor. If the poor suddenly came to vastly outnumber the rich, then the alleviation of poverty would require a very significant sacrifice from each rich person. Suppose a virus wipes out 90 per cent of the wealthy, or a famine plunges millions into poverty. Rule utilitarianism is thus vulnerable to changes in circumstances. Indeed, this vulnerability is an essential feature of any utilitarian theory. In the affluent age, one very significant source of moral demands was partial compliance. We saw earlier that, to avoid excessive idealization, rule utilitarians conceded that even their moderate code could not be perfectly internalized by everyone. It thus tells agents how to respond

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to the non-compliance of others. But what does it say? We select our code by imagining an idealsociety where that code is widely internalized. Although not perfect, the utilitarian ideal society is presumablyvery different from affluent reality or, indeed, any human reality. (Otherwise, what is the point of this imaginative device?) Its inhabitants make sacrifices that, taken together, alleviate all suffering and meet all basic needs. Moral noncompliance is very rare. In affluent reality, by contrast, while compliance with public institutions was very high, compliance with even moderate charity rules was very low. Most people donated virtually nothing. (Are things any different today? Of course, most people comply with their officially enforced obligations. But how common is voluntary moral sacrifice?) This gap between reality and the rule-utilitarian ideal matters because the same rule might be relatively undemandingwhen non-compliance is rare, but extremely demandingwhen it is common. Imagine that you and I are two people in the ideal society. Two children are drowning in a pond, and we are both bystanders. Clearly, we ought to save one child each. But you do not act. I will probably feel obliged to save both children. I might be annoyed, but the alternative is to leave an innocent person to die. And, after all, such situations arise so infrequently in our ideal world that this sensible rule will have little impact on my life as a whole. I can afford to save the odd extra child every now and then. So the ideal code offers simple advice on non-compliance: always pick up the slack. But this rule would have been extremely demanding for actual affluent people. It would have obliged each to give up everything to meet the basic needs of others. Indeed, it might be as demanding as act utilitarianism. Rule utilitarianism was thus potentially very demanding even in an affluent world with a bright future. Could it possibly have remained moderate in the transition to our world? Or did the broken future force affluent rule utilitarians to choose between their radical past and their complacent present?

4. Rule utilitarianism in a broken world

We saw earlier that, while a broken world presents no new theoretical difficulties for act utilitarianism, it does make it even more demanding,

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thus raising the comparative appeal of rule utilitarianism. But a broken world would have been deeply troubling for affluent rule utilitarians, as they accepted the intuitions behind the injustice and demandingness objections, and sought to defend both liberal institutions and a moderate morality that accorded with affluent common sense. This project seems doomed in a broken world. Indeed, even within the affluent world, the threat of a broken future undermined rule-utilitarian moderation. Suppose we are members of the last affluent generation. Being responsible citizens, we have discovered that our future contains a vast number of poor individuals, whose fate rests on the behaviour of the present few. We can avoid (or at least mitigate) a broken world, but only at great cost to ourselves. Given the enormous future happiness at stake, won't the ideal code oblige us to do so? Take a concrete example. Suppose we discover that, if we insist on seventy years of good health for ourselves, and insist on the accompanying investment in medical technology, then our descendants can only hope for a reasonable chance of fifty years of moderate health. Can we still regard a lifespan of seventy years as a right? If so, why is it a right for us and not for future people? Or suppose we discover that, while we can guarantee our basic needs, our descendants will need to run a survival lottery. Can we insist on guaranteed survival for ourselves, or should we move in their direction, operating a survival lottery across the generations? And what would that lottery look like? (Ironically, this was the choice that confronted the last affluent generation. These were the notorious "baby boomers", so named becausethey lived through times of unprecedented prosperity and manifested a concern for others that was reminiscent of young infants. And we all know what they chose!) The broken future thus provided a decisive test for moderate affluent utilitarians. Was their commitment to moderation a prior constraint on utilitarian reasoning, or a contingent empirical claim? Could it be jettisoned in the face of harsh reality? If so, what was the alternative? Rule utilitarians countered the charge of impracticality by appealing to conservative moderation. If they had admitted the need for radical change to avoid catastrophe, how might they have responded? And how might we adapt rule utilitarianism to our own reality, which lies even further from their affluent comfort zone? We return to this pressing question in

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Lecture 11. If we are to adapt any form of utilitarianism to our new world, we must know exactly what we are to supposed to be striving to promote. What is human well-being? Our next lecture explores affluent answers to this perennial philosophical question.

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Affluent act utilitarians said that individuals should choose the act that maximizes human well-being. Rule utilitarians sought rules and institutions to maximize human well-being. Both had to decide what human well-being is, how it is measured and how we compare one person's well-being to another's. Utilitarians were not alone here. Most affluent philosophers gave well-being some moral significance. Consider Nozick's proviso, where we ask whether his institution of property leaves future people better off. We can't answer this question unless we know what is good or bad for people. We first introduce some terminology. Affluent philosophers often used other terms, such as "welfare" and "happiness", but these had distracting connotations. Happiness suggested a preoccupationwith pleasure, while welfare suggested a focus on money or health. Some went to the other extreme and spoke of "whatever makes life worth living". That would prolong our lectures unnecessarily. As a compromise, I suggest the neutral term "well-beingJJ. While particular affluent views about well-being may be alien to us, the basic idea is familiar. We all think about well-being all the time: when we

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ask whether some particular experience will be good or bad; when you look back on your life and list the things that made it go well or badly; when you meet two people and ask who is better off; when a friend seeks your advice on a major life choice, and you wonder what would be better for her; when you ask whether your life will go better if you become a lawyer or a philosopher. Many things can make a life go better (pleasure, money, achievement, health, freedom) or worse (pain, frustration, poverty, disappointment, grief, fear, insecurity). Some are instrumentallyvaluable: means to other ends. (This is how most people feel about money.) Affluent philosophers asked what is intrinsicallygood. What are the ends to which all else is merely the means? Affluent utilitarians offered three broad accounts of well-being: hedonism, the preference theory and objective-list theory. While the three often coincide in practice, affluent philosophers focused on cases where they come apart. The resulting debate contained many bizarre counterexamples and complex arguments. In our brief survey, we concentrate on the essential features of the competing accounts.

1. Hedonism

Hedonists said the only intrinsic goods and bads are pleasures and pains. Nothing can improve my life unless it affects how I feel, or what I experience. Pleasure is obviously relevant to well-being. Hedonism was definitely on to something. But it raised two questions: is pleasure always good; and is pleasure the only good? Some pleasures seem morally wrong. Consider a pre-affluent crowd watching religious dissidents beingeaten alive by lions. (Intriguingly, affluent philosophers usually employed brutal pre-affluent examples here.) Is this pleasure good for the spectators? Does it make their lives go better? Some hedonists said it does. Many bad things happen in this tale. It is bad, all things considered, that the dissidents are tortured. (It is certainly badfor them.) Sadistic pleasure is also instrumentally bad: it encourages people to commit or support torture. And it is bad that the world contains people who get their pleasurefrom torture. But - consideredin isolationsadistic pleasure is good. A world with both torture and sadistic pleasure

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is better than a world with torture and no pleasure. The torture is bad; but at least someone is enjoying it. Many affluent people found this repellent. If you take pleasure in other people's pain, then this makes your life go worse, not better. Sadistic pleasure is not outweighed by other factors; it has no value at all. Suppose your best friend asks whether she should join the crowd. You want her life to go well, and you know she will enjoy it. Would you advise her to go? A popular imaginary test case was virtual torture. Suppose the spectacle is an illusion. There is no actual torture, but only sadistic pleasure. Is this good or bad? Is the spectators' pleasure more respectable if they know the torture is not real? Sometimes pleasure is linked to suffering less directly. Consider the affluent entertainment of "motor racing", where carbon-fuelled vehicles were driven in circles at high speed. (How was thatfun? You might well ask.) We now see this activity as emblematic of a climate-destroying ethos combining self-indulgence and a lack of concern for others. This affluent pleasure was obviously very morally wrong. But did that reduce its intrinsic value? (And what about earlier racing fans who did not know their behaviour was wrong? Was their pleasure valuable?) All these examples suggest that pleasure is not always good. The second principal objection to hedonism was that some good things are not reducible to pleasures. Pleasure is not the only good. Consider three affluent tales.

The pig philosophy objection Polly has two choices: life as a happy pig with intense pleasures, or life as a human philosopher with less intense pleasures.

Ollie and the oyster The good fairy offers Ollie two choices. He can live a flourishing human life for a hundred years or be a happy oyster with very simple pleasures. The oyster life lasts as long as Ollie wants, even up to millions of years.

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Nozick's experience machine Ellie has two options. She can live the rest of her life in the ordinary world, or she can plug into an experience machine. Inside the machine, electrodes attached to her brain provide experiences that are identical to reality, except that life is more pleasant. She will be happier, prettier, healthier, wealthier and more successful, with more friends and less suffering in her life.

Can the same person really be both a pig and a human? Can anyone (even an oyster) really live forever? Won't Ellie worry that the experience machine might malfunction, be sabotaged by "natural life" extremists, or just be disappointingly unrealistic? As ever in affluent philosophy, these practical worries were set aside. What should Polly, Ollie and Ellie choose? Hardcore hedonists said that Polly and Ollie must choose the pig and oyster lives, and that Ellie must plug in. The more intense pleasure is always better; any human life can be trumped by enough oyster years; and the extra pleasure gives Ellie a reason to choose the experience machine, whereas she has no possible reason not to choose it. Opponents of hedonism objected that a flourishing human life is more valuable than any possible pig or oyster life, and that life in the experience machine lacks something essential to a meaningful human life. Some hedonists agreed. For instance, Mill argued that hedonism need not be a philosophy of pigs. Pig (lower) pleasures are less desirable than human (higher) pleasures. Even if pig pleasures are more intense, any competent judge would prefer the human pleasures. Similarly, anyone who understands both will prefer the human life to any oyster life, even an eternal one. Mill's competent judge test raised many questions. What if competent judges disagree? What if some do prefer the pig life? Can we decide who is a competent judge without first decidingwhich pleasures are better? (If not, Mill was arguing in a circle.) What if some judges choose other things - such as knowledge - instead of pleasure? And what about Nozick's experience machine, where the pleasures are identical?

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Affluent philosophers saw Nozick's experience machine as the ideal test case. If you would not plug in, then you are not a hedonist. If it is rational to reject the machine, then it is rational to reject hedonism. If it is irrational to plug in, then hedonism is definitely wrong. But if you are tempted by the machine, then perhaps you are a hedonist. Suppose you agree that Ellie should not plug in. Why not? What is missing? Nozick's answer was that people want to actually do things, not merely to have experiences. Suppose Ellie's life ambition is to climb Mount Everest, to test her mettle against the ice and snow. (This was a standard affluent example. Rememberthat Mount Everest was a very cold place in the affluent age. In our world, Ellie's aim might be to bask in the warm sun, or to see where the mythic ice-rivers once flowed. Although, of course, it is hard to imagine anyone in our world cherishing such a frivolous ambition!) After years of training and sacrifice, she arrives at the base camp, where the operator of an experience machine offers her the experience of climbing Mount Everest - risk-free. Ellie declines. She does not just want to feel as ifshe is climbing Mount Everest, but wants to actually climb it. She wants actual achievement, not delusion. This reaction was common among affluent philosophers. Imagine waking up tomorrow to find that your whole life has been a lie, and the people you thought were your family and friends are actually actors who never liked you. You would be upset, and you might also reevaluate your past life. You thought you were happy in the past, but you weren't. Your friendships were not real. The hedonist could not say this. Your past pleasure was real, and nothing can make it any less valuable. (Or consider an affluent inventor who devoted his life to developing new oil-based technologies, only to discover on his deathbed that his activities had helped to destroy the global climate. Wouldn't he too have reevaluated his past life?)

2. The preferencetheory

Preference theorists said the only valuable thing is to get what you want, prefer or desire. Your life goes well so long as your preferences are satisfied. In affluent classrooms, reactions to Nozick's experience machine

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were deeply divided. Some found it deeply unappealing, while others were very tempted. Some people wanted a strong connection to reality, while others did not. Some wanted genuine achievement; others valued only experience. Pleasure-seekers wanted the machine; reality-lovers did not. The preference theory accommodated both reactions. (What are your reactions? Compared to affluent people, do you think people in our broken world are more attached to reality, or more tempted by escapism?) As we saw with Nozick, affluent thinkers were very anxious to avoid paternalism, where we impose on another person our view of what is good for her. The preference theory is less paternalistic than hedonism. A devout hedonist would force people into the experience machine against their will, because she knows this is for their own good. The preference theory leaves each to choose for herself. Hedonists regarded preference as one indicator of well-being. People tend to prefer what gives them more pleasure. The preference theory made the stronger claim that preference is constitutive of well-being. Giving someone what they want is improving their life. Something is good for you if and only if it satisfies one of your intrinsic preferences. (That is, you want it for itself, not merely as a means to something else.) Preference satisfaction is both suflcient and necessary for well-being: if x satisfies one of your intrinsic preferences, then x is a benefit to you; and nothing benefits you unless you prefer it. The affluent preference theory raised two obvious questions: is preference satisfaction suncient for well-being; and is it necessary?We begin with sufficiency. Is preference satisfaction always good for you? One immediate problem is that preferences can conflict. Suppose Bob wants to drink the liquid in your glass, thinking it is beer. You give Bob the glass, even though you know it contains orange juice, to which Bob is allergic. Bob satisfies his desire, and is horribly ill. Bob's overall level of preference satisfaction would have been higher if he had not drunk the juice. So preference satisfaction is not always good all things considered. But preference theorists still said it is always good considered in isolation. Other things being equal, it is always good to get what you want. On the pure preference theory, the value of a preference depends only on its strength, not its content. People can desire some weird things.

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Affluent philosophers discussed many preferences that seem bad, worthless or irrelevant. Suppose you want to torture people, eat mud or count blades of grass. Suppose all these things happen. Do they make your life go better? Are they as good for you as proving an important mathematical theorem, or curing cancer? And what about desires unrelated to your life? Suppose you hope there is life on other planets. If life exists in some distant inaccessible galaxy, does this make your life go better? One favourite affluent test case was posthumous desire. Suppose Lex and Leia are two scientists. They are equally well regarded in their lifetime. Lex spends his entire life arguing that life on Earth came from the planet Krypton. Lex's theory attracts attention in his lifetime. But soon after his death scientists discover there is no planet Krypton. Lex is forgotten. Leia devotes her entire life to the theory that life on Earth evolved from gum-wrappers discarded by untidy space tourists from the planet Alderon. Leia's theory provides the foundation for a complete revolution in science. Generations of scientists pore over Leia's work and hail her as a genius. Both Lex and Leia desired to produce an influential and enduring scientific theory. Leia's preference is satisfied, while Lex's is not. Do these posthumous events make Leia's life go better than Lex's? Some affluent philosophersfound posthumousharms and benefits ridiculous. Once you're dead, you're dead. Nothingcan make your life go better or worse. Unfortunately, it was surprisingly difficult for preference theorists to deny the significance of posthumous events. Suppose Mary and her partner, both fatally injured in an accident, are taken to separate hospitals. Mary's dying wish is that her partner survive. Her partner dies, but Mary never knows. If her partner diesfirst, then Mary's life goes much worse. If we reject posthumous harms, then the same event a few moments later cannot affect Mary, because it happens after her own death. But how can such a trivial delay make such a big difference?To know how well Mary's life went, do you really need to find out who died first? Another question is whether what matters is preference satisfaction or preferencefrustration. Suppose I own a chocolate store, in a town where no one cares about chocolate. Business is not good. So I use advertisements to make everyone mad for chocolate. Some people buy chocolate and are satisfied; but others miss out. Perhaps they cannot afford any, or perhaps I cannot meet the demand. These people are frustrated. I have

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increased both satisfaction and frustration. Have I made things better or worse? This question was very significant. Most affluent economic "activity" followed this pattern. As affluent people already had everything anyone could possibly need, retailers had to manufacture ever more implausible desires. Did this make people better off? If chocolate seems trivial, consider two weightier examples, "Threat" and "Gift".

Threat I threaten to torture you if you don't give me ten dollars. You now have a very strong desire not to be tortured. This is much stronger than your desire to keep your money. You give me ten dollars and I satisfy your desire not to be tortured. I have increased your total level of desire satisfaction. But have I made your life better?

Gift You have no desire for education, but I force you to go to school. Your horizons are broadenedand you acquire many desires. Some are later satisfied, others are not. Has my gift of education made your life better? I

Intuitively, my creation of a new desire makes you worse off in "Threat", but benefits you in "Gift". But this suggests there must be more to wellbeing than preference satisfaction. Affluent preference theorists made many attempts to accommodate such intuitions, but every solution was open to new objections and counter-examples. One common solution was to focus on informed preferences: not what you actually want, but what you would want if you knew all the relevant facts. But this move created its own puzzles. Which facts are relevant? Should we include facts about value?Should we ask what Bob would want if he knew what was worth wanting? As we shall see in the next section, objective-list theorists argued that we have now simply abandoned the preference theory. Also, once we move beyond actual preferences, we

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lose the possibility of measuring well-being by looking at what people actually choose. (We return to that issue in 95.) These debates also had potentially radical implications for population policy. One way to create new desires is to create a new person. Every human life is a mix of satisfaction and frustration. Does the addition of new people make the world better or worse? (We return to this question in Lecture 10.)

3. The objective-list theory

Many affluent philosophers defended either hedonism or the preference theory. But others concluded that pleasure and preference are not the whole of well-being. Some pleasures and preferences are good, some bad, others neutral. A child's life goes better if we send him to school, no matter how strongly he prefers to play in the sand. Educationteaches people what to desire. The preference theory has its explanation backwards. It is important to satisfy people's desires because (and only if) what they value is independently worthwhile. Things are not valuable because they are desired; they are desired because they are valuable. Objective-list theorists compiled lists of independently valuable things. Here are some common items from their lists: basic needs (Bentham's "security"); achievement or accomplishment; understanding or knowledge; agency, autonomy or freedom; friendship, deep personal relations or mutual love; religion; fame or respect; creativity; health; play; awareness of beauty; living morally; pleasure and the absence of pain; preference satisfaction and the absence of frustration. List theorists often co-opted hedonism and the preference theory, both by including pleasure and preference on their lists, and by saying that these affect the value of other items. Perhaps knowledge is good only if you enjoy and desire it; or enjoyment and desire might at least enhance knowledge's value. Perhaps a valuable accomplishment must be both independently valuable and a source of pleasure. Autonomy was often a key component of affluent lists. Perhaps all list items are good only when autonomously chosen. (One influential precursor was Mill's appeal to "individualityJJ,discussed in Lecture 9.)

All lists were controversial. Affluent philosophers disagreed about what is intrinsically valuable. If someone proposes a new list item (x), we should imagine two otherwise identical lives: one with x and one without. If the former is a better life, then x (say, pleasure) goes on our list. If it is worse, then we add absence ofx (say, pain). If x makes no difference, we ignore x. Wasn't this all very paternalistic? Not necessarily. Many list theorists agreed that each person is best placed to know what is good for her, especially if pleasure, preference and autonomy are on the list. On the other hand, the aim was to construct a single list for all human beings. Affluent critics objected that the lists of middle-class, well-educated philosophers merely reflected their prejudices. Autonomy was often rejected as a value peculiar to wealthy societies. List theorists replied that even if actual lists were biased, this was not an objection to the list approach per se. Different cultures might interpret some items differently. But everyone values some accomplishments and freedoms. What would you put on your list?Are the lists provided by affluent philosophers still useful in our broken world? One striking feature of affluent lists was their individualism. We might give a much greater prominence to involvement in projects that connect us to other people and extend beyond our own death. You may feel that each individual's well-being is intimately bound up in the fate of her community and of humanity as a whole. (Some affluent philosophers mentioned these possibilities, but few gave them much emphasis.)

4. Beyond humanity

The objective-list theory introduced values beyond pleasure and preference. What about values beyondhumanity? If the appreciation of beauty is intrinsically valuable, then perhaps beauty is valuable even if there is no one to appreciate it. Suppose you are the last human and all other animals are extinct. You detonate a huge bomb on your deathbed, leaving the world ugly. Do you do anything wrong? (Astonishingly, this was apparently not regarded as a rhetorical question. What does that say about affluent civilization?)

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Another controversial topic was non-human animals. Affluent people had strange - and often contradictory - attitudes to animals. They ate them, reared them in appalling conditions, kept them in captivity and hunted them for sport. But many also claimed to be "animal lovers", often caring more for animals than for their fellow humans. What did affluent philosophy say about animal well-being? Hedonists said that human lives matter because they contain pleasure and pain. Many non-human animals can enjoy pleasure and suffer pain. If utilitarians should maximize happiness, then animals should count just as much as humans. We must count pigs and oysters. The practical consequences of this moral equivalence between humans and non-humans were both obvious and radical. Many affluent practices caused animal suffering that vastly outweighed any resulting human pleasure. Humans need to eat and to enjoy themselves. But we can easily eat plants and play harmless games rather than killing animals for food or sport. It was no coincidence that several influential defenders of animal rights were utilitarian philosophers. Most utilitarians agreed that the welfare of animals must count for something. But not everyone treated animals and humans equally. Some hedonists argued that only humans can experience the higher pleasures. If a philosopher's life is better than a pig's life, and only humans can enjoy the philosopher's life, then utilitarians should pay more attention to humans. Preference theorists made similar moves. Although non-human animals have desires, perhaps human desires count for more because they are more sophisticated and complex. Objective-list theorists went even further. Many list items are completely unavailable to non-human animals. Pigs cannot autonomously pursue a life devoted to pushing back the boundaries of mathematical knowledge. (But then, of course, nor can most humans!)

5. Measuring well-being

The affluent utilitarian study of well-being was not an abstract theoretical exercise. Utilitarians need to decide which acts, moral codes or institutions best promote human well-being. This task requires measurement,

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comparison and aggregation. How do we know if we have made things better or worse for someone?Once we know how different options affect different people, how do we decide which alternative is best overall? We return to aggregation in Lecture 10. We now briefly explore the challenge of measurement. Different affluent accounts of well-being faced different difficulties. Hedonists based well-being on physiological states that are, in principle, subject to precise scientific measurement. Bentham even invented an imaginary unit of pleasure: the hedon. In practice, however, affluent hedonists could only guess. Pleasure is very difficult to measure. How can we compare your pleasure eating ice cream with my pleasure going to see a film? (This particular comparison is even harder today, as we have no idea what films were like. This raises an important theoretical issue. As we shall see in Lecture 10, affluent utilitarians were committed to valuing all pleasures equally, whenever they occur. But how can anyone evaluate lost past pleasures or as-yet-unimagined future ones?) Preference theorists argued that preferences are easily measured because they are revealed in action. If I offer you a choice between ice cream and poetry, I can observe your preference. You will choose what you prefer. Affluent economists then argued that if I offer two people a chance to purchase ice cream, the one who offers more money reveals a stronger preference. Some even treated money as a common currency of well-being. Affluent economists concluded that free markets necessarily maximize well-being, and that the best institutions maximize people's freedom to choose. (This implied that the preferences of the rich should count for more than those of the poor. Some affluent utilitarians found this disturbing, but others did not.) This all sounds very impressive. But it makes sense only if we count all actual preferences equally, without regard to their content or moral acceptability, and ignore all non-actual preferences. Few affluent moral philosophers endorsed such an undiscriminating approach to well-being. The objective-list theory seemed to face insuperable measurement difficulties. How could anyone evaluate and compare the disparate items on a typical affluent list? In practice, objective-list theorists relied on proxies for well-being. If an action or policy increases average levels of health, income, literacy, civil rights and political freedoms, then it makes people

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better off. Affluent utilitarians argued that these things are (comparatively) easy to measure. Rule utilitarians were especially keen to find measurable proxies for well-being. The task of measuring the impact of a whole moral code is already daunting enough! (One example of the rule utilitarian use of proxies for well-being was the instrumentalargument for democracy discussed in Lecture 16. Another was Mill's defence of liberty, the topic of the next lecture.) Some focused on finding rules or institutionsthat would guarantee everyone a worthwhile life, rather than searching vainly for ways to maximize well-being. But what is a worthwhile life? Hedonists answered with a number: a point on the scale of pleasure when life becomes worthwhile. Preference theorists offered another number: an acceptable net balance of satisfactionover frustration. Objective-list theorists often answered with another list, this time setting out the essential components of any flourishing human life. The idea of basing ethics on the notion of a worthwhile (or meaningful, or decent, or truly human) life is appealing. But affluent philosophers had great difficulty defining that notion. Where would they draw the line? This question becomes even more pressing once future people enter the equation, as we shall see in Lecture 10. First, however, we turn to one very influential utilitarian defence of affluent freedoms.

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This lecture explores one of the classic texts of affluent political philosophy: John Stuart Mill's short essay On Liberty. Mill lived a hundred years earlier than Nozick and his affluent utilitarian opponents. He was briefly a member of a local semi-democratic representative body, and gained notoriety for arguing that women should have the vote. Mill's father was a friend of Bentham, and Mill was raised on utilitarianism. Like Bentham, Mill was an empiricist. All knowledge is based on induction from experience. We know the sun will rise tomorrow only because we have seen it rise many times before. Mill's empirical enquiries into psychology and history led to some very significant departures from Bentham. Some later affluent commentators even argued that Mill's liberalism was incompatible with his utilitarianism.

1. Mill's liberty principle Mill's essay Utilitarianism was the most popular statement of the utility principle. On Liberty was even more famous. Mill called it "a kind of philosophic textbook of [a] single truth".

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Mill's liberty principle: "The only purpose for which power can rightfully be exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant" (Mill, On Liberty, ch. 1).

Prior to Mill, "liberty" meant "freedom from despotism". Liberty was identified with collective self-government ("democracy"). Mill's society slowly became more democratic in his lifetime. Mill argued that individual liberty still faced a threat: "the tyranny of the majority". His liberty principle was designed to prevent that tyranny. The liberty principle first creates a private sphere, where each individual has absolute liberty. Then, in the public realm beyond the private sphere, harm to others is the only possible justification for regulation or interference. Mill was often misunderstood by his affluent readers. Here are some things he did not say: individuals have absolute liberty; individuals have liberty only in the private sphere; no one can ever legitimately harm anyone else. For Mill, harm was a necessary condition for legitimate prohibition, not a suficient condition. Without harm, there can be no prohibition, but harm alone does not justify prohibition.

2. The private sphere

We begin with the absolute liberty of the private sphere. This covers anything a person does in private on his or her own, such as: the consumption of literature, drugs or alcohol; solitary sexual activities; solitary religious activities; reading; and the private contemplation of thoughts and ideas. This liberty is enjoyed by all rational adult human beings. Children, animals and insane people do not have absolute liberty. The liberty principle rules out paternalism: treating adults like children. But paternalism is appropriate for children. Their future good trumps their present freedom. You do not respect a toddler's liberty by allowing her to play with fire. The liberty principle rules out both legal restrictions and social sanctions. No coercion is permitted within the private sphere. But persuasion

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is legitimate. Anyone is allowed to try to change your behaviour by convincing you it is wrong, silly, pointless or vulgar. The private sphere is not a morality-free zone. Mill believed that each individual is obliged to improve herself. But in self-regarding matters, each must be left to make her own mistakes.

3. Why accept the liberty principle?

Mill's principle would greatly restrict a community's power to interfere in people's lives. Many affluent philosophers defended similar restrictions. Nozick appealed to natural rights; some preference theorists argued that individuals are infallible judges of their own interests; and (as we shall see in Part Ill) social-contract theorists suggested that rational contractors would agree to a liberty principle. Mill took none of these routes. He rejected natural rights, denied that anyone is infallible about anything - especially something as complex as human well-being-and regarded social-contracttheory as unhelpful mythmaking. On the other hand, many of Mill's contemporaries were suspicious of utilitarianism. So Mill defended his principle not on explicitly utilitarian grounds, but as an extension of pre-affluentcommon-sense morality. Mill began with one particular freedom that all his contemporaries supported and then argued that the liberty principle merely extended the same idea. He began with religious freedom. Mill's society had an "established church": a strange arrangement where government offices, professions and universities were open only to adherents of one minor branch of one particular religion. However, almost everyone agreed that people should be free to choose their own religion, and many respectable citizens were "non-conformists" (people who attended a very slightly different church). Earlier rulers had tried to force people to join the established church, leading to centuries of religious persecution and warfare. No one wanted to return to that! Mill argued that once we accept religious freedom, we are logically committed to a much broader liberty of lifestyle choice. After all, why single out religious life choices? Mill's argument persuaded many of his contemporaries. In a broken world, however, all affluent liberties are controversial. (We do not think

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anyone should be free to join a climate-change-denying cult, and we wish people had not enjoyed that freedom in the affluent age!) So we need a more robust defence of Mill's principle. If pressed, Mill would have turned to rule utilitarianism and argued that the liberty principle promotes human well-being. Mill's account of well-being was idiosyncratic. Mill said he was a hedonist. Only pleasure and pain have intrinsic significance. But Mill's hedonism was very sophisticated. (Some later commentators said it was too sophisticated to count as hedonism at all.) Mill placed great weight on individuality: living your own life according to values you identify with, as opposed to either having your life dictated to you or choosing unthinkingly. ("lndividuality" was Mill's term. Many later affluent philosophers preferred "autonomy" or "authenticity".) Mill combined individuality with hedonism. lndividuality makes experiences more pleasant, and the higher pleasures (the pinnacles of human flourishing) are available only to autonomous adults. Do you agree with Mill? Imagine you are approached by two committees: the finance committee offers to manage your money, and the life committee offers to run your whole life. Both committees are very experienced. (How many human lives have you run?) Many affluent people would have accepted the first offer and declined the second. But why? Isn't life more important than money? Didn't they want the best possible life? Mill's explanation was that a worthwhile life is something you must livefor yourself. lndividuality is essential to a flourishing human life. Mill argued that liberty benefits everyone. Because people are different, they exercise their individuality in diverse ways. lndividuality produces diversity. But it also requires diversity. We express our individuality by choosing a style of living. We can choose only in a society with a variety of available lifestyles. Other people's "experiments in living" provide the necessary background for my individuality. If we all conform, then no one enjoys meaningful choice. Conformists benefit from the individuality of non-conformists. The connection between individual well-being and social diversity was a central theme for Mill. lndividuality obviously strengthened Mill's utilitarian argument for liberty. But it was not essential. Many hedonists favoured liberty on purely instrumental grounds. If people are generally best placed to judge their

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own pleasures, then the liberty principle promotes happiness better than any coercive alternative.

4. The limits of the private sphere

Mill's private sphere was actually much narrower than it sounds, because Mill had a very broad notion of harm. I harm you whenever I leave you worse off than you would otherwise have been. For Mill, the following cases all fall outside the private sphere. Private acts between consenting adults can involve harm, because people are not infallible judges of their own welfare. If my otherwise self-regarding behaviour offends you, then this is a genuine harm. A man's treatment of his wife and children can harm them. Women, of course, are rational adults. Children do not enjoy liberty, but they are among those who should not be harmed. (This was all radical in Mill's day, when a man's private sphere included his treatment of his wife, children and servants.) While sexual behaviour is private, reproductive behaviour is not. Creating a new human being is not a private act. The decision whether to have children can harm both the resulting children and society at large. My child may become a criminal, or a destitute person who burdens others. (Again, this was radical, as reproduction was regarded as a paradigmatically private decision.) Suppose jobs in the civil service are allocated by competitive examination. You and I both enter the exam. I win. If I had not entered, you would have won. You are worse off. I have harmed you. (This was Mill's own example, drawn from the practice of his day.) My absolute liberty covers only the consumption of drugs or books, not their manufacture, distribution or sale. Commercial activities may harm consumers, competitors or those who need scarce resources for other purposes. While my thoughts cannot harm others, my expression of those thoughts can. Speech is not private.

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Ihave an absolute liberty to drink alcohol in private. But if my drinking makes me unable to fulfil my positive duties to others, then it is harmful. A law-enforcement official has no liberty to be drunk on duty, nor a parent to be drunk while responsible for a child. If my drinking makes me violent to others, then it is harmful. As a utilitarian, Mill recognized no fundamental distinction between doing and allowing. My duty to help others is as strong as my duty not to kill others. Because harm is comparative, a failure to assist is a harm. I have absolute liberty to read what I like. But if I keep reading while a child drowns at my feet, then I harm her.

Mill argued that, despite its limitations, the liberty principle is still very important. First, even if the private sphere is a comparatively small part of your life, the absolute liberty you enjoy there is vital to your individuality. Second, in the public sphere, the liberty principle rules out many popular affluent reasons for interference. A passer-by can interrupt my readingto make me save a child, but not to make me read a more improving book. Society can regulate commercial activitiesfor reasons of health and safety, to prevent monopolies, to ensure that resources are used efficiently, or to raise necessary government revenue. But it cannot intervene to discourage self-harm. (Mill argued that taxes on specific products are permitted only if sufficient revenue cannot be raised via general incometax.) Finally, even though harm can justify interference, it does not always do so. Mill definitely did not argue that we are free only in the private sphere. Beyond the private sphere, Mill's arguments became more clearly utilitarian. He often rejected interference altogether. For all practical purposes, mutual adult consent is sufficient evidence that no one is actually harmed. (Although people are not infallible, each is almost always the best judge of when she is harmed.) Although offence is a genuine harm, it never outweighs the value of individuality. Because individuality needs diversity, even the offended person benefits from liberty. (Mill allowed an exception for public indecency. Forcing people to conduct their sexual activities in private does not greatly restrict their individuality. Here, the harm of offence can outweigh the loss of choice.) Mill also argued that, even when interference is warranted, regulation is usually better than prohibition. Society must balance many different

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harms. Any allocation of public offices harms someone. Suppose we abolish exams and sell public offices instead. You now get the job because you are richer than me. Now Iam worse off than I would have been. Other people will also be worse off, because you are presumably less skilled than I am. If we want the most able people to get the jobs, then competitive exams probably minimize harm. More generally, Mill largely followed Bentham's utilitarian advocacy of the free market. Regulated freedom is the best approach beyond the private sphere. Sometimes, however, Mill did defend constraints on liberty. Husbands should be made to treat their wives as equals, and people should have children only if they can provide a good life for them. If I am neglectingmy positive duties as an official or a parent, others can legitimately compel me to do my duty. If a drug makes people violent, then prohibition might even be warranted. In all these cases, detailed utilitarian calculation is necessary to determine whether the sanctions involved should be social or legislative. Mill said little about the potential clash between general positive duties and individual liberty. He never realized that the demands of rule utilitarian morality might one day overwhelm his private sphere. Like later affluent rule utilitarians, Mill was confident that the best utilitarian moral code makes only moderate demands. As ever, we must ask whether Mill's utilitarian commitment to moderation could have survived into a broken world. (We return to this issue in Lecture 11.)

5. Mill on freedom of expression Mill's discussion of freedom of expression nicely illustrates the contingency of his utilitarian defence of liberty. I can think whatever I want. Thought is private. But its expression often causes harm: I shout "fire" in a crowded theatre and people are trampled; I shout in your ear and you go deaf; I publish racial slurs and people are attacked; I publish bombmaking instructions and people follow them; I delay people by protesting on a busy street; my religious questioning undermines your faith; my false advertising costs you money; my beer advertisement leads you into alcoholism. Expression falls outside the private sphere. Mill's defence of

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freedom of expression was utilitarian. The social benefits outweigh the harms. Mill's starting-point was that we obviously should not silence a true belief. Of course, I think my beliefs are true. If we disagree, I presumably think your views are false. This is reasonable and unavoidable. We could not live without taking some things to be true. I follow my religion because I think it is true. If I thought yours was true, I would follow it instead. However, if I silence your attempts to refute my beliefs, then Ican never discover my errors. To silence a view (rather than merely disagreeing with it), I must assume my own infallibility. But no one is infallible. Just think of all the past beliefs we now reject, including many of the affluent "platitudes" discussed in this course. We must expect that many of our present beliefs will seem equally ridiculous in the future. Even if Iam certain my belief is true, it does not follow that your belief is false. In complex human affairs, different beliefs may capture parts of the truth. Mill gave the example of competing moral ideas in his own society: Christian morality was too submissive, but pagan morality was too individualistic. The moral truth lay in-between. If either was silenced, no one would ever find that truth. We should never silence any view, because it might contain at least part of the truth. (HISTORICAL NOTE: Christianity was the official religion of Mill's society, while paganism had been the religion of some very early pre-affluent philosophers.) Even if we are certain a view is false, we still should not silence it. Dissentingviews keep the orthodox view alive. If dissent is silenced, then people cannot test their belief by considering objections and alternatives. In the long run, belief becomes dead dogma. Mill compared his contemporaries with the founders of their religion, whose faith was strong because they were constantly confronted by the arguments of their opponents. Mill permitted some regulation of speech. Public expression takes place in a finite public space. The community must allocate that scarce public space between competing uses, and ensure that different voices can be heard. (This is another place where, in different circumstances, liberty might be overwhelmed. In a crisis, can the whole public space be commandeered to organize public works to meet vital needs? But then what if the crisis is permanent? How much room for frivolous public discourse is there in our world?)

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Some contemporary critics said Mill was too pessimistic. Truth will always triumph over falsehood, and censorship does no lasting harm. Mill repliedthat even if censorship did not destroy dissenting opinion, it could impede the progress of science for centuries. Others thought Mill was too optimistic. Open debate is much more dangerous than Mill thought. He underrated the human capacity to believe the most dangerous and irrational things. Mill assumed that if people enjoy freedom of expression, they will tend to progress towards true and useful opinions. This was an empirical claim, based on his reading of human history. Does it seem plausible today? Consider the notorious "climate change sceptics". Did their freedom promote human welfare? Or would an affluent culture of censorship have been even worse, allowing the sceptics to silence evidence of climate change? (If you have studied affluent history, you may remember how unpopular the very idea of climate change was at first, and how well connected the climate change sceptics were.)

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Utilitarians were the first affluent philosophers to take future people seriously. In this lecture, we focus on five key affluent questions. Could traditional affluent moral thinking make sense of obligations to future people? Should future people be given equal moral weight in present deliberation? How should utilitarians evaluate possible futures containing different numbers of people? How should those evaluations feed into utilitarian deliberation?And, finally, was the widespread affluent commitment to reproductive freedom consistent with utilitarianism?

1. Parfit's non-identity problem

The affluent philosopher Derek Parfit argued that non-utilitarian moral thinking could not make sense of obligations to future people. He offered two simple tales: "Mary's choice" and "Risky policy". In "Mary's choiceff, Mary's behaviour seems morally wrong. But why? Intuitively, Mary acts wrongly because she harms her child. But the winter child has a life worth living, and would not otherwise have existed at all.

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Mary's choice Mary is deciding whether to have a child in summer or winter. Mary suffers from a rare medical condition. Any child she has in winter will suffer serious ailments, while a summer child will be perfectly healthy. On a whim, Mary opts for a winter birth. Despite his ailments, her child has a life worth living.

Risky policy We must choose between two energy policies. The first is completely safe. The second is cheaper, but riskier. (Perhaps burying nuclear waste where there is no earthquake risk for several centuries, but a significant risk in the distant future.) Suppose we choose the risky policy. Many centuries later, an earthquake releases radiation, killing thousands of people.

(A child born in summer, made from different genetic materials, would be a different person.) How can someone be harmed if they would otherwise not have existed at all? (It would be even odder to say that Mary harms the child she would have had in summer. How can you harm someone who never exists?) Again, in "Risky policy" our choice seems clearly wrong. But suppose the two energy policies would lead to radically different patterns of migration and social interaction. Now take any particular individual killed by the catastrophe. If we had chosen differently, her parents would never have met and she would never have existed. We have not harmed her, any more than Mary has harmed her winter child. But if we harm no one, how can our choice be wrong? Parfit distinguishedtwo kinds of moral choice. In a same people choice, our actions affect what will happen in the future, but not who will exist. When our actions affect who exists, we are making a diflerent peopk choice. (Parfitfurther divided different-people choices into same number -when our choice does not affect how many people exist - and different number- when it does. We discuss different number choices in 93.)

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Human reproductionoften involves different people choices. Slight variations in the timing of conception affect a child's identity. (METAPHYSICAL NOTE: This is numerical identity, not qualitative identity. Identical twins may be qualitatively indistinguishable: they have the same abilities, looks, character and so on. But they are numerically distinct. They are different people. If your parents had conceived a child at a different time, that child might have resembled you, but he or she would not have been you. You would not have existed at all.) Parfit's tales show that different people choices are very common. Parfit called this the non-identity problem. It mattered because many non-utilitarian affluent philosophers endorsed person-affecting moral principles, where an action can only be wrong if some particular person is worse off than she would otherwise have been. In a different people choice, no one is ever worse off, and nothing can be wrong. Recall Okin's monstrous libertarian mother, who creates a child just t o cook him, enslave him or keep him in a cage. On any person-affecting view, she does no wrong. The non-identity problem had many practical applications in affluent society. Medical ethicists asked whether new reproductive technologies harm the resulting children; lawyers asked when one person harms another; economists sought policies that would leave someone better off and no one worse off; and political philosophers wondered whether present people could consistently complain about past injustices (slavery, colonization, war) when they themselves would not have existed without those injustices. Some even wondered whether climate change would harm future people! Parfit introduced the non-identity problem to defend utilitarianism. Utilitarianismtreats same people and different people choices identically. It is impersonal, not person-affecting. What matters is how happy people are, not who they are. Affluent utilitarians solved the non-identity problem by ignoring it. Faced with two possible futures, they preferred the one with happier people, whether or not those people would otherwise have existed. Utilitarianismeasily accommodates the compelling intuition that both Mary's choice and the risky policy are wrong. Affluent non-utilitarians offered many replies to Parfit's non-identity problem. Some simply denied all obligations to future people. Others

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defended such obligations, arguing that future people could be harmed even if they were no worse off, that someone could be wronged without being harmed, or that a future person's rights might be violated even by an action without which she would never have existed. Think about all the decisions in the affluent age without which you would not exist. What is your attitude to your affluent ancestors?Are you glad that their actions led to a broken world where you exist? Are you grateful? Did they harm you? Have your rights been violated? Are you worse off than you would otherwise have been? Do you feel wronged? Or do you think their behaviour is open to criticism on more impersonal grounds?After all, even if they did not harm you, they did leave the world a much worse place. Non-utilitarians also employed the standard affluent comparative argument that even if their theory had problems with non-identity, utilitarianism had far more serious problems of its own. We shall see those problems in 53.

2. Discountingfuture people

One striking example of the affluent bias towards present people was the practice of discountingthe future. As the scientific evidence that humans were causing climate change became overwhelming, climate change "sceptics" shifted from science to economics. They argued that the future benefit of preventing climate change was not worth the present cost. Central to this "cost-benefit analysis" was a social discount rate, where future costs or benefits are discounted. Even a modest discount of 5 per cent per annum makes it "uneconomic" to spend even one dollar today to avert a global catastrophe in five hundred years' time. (To be worth a dollar today, the catastrophe has to cost $39,323,267,827 at that future date.) Some affluent economists discounted as a proxy for uncertainty, and to accommodate the remote possibility that there will be no future people. (Humanity might be wiped out by an asteroid strike, for instance.) Many also discounted because they believed that future people would be richer than present people, and a dollar is worth more to a poor person than to

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a rich one. (Of course, this argument would have been reversed if affluent people had acknowledged the broken future of their world!) This pragmatic discounting seems reasonable enough. But other affluent economists went further. They defended a pure time preference. Future happiness counts for less simply because it lies in the future. The justification was that this was how affluent people actually behaved. They did discount future benefits both to themselves and to others. (And we now live with the consequences of their temporal partiality.) Perhaps the pure time preference reflected actual affluent behaviour. But did that make it right? (Affluent and pre-affluent people had all sorts of prejudices. Were they also justified in discountingthe welfare of slaves, or foreigners, or the poor?) Unlike economists, most affluent utilitarian philosophers rejected this shift from the descriptive to the normative. They embraced temporal impartiality. Human beings are equally valuable, no matter when they live. Present happiness is not intrinsically more valuable than future happiness. However, in a world with a broken future, this principled refusal to discount at all threatens to overwhelm all other moral concerns. Given their commitmentto temporal impartiality, how could affluent utilitarians have possibly hoped to remain moderate or liberal in the face of climate change? (Think how demanding temporal impartiality would be for us today.)

3. Evaluating possible futures Parfit's Reasons and Persons launched a huge literature on utilitarianism and future people. Sadly, as ever, very little survives. From what we can piece together, that literature was often very abstract. It compared imaginary possible futures involving different numbers of people. Utilitarians, who seek to maximize happiness, need a theory of aggregation. Faced with a vast array of possible futures, they must decide which is best overall. The simplest and most popular theory of aggregation was total utilitarianism. The best outcome contains the greatest total happiness. This view has obvious intuitive appeal. If happiness is valuable, then more

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happiness is better than less. If you care about happiness, why not produce as much as possible? But total utilitarianism has some puzzling implications.

Parfit's repugnant conclusion Imagine a series of possible human populations. In A, ten billion people enjoy wonderful lives. B contains twice as many people, each slightly more than half as happy as the A people. B has more total happiness than A. Repeat this process until you reach Z, a world where a vast population have lives barely worth living. As each step increases total happiness, overcrowded Z is better than flourishingA. Parfit found this conclusion "repugnant", and argued that any acceptable theory must avoid it. The resulting debate was a classic affluent clash between intuition and theory. Total utilitarians embraced the repugnant conclusion. Some were especially suspicious of appeals to intuitions about very bizarre tales involving vast numbers of people. Can anyone really compare Z and A? Indeed, can anyone even imagine them? (Can you?) Other total utilitarians thought they could imagine Z, and it was not so bad after all. Parfit said the Z lives are "barely worth living". What did that mean? Parfit described lives containing nothing but muzak and NOTE: "Muzak" was a very dull form of pre-recorded potatoes. (HISTORICAL music played in lifts. A "lift" was a device to save lazy affluent people from the degradation of climbing stairs.) But if these are human lives, they must also contain negative elements: boredom, frustration and a lack of accomplishment or friendship. On a numerical scale of well-being, these Z lives will be well below zero. But then Z has negative total happiness, and total utilitarianism no longer implies the repugnant conclusion. (If 2's value is negative, A must be better!) Total utilitarians then argued that, if the Z lives really are above zero, they will be quite good. But then perhaps it is no longer repugnant to suggest that Z is better than A. Why not prefer a world where a vast number of people are really quite happy?

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Parfit replied that, however good Z life becomes, a smaller number of much happier people is still preferable. Even if Z is a not bad world, A is still better. Those who agreed with Parfit rejected total utilitarianism. The simplest alternative is average utilitarianism. The best outcome contains the highest average happiness. Average utilitarianism has a strong intuitive appeal. If you care about human well-being, surely you want each person to be as happy as possible. Total and average utilitarianism coincide in same number choices. Whatever maximizesthe total also maximizes the average. But they often come apart in different number choices. For instance, average utilitarianism easily avoids the repugnant conclusion. A is much better than Z. Average utilitarianism faces an obvious objection. Doesn't it tell you to kill anyone whose happiness is below average, as this would raise average well-being? And then you should kill everyone below the new average. Eventually, only two people will remain, and the happier person should kill the other. To avoid these silly results, affluent utilitarians averaged over all those who will ever live. As killing someone typically makes her life go worse, it lowers average happiness. However, average utilitarianism faces other, less avoidable, objections. Consider two affluent tales: "Hermit" and "Mere addition".

Hermit Everyone in the cosmos is extremely happy. On a distant uninhabited planet, we create a new person. Although his life is very good, it is slightly below the cosmic average.

Mere addition Contrast two possible futures: A and A+. Both contain ten billion people whose lives are extremely good. A+ also contains an extra ten billion people. Their lives, although still very good, are slightly less wonderful.

Affluent opponents of average utilitarianism began by claimingthat it is good to create the hermit, and that A+ is better than A. They then argued

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that average utilitarians had to disagree. In "Hermit", our action lowers average happiness; in "Mere Addition", A has higher average happiness than A+. But, as Parfit himself argued, this is an absurd conclusion. The only difference is that A+ contains extra very happy people. How could that possibly make it worse? Some affluent philosophers rejected both total and average utilitarianism. One popular alternative was the lexical view. Recall our tale of Ollie and the oyster from Lecture 8. Many affluent people felt that Ollie should choose a flourishing human life over an indefinitely long oyster life. (I know many of you had the same reaction.) These people did not necessarily think that oysters have no value. Instead, they regarded human lives as incomparablybetter. No amount of oyster pleasure could possibly outweigh the value of a good human life. In affluent philosophicaljargon, these people believed that flourishing human lives are lexically superior to oyster lives. Similarly, some affluent philosophers posited a lexical gap between flourishing human lives and those barely worth living. In Parfit's repugnant conclusion, A is better than Z because A lives are lexically superior to Z lives. But A+ is better than A because the extra lives in A+ still add value. This lexical view has affinities with the common affluent notion of a worthwhile or meaningful life (see Lecture 8). It also raises the same fundamental question. Where do we draw the line? Do flourishing and destitute humans differ in the same way as humans and oysters? Parfit asked his readers to imagine a continuum of possible lives, going from the best to the worst. Where on that continuum would we locate our lexical gap? Any location seems arbitrary and ad hoc. Why draw the line there? Some affluent critics worried that the lexical view is elitist. Doesn't it tell us to favour those above the lexical threshold over any number of people below it? Some supporters replied that if the lexical level is identified with central human capacities (basic needs, Bentham's security or the ability to pursue valuable goals), then it is anti-elitist, as it tells us to concentrate on raising everyone above the lexical threshold. But what about those who can never reach that threshold?And what about people in a broken future? Are we below the lexical level? If so, does that mean that affluent people were right to discount us after all? In our broken world, where would you set the lexical level?

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4. From evaluation to deliberation

I imagine some of you find these abstract puzzles in affluent value theory irrelevant. How could anyone have strong intuitions about impossible worlds? Many affluent people agreed. They felt the vast literature on the repugnant conclusion addressed the wrong question. Their strongest intuitions were not about the comparative values of possible futures, but about their obligations to future people. They wanted to know about the practical implications of Parfit's clever puzzles. To illustrate the relevance of affluent debates about value, consider the question of reproductive freedom. Act utilitarianism says you should do whatever best promotes human well-being. As an individual, you cannot choose between A and Z. But you might be deciding how many children to have. Act utilitarianism is uncompromising. You must have another child whenever (and only when) this maximizes human well-being. The specific demands of act utilitarianism depend on our theory of aggregation. Different value theories make different demands. If we combine act utilitarianismwith total utilitarianism, then you must have a child if her life would be above zero. If we switch to average utilitarianism, then you can only produce children whose happiness is above average. Other affluent philosophers argued that whatever your value theory, you must never have children, as you will always do more good if you devote your resources to people who already exist. Despite these disagreements, all act utilitarians agreed that circumstances entirely dictate your choice. No one has any reproductive freedom. This result is not surprising. Affluent act utilitarians were expected to be extreme and uncompromising. By contrast, rule utilitarians sought to respect affluent freedoms. As we saw in our discussion of Nozick, reproductive freedom was a key value for affluent people. Rule utilitarians sought to respect it. But how? If the ideal code is designed to produce the optimal human population, won't it need very prescriptive reproductive rules?Any population goal conflicts with reproductive freedom. Left to their own devices, people may have too many children or too few. If we aim at any precise population size, then we need a very prescriptive policy. To achieve a global population of precisely six billion, or ten

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billion, would require considerablecoercion. (Iknow these numbers seem incredibly large, but they correspond to affluent reality.) In reply, some rule utilitarians appealed to the intrinsic value of reproductive freedom. A person's life goes better if she is free to control her intimate decisions. The ideal code will respect that freedom unless there is very good evidence that coercion (either political or moral) is necessary to avoid a population disaster. Affluent utilitarians would then cite the instrumental value of freedom. Whatever our population goal, reproductive freedom is the best way to achieve it. This claim was explicitly comparative. No one denied that non-coercive policies can never guarantee an optimal population, a sustainable population or even human survival. But they argued that coercion would be even worse. (Affluent rule utilitarians could also defend reproductive freedom on conservative grounds. Because affluent common-sense morality itself endorsed reproductive freedom, their default presumption was that the ideal code would do the same. But what is our default presumption?) As we saw in Lecture 7, affluent rule-utilitarian ideal codes were vulnerable to radical changes in circumstances. Affluent population policies were very modest, aiming merely to stabilize the population, or to achieve moderate population growth. Our broken-world goals are often much more ambitious. Many of our societies reduce population significantly in successive generations. Others, drawing on mathematical models of animal populations, alternate between drastic population reduction in periods of crisis and expansion in times of relative plenty. This allows maximum exploitation of resources, and avoids epidemic diseases and other low-population threats. Could affluent utilitarians have reconciled these goals with reproductive freedom? Did rule utilitarianism have the flexibility to adapt? We, of course, would institute a survival lottery. And, ironically, as we noted in our discussion of Nozick in Lecture 2, we know that once a survival lottery is in place, restrictions on reproductive freedom appear less drastic or intrusive. It is much harder to believe that anyone has a right to have as many children as she pleases when there is not even enough to feed all those who are already alive. Perhaps, in our rule-utilitarian ideal code, the duty to meet basic needs would trump any sense of entitlement

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to reproductive freedom, thus bringing rule utilitarianism into line with our considered moral judgements. But that raises a deeper question. Could rule utilitarians ever endorse a survival lottery? We address that question in the next lecture.

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TEACHER: Today,

instead of a regular lecture, three graduate students who are studying affluent utilitarianism will present a short philosophical debate. Each is playing a role, and should not be held accountable for the views they express. (You will recognize the participants, but I shall anonymize them for the transcript.) Let me set the scene. Imagine three inhabitants of our broken world, each a proponent of one utilitarian tradition. ACT favours act utilitarianism, hedonism and total utilitarianism. RULE favours moderate rule utilitarianism. INSTITUTION concentrates on the utilitarian evaluation of institutions. They are familiar with debates from the affluent world, but they focus today on the application of utilitarianismto our broken world. The debate opens with RULE posing a challenge for ACT. RULE: I admire the simplicity and directness of your theory. But isn't it extremely demanding in our broken world? ~ c rYes. : Act utilitarianismis extremely demanding. But that is old news. It was extremely demanding even in the most favourable of human situations. Every agent, on every occasion, must perform the one action that best promotes aggregate human happiness. This demand remains

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constant. No one who accepted act utilitarianism in the affluent world would have any reason to abandon it now. Quite the reverse. Act utilitarianism is more plausible now. INSTITUTION: Really? How could those abstract affluent arguments for act utilitarianism be stronger now? ~ c rThe : positive case is unchanged. But our affluent opponents appealed to intuitions about injustice and demandingness. The transition to a broken world undermined those intuitions. RULE:That is a pretty bold claim. Can you give us an example? ACT: Demandingness is the clearest case. Our intuitions about the demands of morality are very different from those of affluent people. Just think about all the assumptions that affluent readers unthinkingly brought to simple examples such as "Charity" and "Pond". How do I come to have money in my pocket?What makes it my money? What about the carbon footprint (and other needless extravagance)that lies lay behind the very existence of films? INSTITUTION: I agree. I was shocked, in our affluent history class, to discover the sheer wastefulness of these so-called leisure achkities. I would be much happier spending the evening costlessly talking to my friends. Affluent people must have been very superficial. ACT: "Pond" raises many other questions. How did I come to have a suit, a job, money for dry cleaning?Wouldn't I perform my duties just as well with a less clean or less expensive suit? INSTITUTION: Perhaps your clients and co-workers are as shallow as your friends. ACT: Or consider the wider context. How did the child get into the pond? Is this an isolated case, or is the world full of children drowning in ponds? Is their drowning somehow connected to my affluent lifestyle? RULE: OK, we get the message. Affluent people made many silly background assumptions. So what? I hope you are not going to take us through every single assumption behind every affluent intuition. ACT: NO. I have broader reasons for scepticism. Affluent intuitions evolved in a world of affluence, stability and improvement, where emergency situations were comparatively rare. In our broken world, analogues of "Pond" are a daily occurrence. And our dilemmas are much more complex than the simple affluent tale.

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INSTITUTION: I know. When we discussed "Pond" in our seminar group, we

all thought: "If only life were that simple!" Exactly. Our dilemmas are more like this tale. (I call it Super Future Pond.) On my way to work, I could take a small inconvenient detour to donate a small sum to a land reclamation project. I am one of many millions who could do so. If we do not, then natural processes will eventually lead to floods, leaving many children drowning in ponds. The land reclamation project has such widespread social impact that our present collective decision is identity-determining for those possible future children. If we do embark on the project, they will never exist. What should I do? RULE: Cute tale. But that sounds more like an affluent world with a broken future, not a truly broken world. INSTITUTION: Yes. In our world, you would not be strolling around deciding for yourself whether to contribute to a vital reclamation scheme. Someone would make you do it! ACT: That's exactly my point. Affluent people would have found that degree of interference intrusive and demanding. But we don't. Affluent objections to act utilitarianism, based on affluent intuitions, are no longer convincing. INSTITUTION: Actually, 1 think "Super Future Pond" nicely illustrates the defects of act utilitarianism.Surely the situation you imagine calls for a collective institutional response. "What should I do?" is not a sensible question. RULE: Excellent point! But we agreed to discuss institutions at the end. Let's return to ACT'S argument. Is your claim just that the demands of act utilitarianism now seem reasonable? ACT: Demandingnessis just one example. Our intuitions about justice also differ. Consider a variant of the affluent "Sheriff" tale. Supposeyou are a utilitarian sheriff in our broken world. You must enforce the results of a survival lottery against an unwilling loser. Affluent intuition would condemn this, but we would not. Act utilitarianism fits our intuitions. RULE: Not so fast. Your new "Sheriff" tale is a trick, because it is not about something we regard as unjust. For us, the person who loses the lottery is not an innocent victim, and the official who enforces her fate is clearly doing what justice requires. That is not the right analogy. ACT:

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Here is a better one. Suppose you are the official in charge of the public survival lottery, and you can maximize happiness by fiddling the results. Perhaps you know that the person who has won the lottery is unhappy, and things would go better if a different person survived instead. (Of course, you couldn't know anything of the sort. But that's another problem for act utilitarianism!) Affluent people didn't have very well-developed intuitions about survival lotteries. But we do. We know this would be categorically unjust. Don't we? INSTITUTION: Yes, of Course. RULE: Similarly, while we expect morality to be much more demanding than our affluent ancestors did, we still believe there are limits to those demands. Wherever those limits lie, your theory oversteps them. Forget about affluent people. (After all, they never thought about us.) Act utilitarianism demands more of us than we think reasonable, and requires actions we regard as unjust. INSTITUTION: Actually, ACT, you sound very much like an affluent person. They all thought that life in a broken world must be brutal, meaningless and immoral, because they couldn't imagine giving up their extravagant luxuries. So they would not find it either objectionable or surprising that act utilitarianismis extremely demanding here. But that won't fool us. We know that life here can actually be pretty good. You can recommend total self-sacrifice if you want, but don't pretend life in our world has to be so bleak. RULE: DOyou have any other arguments for act utilitarianism? ACT: The best argument for any moral theory is that the others are worse. Take rule utilitarianism. It might have made some sense in the affluent world. But it collapses in our broken world. RULE: That's not true. The standard arguments for rights and freedoms carry over to a broken world, becausethey appeal to universalfeatures of human nature. ~ c rReally? : The affluent rule-utilitarian case for freedom and moderation rested on familiar optimistic assumptions. It presupposed favourable conditions, where basic needs can be met without compromising basic liberties. INSTITUTION: I can never get used to that idea. What would it be like to think you lived in such a world? How could you fail to be permanently

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joyful? Or would all life decisions seem trivial and empty? If everyone can survive, what could serious political debate even be about? ACT: Affluent rule utilitarians made other optimistic assumptions as well. Like Nozick, they trusted the productivity of capitalism, and were generally optimistic about human responses to freedom. If you grant all those assumptions, then universal freedom benefits everyone. But such optimism makes no sense now. Given the ways they exercised it, how can you say that the freedom enjoyed by affluent people has benefited us? INSTITUTION: In fact, affluent rule utilitarians were even more tied to circumstancesthan Nozick. They defended a welfare state, not a minimal state. But the very idea of the affluent welfare state is incoherent in our broken world. We cannot meet all basic needs. So how could we possibly implement universal rights to subsistence, security, health, education or basic income (to name just a few affluent obsessions)? And consider the inevitable conflicts between basic needs and other rights, especially personal liberties. As we all know, in our world any inefficiency in food production leads to starvation, as does any diversion of economic activity from necessities to luxuries. Even if liberty generally promotes economic efficiency, it certainly doesn't always maximize food production. Perhaps affluent people had good utilitarian reasons to treat liberty rights as absolute. But we have to radically rethink the relationship between freedom and survival. And - as I'll soon be arguing with regard to institutions -there's no reason to expect our thoughts to lead us back to affluent rights. ACT: Exactly. Human survival demands sacrifices that affluent people would have found excessive. (Which is what I was trying to say earlier.) RULE: I cannot defend affluent rights. Any survival lottery clearly violates the basic rights claimed by affluent utilitarians; and any plausible broken-world moral code has to contain some survival lottery. (In our circumstances, nothing else would be fair.) But I do want to borrow affluent arguments, to get a new set of rights and freedoms that fit our common-sense intuitions. In the affluent age, rule utilitarianism emerged as a moderate, humane alternative to act-utilitarian extremism. Our central question is not whether the theory fits outdated,

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self-indulgent affluent intuitions, but whether it can help us to design rules and institutions that both promote human well-being and also make space for flourishing human lives. Affluent people were wrong to insist on their carbon-fuelled extravagances and cast-iron guarantees of survival. But a broken-world utilitarian can plausibly defend more modest freedoms and a more circumscribed private space. I don't think we have to abandon the liberal utilitarian tradition. ACT: Why not? After all, as we know from our class on the history of the collapse of the affluent age, that's what most so-called "liberal" nations did. They used the loss of favourable conditions as an excuse to ignore justice and cast aside all their liberal traditions. RULE: But no true utilitarian could have taken that road. Even in a broken world - indeed, especially in a broken world -we can still ask whether one arrangement better promotes human welfare than another. Utilitarian justice still applies. It always applies, because it compares feasible institutions, not unattainable ideals. Instead of abandoning justice, we new utilitarians need to reconceptualize justice, isolating some essential notion that does translate to the broken world. ACT: This is all too abstract for me. Let's take a specific example. What about Mill's liberty principle?Does it survive in a broken world? RULE:Yes. The human need for a private sphere was not an affluent fantasy. Everyone should enjoy absolute liberty in self-regarding matters. You wouldn't like it if I started interfering in your life to stop you harming yourself. INSTITUTION: Actually, that doesn't sound so bad. I might even be grateful. RULE: And what if my interference is based on a philosophical account of well-being that you don't share? Suppose I stop you from reading those trashy novels, because I think they are bad for you. INSTITUTION: Good point. I certainly wouldn't like that! ACT: But the scope of Mill's liberty principle is surely greatly reduced. Suppose, peacefully reading by my pond, I am constantly interrupted by the screams of drowning children. Each time, I must put down my book and save them. Do I still have the liberty to read? In our broken world, don't 1 face this situation all the time? INSTITUTION: Can we please stop talking about ponds. I can't bear to think of all that drinkable water going to waste!

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I agree. Pond-talk is a silly affectation. After all, it's not as if any of us has ever seen a pond. ACT: OK. Here is a more up-to-date tale. Suppose society determines that all resources must be devoted to agricultural staples, leaving nothing to make or transport books, and no time to read them. Or recall Mill's own "on duty" exceptions, where the right to drink in private is constrained by the need to fulfil our obligations to others. Suppose society orders every individual to maximize her own health so that she can best perform her socially necessary labours. Mill's precious private sphere now shrivels to nothing. RULE: But this is simply the old demandingness objection. Mill, like any rule utilitarian, had to rely on some broader argument for moderation. Thingsgo best if there is a limit to the demands of morality. This is what justifies the creation of the private sphere within which the liberty principle operates. The liberty principle must earn its keep within the ideal code. But I think it can, even today. And here Iborrow familiar affluent arguments. Some moral principles are too demanding or alienating to be successfully taught to a population of human beings. We cannot internalize or follow them. The ideal code cannot contain such rules. ACT: But affluent arguments for moderation all appealed to familiar optimistic assumptions: the productivity of capitalism; the unexamined background of property rights; and the "fact" that comparatively wealthy people outnumbered those in dire need. (A fact that conveniently ignored all those in dire need in the future!) Without these assumptions, doesn't rule utilitarianism collapse back into act utilitarianism? RULE: NO. Many rule utilitarian arguments translate to any world - no matter how broken-so long as it contains recognizable human agents. Some logically possible codes of rules will always be too demanding, alienating or intricate to be effectively taught to any human population. Even in a broken world, rule utilitarianism doesn't collapse back into act utilitarianism. Some essential components of a worthwhile human life are inconsistent with act utilitarianism: friendship, Mill's individuality, close personal relations, security. Would you really want to live in a broken world governed by act utilitarians, where no one enjoyed any rest, stability or security? RULE:

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has a point. After all, ACT, your tale doesn't offer a true picture of our society. Our government doesn't make us devote all our resources to agriculture. In comparativeterms, actually, we have quite a moderate survival lottery. ACT But surely, as utilitarians, we must count the interests of all people equally, no matter when they live. We can't only consider a single generation. In our broken world - indeed, in any world with a broken future - present people are a tiny, comparatively affluent minority who could, by making very considerable sacrifices themselves, greatly increase the quality of life of an enormous number of worse-off people (namely, all future people). Surely any utilitarian moral code must demand that sacrifice? RULE: Of course, rule utilitarianism is more demanding than affluent people thought. But there are still limits. Both the costs and benefits of the code ramify through time. One consequence of teaching a code to the next generation is that subsequent generations will inherit the same code, or at least a close descendant of it. Of course, future generations would benefit directly from a very demanding rule, because present people would make very large sacrifices. But future people would then, in their turn, be subjectto the same rules. So they too must make very great sacrifices for those who come after them. At some point, the cost outweighs the benefit: the demands on each generation outweigh their increased chance of survival. No one benefits from a code that completely undermines individuality or personal freedom. INSTITUTION: This all sounds very ad hoc. RULE:Not at all. Everythingflows from the simple rule-utilitarian startingpoint. We imagine teaching a code to the next generation. Full stop. The impact on subsequent generations is just an inevitable consequence of that initial teaching. ACT SO freedom is more important than survival? RULE: Not necessarily. But survival is not the only value. And let's be realistic. We are not discussing the extinction of the human race. We are comparing possible futures where different numbers of people survive in different ways. No one would value freedom without survival. (What would that even mean? You can't be free if you don't survive.) But freedom is one of the things that makes survival valuable. And INSTITUTION: RULE

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someone might rationally accept a lower chance of survival if they knew that survivors enjoyed more freedom. And if everyone would prefer a lottery with more freedom and less survival, then that is very good evidence -for an empiricist utilitarian like me - that such a lottery maximizes human well-being. ACT: This reminds me of those affluent attempts to avoid Parfit's repugnant conclusion by setting a lexical threshold on our scale of human well-being. Are you one of those who prefers pamperedA to populous

z? Yes I am, actually. Another relevant affluent idea is the notion of a worthwhile, meaningful or flourishing life that should be guaranteed to all. ACT: But remember where affluent people set the lexical level. Think about their inflated notions of what was necessary for a worthwhile life. By their lights, everyone alive now (not to mention everyone in the even more broken future that will come after us) would be far below the lexical level. Indeed, that was the problem. Because they couldn't imagine life below their lexical level, affluent people didn't care enough about us. They poured all their energy into increasingly desperate attempts to keep themselves above that level. And we are living with the result. RULE: Stop asking me to defend affluent people! Of course, our broken world calls for a lower lexical level: a more modest notion of a truly meaningful life. Some changes are obvious. Affluent people took for granted a broad range of resource-intensive goals, and a long, healthy lifespan. These are simply not available today. But Ithink we can borrow moral ideasfromother affluent debates. I'm often struck by the fact that we, in our broken world, think of land the way some of them thought about fishing reserves: as a fluid common resource, not a fixed stock to be individuallyowned. And we see water as they saw expensive medical treatment: something to be rationed, rather than given freely to all. ACT: Now I'm confused. As you said earlier, for affluent people these notions - the lexical level, the worthwhile life - represented something to be guaranteed to everyone. But we can't even guarantee survival. RULE: I agree there is a serious disanalogy. We need to rethink things more thoroughly. I'm still working all this out. Perhaps we might think of the RULE:

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lexical level not as a guarantee of a worthwhile life, but as guaranteeing the maximum possible equal chance of such a life. INSTITUTION: I like the sound of that. In a broken world, I think utilitarian political institutions have to shift from securing the good life for all to managing a fair distribution of chances at such a life. Which brings us nicely to my pet topic: the utilitarian survival lottery. (As you all know, I'm writing my thesis on this.) I'm not so interested in individual morality. History teaches us that people ignore utilitarian moral codes. My topic is public institutions. ACT: But our modern survival lotteries are completely different from any affluent institution. And affluent philosophers never seriously discussed survival lotteries. So we have nothing to learn from them. INSTITUTION: We can still learn quite a lot, actually. The basic utilitarian principles for institutions remain the same. Our institutions must be impartial, transparent and accountable. And we must get the incentives right, so that officials find that their public duties coincide with their personal self-interest. Affluent philosophers developed procedures to resolve conflict and disagreement. We can borrow those. The stakes are higher, but the rules might be the same. And, at an abstract level, affluent people did discuss survival lotteries. In a lottery, we allocate scarce resources when not everyone can survive. They did the same when allocating scarce medical resources. Affluent people did not use literal lotteries. (For some reason, they preferred less transparent allocations based on wealth or political influence.) But every human society has ways to decide who lives and who dies. ACT: I don't see why institutional design is a philosophical problem. Surely scientists are the ones to design a lottery that maximizes human well-being. INSTITUTION: Really?So affluent utilitarians should simply have waited for "empirical scientists" to design the "climate change regime" that maximized human well-being? RULE: Actually, I think that's what they did. INSTITUTION: And how did that go? Look, obviously there are empirical issues here. As utilitarians, we don't think philosophers can decide everything. But there are still conceptual issues to discuss. Any realworld survival lottery faces three basic problems. (i)Information:

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what is feasible? How many can survive, and in what conditions? (ii) Evaluation: how do we balance competing values -security, survival, individuality, wealth, freedom, and power? (iii) Compliance: how do we get the lottery losers to comply? ACT: Compliance isn't a philosophical problem. People will support a survival lottery in advance if it maximizes their chances of survival. Afterwards, winners will support it, and losers won't. A lottery is viable if (and only if) winners can outfight losers. In our world, fortunately, they can. In a more broken world, no lottery is possible. RULE: Are people really only motivated by self-interest? What about you? Does act utilitarianism serve your interests? Or are act utilitarians the exceptions? You sound like Bentham. He thought he was exceptional too. INSTITUTION: Bentham was far too simplistic. Real people have motivations beyond both self-interest and utilitarian impartiality. Think of fairness, group solidarity or shame. ACT: HOWdoes that help? INSTITUTION: People are more likely to accept a lottery if it seemsfair, and if they feel a sense of ownership. Having some utilitarian philosopher say it is fair won't work. Participation in the lottery design does. If we want to maximize compliance, we should first conduct a public deliberation to decide how many people can survive, and then hold a lottery to decide who survives. ACT: That's just speculation. INSTITUTION: Actually, it's not. Recent empirical evidence suggests that utilitarian lotteries could work. Of course, that evidence is classified. RULE: Remind us: who is funding your research? INSTITUTION: That's classified too. ACT: But uneducated citizens cannot make controversial scientific decisions. Remember the disastrous impact of democracy on late-affluent climate change policy. Empirical questions must be left to experts. INSTITUTION: But who decides who the experts are? That is a political decision. I hope that citizens will recognize scientific expertise, just as you hope that some imaginary utilitarian dictator will. But there is no guarantee. ACT: But will people take their responsibility seriously? Despite the

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potentially enormous impact on future people (including their own descendants), many affluent citizens were happy to receive all their information about climate change from the oil industry. Are our contemporaries any better? INSTITUTION: In the affluent age, taking responsibility for climate change conflicted with self-interest. In a survival lottery, self-interest reinforces people's epistemic responsibilities. The knowledge that their own survival is at stake focuses people's minds. ACT: But won't people be swayed by optimistic "experts" saying what they want to hear? Just think about universal survival cults. (I know they don't officially exist, but you all know who I mean: those crazy folk who attribute climate change to divine wrath, and claim that once we follow God's chosen path he will miraculously restore the climate so that everyone can survive.) Shouldn't we all be grateful that they have no voice in our public debate? RULE: Or consider affluent climate change scepticism. Surely that was driven by a desire to believe that one's current way of life must be morally defensible? And isn't that a universal human tendency? We must take empirical debate away from ordinary citizens. INSTITUTION: And place it where? Everyone has the same incentive to ignore future people. If we are narrowly rational, we will simply do what is best for ourselves. Nothing outside ethics can make us care for future people, just as nothing outside ethics could have saved us from the indifference of affluent people. But ordinary citizens are no less ethical than scientific experts or utilitarian philosophers. ACT:Suppose we do agree on the facts. What next? INSTITUTION: People propose different survival lotteries. Once the risks and rewards of each lottery are clear, we collectively choose one. Probably by voting. ACT:Voting? Are you mad? INSTITUTION: Stop playing to the crowd, ACT, and get in character. You know that affluent utilitarians were very fond of voting. ACT: I am in character. There was nothing democratic about affluent act utilitarians! We ought to maximize well-being, no matter what the majority says. RULE: Maybe I've read too much Mill, but I've always been worried about

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the tyranny of the majority. Suppose one ethnic group makes up 60 per cent of the population, and only 60 per cent can survive. Won't they choose a lottery where they - and only they - survive? INSTITUTION: My procedure is not perfect. It may not even be good. But what is the alternative? If one ethnic group is a clear majority, and iftheir mutual loyalty swamps their sense of fairness, then they will act together no matter what. In those conditions, I don't see how any institutional design could avoid civil war. ACT: Why not just stipulate that no lottery can take ethnic membership into account? INSTITUTION: But who is to "stipulate" this? RULE: Duh. It's your thesis. You can build in anything. INSTITUTION: But I must balance desirability andfeasibility. The more constrained the discussion, the harder it is to get people to participate. If I require impartiality in advance, then RULE'S ethnic majority would refuse to even begin. Viable constraints can only emerge through public deliberation. We must hope that people see impartiality as a fair protection against majority tyranny. ACT: HOWdo we evaluate lotteries?What theory of well-being should we use? INSTITUTION: Philosophers have no privileged insight into the nature of value. The difficult questions are not whether pleasure is better than pain, or knowledge is preferable to ignorance. Instead, they concern the subtle balance between such different goods as stability, security, achievement, individuality, wealth and survival. People will never agree. But they might find a fair way to choose despite their disagreement. RULE: SO what is the ideal survival lottery? ACT: Yes, tell us! Once we know that, we can bypass all this silly public deliberation and just implement the best lottery. INSTITUTION: YOU have missed my point. Deliberation isn't a means to some predefined end. We cannot predict what people will decide. And imagine if you tried. Our public deliberation is just starting, when some utilitarian philosopher shouts out, "Good news! My calculations demonstrate that we will agree to the following lottery. So we should implement it immediately." That would not maximize anyone's happiness, least of all yours.

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TEACHER:Thanks to

our three panellists for a thought-provoking debate. It introduces a number of themes we'll discuss in coming weeks, especially deliberation, disagreement and democracy. (I must remind you all that our panellistswere only playing roles. Of course, no student in this respectable institution would really advocate such things. Voting indeed!)

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The main affluent alternative to utilitarianism was the social-contract tradition, where justice was modelled as a bargain or agreement betwveen rational individuals. Affluent courses in political philosophy often began with two pre-affluent philosophers who both lived three centuries earlier, at a crucial time in the development of affluent political institutions. To understand affluent contract theory, we begin in the same place.

1. Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes lived through a destructive civil war that caused the deaths of 800,000 people in a population of five million. For Hobbes, civil war was to be avoided at any cost; it not only caused great loss of life, but also made everyone insecure. Hobbes used his experience of civil war to imagine a state of nature. It was a grim place. During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war;

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and such a war, as is of every man, against every man. For WAR consisteth not in actual fighting; but in the known disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. ... [Tlhere is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. (Leviathan, ch. 13)

...

Hobbes's state of nature was not an imaginary thought experiment nor some mythical past. He thought it represented a constant threat in the real world. The state of nature arises whenever we do not all recognize a common political authority. To explain why the state of nature is so bad, Hobbes cited three universal features of human nature: People have incompatible desires. We are more concerned for ourselves than for others; and we want things that are scarce. You might think affluence would resolve this. Quite the reverse. Hobbes argued that when everyone is well-fed, people shift their attention to things that are necessarily scarce, such as power or precedence over others. Subsequent history supported Hobbes: the abundance of affluent society led to more competition and dissatisfaction. People are roughly equal. No one can impose his will on others. Even the weakest person can murder the strongest person while he sleeps. (And everyone has to sleep sometime.) In the state of nature, no one enjoys security. Everyone is a potential threat; each fears pre-emptive strikes from everyone else; and life is a constant cycle of violence and threat. People disagree aboutjustice. We cannot escape the state of nature simply by agreeing to accept a "fair" result. We could never agree what that means. (Consider all the disputes within affluent philosophy. Some favoured a libertarian minimal state, while others

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preferred a utilitarian welfare state.) Even if we did agree on general principles, each person would inevitably interpret them in her own favour. In Hobbes's day, religious disagreement had led to civil war. Everyone agreed that everyone should follow the true religion. But they couldn't agree what the true religionwas! Earlier philosophers had often appealed to reason to resolve disagreements about justice. But Hobbes noted that people disagreed about what reason said: And when men that think themselves wiser than all others, clamour and demand right reason for judge, yet seek no more, but that things should be determined, by no other men's reason but their own, it is as intolerable in the society of men, as it is in play after trump is turned, to use for trump on every occasion, that suite whereof they have most in their hand. (Leviathan, ch. 5) How could the state of nature be avoided? Hobbes argued that we need a sovereign who can enforce laws and resolve conflicts. This sovereign must have absolute undivided power. Chaos results whenever power is divided among people with incompatible desires. So we must unite all power in one person. Only the sovereign can make laws, settle disputes, punish people or raise taxes. Whoever has ultimate power is the sovereign. If we have an assembly that can dismiss our ruler, then that assembly is the real sovereign. This example was not imaginary. Hobbes's civil war was fought between a king and a parliament. One was a hereditary absolute monarch who claimed to rule by divine right, the other an assembly of representatives of rich people. Hobbes's sovereign is not a being with superhuman powers. Her power consists in other people's recognition of her authority. We must all recognize the sovereign, or we shall be plunged back into the state of nature. We must reject all other authorities, including law, morality, property rights and religion. If we recognize any authority separate from the sovereign, then disagreement and conflict are inevitable. Hobbes was making radical claims here. The sovereign defines (and interprets) law, morality, property rights and religion. The following remarks give a flavour of Hobbes's views:

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[In the state of nature] notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have ... no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law: where no law, no injustice. (Leviathan, ch. 13) For if men were at liberty, to take for God's commandments~ their own dreams, and fancies, or the dreams and fancies of private men; scarce two men would agree upon what is God's commandment; and yet in respect of them, every man would despise the commandments of the commonwealth. I conclude therefore, that ... all subjects are bound to obey that for divine law, which is declared to be so, by the laws of the commonwealth. (Leviathan, ch. 26) Hobbes also mocked the idea (very influential in his day) that people should obey religiousvisions or prophecies: "To say that God hath spoken to him in a dream is no more than to say that he hath dreamt that God spake to him" (Leviathan, ch. 32). The obvious problem, once again, is that different people have different dreams. How do we get a sovereign?Hobbes discussed two methods: institution and conquest. In the first, we choose someone to be sovereign; in the second, a foreign ruler who defeats us becomes our sovereign when we submit to his authority. (In Hobbes's day, many actual sovereignswere the chosen leaders of one nation, who then conquered others.) Institution and conquest both involve a covenant that generates a social contract between citizens and sovereign. We give the sovereign absolute power so that we can escape the state of nature. The purpose of the social contract limits my obligations to obey the sovereign. If Ifind myself worse off than in the state of nature, I may disobey. If obeying the law would lead to starvation, then I may steal food. If the sovereign threatens my life, I can fight back. What do I have to lose? Although she has absolute authority, these facts constrain the sovereign. The sovereign can condemn everyone to death, or make a law leading to universal starvation. After all, she can make any law. But she won't. The sovereign dislikes the state of nature as much as anyone else, and she knows that deposed sovereigns usually die. Every sovereign needs to maintain order, and thereby retain power. A prudent sovereign will ensure that everyone is better off than in the state

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of nature. Imprudentsovereigns will be removed by their disgruntled subjects. So most societies will end up with prudent rulers. A Hobbesian sovereign might offer more than survival and security. She might provide health care, education, entertainment, economic development and many other amenities. But survival and security are all we can demand. And we will demand them. Hobbes prized stability above all else. He favoured a single monarch over a democratic assembly, because disagreement and instability are more likely with an assembly. The state of nature is so awful that everyone prefers the sovereign who best guarantees security. No one will risk instability for wealth, freedom or any other good. Even if a parliament would be much better in all other respects, everyone will still prefer the stability offered by a single monarch. Hobbes's fundamental law of human nature was that our overriding motivation is the fear of a violent death. This is why we are all obsessed with avoiding the state of nature at any cost. Hobbes's law may seem obvious. But is it correct? Of course, everyone wants to avoid a violent death. But is this everyone's strongest motivation? Throughout history, people have risked violent death for many causes: patriotism, glory, eternal salvation, the lives of their children or the common good. Indeed, people's willingness to fight over religion was the cause of the very civil war that Hobbes wanted to avoid. This was partly why Hobbes gave the sovereign total control over religious teaching: so that people are taught not to value eternal salvation (or to fear eternal damnation) more than they fear the punishments the sovereign can deliver in this life. Hobbes was aware that some people fear shame more than death. He responded by letting the sovereign decide what counts as shame. Once a sovereign is established, she can mould her people to suit her rule, ensuring that everyone most fears a violent death. Would Hobbes's arguments have worked with the weaker (but more realistic) premise that it is almost always irrational to sacrifice one's life? Perhaps they would. Whatever our motivations, everyone still has a very strong incentive to escape the state of nature, if it is as bleak as Hobbes said. But would people still prefer Hobbes's sovereign over all rival systems of government?Or might they risk some insecurity in exchange for greater wealth or freedom? Also, if Hobbes was wrong about human motivation, then perhaps the state of nature will not always be the constant, anxious

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nightmare he so vividly painted. People who are less fearful, less competitive and less prone to disagree might coexist peacefully without any ruler. This possibility was explored by our next pre-affluent thinker.

2. Locke

John Locke was the most influential pre-affluent philosopher. We have already seen his influence on Nozick's libertarianism. Locke's views about limited government - his disagreements with Hobbes - were also very influential. Locke lived a generation later than Hobbes. He wrote at a time of relatively stable government, and feared that the king had too much power. Hobbes sought to avoid civil war at all costs, while Locke thought despotism was even worse: "He being in a much worse condition, who is exposed to the arbitrary power of one man, who has the command of 100,000, than he that is exposed to the arbitrary power of 100,000 single men" (Locke, Two Treatises on Government, Second Treatise, bk 2, ch. 11). Locke's main political question was when subjects may justly rebel against a sovereign. Hobbes said, "Only if the state of nature would be worse". Confusingly, Locke gave the same answer. But Locke allowed much more scope for rebellion, because his state of nature was very different from Hobbes's. Locke believed in laws of nature instituted by God. These laws create natural rights. In Locke's state of nature, people enjoy their rights and respect the laws of nature. Life is not bleak, and there is no scarcity. Most of the goods that people need are the productsof industry and land, neither of which is scarce. Locke was also more optimistic about human nature than Hobbes. He denied that people will wilfully create artificial scarcity. Locke argued that, under Hobbes's absolute sovereign, natural rights are under constant threat, and people are effectively slaves. This is worse than Locke's state of nature. No one would agree to institute Hobbes's sovereign. Everyone prefers the state of nature. Here was Locke's picturesque reply to Hobbes: As if when men quitting the state of nature entered into society, they agreed that all of them but one should be under the

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restraint of laws, but that he should still retain all the liberty of the state of nature, increased with power, and made licentious by impunity. This is to think, that men are so foolish, that they take care to avoid what mischiefs may be done them by pole cats, or foxes; but are content, nay think it safety, to be devoured by lions. (Two Treatises on Government, Second Treatise, ch. 7) (HISTORICAL NOTE: Pole cats,

foxes and lions were large carnivorous mammals. Common in Locke's day, they became extinct during the affluent

age.) Locke was driven by a contemporary political question: could the king .justlytax without the consent of parliament? Locke said no. Once the king starts taking my property, he will not stop. If he can take some property, he can take it all. My property includes my life. But the king cannot take my life. (Why not? Because the king has only the rights that I transfer to him. I cannot transfer a right I do not possess. And I have no right to take my own life, because it is a gift from God.) Therefore, the king cannot take any property without consent. Locke argued that property rights limit political authority, as in Nozick's minimal state. We can imagine how Hobbes would have replied: Your property rights, Mr Locke, are good advice to a sovereign. But they are too controversial. People will always disagree. What is just acquisition?When is your mysterious proviso ever actually satisfied?Who really owns what? Did God really institute those rules of property? Who is to say? Unless there is a sovereign to offer definitive answers, we will have chaos. So we cannot possibly posit natural property rights that constrain the sovereign. In reply, Locke used God to ground both human reason and property rights. People cannot agree on the details of religious doctrine and ritual, and they disagree passionately about the true church. But all reasonable people will naturally agree on the following facts: God exists; God is morally perfect and the creator of all things; human beings are created in the image of God; God has given us the earth for our use and enjoyment. (Locke believed that a benevolent God will ensure that his human

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creatures can acquire these essential beliefs. Natural human reason leads us to knowledge of God, and of his plans for us.) Locke then derived his account of property rights from these theological premises. In Locke's state of nature, where people are reasonable, everyone agrees about natural rights. Locke's claims about God's purposes were essential to his argument. This is perhaps the starkest contrast with Hobbes. Locke would have conceded that his argument would not apply to a world of atheists. For him, this was not a weakness. It was merely further proof that atheists are immoral and unreasonable. (Locke notoriously said that atheists cannot give evidence in a law court, because the oath to tell the truth has no meaning for someone who does not fear God.) Locke developed a more complex system of government than Hobbes. Instead of a direct covenant with the sovereign, we first delegate our authority to the community. The community then delegates its authority to the legislature, which then appoints the executive to govern. The community (or "the people") has a continuing role. Having placed its trust in a system of government, it can withdraw it, either replacing individual officials or redesigning the entire system. If Locke's state of nature is so good, why do we need any government at all? Why not stay in the state of nature, like Nozick's anarchist?Locke's answer was that although the state of nature is better than Hobbes suggested, it is still unsatisfactory. Each person is the judge in her own case, and nothing guarantees that justice will have might on i t s side. Although everyone agrees about natural rights in the abstract, we still need some central authority to resolve specific disputes about property: "The great and chief end, therefore, of men's uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property. To which in the state of nature there are many things wanting" (Locke, Two Treatises on Government, Second Treatise, bk 2, ch. 9). Hobbes's sovereign is not a real solution; we just get one individualwho is judge in all cases! Instead, we need a separation of powers between two branches of government. The legislature makes law, while the executive enforces it. Locke said that the community is sovereign, rather than the executive or the legislature. All power is held on trust from the people. It must be

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exercised for the common good, and can be withdrawn at any time. This withdrawal is justified if either the executive or the legislature breaks its agreement with the community. Locke focused on the executive, as his political target was the king. An initially legitimate king who exercises "power beyond right" is a tyrant. In effect, this king rebels against the community. So he is the rebel, and not those who oppose him. Tyranny occurs when a king surrenders to a foreign power, violates a law of nature (especially property rights) or loses the trust of the people. (Locke thought the second and third possibilities go together. A king will only lose the people's trust if he violates natural law.) Locke's complex system of government raises many questions. When do the people consent? Locke replied that you give tacit consent if you remain in a country, obey the law and benefit from it. Hume (a later preaffluent philosopher) famously disagreed. What if Icannot leave? Is tacit consent any real kind of consent? This was a very serious problem for all social contract theorists, as most people never explicitly consent to any government. Unless we allow tacit consent, no actual government can ever be legitimate. What if people disagree whether the king is a tyrant? (This happened in both Hobbes's day and Locke's.) Suppose some people trust the government and some do not. Have "the people" withdrawn their trust? Locke said the community's support for the government must be unanimous. But is that realistic? Or would a majority decision suffice? (Some later affluent commentators suggested that Locke was logically committed to democracy, where the people reaffirm their trust in both legislature and executive through periodic elections. We return to democracy in Part IV.) The contrasting approaches of Hobbes and Locke dominated affluent social-contract theory. Some followed Hobbes, and imagined a contract between self-interested agents with no prior ethical commitments or claims. Others followed Locke, and insisted that we bring both moral values and moral entitlements to the bargaining table. Subsequent theorists added much complexity and technicality, but the substantial issues remained the same. Over the next three lectures, we explore in detail the most important late-affluent contract theorist. But first, we ask what Hobbes and Locke might have said to us.

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3. Hobbes and Locke in a broken world How does the transition to our broken world affect the perennial debate between Hobbes and Locke? A common first impression is that Hobbes, with his grim realism, seems tailor-made for a broken world, while Lockets optimistic state of nature now seems quaint and naive. But first impressions can deceive. In fact, both thinkers would face new challenges. Hobbes's descriptions of his state of nature often seem strikingly relevant today. The passages quoted earlier read like bleak accounts of life in a broken world. Or consider Hobbes's predictionof the dire consequences of overpopulation: "And when all the world is overcharged with inhabitants, then the last remedy of all is war; which provideth for every man, by victory, or death" (Leviathan, ch. 30). But we must not read Hobbes's dire descriptions out of context. Hobbes always contrasted the state of nature with life under a sovereign. The deficiencies of the state of nature result from present human failings, not from any environmental deficiency. In Hobbes's story, we suffer death, famine and anxiety only because we have no sovereign. Our social organization is broken, but our world is not. Hobbes clearly imagined a world with enough material resources to meet everyone's basic needs. Hobbes wrote for a world in favourable conditions. His sovereign promises peace, security and survival for all. This is what makes the sovereign so attractive. In a broken world, you might expect the state of nature to be worse, as the competition for resources is even more fierce. However, given the human propensityto manufacturescarcity, Hobbes insisted that any state of nature must be horrible, even if resources are abundant. The real difference in a broken world is that the sovereign can no longer offer security and survival to all. The crucial question is whether she can offer enough to secure people's loyalty. Can she improve on the state of nature? Intriguingly, Hobbes did discuss the distribution of scarce resources, and his remarks do seem to prefigure a survival lottery: "Then, the law of nature, which prescribeth equity, requireth, that the entire right ... be determinedby lot. For equal distribution is of the law of nature; and other means of equal distribution cannot be imagined" (Leviathan, ch. 15). Imagine a sovereign who institutes a survival lottery. She cannot guarantee everyone's survival, but she does offer everyone a better chance

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of survival than they enjoyed before. If her lottery is well designed, she also guarantees lottery winners much greater security, peace of mind and quality of life than anyone could hope for in a state of nature. So long as winners outnumber losers, this sovereign will be secure. Hobbes insisted that anyone could resist if the sovereign threatened his life. Won't this sanction all lottery losers to rebel?This result seems inevitable, ifwe follow Hobbes and regard the universalfear of a violent death as the overriding human motivation. But, as we saw earlier, this disposition is not universal, and must be cultivated by the sovereign. In a broken world, a Hobbesiansovereign might encourage other motivations: perhaps a sense of honour or a concern for future generations. If lottery losers feel honour bound to submit to their fate, our sovereign will sleep more soundly! Hobbes thus can be relevant to our broken world. What about Locke? In Locke's state of nature, everyone has sufficient resources for a pretty good life. This is not possible in a broken world. Locke's state of nature cannot be realized. The problem lies in Locke's account of property. We have already seen the difficulties a broken world would create for Nozick, whose account is similar. In a broken world, people cannot justly acquire Lockean property rights, because they cannot obey Locke's proviso. No one can leave enough and as good for all others. For the sake of our present argument, suppose we develop a new Lockean account of property rights for a broken world. In the state of nature, people enjoy and respect these new property rights. By definition, not everyone can survive. This obviously reduces the desirability of life in the state of nature, and increases everyone's desire to form a community, appoint a government and escape the state of nature. But, just like Hobbests sovereign, that government now has less to offer. Locke's originalgovernment promiseda service and a guarantee. Itwould resolve disputes without violating anyone's property rights. In parh'cular, it would not take anyone's property without her consent. No government could now guarantee Locke's original rights. But could it at least protect our new, more modest, Lockean rights? Much depends on how those rights are specified. Do people still have individualownership of resources?Or does collective ownership prevail? Can a survival lottery incorporate property rights, or must it violate them? If it does, will the people rebel, despite knowing that they cannot survive in the state of nature?

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Locke assumed that people in the state of nature are autarkic. They can survive perfectly well without a government, just like Nozick's principled anarchist. Unlike Hobbes's sovereign, Locke's original government could not improve your chances of survival. In a broken world, even though no government can guarantee survival, an efficient survival lottery (one that harnesses everyone's productive capacities for the common good) does improve everyone's chance. A Lockean government can now offer this vital new service. Rational people might consent to sacrifice some property to join this lottery. If they do consent, their rights are not violated and the lottery is just. (A Lockean government can also still serve as the arbiter of disputes about property. This role is, if anything, even more urgent in a broken world.) God played a key role in Locke's social contract. Property is God's gift, and our shared knowledge of (and respect for) property rights in the state of nature flows from our knowledge of God. This was what really differentiated Locke from Hobbes. Locke pictured a benevolent God giving the earth and all its resources to human beings for our productive use and enjoyment. Does this vision ringtrue in a broken world? Could any modern society enjoy Locke's confident shared belief in such a God? If not, could some other, less optimistic, belief play the same role? (Remember, what does the real work in Locke's argument is not the existence of God or the reality of God's gift to human beings. Hobbes did not deny those claims. What Locke needed was widespread belief in God and broad agreement about God's purposes. Can these be recaptured in our broken world?) Both Hobbes and Locke would face new challenges in a broken world. Hobbes's sovereign must gain the allegiance of subjects whose survival she cannot guarantee. Locke's government must either respect new (broken-world) property rights, or offer something else in compensation. More fundamentally, if we are to borrow from these pre-affluent theorists, then we must reconsider Hobbes's reliance on the fear of death and Locke's reliance on God. On the other hand, their experience of civil war, their awareness of the fragility of human civilization and their understanding of practical politics all give Hobbes and Locke a relevance to our real-life predicament that you may find lacking in the writings of later, more pampered, philosophers.

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John RawlsJsA Theory oflustice was the most significant single text in affluent political philosophy. Rawls followed the social-contract tradition of Hobbes and Locke. But he differed from them both in his context and in his philosophical ambitions. Hobbes and Locke were actively engaged in politics and public affairs. Rawls was a professional academic philosopher who spent almost his entire adult life at one university and had no direct involvement in public affiirs. The development of his thought was driven more by internal philosophicaltensions than by real-world events. Hobbes and Locke lived through civil war, the threat of foreign invasion and political unrest. RawlsJssociety had experienced all these in the past, and he himself served as a soldier in overseas campaigns in his youth. But by the time Rawls wrote his mature philosophicalworks, his society was stable and secure. That society was a wealthy affluent liberal democracy, very different from the semi-feudal monarchy inhabited by Hobbes and Locke. (Rawls lived in the same nation as Nozick. Indeed, they worked in the same university department.) Although Hobbes and Locke were driven by immediate political concerns, they presented their foundational claims about human nature and

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natural rights- and their conclusionsabout sovereignty and its limits - as universal. Rawls was less ambitious. His theory of justice was tailored to his own society, and to precisely those features that distinguished it from our broken world. Over the next two lectures, we lay out Rawls's theory, before asking how he might have addressed our present-day concerns.

1. Rawls's method Rawls's most obvious departure from the social-contract tradition was that he ignored actual contracts altogether, and instead developed a hypothetical contract. Justice is not what people do agree, but what they would agree under highly idealized circumstances. Rawls called his approachjustice asfairness. He sought principles of justice that everyone could recognize as a fair basis for mutual interaction. To find them, he employed a striking imaginative device: Rawls's original position: You must choose principles to govern your society. You have considerable general knowledge of human nature, economics, sociology, psychology and history. (Any general knowledge can be fed into the original position.) You also have specifc knowledge of your society: its histoty, culture, natural resources and so on. One piece of knowledge is especially significant. You know that your society enjoys favourable conditions. It is possible to meet everyone's basic needs without sacrificing anyone's basic liberties. But there is much that you do not know. You must choose from behind a veil of ignorance. You do not know who you are. You do not know your social status, race, gender, religion, talents or even your conception of the good (your values, goals, aspirations). You cannot even attach any probability to propositions about yourself. Finally, your motivation is somewhat unusual. You are completely self-centred and very risk-averse. Your only aim is to ensure that nothing terrible happens to you. (In the technical jargon of affluent philosophy, your decision-rule is maximin: you first identify the worst possible outcome under each alternative,

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and then choose the alternative with the most attractive worst outcome.) Given this combination of knowledge, ignorance and motivation, what principles of justice would you choose? Rawls's original position is bizarre and impossible. Clearly, no one has ever been in this position. What was it for? Rawls introducedthe original position as a device to derive specific principles of justice from general moral ideals. We begin with relatively vague ideas about fairness. We then build these into our original position. We are thus confident that the resulting principles fit our ideals. The original position focuses our moral gaze. We face a new barrier when trying to imagine Rawls's original position. The idea of favourable conditions - so familiar to his affluent readers - is completely alien to us. To construct an original position that models our views about justice, we may need to abandon this particular Rawlsian assumption. We return to this issue in Lecture 15. We must not take Rawls's motivational assumptions out of context. They were not offered as a story about how real people do (or should) behave. But - together with the veil of ignorance- they model the moral point of view. Rawls asked what principles would be chosen if our status as free and equal rational beings were the decisive determining element. This reflected his normative belief that that status is what matters for justice. The veil of ignorance and Rawls's motivational assumptions together model fairness. A just society treats people equally regardless of race, gender or religion. Rawls thus built these morally irrelevant factors into his veil of ignorance. Your selfish motivation then ensures that everyone's interests are protected. Rawls characterized affluent society as reasonably pluralist. People disagreed, and they regarded disagreement as a good thing. In those circumstances, Rawls argued, justice should embrace disagreement, not remove it. (In Lecture 15, we shall ask whether we share this commitment to pluralism today, or whether this is another place where a broken-world original position must depart from Rawls.) Another key Rawlsian moral ideal was that benefits to the majority never justify the slavery or destitution of a minority. This was why Rawls stipulated that you follow maximin. If you are risk averse behind a veil

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of ignorance, you will focus your attention on the plight of the worst off. (HISTORICAL NOTE: AS we learnt in our discussion of Nozick in Lecture 2, Rawls's particular affluent society was scarred by the legacy of slavery. Rawls regarded the injustice of slavery as a bedrock moral intuition. Any plausible theory of justice must prohibit slavery.) Rawls's philosophical method was reflective equilibrium. Our moral judgements cover both general ideals and specific principles. We test the principles generated by our original position against our judgements. If we get crazy principles, we must redesign the original position. Eventually, we reach an equilibrium, where an original position based on our ideals yields principles we endorse. This is the best we can hope for. We have no independent access to eternal moral truths. You might think that reflective equilibrium must be very conservative. But it need not be. Our considered moral judgements cover ideals as well as particular institutions, policies or situations. When different levels of judgement conflict, Rawls typically favoured ideals. Rawls was not a conservative apologist for the affluent status quo. For instance, he defended universal health care, redistributive taxation and restrictions on political speech. While commonplace in other affluent nations, these views were quite radical in Rawls's own, more libertarian, nation. However, as we shall see, some of Rawls's affluent followers argued that he was not radical enough, especially in regard to international justice. In the original position, you choose principles to govern the basic structure of your society. This is the system of rules and practices that define the political constitution, the legal procedures, and the economic institutions of property, markets, production and exchange. The basic structure distributes fundamental rights and duties, and determines the distribution of advantages from social cooperation. Rawls regarded the basic structure as the primary subject ofjustice, because it has a profound effect throughout everyone's life. Rawls's principles of justice were not designed to govern the whole of human life. Like Mill - whose liberty principle was one of his inspirations Rawls wanted to protect a private sphere. The principles of justice govern our behaviour as citizens: when we vote, stand for public office, engage in public debate and so on. Our lives as private moral individuals are governed by quite different moral principles. One crucial difference

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is that, while we must agree about justice, we may well disagree very strongly about personal morality. Here are some examples. Rawls did not expect his principles of distributive justice to govern relations between family members; and his liberal commitment to gender neutrality did not mean that an individual's choice of sexual partners has to be "genderblind". Or consider religion. Rawls argued that, in the original position, you will choose principles of religious neutrality. The liberal state itself has no religion. (Rawls's views on religion were heavily influenced by the wars of religion that devastated the pre-affluent age of Hobbes and Locke. He drew the historical lesson that religious toleration and neutrality are the only possible foundation for a just society.) But Rawls's ideal liberal society was not meant to be atheist or secular. The state is not against religion. Rawls himself was not hostile to religion. On the contrary, he sought to create a space where private religious associations could thrive.

2. Rawls8sprinciples of justice

What would you choose in the original position? Given your ignorance of your own goals, some of Rawls's affluent critics worried whether you could choose at all. Rawls replied that you do know that you have some conception of the good, and that you want to pursue it. You will focus on primary goods that are useful for any lifestyle: basic necessities, allpurpose means (money, freedom) and self-respect. You aim to maximize your bundle of these versatile goods. Rawls divided primary goods into two categories: social (rights, liberties and opportunities; income and wealth); and natural (health and vigour; intelligence and imagination). The basic structure distributes social primary goods. It also compensates for the unequal distribution of natural primary goods. "The natural distribution is neither just nor unjust; nor is it unjust that men are born into society at some particular position. These are simply natural facts. What is just and unjust is the way that institutions deal with these facts" (Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 87). In the original position, you are offered a choice from four alternatives: perfectionism, egalitarianism, utilitarianism and Rawls's own principles.

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Rawls's first principle of justice (liberty principle): "Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all" (ibid.: 266). (Basic liberties include freedom of conscience, thought, speech, association and movement, and equal political participation.) Rawls's second principle of justice: "Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both: [diflerence principle] to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged and [equal opportunityprinciple] attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality and opportunity" (ibid.).

...;

Rawls placed these principles in a strict lexical order. Liberty trumps wealth, opportunity or efficiency; and equal opportunity trumps the difference principle. (Rawls also included a just-savings principle, which is discussed in the next lecture.) Rawls argued that in the original position you will choose his principles. His basic argument was simple. In favourable conditions, we can arrange our society so that everyone can pursue her conception of the good. Your overriding goal is to guarantee that you can pursue your conception. Behind the veil of ignorance, nothing is guaranteedfor you unless it is guaranteedfor all. So you must guarantee everyone the chance to live the life she chooses. Rawls's two principles guarantee this, while those of his rivals do not. Consider the worst-off person in a society governed by Rawls's two principles. Her basic liberties are protected, her basic needs are met, and she has the wealth and opportunity to pursue her chosen lifestyle without discrimination or prejudice. This is the worst fate you might suffer under those principles. Now compare this to your possible fate under the three alternative principles available to you: perfectionism, egalitarianism and utilitarianism. A perfectionist state chooses one conception of the good and "encourages" everyone to follow it. This sounds great. But what if your conception is different? The authorities might impose a religion that is incompatible with yours. Will you risk that? No. You will chose Rawls's liberty principle instead.

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Egalitarians distribute everythingequally. This looks good from behind the veil of ignorance. You know what you will get. But suppose some unequal distribution would benefit everyone. Perhaps your knowledge of economics teaches you that incentives can increase total production so much that, thanks to redistributive taxation, the worst-off person is still better off than anyone in a poorer egalitarian society. Rawls explicitly designed his difference principle to allow this kind of inequality. So you will choose Rawls over egalitarianism. (Rawls assumed that you are not envious in the original position. You only care what you get, not whether others get more. After all, why would justice involve envy?) Rawls used this style of argument to defend many economic institutions of the affluent welfare state. He permitted considerable inequality. But any inequality must benefit the worst off. The welfare state ensured this by offering welfare payments funded by general taxation. Rawls insisted that a free market without redistribution could never be just. (To complicate matters, Rawls did not actually defend affluent capitalism, even with a welfare state. Instead, he favoured a different economic system known as a "property-owning democracy", where all citizens would share in the ownership of resources. Rawls worried that the concentration of wealth in a capitalist society was incompatible with genuine political equality.) Rawls's main target was utilitarianism, the dominant alternative tradition in affluent political philosophy. Rawls focused on average utilitarianism, where we maximize average happiness (see Lecture 10).Affluent utilitarians often agreed with Rawls. His arguments against perfectionism and egalitarianism (and also libertarianism) had a utilitarian flavour. But Rawls argued that utilitarians are always willing to sacrifice the few for the many. Perhaps some will be enslaved or oppressed, if that is what maximizes average happiness. Those people cannot pursue their conceptions of the good. You will not risk being in their shoes. So you will reject utilitarianism. Some affluent critics used Rawls's original position to defend utilitarianism. Slavery and oppression never maximize welfare. The suffering of slaves always outweighs any economic benefit. If slavery is permitted, then everyone is insecure and no one is happy. Rawls replied that any utilitarian argument against slavery is always too contingent. If slavery

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would promote welfare, then utilitarians must permit it. Why take that chance, when Rawls's principles guarantee your liberty? Other utilitarians objected that Rawls was too obsessed with the fate of the worst off. Justice requires trade-offs. These utilitarians redesigned the original position. You now know how many people enjoy each level of welfare, so you can estimate probabilities.And your aim is to maximize your expected happiness. Behind the veil of ignorance, that means maximizing average happiness. So you will choose utilitarianism. Many utilitarians thus rejected Rawls's use of maximin. Rawls agreed that maximin is often a crazy rule in real life. Suppose someone offers you a $1 ticket in a lottery where you are almost certain to win $1,000,000. If you obey maximin, you will lose an almost certain windfall rather than risk a single dollar. But Rawls argued that sometimes maximin is rational. Suppose you have only one dollar, and you need it immediately to save your child's life. Would you bet now? Expected utility makes sense in the long run if you can play again and recoup your losses, but not when all your future prospects are at stake. If you gamble in the original position and lose, there is no second chance. In the original position, Rawls used maximin to capture something that utilitarianism ignored: the separateness of persons. Each person has only one life to live, and justice must not sacrifice some for others. Rawls defended maximin only when one option guarantees a good enough result. If you need $2 to save your child, and you have only $1, then it does make sense to gamble. In favourable conditions, justice as fairness guarantees an adequate bundle of primarygoods, whatever your conception of the good. (This raises the question whether maximintranslates to our broken world, where favourable conditions no longer apply. Or did Rawls's utilitarian critics develop an original position that is more relevant to us?) Perhaps Rawlsts most striking claim was the priority of liberty. The basic liberties must never be sacrificed for wealth, even if that additional wealth goes to the worst-off person. Mill offered a utilitarian defence of his liberty principle. But Rawls went much further even than Mill. Rawls gave liberty a lexical priority. Most utilitarians rejected Rawls's priority. Why should basic liberties always trump material improvements?

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How did Rawls defend his priority claim? First, remember that Rawls assumed favourable conditions. Basic liberties never compete with basic needs. We must imagine that everyone's basic needs are met and that all basic liberties are protected. Rawls said that, once this point is reached, you will not sacrifice basic liberties for any further gain in wealth. (Rawls himself conceded that if they ever did conflict, basic needs would trump even the basic liberties. We return to that possibility at the end of the next lecture.) Freedom was important for Rawls because the basic liberties are essential to your development as a free and equal moral person. Without those liberties, you cannot even have (let alone pursue) a conception of the good. As a matter of logic, wealth cannot compensate you for the loss of liberty. Without liberty, you will not know what to do with your wealth. In the original position, where you focus on your interests as a free and equal person, the priority of liberty is built in from the start. Once we have chosen principles of justice to govern our society we must design institutions to implement those principles. We first imagine a constitutional convention where delegates come together to design political institutions.This is followed by a legislativestage, where elected representatives make policy decisions. At each stage, the veil of ignorance is partially removed so that the participants have more information about their situation. Rawls said comparatively little about institutions or policies. Because his theory of justice was designed for a liberal democratic society, Rawls took it for granted that justice requires a democratic constitution. (As we shall see in Lecture 15, this makes it very difficult to apply his theory to our world.) Rawls sometimes discussed a constitutional structure modelled on that of his own particular affluent nation, where the difference principle guides the deliberationsof an elected legislature, while the basic liberties are enshrined in an entrenched bill of rights that constrains the legislature and is interpreted by an independent judiciary. But he also acknowledged that each affluent liberal nation needed a constitution that was tailored to its own historical circumstances. For example, Rawls remained neutral regarding the merits of the different forms of affluent democracy that we shall study in Lecture 16.

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3. Rawls's critics

Rawls's theory generated an enormous affluent philosophical literature. Sadly, most of that literature is now lost. However, scholars have managed to piece together the most prominent affluent criticisms. Some critics questioned particular arguments, while others rejected the very idea of the original position. What if some severely disabled people need all of society's resources just to survive? (This was a very real prospect. Affluent health care was extremely expensive.) In the original position, if you give absolute priority to the worst off, then you must sacrifice everything to help these people. Rawls denied that justice is really that demanding. His solution was that, because justice concerns the distribution of the benefits of social cooperation, the social contract only includes people who can contribute. Therefore, Rawls deliberately set the severely disabled aside when choosing his principles of justice. In the original position, you know that you are not severely disabled. (This sounds very harsh. However, unlike some more brutal affluent contract theorists, Rawls did not advocate either allowing the severely disabled to die or forcing them to beg for private charity. Their needs are to be accommodated later, when the legislature determines its spending and taxation priorities.) We might ask whether Rawls's solution fits our views about justice. Can we so easily separate "the severely disabled" from everyone else? What about people with expensive needs who can still make? "productive contribution"? And, in our broken world, aren't all needs "expensive"? Many affluent critics asked whether the basic structure includes the family. Rawls was in two minds here. (In his treatment of the family, Rawls was less radical than Mill, who had lived over a hundred years earlier.) On the one hand, the family does have a profound influence on each person's life. On the other hand, Rawls strongly disliked state interference in domestic life. Rawls tried to steer a middle course, and thus faced criticism from both directions. Somefeminists criticized his failure to challenge the injustice of traditional affluent family structures. Feminists sympathetic to Rawls replied that Rawls's own principles require liberal institutions to intervene whenever parents undermine their daughters' liberty or selfrespect. But conservatives then accused Rawls of undermining traditional

family life, and failing to be neutral between competing religious conceptions of the good. In the original position, how might you balance these risks? Is it worse to be a daughter whose parents restrict your freedom, or a parent who cannot pass on your religion to your children? Other affluent criticisms were more wholesale. Communitarians rejected the original position itself, arguing that it requires an incoherent imaginative leap. You have to separate yourself entirely from your social context. But morality is necessarily embedded in a web of culture, history and personal ties. How can you choose if you know nothing about yourself? Communitarians also worried that a Rawlsian liberal society would not adequately support the cultural connections necessary for moral development. Rawls replied that every conception of the good needs primary goods, so you do know enough to make a rational choice in the original position, and that his principlesof justice would create a social framework where specific associations and cultures can thrive. (The communitarian critique connects with the problem of stability, which is addressed in the next lecture. Can any liberal society nurturethe moral commitments necessary for its own survival?) Libertarians objected that Rawls ignored natural rights, especially property rights. This was true. Rawls did reject natural property rights. He regarded property as a social institution, and thus as something to be chosen within the original position. (You may have noticed that libertarianism is not even listed as an option in the original position. Libertarianism is a non-starter, because it cannot guarantee you any resources. You will not risk being a person in Nozickts minimal state who has no property!) Rawls's basic liberties did not include property rights. The liberty principle protects you from slavery and coercion. But Rawls did not explain this, as Nozick did, by appealing to self-ownership. Property rights are assigned only at the legislativestage, when we implement the difference principle. While Nozick regarded redistributivetaxation as akin to theft or rape, Rawls saw it as an essential element of any just institution of property. The sharpest disagreement between Rawls and Nozick was their different attitudesto naturaltalents. Nozick said that each person has absolute propem rights over her own talents and their fruits. Rawls treated the distribution of talents and skills as a common asset. He did not mean that

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society "owns" you, but rather that the benefits produced by your talents must work to everyone's advantage. You do not deserve your place in the natural lottery, so you have no automatic entitlement to the fruits of your labour. Affluent philosopherswho believed in natural rights thus had to distance themselves from Rawls. They either regarded such rights as external constraints on the design of the original position (perhapswe should ask what you would choose if you did know your own talents), or abandoned Rawls's imaginative device altogether. (Nozick, for instance, denied that we learn anythingabout justice by placingourselves behind a veil of ignorance.) Another common affluent criticism of Rawls was that his critique of affluent society was insufficientlyradical because he failed to apply it consistently to the vexed questions of international and intergenerational justice. We address the second of these in the next lecture. We finish the present lecture with the first.

4. Rawls and global justice

Rawls developed his theory of justice for a liberal democratic nation. As we saw in Lecture 5, this was standard affluent practice. But cosmopolitans said that Rawls's nationalism contradicted the spirit of his liberalism. Nationality is irrelevant to our status as free and equal moral beings. Rawls should have weaved ignorance of nationality into his veil of ignorance, so that you do not know where you will live. You would then choose principles of global justice to promote the interests of the worstoff people in the world. Cosmopolitanism was very radical. Actual affluent global institutions did not protect basic liberties, and the global equalizing of opportunities and resources would have involved an enormous redistribution of resources from wealthy countries to poorer ones. (Remember that, because it insists that all inequalities must benefit the worst off, Rawls's difference principle is even more redistributive than utilitarianism!) Rawls was no radical. He rejected cosmopolitanism. Justice concerns the distribution of the benefits of cooperation. Cooperation occurs within nations, not between them. The ties between nations are not sufficient to

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ground obligations of justice. Rawls even denied that his liberal principles applied within other nations. Justice depends on a society's traditions and values. Liberal justice suited liberal nations, but perhaps it did not suit others. Instead, Rawls imagined an international original position. This time you represent a people, not an individual person. (Rawls deliberately chose the vague term "people", which was not quite synonymous with "nation" or "state".) You must choose laws to govern relations between peoples. You know general facts about peoples, but you do not know particular facts about your people: its level of development, institutions, resources, climate, history or conception of justice. (Peoples disagree about justice, just as individuals have different conceptions of the good.) You want what is best for your people. You focus on what every people needs: trade, security, freedom to govern itself, control of national resources, control of borders. Rawls concluded that you would choose a law of peoples that closely resembled the affluent international law we discussed in Lecture 5. His argument had two crucial premises. You know both (i) that every people enjoys favourable conditions except in rare emergencies; and (ii) that each people owns the natural resources found within its territory. So you recognize only limited duties of assistance between peoples. And instead of assigning each people's property rights within the original position, you treat them as an external constraint. (This is very ironic. Rawls disagreed sharply with Nozick about justice within a nation. But Rawls's defence of the moral significance of nations- one of the bedrock assumptions of his theory of justice - was very reminiscent of Nozick's individual property rights.) As we saw in Lecture 5, these premises are no longer tenable in our broken world.

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Any social-contract theory bases justice on reciprocal interaction. Justice is what rational self-interested people would agree to under fair conditions. As we cannot interact with people in the far-distant future, a social contract with them seems impossible. We hold their quality of life, and their very existence, in our hands, while future people can offer us nothing in return. The standard affluent test case was the time bomb: an action that is beneficial to present people, devastating for distant-future people and irrelevant to intervening generations. Parfit's risky policy was a classic example. Our choice of the cheaper power plant is good for us, has no effect on anyone for several centuries and is then very bad for those who are alive when the radiation leaks. Surely planting a time bomb is wrong, especially if the present benefit is negligible. (Plantinga time bomb purely on a whim would be morally equivalent to driving a carbon-fuelled vehicle just for fun!) But how can any contract or agreement between selfinterested people condemn it? Some affluent social-contract theorists bit the bullet here. If justice requires interaction, then we have no obligations of justice to future

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people. We may happen to care about them, we may choose to take their interests into account, but we owe them nothing. Some cited the non-identity problem we first encountered in Lecture 10. Because our social-policy choices affect the identity of future people, we do not harm them, even if the result is that they inherit a broken world. Affluent utilitarians-and many others - strongly disagreed. Surely justice does not disappear when others are completely at our mercy. Rawls sided with the utilitarians here. He sought to accommodate obligationsto future people, extending his original position to include intergenerational justice. Rawls also shared the utilitarian belief that justice is temporally impartial. As we saw in Lecture 10, many affluent utilitarians rejected any pure time preference as unethical. Rawls explicitly agreed. All human beings are equally valuable, no matter when they live. To model this moral claim, Rawls insisted that the parties to the original position themselves have no pure time preference. Rawls thus believed that present people have a duty to safeguard the basic needs and basic liberties of future people, to "preserve the gains of culture and civilization, and [to] maintain intact those just institutions that have already been established" (A Theory of justice, 252). Given these commitments, you might expect to find that Rawls devoted considerable attention to intergenerational justice. In fact, he barely mentioned it. Rawls optimistically assumed that, in any stable liberal society, favourable conditions continue indefinitely, basic needs never compete with basic liberties, there is no conflict between the liberties of present and future people, and each generation is better off than the one before. This optimism explains why Rawls never discussed population policy, environmental issues or the possibility that future people might be worse off. Rawls only addressed two intergenerational issues: just savings and stability. We consider each in turn, before asking how Rawls might have reacted to the threat of a broken future. Rawlstslimited focus made sense at the time, as he wrote before affluent people really knew about climate change. But does it make sense now?

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1.Rawls on just savings Rawls's explicit discussion of intergenerationaljustice focused on the justsavings problem. Suppose we are people in a liberal society that enjoys favourable conditions. Can we legitimately consume everything we produce, or should we save so that later generations will be better off? Here, following affluent economic jargon, ifconsumption" covers any activity that benefits present people. Suppose we are considering a redistribution of resources to aid the worst-off present people. If we decide to save instead, then we must sacrifice the worst-off present people to benefit future people. But, given Rawls's own optimistic assumptions, we know that those future people will be better off. Rawls thus faced a dilemma. He saw saving as necessary for the very existence of liberalsociety. (If our ancestors had not saved, we would still be living in Stone Age poverty.) But Rawls was also committed to giving absolute priority to the worse-off individuals. So how could he ever permit saving? From our broken-world perspective, it is hard to avoid incredulity. Imagine seeing this wonderful situation as a "problem"! But I urge you to try to think yourselves inside Rawls's affluent mind. Although his justsavings problem is foreign to our experience, we might learn valuable lessons from his treatment of it. Rawls discussed just savings in 944 of A Theory of Justice. The location is revealing. By that point in his book, Rawls had already established the two principles of justice (and the priority of liberty), and described the political institutions that safeguard the liberty principle. All this is set in stone before intergenerational justice is even mentioned. (This is the clearest example of Rawls's optimism. He assumed that, once a liberal basic structure is in place, other - more pressing - intergenerational concerns will take care of themselves.) For Rawls, the just-savings problem arises at the legislative stage, where the people's elected representatives must decide how much to spend, tax, borrow and save. These legislators seek to be fair to both present and future people. To implement the difference principle, they set a social minimum: a bundle of primary goods that is guaranteed to every present citizen. If they decide to save, they must reduce that social minimum. What principles should guide the legislators here?

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For Rawls, of course, the choice of principles of justice occurs in the original position. What principles of intergenerational justice would you choose in that imaginary situation? If you know that you represent a present person, and if your motivation is self-interested, then you will give no weight to the interests of future people. This result - favoured by some of his contemporaries - was anathema to Rawls. To generate plausible principles of intergenerational justice, we must refine the original position. But how? The simplest option is to extend the veil of ignorance. Suppose you do not know when you will exist. Being selfish, you will automatically give equal weight to all people, whenever they live. You will favour radical redistribution. After all, you presumably share Rawls's optimism. You know that, even without explicit saving, the natural accumulation of knowledge and culture in the liberal society will inevitably leave future people better off. The worst-off person - out of all those who will ever exist - is thus a member of thefirst human generation. You will instruct that generation to devote all its resources to itself and save nothing. The same holds true for every subsequent generation. You will never permit any saving. In addition to its radical implications, this new original position also comes up against Parfit's non-identity problem. Present policy choices affect the identity of future people. In the original position, do you even know whether you exist? If so, you might choose a tiny population who squander the earth's resources and leave no descendants. You know you will be one of them, and you only care about yourself. On the other hand, if you do not even know whether you exist, your situation is even harder to imagine. (Do you represent a vast array of possiblefuture people?)Will you now choose an empty world, eliminating all risk of a life below zero? Or will you maximize the population, seeking to avoid non-existence at all costs? Rawls wanted to justify saving, so he rejected the intergenerational original position. (We do not know how Rawls resolved the non-identity problem, because he appears never to have even acknowledgedit.) Rawls defended ajust-savings principle that prescribes different rates of saving at different stages of civilization. The goal of saving is to establish just institutions. Saving is a transitional obligation. It is compulsory only until

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we have built up sufficient wealth to establish a just society. Saving then becomes optional. We may remain in a steady state, consuming everything we produce. However, even once saving is optional, each generation must pass on everything it receives. You can never leave future people worse off than present people, even if they would still enjoy favourable conditions. (Rawls focused on each generation's obligations of justice. Private individuals within the liberal society are free to use their own property to make extra savings if they so wish.) Rawls argued that a just society does not require great wealth or abundance. In his Law of Peoples, Rawls even suggested that most nations in his time could have established just institutions. As his own society was immeasurably wealthier than most of its neighbours, it had presumably long passed the point where saving becomes optional. (The continued economic expansion of Rawls's society, often at the expense of its own worst-off citizens, was thus probably not consistent with Rawls's own principles.) Rawls's just-saving principle, unlike his difference principle, does not maximize the welfare of the worst-off generation or individual. The two principles compete. Rawls gave priority to savings. When saving is required it must be undertaken, even at the expense of the worst-off present people. To justify giving future people priority over present people who are worse off, Rawls argued that relations between generations involve a different kind of cooperation than relations between contemporaries. Therefore, the intergenerationaloriginal position is not the correct way to model intergenerational justice. Rawls was engaging in reflective equilibrium here. Convinced that his just-savings principle is correct, he sought to redesign the original position so that it yielded that principle. Rawls offered two distinct solutions at different times. The first altered your motivations in the original position. You are not purely selfish. You also care about your descendants, for at least one or two generations. You will now protect their interests as well as your own. Many affluent philosophers found this solution ad hoc. Why care for your descendants when you do not care for your contemporaries?And what about people in the far-distant future? Will you be happy with time bombs? (Rawls never addressed longer-term environmental issues. He

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could have stipulated that you care for all your descendants, however far in the future. But that would have been even more ad hoc. You now care about your own descendants for thousands of years, but not at all about the person living next door. That seems a strange way to model justice.) Finally, will you really choose Rawls's own just-savings principle? Why favour your descendents over yoursel' Have you suddenly forgotten that you might be the worst-off present person? Why abandon your pathological risk aversion now? Rawls soon abandoned his first solution. Instead, he changed your motivation in a different way. When choosing a savings policy, you must behave as you would want previous generations to have behaved. How much are you prepared to save, assuming that all previous generations have done the same? You deduct the cost of your own saving from the benefits you inherit from previous generations. You will not choose total self-sacrifice: the cost is too high. But total selfishness also fails: the lost inheritance is too valuable. You will choose something in-between. Unfortunately, Rawls never said what. Will you choose Rawls's own principle? Will you agree that saving becomes optional once just institutions are in place? And, of course, what will you choose once you realize that future people may be worse o m

2. Rawls and stability

In his later work, Rawls came to believe that stability is perhaps the central problem of political philosophy. In the original position, as in the states of nature of Hobbes and Locke, you face an assurance problem. You will not agree to anything unless you are confident that others will comply. Hobbes introduced his sovereign to provide that assurance. You know others will obey because disobedience is severely punished. Locke also offered stability. If you know that people respect natural rights, then you will be confident that any agreement founded on those rights will endure. Rawls rejected both Hobbes's solution and Lockets, for different reasons. Hobbes's sovereign offers stability without justice. In the original position, an absolute sovereign is very unattractive. What if the sovereign's religion is incompatible with your own? Rawls sought stability with

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justice. (He hoped humanity would never have to choose between stability and justice.) Locke's solution would have been ideal. But Locke needed broad religious agreement, and that contradicted Rawls's commitment to reasonable pluralism. So Rawls had to look elsewhere. He first argued that libertarianism and utilitarianismare both unstable. These theories permit inequalities that do not benefit the worst off. This leaves the poor with no meaningful stake in social cooperation. Social order can then only be maintained by force. Libertarians and utilitarians cannot deliver a society that is stable for the right reasons. A just society should owe its stability not to oppressive force, but to people's moral commitment to its values and institutions. In the last third of A Theory of Justice, Rawls developed a long argument to prove the stability of his ideal liberal society. Rawls argued that his two principles of justice cohere with the correct principles of psychological development and individual rationality, and that the difference principle will create a society where everyone benefits from economic progress. As a result, well-adjusted citizens will want to comply with Rawls's two principles. Rawls subsequently rejected his own stability argument. This dissatisfaction was the prime motivation for his subsequent work. The problem was that Rawls had offered a philosophical argument that rested on controversial metaphysical premises. But in a society governed by Rawls's own liberal principles, people will not agree about philosophy any more than about religion. If justice rests on metaphysics, then people will not agree about justice either. Future people in Rawls's own ideal society might reject his liberalism. But then that society is unstable: "[A] continuing shared understandingon one comprehensive religious, philosophical, or moral doctrine can be maintained only by the oppressive use of state power" (Rawls, PoliticalLiberalism, 37). Some affluent critics concluded that freedom must be curtailed, so that everyone does accept the prevailing institutions. In our broken world, many would agree. But Rawls wanted a liberal solution. He now sought an overlapping consensus, where people with widely divergent comprehensive doctrines still agree about justice. (A comprehensive doctrine is a complete worldview covering metaphysics, morality and the meaning of life. In Rawls's day, the most obvious comprehensive doctrines were

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religious, but Rawls's overlapping consensus also included non-religious worldviews.) Justice is independent of all controversies about metaphysics or religion. Religious and secular people may never agree why freedom and equality are valuable. Some say we are created in the image of God, while others offer evolutionary tales. But what matters is that they do agree that freedom and equality are valuable. Rawls's opponents objected that many actual affluent comprehensive doctrines contradicted Rawls's two principles. What about racism, sexism, libertarianism, perfectionism and perhaps even utilitarianism? Proponents of those views would never agree with Rawls. Rawls replied that his overlapping consensus only covered reasonable comprehensive doctrines. If unreasonable views predominate, then stability becomes impossible. (Some critics worried that Rawls argued in a circle here. A reasonable comprehensive doctrine is one that accepts reasonable pluralism. But it is no great surprise that those who share Rawls's commitment to pluralism also endorse his principles. The real issue is whether it is legitimate to simply define opponents of reasonable pluralism as unreasonable. In the next lecture, we ask whether we would accept such a move today.) Rawls called his new position political liberalism, because liberalism is no longer itself tied to any particular comprehensive metaphysical doctrine. Rawls hoped that, in a liberal society, many reasonable comprehensive doctrines will flourish, while unreasonable doctrines remain marginal. (If unreasonable people ever gain the ascendancy, even for a single generation, liberal society will collapse.) Was Rawls's hope plausible then? Would it be plausible now? (Isn't that exactly how actual liberal societies did collapse?) Rawls considered a threat to stability that is triply internal: it arises within the liberal nation from the operation of liberal institutions and concerns the beliefs of individuals. He set aside obvious external threats such as military invasion or an influx of climate refugees. Rawls also treated favourable conditions as a permanent background fact. He did not contemplate either external threats to those conditions or the possibility that liberal institutions and practices themselves might threaten them. This was a rather blinkered view even in Rawls's day, and it faces obvious problems in our broken world.

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3. Rawls for a broken future

Our discussion now becomes more speculative. We seek to go beyond Rawls and apply his general ideals in circumstances that he explicitly did not address. Rawls did not know that his own society faced a broken future. If he had known, how might he have responded? His key concern would have been stability. Can a society founded on liberal principles survive the transition to a broken world3This question may seem absurd. We all know how badly liberal democracies dealt with the oncoming storm. But this reaction is unfair to Rawls. His ideal liberal society was not a replica of affluent reality. Perhaps if affluent people had followed Rawls their way of life might have endured. In this section, we briefly explore the implications, for an affluent society with a broken future, of Rawls's commitments to temporal impartiality, the priority of liberty and the priority of basic needs. Rawls optimistically assumed that, in a just society, the liberties of present and future people never conflict, and basic liberties never compete with basic needs. But he explicitly stated how, if they ever didarise, such conflicts should be resolved. If the parties have no time preference, then they must give equal priority to the liberty of all people, both present and future. And basic needs take priority over all other concerns of justice, including basic liberties. I know that many of you find the original position too abstract, so we need a more concrete way to explore the potentially radical impact of these new Rawlsian commitments. Suppose you are living in an ideal Rawlsian liberal society. All your basic needs are met, your basic liberties protected and the prevailing economic institutions guarantee an adequate bundle of primary goods whatever your conception of the good. Life is good. But now you learn the bitter truth about climate change. Unless drastic steps are taken now, favourable conditions will disappear. What should you do? We begin where Rawls situated his own discussion of intergenerational justice. Suppose you are elected to the legislature. Perhaps you chair the social minimum committee. You have to balance two priorities: redistribution to aid present people, and saving to benefit future people. You must implement the difference principle, but you are constrained by the justsavings principle. How might the possibility of a broken future affect your

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deliberations? (Iknow that most of you find the very idea of participating in any affluent democratic institution absurd. This is, of course, a most virtuous reaction. However, if we are to enter imaginatively into Rawls's world, we must try to overcome our instinctive repugnance.) You turn to Rawls for guidance. You first remember Rawls's insistence that liberal institutions can thrive without great wealth. The material cost of avoiding a broken future would not threaten your way of life. (When Rawls wrote A Theory oflustice, affluent people could still have averted a broken world by abandoning their carbon-fuelled ways.) And you know that your obligations to future people trump the difference principle. You conclude that you must do whatever it takes to protect liberal institutions for future people. And, according to Rawls, liberal institutions need favourable conditions. So any financial sacrifice to avoid a broken future is obligatory. You have many worthy policies that would help disadvantaged present people. But these must be abandoned if they might damage the climate. You must set the social minimum very low. A broken future may have even more far-reaching implications. Now suppose that, within your Rawlsian society, you are a member of the supreme (constitutional)court. What should you do? (Many affluent law professors devoted their entire lives to this fantasy question.) Your role is to scrutinize the proposals of the legislatureand to strike down those that violate the liberty principle. You do not normally think explicitly about future people, confident that, if you do your job well, liberal institutions will endure indefinitely. But now you too learn about climate change. Is your job only to protect present liberty? Surely not. The liberty principle is not temporally limited. So you must seriously consider restrictingpresent liberty for the sake of future liberty. You also learn, from Rawls, that basic needs are a vital precondition for any meaningful liberty. So you might need to restrict present liberty to safeguard future needs. (And, above all else, you must preserve favourable conditions.) You begin by not acting. Legislators concerned about climate change propose to spend less on health care, to restrict driving, to censor anticlimate-science speech and to focus public education on maximizing climate awareness amongthe young. In affluent times, you would have struck down such legislationwhenever it encroached on present liberty. But now you refrain. You agree that the broken future is a greater threat to liberty.

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Your fellow citizens are now paying a heavy price to avoid climate change. They rebel. Not literally - violent revolution was virtually unknown in affluent societies before the onset of the dark times - but by electing new climate-change-denying legislators who promise a return to affluent business as usual. Now your protection of future liberty becomes more active. You will strike down anything that threatens the long-term stability of liberal institutions, the needs of future people or the continued existence of favourable conditions. What might you do? Here are some possibilities- some more speculative than others. The new legislators plan to preserve all existing welfare provisions. You know this is unsustainable. Looking ahead, you imagine the last affluent generation: the final cohort for whom all this can be guaranteed. You picture their relations with the next generation. (Call the two generations "the old" and "the young".) The old, having supported earlier generations, demand the same support from the young. But the young know that no one will support them when they are old. And they know why. (By this point, climate change is undeniable.) The young know that the old, by insistingon their own rights, hastened the broken world. Foreseeingall this, you fear that when the time comes the young will not support the old. But liberal democratic institutions can survive only if people believe in them. Such institutions will collapse once they begin to demand sacrifices that will never be reciprocated. So you strike down the legislature's welfare plans, and enforce a much lower - but sustainable -social minimum. You have always protected reproductive freedom. (For Rawls and his affluent followers, this was a basic liberty.) But you realize that only drastic population reduction can avert a broken future. Overpopulation threatens future basic liberties. You restrict present reproductive freedom for the sake of future freedom. You strike down any legislation that encourages people to have more children, such as the provision of childcare, health care or education. If that proves insufficient, you might even strike down any health or education policy that fails actively to impose strict limits on family size.

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You strike down any transport or energy policy that fails to forbid private motor cars, oil exploration or the non-essential consumption of fossil fuels. Present economic benefits are simply trumped by future needs and liberties. Suppose I am another citizen in your Rawlsian society. I have some very strange beliefs. I believe the universe was created by a God who placed resources in the earth for us to use, and who wants us to live free from the constraints and coercions of any central authority. (Perhaps I have read too much Nozick!) I denounce climate science as a conspiracy to destroy "our way of life", and form a political party to undo all attempts to combat climate change. You recognize me as a danger to future liberty. You have always protected freedom of speech, association and political participation. But now you restrict my liberty, banning climate change denial, preventing my oil company sponsors from funding my campaign, perhaps even proscribing my political party altogether. (You could trust our fellow citizens to take their civic responsibilities seriously and not be fooled by my anti-intellectual rhetoric. But can you take that risk? If my political party gains momentum, it will be very difficult to stop.) In a Rawlsian liberal society, these are very radical moves. The legislature and its supporters denounce you as an illiberal anti-democratic despot. But you are the guardian of the constitution, the last best hope of liberty, the "exemplar of public reason" (in Rawls's own fine phrase). You must remain aloof from any partisan political, scientific or religious views that gain traction in the wider culture. That is your role. You cannot sit on your hands while favourable conditions are destroyed. You have no choice. How else could you possibly act? Rawls's theory thus did offer affluent people the intellectual resources to avoid a broken future. But this just highlights the gulf between Rawls's theory and affluent reality. As a matter of historical fact, when it came time to make harsh choices at the end of the affluent age, both elected legislatures and judicial constitutional guardians conspicuously failed. As a result, we must now ask what Rawls could have said about life in a broken world.

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Rawls explicitly designed his theory of justice for his own society. He did not extend his principles to the unfavourable conditions of a broken world. To use Rawls today, we must extrapolate. And our resources are meagre. Rawls's two great works A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism - both survive only in fragments; and virtually all of the (apparently once voluminous) scholarly commentary is now lost. So the task of interpreting Rawls for our broken world leaves much scope for experiment, speculation and disagreement. Today, three graduate students whose dissertations discuss Rawls offer their different perspectives. As ever, Ishall anonymize everyone for the transcript. And remember, I have asked them to speculate about what Rawls might have said, so they are not necessarily presentingtheir own views.

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1. A broken original position

Good afternoon! My thesis develops a Rawlsian original position for our broken world. My starting-point is a great quote I found

STUDENT A:

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from one self-described affluent fldisciple" of Rawls: "We take for granted that today only a fool would not want to live in such a society". Astonishingly, he was talking about liberal democracy! (I know: how myopic is that?) But, actually, he was right about Rawls. Rawls never really defended liberal democracy. He built a presumption in favour of democratic institutions into his original position. Rawls explored liberal democracy. He began with affluent common-sense knowledge and considered moral judgement, and sought to bring them into reflective equilibrium. That got me thinking. What are our paradigms of justice or injustice? What institutions do we take for granted? To follow Rawls today, we must seek our own reflective equilibrium. We must design principles of justice for our society, built around our own paradigms. The specific principles and institutions that Rawls dreamt up in his affluent world are no use to us, but perhaps we can borrow his method. We need to find our own considered moral judgements. QUESTION: But people passionately disagree about so many moral issues. Isn't it presumptuous to speak about "our" considered moral judgements? STUDENT A: Great question! Obviously, we cannot hope to design an original position that captures all contemporary moral opinions. But then Rawls didn't try to capture all afluent views either. (Remember, affluent society was even more morally pluralist than our own. Think of Nozick, after all, who explicitly rejected so many of Rawls's central ideas.) Rawls's original position modelled controversial moral ideals. But, on the other hand, Rawls did try to start with some universally accepted moral beliefs. His paradigm injustice was slavery. No just principle can permit slavery; and the original position must rule it out. Abhorrence of slavery was - apparently - a defining feature of Rawls's own society, at least among reasonable people. (That's involuntary slavery, of course, not the voluntary slavery that Nozick supported.) And, as his disciple noted, Rawls also took for granted a commitment to democracy. QUESTION: Well we don't share that commitment! STUDENT A: NO, of course not. But my hypothesis is that we can find our considered moral judgements - our fixed moral points - by doing what

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Rawls did. We should look to our central social institution: the survival lottery. For us, this is what epitomizes fairness in unfavourable conditions. (How do we teach children about fairness? By explaining the survival lottery to them.) Rawls used his original position to design ideal liberal-democratic institutions. Similarly, we want our original position to help design a survival lottery. We don't ask whether to have a lottery. (Like Rawls's disciple, we say, "Only a fool would ask that question!") We seek a theory of justice for a broken-worldsociety organized around a fair social lottery. QUESTION: But different societies have different lotteries. How do you decide which lottery to choose? STUDENTA: Like Rawls, I try to avoid most real-life details. But I do tentatively draw some general conclusions. To explain them, I need to tell you more about my new original position. Any original position models fairness using self-interestedchoice behind a veil of ignorance. Ifollow Rawls and assume the parties use the maximin decision procedure. QUESTION: But that's absurd. We all know that maximin cannot work in a broken world. How can you focus on the worst off when not everyone can survive?Whatever you choose, someone must die. STUDENT A: I agree that maximin would be impossible if we borrowed Rawls's account of how the parties think. But I use the survival lottery to develop a new account, one where maximin does make sense. Rawls spoke about distributions of bundles of primary goods. He argued that a fair distribution gives everyone a bundle that is adequate for a worthwhile life. That's impossibletoday. A better picturefor us is of tickets in a lottery over bundles of primary goods. For philosophical purposes, of course, "ticket" and "lottery" are metaphors, as were Rawls's "bundles" and "goods". Affluent officials didn't literally hand out baskets of good things! In my new broken original position, you know you must accept some survival lottery, and you want one where everyone has some chance of survival. Specifically, you focus on the value of the least valuable ticket; and you seek a lottery where you are relaxed about the removal of the veil of ignorance. QUESTION: What do you mean "relaxed"? STUDENT A: "Relaxed" is a new technical term I've introduced. (Affluent philosophers were always making up new jargon.) To illustrate it, let's

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use a standard affluent example. Suppose, in the original position, you are told that your society has an established religion. You are not relaxed. You very much hope that you belong to that religion. Next, suppose your society enjoys perfect religious freedom. Now you are relaxed about your religion. (If religion doesn't matter to you, pick something that does.) If you are relaxed about all aspects of the veil of ignorance, then you have chosen principles that treat everyone fairly. QUESTION: Your original position still sounds unreasonably risk averse. STUDENT A: Perhaps, but remember that Rawls's own use of maximin was also controversial. If we follow his underlying thought that fairness involves maximizing the position of the worst off, then we should also borrow his commitment to maximin and see where it leads. To mirror Rawls's commitment to the worst off, we focus on each lottery's guaranteed ticket. QUESTION: SO which lottery will your parties choose? STUDENT A: The parties choose principles of justice, not specific lotteries. I'm working on new principles modelled on Rawls's general conception of justice. (This is a vague idea, mentioned in some fragments, that is apparently supposed to apply even in unfavourable conditions.) This part of my thesis is still very tentative, but here is a first approximation: Broken general conception (BGC): Each person is to receive the most valuable ticket (in a lottery over bundles of social primary goods) that can be guaranteed for all, unless an unequal distribution of tickets is to everyone's advantage.

But doesn't that just follow from your assumptions about the motivations of the parties? STUDENT A: Yes it does. But that is exactly what Rawls did. His original position was designed to show why his principles are just. Mine is designed to show you why BGC is the best option. Under BGC, your ticket has a guaranteed value for you - whatever your conception of the good. You will reject Rawls's alternatives- perfectionism, egalitarianism, utilitarianism- because none offers the same guarantee. If you want to get one of those alternatives instead, then you need to design a different - and less Rawlsian- original position. QUESTION:

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2. A Rawldan survival lottery

My thesis is more down-to-earth. It is primarily a history of the different survival lotteries that have been implemented since the onset of the dark times. The historical details are not relevant to your course. (And, anyway, most of them are classified.) But my thesis does end with a brief normative coda, where I evaluate different lotteries using Rawls's theory of justice. And that is what I want to discuss today. (Other members of our research team are using different normative theories to evaluate survival lotteries. For instance, in an earlier class I think you heard from my colleague who is working on institutional utilitarianism.) We must first decide what a Rawlsian survival lottery would look like. That is a very broad question, so I focus on one key contemporary issue. As many of you know, a central theoretical - and practical - puzzle in lottery design is the treatment of risk. So I ask what Rawls might teach us about that. QUESTION: Didn't Rawls introduce the veil of ignorance to eliminate risk? Because you don't know who you are, you won't take any risks. STUDENT 8: Yes, but I'm interested in a particular kind of risk that cannot be eliminated in our broken world, one that Rawls ignores. This is the risk of death. Today, as in Rawls's own decadent liberal society, people have different values, priorities and goals. But we also differ among ourselves in a new way: in our responses to survival bottlenecks where not all can survive. Of course, everyone wants to both survive and flourish. But different people have different attitudes to risk; and we balance the competing goods of survival, health, liberty and accomplishment very differently. Risk-averse ascetics are content with modest bundles of primary goods, while ambitious gamblers accept a lower possibility of surviving at a higher level of wealth. Today, many societies balance risk and flourishing collectively, by adopting and enforcing an official conception of the good. There is much to be said for this uniformity. But a Rawlsian liberal would acknowledge a plurality of reasonable conceptions, and try to treat them all fairly within a single lottery. QUESTION: Surely that's impossible! A fair survival lottery must have the same risk for everyone. STUDENT B:

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might think so. But, actually, the theoretical possibility of a fair lottery offering differential risks has long been recognized. QUESTION: I heard that some lotteries even operate like that! STUDENT B: I can't comment on that. But perhaps, after class, you could tell me where you heard it. QUESTION: I still don't see what is unfair about a uniform risk. If the risk is the same for everyone, surely the lottery must be fair. STUDENTB: Rawls would have disputed that. Consider two possible lotteries: one where everyone has a 90 per cent chance of bare survival; and another where everyone has an 80 per cent chance of a much better life. Now ask STUDENT A'S question: "Which lottery offers the better guaranteed ticket?" How do we balance survival against flourishing? What are our priorities among primary goods? People disagree. And neither lottery is fair to those with different priorities. A fairer lottery would allocate flexible tickets, where individuals can choose their own payoff matrix. Surely liberals should leave people to decide for themselves. QUESTION: But we're not liberals! STUDENT B: Not in all lifestyle choices, of course not. But we might agree with Rawls that a fair lottery should equalize the value of all tickets, regardless of the person's conception of the good. QUESTION: But if the tickets are identical, surely they are all equally valuable. STUDENTB: Not necessarily. One mark of unfairness is that someone prefers another person's ticket. Identical tickets avoid that kind of unfairness. But a different unfairness arises when one person reasonably resents another person's situation. If our tickets are identical, but your personal values make that ticket more appealing to you, then I may reasonably resent this. In a fair lottery, there should be no resentment. QUESTION: Can you give us an example? STUDENT B: Sure. Let's imagine a ridiculously oversimplified case, just as affluent philosophers always did. Suppose there are two people. Ascetic Alan only wants a bare minimum of resources, but he really wants to survive so that he can spend his life meditating in a cave. Profligate Paula wants to have as many resources as possible, and is willing to risk death to get them. Alan would prefer near-certain

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survival in abject poverty, while Paula prefers a smaller chance at a life of luxury. Now imagine a lottery that maximizes survival, but offers a very low quality of life. Under this lottery, Alan is much happier than Paula. Paula might resent this. She might complain that the lottery designers have not respected her values. QUESTION: But how can Rawis allow different risks? Doesn't he stipulate one - very extreme - attitude to risk? STUDENT6: Excellent question! We need to distinguish your motivations in the original position from your motivations in real life. In the original position, you are worried about the fit between your conception of the good and your lottery ticket. You choose the principle that offers the best worst-fit: the one with the best "guarantee", as STUDENTA puts it. One unknown aspect of your conception of the good is your real-life attitude to risk. You know that, while you might be very risk averse, you might also be a risk-taker. You don't want to end up as a risk-taker in a risk-averse society, or vice versa. To be risk averse in the original position, you must not privilege real-life risk aversion! QUESTION: SO what's the solution? STUDENT 6: Simple. If people have different attitudes to risk, why not give them different tickets? Suppose you know the distribution of values within your society. You can then design a lottery with different tickets tailored to different conceptions of the good. Consider a very simple society with two groups: risk-averse ascetics and ambitious gamblers. Your lottery has two types of ticket: Safe (high probability of a small bundle) and Risky (lower probability of a larger bundle). People choose the ticket they want. QUESTION: But how do you know when you've got it right? Surely, in practice, any such lottery will end up favouring one group over the other. STUDENT 6: TOtest your lottery behind the veil of ignorance, you should try to imagine living in a society governed by that lottery. Suppose you find yourself hoping you will be in one group rather than the other. Behind the veil of ignorance, you are not relaxed, to borrow another of STUDENTA'S terminologicalinnovations. So you redesign the lottery, making the ticket you wish to avoid more valuable. (Perhaps you made Safe tickets too safe or Risky ones too generous.) Eventually, you reach

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an equilibrium where you are genuinely relaxed about removing the veil. You have now designed a fair lottery. QUESTION:YOU said we should imagine a society governed by this strange lottery. But what kind of society would that be?What are we supposed to imagine? STUDENTB: One possibility is a class-based society with two groups: workers and aristocrats. Aristocrats have a better life, but they are disproportionately sacrificed whenever the population must be reduced. Unlike the class-based societies of the distant past, this society would lack resentment and envy. With their different values and attitudes to risk, everyone is equally content with her lot. Workers don't want to trade places with aristocrats, or vice versa. The society is thus both just and stable. QUESTION: But any real human society is much more complicated. There are many different groups with very different attitudes. I don't see how anyone could really design a specific lottery within the original position. STUDENTB: Maybe not. But perhaps you can use the original position to design a fair lottery-design procedure to be implemented in the real world. Your procedure is fair ifyou are relaxed about living in a society governed by that procedure. QUESTION: HOWcould anyone be relaxed about a survival lottery? STUDENTB: YOU must remember that "relaxed" is a term of art here. You are relaxed only about removing the veil of ignorance. Real life in a broken-worldsociety is never likely to be particularly relaxed. QUESTION: What would this lottery-design procedure look like? STUDENTB: I'm still working on that. I'm trying to model the lottery-design procedure on Rawls's image of a constitutional convention where delegates choose political institutions to implement the principles of justice they have chosen in the original position. (Apparently Rawls himself was borrowing from some real-life convention, but nothing shows up in the historical record.) In theory, the procedure might resemble Rawls's liberal-democratic institutions, or some brokenworld institution, or something entirely new. What do you think it would look like?

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3. Reasonable pluralism in a broken world My thesis explores Rawls's puzzling notion of reasonable pluralism, and what it might mean for us. My original plan was to design a complete original position for our broken world, like STUDENT A. But then Igot stuck on one simple question: what should the parties know about climate change? The problem is that different fragments of Rawls point in different directions. On the one hand, the parties have knowledge of natural science. So presumably they do know about the impact of human activities (such as the consumption of fossil fuels or deforestation) on the climate, and the resulting impact on food production, water availability, rising sea levels and so on. And, if our original position is to help answer our questions about justice, it had better be based on true science. But, on the other hand, Rawls insisted that the parties don't know anything about their religious beliefs. And - here's the scary part this religious neutrality was more important for Rawls than scientific knowledge. (Or, at least, he emphasized religious neutrality much more.) But we know that, in our society, some religions deny the very possibility of climate change. (Don't look so shocked! I know such people don't officially exist, but we still need to think about how to deal with them.) So it looks as if the parties can't know about climate change. QUESTION: But that would make the original position useless - if not downright dangerous! STUDENTC: Exactly! Perhaps the sensible thing would have been to abandon my thesis and choose a less controversialtopic. Instead, I decided to delve deeper into Rawls, to see if he has the resources to meet this challenge. QUESTION:Can't you just look at what he said about climate change denial, or other crazy views? STUDENT C: Unfortunately not. The surviving fragments don't include or even mention - any place where Rawls discussed climate change. Nor did he ever systematically address any other affluent issue where popular disagreement about science was directly relevant to political

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theory. So I've had to abandon detailed exegesis and try to follow the spirit of Rawls as best I can. QUESTION: That sounds brave! STUDENTC: Oh dear, I hope not. Anyway, I went back to basics, and asked why Rawls denied the parties any knowledge of religious truth. QUESTION: That's easy. Rawls was obviously one of those sophisticated late-affluent religious sceptics who thought that religious truth is unknowable. STUDENT C: Actually, he wasn't. Rawls was very respectful of religion: much more so than many of his disciples. He didn't assume that religion is false or irrational. But he did believe that a just society must respect the fact of religious pluralism. By placing religioustruth behind the veil of ignorance, we ensure that the parties choose principlesthat treat people fairly whatever their religious beliefs. QUESTION: HOWdoes that help us with climate change? STUDENT C: YOU have to remember that the original position is a moral device designed to modeljustice. My suggestion is that, like Rawls, we should begin by asking what questions of justice are most important to us. Rawls's starting-point - in thinking about religion - was that a just society must treat different believers equally. For us, what is the most important requirement of justice regarding climate change? QUESTION: That a just society must safeguard the lives and liberties of future people? STUDENT C: Exactly! The urgent task of climate justice is to respond to the world as it actually is, not to treat climate science and climate "scepticism" neutrally. And we can borrow from Rawls a neat way to decide which question is more urgent. Ask yourself, would you rather be an unreasonable present person whose eccentric views are ignored, or a future person whose life is destroyed by climate change? QUESTION: But how does this fit with Rawls's liberalism? If you give the parties knowledge of their religion, aren't you abandoning his pluralism? Even in Rawls's day there were crazy religions that rejected science. So presumably his parties never knew what they believed about anything! STUDENT C: I don't think Rawls wanted to go that far. According to some tantalizing fragments, Rawls distinguished between reasonable and

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unreasonable pluralism. Reasonable pluralism is a good thing that will flourish in the just society. This was a founding assumption of Rawls's political liberalism. But unreasonable pluralism is not a good thing. QUESTION: What makes something unreasonable? Does this mean that Rawls would have silenced people with false beliefs? Finally he's said something sensible! STUDENT C: I'm afraid, if that's what you're after, you might find Rawls a disappointment. He used "reasonable" and "unreasonable" in a very specific way. I'm still piecing it together, but here's how I think it goes. For Rawls, the notion of "the reasonable" was not epistemological but political. QUESTION: What on earth does that mean? STUDENT C: It seems to mean this. An unreasonable person is not one who believes crazy things, but one who presents those crazy views in public debate about basic political or constitutional questions, as if they provided reasons that everyone else should accept. QUESTION:Can you give us an example? STUDENT C: Sure. In affluent society, different religious groups had different sacred days of rest: for some it was Friday, for others Saturday and so on. Choosing not to work on Friday because it is my holy day is reasonable. That is a choice about my personal life. But if I were to insist that no one should work on Friday, just because it is my holy day, then that would be unreasonable. I cannot expect other people to regard my religious beliefs as giving them reasons to act. QUESTION: Are you seriously saying that affluent people took a whole day of rest every week? What luxury! STUDENTC: Apparently so, although perhaps it was only the very wealthy who could afford to take the whole day. QUESTION:SO there could be unreasonable religions? STUDENTC: Exactly. And what makes a religion unreasonable is not what it believes, but rather that it presents its own eccentric scientific beliefs as a more appropriate basis for political deliberation than the consensus of expert opinion. QUESTION:Why is that unreasonable? STUDENT C: Because you can't expect other people to be governed by your crazy views!

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QUESTION: What happens to these unreasonable people?

Astonishingly, very little. Rawls never suggested that the unreasonable person should be punished. She is not shot, bullied or silenced. She is even allowed to speak. She just fails to command an audience. QUESTION: That sounds very naive. Surely these people are too dangerous to be allowed to speak. STUDENT C: I know! Still, we mustn't judge Rawls too harshly. Perhaps there are lost texts where he gave the unreasonable people what we all know they deserve. QUESTION: SO what's the lesson for the design of the original position? STUDENT C: In the original position, you know that - in the real world your beliefs might be false. This is often harmless. When it is, you presumably want to be left alone to pursue your conception of the good. But climate-change-denying religion is not harmless. When we design our original position, we must decide whether dangerous ignorance is worse than having your (false) religion curtailed by the state. We must stipulate one way or the other. (I'm sure you all know the right answer here, but the alternative is worthy of hypothetical private study, if only to confirm how dangerous it would be.) TEACHER: Thanks to our three guests for their very provocative talks! This concludes our study of Rawls and the social-contract tradition. Next week, we embark on our final topic: the affluent commitment to democracy. STUDENT C:

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Affluent philosophers lived in liberal democracies. They also largely approved of this form of social organization. Both their experience and their attitude were historical anomalies. Pre-affluent societies were resolutely undemocratic. And while pre-affluent political philosophy was dominated by the question of who should rule, virtually no one defended anything remotely resembling affluent-style democracy. Hobbes and Locke disagreed over the best system of government. But they both distanced themselves from radical democratic ideas such as the notion that men without property (or any woman) should be allowed to vote. By Rawls's time, these once-radical ideas were almost universally accepted. In this lecture, we explore the affluent justification of democracy. We also draw together themes from all previous parts of the course. Democratic assumptions and ideals permeated affluent philosophy. Libertarians, utilitarians and social-contracttheorists each had their own story about democracy's value and legitimacy. If we were to follow our earlier practice, we would close this part of the course with questions such as the following. Does democracy have any lessons for our broken world? Is majority rule only appropriate in

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favourable conditions, or could voting be legitimate today? If so, under what constraints?Affluent people were tragically unworthy of their democratic responsibilities. Are we any better? What have we learnt from their mistakes? However, we must tread carefully here. The thinkers and theories we encountered in earlier lectures are largely forgotten today, even among scholars. When we apply libertarianism, utilitarianism or social contract to our broken world, everyone sees this as a harmless academic exercise. Democracy is quite different. Everyone knows that word, and the dangerous, future-destroying anarchy it symbolized. We cannot openly discuss the names of prominent affluent democrats (except those we have already met in earlier lectures), and we dare not ask whether democracy has any place in our broken world. When my superiors approved this course, this is where they drew the line.

1. What is democracy? Democracy meant rule by the people. It was contrasted with rule by a king or queen (monarchy); rule by a small elite (aristocracy/oligarchy); rule by religious leaders (theocracy); or rule by a dictator (despotism). The basic democratic ideal is that those who are ruled should also be the rulers. A democratic community is self-governing. Democracy first emerged in the small city state of Athens, some 2,500 years before the affluent age. (Most scholars place this ancient city somewhere on the Western fringes of the Eurasian land mass, but its precise location remains a mystery.) Athenian democracy was very limited. Sixty per cent of the adult population were slaves. They were excluded from democratic self-government, as were women and "foreigners" (people from other cities). Democracy began to re-emerge in the age of Hobbes and Locke. Over the next three centuries, affluent society became progressively more democratic. Elected legislatures acquired more power at the expense of hereditary monarchs or other aristocratic rulers, and more people were allowed to vote. In late-affluent democratic societies, all adult citizens could vote. (And, even more astonishingly, everyone's vote counted equally!)

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Voting was central to affluent democracy. Affluent philosophers defined a democratic procedure as one that gives each person equal input into a decision. Suppose our group must perform some task together. We decide democratically whether everyone should get a chance to speak, to contribute ideas and to formulate proposals. Ideally, we continue until we all agree. But suppose we never agree. (Or perhaps we must decide before we can achieve unanimity.) This is where voting comes in. For affluent philosophers, majority rule was the natural response to disagreement. Each person has one vote, and the most popular proposal wins. Even this simple example brings out several conflicting democratic ideals: equality, participation, deliberation, voting and majority rule. A key affluent question was whether majority voting is always the most democratic option. Not only procedures, but also institutions, constitutions or whole societies were described as "democratic". A democratic institution is one that embodies democratic values. (Bentham, Mill and Rawls each developed their own ideal democratic institutions.) In a democratic constitution, all public institutions (Rawls's "basic structure") will reflect democratic values. Affluent philosophers focused on idealizations of two actual democratic constitutions. Under majoritarianism, there are no constraints on majority rule, and the elected legislature has all legitimate political authority. (This legislature is a Hobbesian sovereign.) Constitutionalists preferred an entrenched bill of rights (interpreted by independentjudges) that constrains majority rule. In a very small group, each individualcan vote on every policy question. But affluent societies contained tens of millions of people. Direct democracy was not practical. Instead, these societies were all representative democracies. Individual citizens elected a legislature that governed on their behalf. (These representatives were elected in a bewilderingvariety of ways. Fortunately, such arcane historical details do not concern us in this course.) Affluent people used "democratic" both descriptively and normatively. When affluent philosophers said they lived in democratic states, this was descriptive. They shared their world with non-democraticstates, typically ruled by dictators or military elites. But "democracy" also had an aspirational meaning. When Rawls said that his theory of justice was designed "for a democratic society", this elusive notion combined descriptive and

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normative elements. In a democratic society, democratic ideals should inform not only public institutions, but also the motivations and values of individual citizens. Rawls inspired a school of affluent philosophers known as deliberative democrats. They argued that affluent democratic states were not true democratic societies, because they failed to live up to their own democratic ideals.

2. Instrumental arguments

Affluent philosophers offered many arguments for democracy. Some defended actual affluent practice, while others supported abstract democratic ideals. Most arguments were either instrumental(democracy is the best form of government because it producesthe best results) or intrinsic (democracy is the only legitimate authority because it alone embodies the values of equality and self-government). Utilitarians offered the most straightforward instrumental argument. Democracy is the best form of government because it best promotes human well-being. This argument was explicitly comparative. Two salient comparisonswere between democracy and despotism, and between competing affluent democratic constitutions. (As a take-home exercise, you might use the utilitarian criterion to compare recent systems of government from our broken world.) To compare democracy and despotism, utilitarians extended their standard story about freedom (see Lecture 7). A despotic prescriptive utilitarian government might seem best. (Think of a Hobbesian sovereign who compels everyone, on pain of death, to promote human happiness.) However, given human nature, things will actually go much better if people are left to govern themselves, just as the moderate liberal codes developed by affluent rule utilitarians are better than the very demanding prescriptive morality of act utilitarianism. (Wouldyou really be happy living under a fanatical utilitarian absolute monarch?) Utilitarians assumed that governments should maximize well-being. This normative premise was very controversial. Many affluent democrats sought less controversial starting-points. Some suggested that utility is one measure of good government. If democracy promotes well-being,

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this places the burden of proof on its opponents. Others argued that any acceptable government must protect basic human interests: food, shelter, education, health care and so on. If democracy alone satisfiesthis requirement, then it is the only acceptable way to govern. Non-utilitarians argued instead that the virtue of democracy is not its contribution to human happiness, but i t s promotion of some other value such as equality, liberty or rights. Suppose we agree how to evaluate outcomes. We must then ask whether democracy actually produces good results. Early utilitarians such as Bentham and Mill - wrote before democracy was established. So they could not cite the actual successes of democracy. Instead, they offered theoretical reasons why we should expect democracy to produce good results. Bentham appealed especially to self-interest and expertise. The primary human motivation is self-interest. It would be nice if rulers spontaneously served the public interest. But in the real world, public policy inevitably serves the interests of those who control it. If you want policies that serve everyone's interests, you must give everyone a vote. (Bentham drew on his own personal experience here. He spent many years trying to interest the absolute rulers of his day in his various schemes for utilitarian improvement, without success.) Bentham also argued that in any human society, people have different useful expertise. Decisions made by small isolated elites are less reliable than those that draw on everyone's expertise. Democracy is the best way to pool a community's intellectual resources. Mill offered an additional argument. Philosophers often assumed that a benevolent dictator would do better than democracy. Mill pointed out that such a godlike figure is impossible. But he went on to argue that benevolent dictatorship is undesirable, as well as unattainable. Dictators inevitably render their subjects entirely passive. By contrast, a good political system should improve people, training them to exercise judgement and self-government. (As we saw in Lecture 9, Mill regarded these capacities as necessary preconditions for a truly worthwhile human life.) In Mill's own pre-affluent industrial society, most people's daily lives offered few opportunitiesto exercise judgement about important matters. Voting would provide that opportunity. Democratic citizens would be better and happier human beings.

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Mill's commitment to democracy was limited. He argued that democracy needs citizens who can already make decisions and plan their own lives responsibly. Democratic institutions are appropriate only once a society has reached a certain level of development. Mill notoriously advocated liberal democracy in his own nation while working for a company that despotically ruled another country. Hisjustification? His compatriots were ready for democracy, while those he ruled were not. As we saw in Lecture 9, Mill was very optimistic about human nature. Sadly, his vision of workers studiously applying themselves to the serious business of democratic deliberation was refuted by subsequent history. Actual affluent democratic practice was characterized by very low voter turnouts, widespread ignorance of (and disengagement with) politics, political elites serving powerful interests and the persecution of minorities. Affluent workers paid closer attention to celebrity mating rituals and reality television than to affairs of state. (HISTORICAL NOTE: "Celebrities" were talentless individuals famous for no discernible reason who appear to have mated only with one another. "Reality television" was apparently some form of entertainment. Although references abound in late-affluent sources, modern scholars are at a loss, as all alleged explanations of this phenomenon are simply too ridiculous to believe.) Given their apathy and their failure to care for future people - we might ask whether affluent people were themselves sufficiently civilizedto be trusted with democracy. Later utilitarians supplemented these theoretical arguments with direct empirical evidence. One affluent thinker made the striking claim that democracy reliably prevents famine, while despotism does not. (Many affluent students found this result unimpressive, as the possible threat of famine did not enter their thoughts. But imagine the delight that would greet such a guarantee today!) Bentham's arguments helped explain how democracy achieved this result. A government with incentives and information will avoid famine. A government without incentives and information will not. Democratic governments have information and incentives, while non-democratic regimes do not. If there is a famine, democratic citizens will find out, and elect a new government. (On this model, democracy includes a free press, so no government can hide its failures.) By contrast, despots do not care if some people starve, and their officials are too afraid to tell them what is really happening.

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This argument assumed, of course, that governments have the power to prevent famine. In the affluent world, where famine resulted primarily from localized market failure, this was plausible. But not today. In a broken world, where famine is unavoidable, what new guarantee might democracy offer? Other affluent instrumental arguments cited statistical correlations between democracy and a wide variety of good things, such as economic growth, equality, literacy, liberty or respect for civil rights. In each case, it was argued that democracy scored better than despotism. If we applied these criteria today, how would different regimes compare? Most affluent philosophers agreed that democracy trumps despotism. (They did not take much persuading! Rawls's disciple spoke for many when he said that "only a fool" would want to live under despotic rule.) They then used instrumental arguments to support specific types of democracy. Mill himself offered a utilitarian defence of representative democracy against direct democracy. He sought to reassure his contemporaries that democratic government need not lead to irrational "mob rule". (Mill also defended the eminently sensible idea that, to prevent mob rule, better educated citizens should be given extra votes. While popular with philosophers, this suggestion never caught on among their less-educated fellow citizens.) Affluent constitutionalists offered instrumental arguments against majoritarianism. Some of these arguments related to stability, or other intergenerational issues. We examine those arguments in the next lecture. The main intra-generational objections to majoritarianism concerned minority rights. Imagine a society divided into two groups, one larger than the other. Each group has a distinct identity, with its own values, religion, conception of the good and theory of justice. Decisions are made by majority rule, and the minority always lose. Every aspect of public life reflects the majority worldview. Public holidays always coincide with majority religious festivals, while minority folk must work through their holy days. Legally recognized forms of property, marriage and education, built on majority models, inevitably fail to capture (or even accommodate) minority lifestyles. If the majority happen to find them "offensive" or "threateningtf, then minority practices might even be outlawed. (This was what Mill meant by "the tyranny of the majority".)

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When the minority resist, majority legislators enact draconian public safety laws and imprison minority members without trial (or worse). At the extreme, a democratically elected government might even embark on a programme of deportation or genocide against a "troublesome" minority group. This was not a paranoid fantasy. All these abuses of majority power occurred in affluent (or pre-affluent) democracies. You might think this was bad news for democracy perse. But affluent philosophers saw these abuses primarily as problems to be solved within the theory of democracy. (And, in fairness to them, in the affluent age all these bad things were even more likely to occur in a despotic regime whose ruler belonged to the majority ethnic or religious group.) Constitutionalists argued that, while majoritarianism is a better protector of minority rights than despotism, it is far from perfect. They promised something much better. They would guarantee basic rights by writing them into an entrenched bill of rights. This argument often took a Rawlsian form, as explored in Lecture 13. If Rawls's liberty principle is entrenched, then no one's freedom of conscience, association or speech will ever be threatened by any elected legislature. Majoritarians rejected the comparative empirical claim that constitutionalism offers better protection for minority rights. They pointed out that by itself a written constitution guarantees nothing. Majoritarians cited real-life affluent examples here: many affluent constitutions prohibited torture while governments tortured in secret; and constitutional guarantees of adequate nutrition never fed anyone. (We might add the numerous affluent treaties and constitutions that guaranteed the rights of future people!) Majoritariansinsisted on comparingactualconstitutional arrangements, to see what worked best in practice. They then argued that affluent empirical evidence was, at best, inconclusive. This debate often ended in stalemate. Philosophers from different democratic states each believed that their particular constitutional tradition best promoted true democratic values. Meanwhile, deliberative democrats criticized both sides. They argued that all existing democracies did a bad job of protecting minority rights, and that wholesale moral transformation was essential to eliminate the many subtle barriers to full participation by disadvantaged minorities.

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3. Intrinsic arguments Instrumental arguments measured democracy against some predefined evaluative standard. But all such standards were controversial. Other affluent philosophers argued that, irrespective of results, democracy is the only legitimate government because it alone embodies equal selfgovernment. Only democracy treats each person fairly. This argument took up a challenge we first encountered with Hobbes and Locke. How can political authority ever be justified? Any government demands obedience from individuals. By what right does it demandthis? What justifies the imposition by force (implicit or explicit) of one person's will on another? The affluent democratic answer was that legitimate authority requires everyone's equal consent, and only democracy provides that consent. Affluent democrats regarded each person as an independent moral agent, strivingto live her life in accordance with her own values. Any exercise of authority over such an agent - perhaps forcing her to act against her own values - must be justified to her. By contrast, many pre-affluent philosophers had defended natural authority: some deserve to rule others. For the ancient Athenian philosopherAristotle, naturalsubordination justified both slavery and political authority. Affluent philosophers all rejected any natural superiority. They were committed to equality. People are morally equal, and each has an equal right to govern herself. Why did affluent people believe in human equality?Some searched for a natural property that everyone possessesto the same degree. But what is that property: intelligence, rationality, compassion, wisdom, strength? What about the vast differences between human beings? (Another perennial puzzle was posed by non-human animals that are as intelligent as some humans. Some affluent radicals even argued that dolphins and chimpanzees deserve to vote!) Many pre-affluent philosophers (such as Locke) had argued that people have equal worth because each is equally created in God's image. Everyone receives an equal right to selfgovernment as a gift from God. But, as we saw in our discussion of Rawls, later affluent philosophers were very reluctant to basejustice on religion. Most affluent philosophers simply treated egalitarianism as a default. Equality was a basic commitment of democratic society. We should

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note that this particular egalitarian claim was very specific. The intrinsic argument did not assume that people are equal in all morally relevant respects. Some are smarter, wiser, kinder or nobler than others. Nor did this argument necessarily entail any commitment to an egalitarian distribution of resources. The central claim was only that each person is (equally) a moral agent with her own life to lead. The next task for affluent democrats was to justify authority among equals. One popular pre-affluent answer had been divine authority: I rule because God made me king. But - as Hobbes and his contemporaries knew only too well - claims to divine authority are easy to make and impossible to prove. Others claimed authority based on their special insight into morality, truth or justice: I should rule because I know (better than you) how your life should be lived. This was where affluent democrats insisted on equality. No one is an expert at how life should be lived. (You might wonder how, having denied that anyone has any moral expertise, affluent philosophers justified their own continued employment. Presumably they offered powerful arguments that convinced their contemporaries. Sadly, those arguments are now lost.) Affluent democrats concluded that any justification not based on consent must inevitably rely on controversial premises that some citizens can reasonably reject. Consent thus emerges as the only viable alternative. How did affluent philosophers get from individual consent to legitimate government? In Hobbes's simple model, we all consent to the rule of the same sovereign. Locke also strived for unanimity. (They both ignored those pesky "irrationalJ' people who prefer the state of nature!) Affluent democrats -following Rawls - regarded unanimity as unattainable. They accepted that, as reasonable people disagree about all manner of moral, religious and metaphysics topics, they are unlikely to all want either the same rulers or the same policies. The solution was to seek agreement on a fair procedure. Imagine a group deciding what game to play. They discuss the matter, each putting forward her own preferences and reasons. But they never agree. If they wait for unanimity, they will not play at all: a result that no one wants. How might they proceed? Affluent democrats argued that majority rule is the obviously fair procedure. It alone gives each person an equal input into the decision. Any alternative would give some people's opinions

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more weight than others. Similarly, suppose we must decide some contested public-policy question, and we cannot agree. Again, majority vote is the fairest procedure. People who disagree about results can still agree about fairness. If everyone recognizes equality, then no one will either accept less than an equal input into decision-making, or insist on a greater share of influence. Affluent democrats concluded that all reasonable people will consent to democracy. Some argued that the history of the affluent age demonstrated that people do consent to democracy. Societies that were allowed to choose their own system of government consistently opted for democracy. People in non-democratic states, observing that life was much better in democratic states, demanded democracy for themselves. They chose democracy in part because they believed it would promote their welfare, protect their interests, save them from famine and develop their capacity for self-government. (The instrumental and intrinsic arguments for democracy thus reinforced one another.) Pre-affluent people had feared that democracy would destroy the social fabric, but late-affluent people knew better. (Or so the story went.) People consent to all sorts of things. It is always possiblethat everyone will consent to democracy. But what if some people do not? Affluent people often sincerely disagreed, in particular cases, whether voting was the fair procedure. For instance, no true (Nozick-style) libertarian ever voluntarily consented to any affluent democratic welfare state. They insisted that forced taxation (the basis of every affluent democracy) always violates property rights, and that without universal consent no authority is ever legitimate. Libertarians did not seek fair procedures. They sharply separated justice from fairness. (Libertarians were not Rawlsiansl) They argued that a just state only ever has one job: to protect rights. Some affluent democrats offered instrumental replies to the libertarian. They argued that basic needs trump individual consent. It would be nice to get Nozick's consent, but other things are simply more important. Many affluent democrats were not satisfied with this reply. They argued that majority rule constitutes consent. When people disagree, and unanimity is impossible, this is how the people give their consent. When affluent democratic governments taxed people, or conscripted them to die

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in foreign wars, or allocated scarce medical resources so that some died while others lived, they did so with the people's consent. Libertarianswere outraged: "How can you abandon individual consent? Why retreat to this dangerous mystic talk of 'the people's consent'? The demands of justice are clear. The just state must treat individual property rights as inviolable. Who are you to take my property without my consent?" Democrats replied: "We disagree about justice. By insisting on your interpretation of justice - your view of your rights - you seek to impose your view on the rest of us. Who are you to determine what justice is?" Affluent libertarians asked whether the government could legitimately appropriate a person's property without her consent. This question suggested a default answer: it cannot. Affluent democrats asked what principles of justice should guide our life together. They argued that this question has no natural default answer. Democrats saw no reason to presume libertarianism, or utilitarianism, or Rawls's liberalism, or any other view. Faced with disagreement, equality demands democratic deliberation, followed by a vote. As with the instrumental argument, most affluent philosophers were easily persuaded that legitimacy favoured democracy over despotism. They disagreed over which democratic constitution best captures the people's consent. Is majority rule appropriate always and everywhere? Or does legitimacy demand something more? (And, if so, what?) Constitutionalists argued that voting expresses consent only if people are free and equal, and that requires an entrenched bill of rights. Unless everyone's rights are protected, majority rule has no democratic legitimacy. Majoritarians replied that affluent people disagreed about legitimacy. Constitutionalists wanted their particular (minority) view of legitimacyto prevail. But surely it is more democratic to follow the majority view, by allowing the legislature to decide constitutionalmatters. Some constitutionalists then replied that entrenchment is necessary to prevent unjustfuture decisions. (Some prescient affluent philosophers feared that their fellow citizens' commitment to justice would fail in harsher future times.) We return to this issue in the next lecture. Majoritarians pictured democracy as a site of reasonable disagreement about justice. This was an extremely idealized picture. Affluent

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deliberative democrats argued that no democratic constitution, on its own, can ever be sufficient for true legitimacy. Core democratic values (liberty, equality, minority rights) have to be shared and endorsed throughout the whole population. They argued that affluent democracy was illegitimate, because it did not represent the considered will of the people. Other affluent democrats replied that, for all its faults, actual affluent democracy was the most legitimate feasible alternative. If democracy is only legitimate under certain (very favourable) conditions, then we may wonder if it could ever be legitimate in any world facing a broken future, let alone in our own broken world.

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In affluent democracy, only present people could vote. But present decisions always impact (often very seriously) on future people. Not everyone ajfected by affluent "democratic" decisions was able to vote. But was that really democratic? Did affluent democracies treat future people justly? Our final lecture brings an intergenerational perspective to our assessment of affluent democracy. We first ask whether the standard affluent arguments for democracy make sense in an affluent world with a broken future. We then ask whether affluent philosophers had the conceptual resources to imagine a truly democratic intergenerational community.

1. Does democracy produce good results across generations?

Affluent utilitarians argued that democracy promotes present well-being. But does it also promote the well-being offuture people? We begin with the theoretical arguments of pre-affluent utilitarians. Bentham argued that democracy promotes well-being by giving individuals control over decisions that affect them. But no affluent democracy

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ever offered that control to future people. Democracy has all the defects of despotism, as present people are free to arbitrarily impose their will on future people. On utilitarian grounds, we should expect to find that affluent democracy did not benefit future people. Affluent philosophers recognized this problem. They offered other theoretical arguments why, on the contrary, we should expect democracy to benefit future people. The most common argument cited empirical connections between democracy and capitalism. Affluent philosophers believed that voters will always choose economic policies that make society richer over time, leaving future people materially better off. Such appeals to the productivity of capitalism were a staple of affluent political philosophy, as we have already seen in our discussionsof Nozick, utilitarianism and Rawls. (By contrast, it was argued that a despot will typically deplete the economic resources of the territory he controls, thereby leaving future people worse off.) Another common argument was that, because most people care about their descendants, democratic voters will choose future-friendly policies; whereas a despotic ruler cares only for very few future people, if any. Finally, inspired by Rawls's discussion of stability, many affluent democrats argued that a society is more likely to be democratic tomorrow if it is democratictoday. Affluent democracy took a long time to develop, as it required robust public institutions and widespread commitmentto democratic values. Once established, however, democratic regimes seemed to be relatively stable. If tomorrow's democracy will be a direct benefit to future people, then today's democracy is an indirect benefit. If we assume Rawls's favourable conditions, then these arguments all seem plausible. Affluent democracy was more productive and stable than despotism, and democratic citizens did show more concern for future people than dictators. Perhaps if conditions had remained favourable, democracy would have benefited future people. Unfortunately, the threat of a broken future changed everything. Most obviously, a broken future destroys all arguments based on productivity. It is no longer credible to assume that affluent business as usual (in this case, democracy) will leave future people either better off than present (affluent) people or better off than they would otherwise have been. The second counterfactual comparison is crucial. If democracy

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promotes efficiency, and if efficiency exacerbates climate change, then perhaps a less efficient regime would better serve future people. The efficiency of democracy now cuts both ways. (Affluent people gloried in their ingenuity and invention. But perhaps we would be better off today if they had been less ingenious.) As we saw in our discussion of Rawls in Lecture 14, affluent philosophers also assumed that the productivity of capitalism would eliminate all conflicts between present and future people. They then argued that, in the absence of such conflict, moderate concern for future people is sufficient to ensure intergenerational justice. We now know that this optimism was unfounded. Once intergenerational conflict began to bite, and democratic citizens (raised to expect the state to pander to their whims) were called on to make significant personal sacrifices to save future lives, their intergenerational compassion proved inadequate. Perhaps a dictator would have done better, as he might have valued stability or posthumous fame more than the approval of his self-absorbed present-day subjects. Affluent deliberative democrats argued that democracy is only beneficial or legitimate in a democratic society where citizens have the right motivations. Perhaps those motivations must include a much stronger commitment to intergenerational justice than anything found in the actual affluent world. Drawing on Mill, we might conclude that people who so flagrantly ignored future needs were insufficiently morally developed - too uncivilized - to be trusted with the awesome responsibility of democratic self-government. (Was this selfishness just an accident of affluent society? Or does it reflect a deeper truth about human nature? If so, could democracy ever be viable?) Productivity and prosperity were also essential to any affluent argument based on stability. A regime that benefits present people, is widely perceived to be legitimate, leaves each generation better off than the last and generates adequate intergenerational concern is likely to be stable across generations. (Just imagine how strongly you would support any government that guaranteed all those good things!) Under favourable conditions, democracy met these conditions, while despotism did not. So it was not unreasonable to expect democracy to be more stable. But in the transition to a broken world, democracy's ability to give present people

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what they wanted actually made it less stable, for reasons we explored at the end of Lecture 14. (Democracy could only survive by giving each generation more than the last.) The transition to a broken world also gave rise to a host of new external threats (climate change itself, influxes of climate refugees, invasion by nations desperate for water and so on) that left every actual regime less stable than it had been. To evaluate democracy, affluent philosophers used two types of empirical evidence: short-term statistics comparing regimes over a few decades, and anecdotal evidence about a small number of longer-lasting democratic states. They thus had insufficientdata to predict the long-term fate of democracy, especially given the loss of favourable conditions. Affluent people simply had no idea where democracy would lead. Affluent empirical evidence was also insufficient to resolve disputes between competingdemocratic constitutions. Majoritarians assertedthat their constitution was better for future people because it was more flexible, and thus allowed each generation to adapt as conditions changed. Constitutionalists replied that their model would better protect minority rights into a dangerous and uncertain future. Each side argued that its model would prove to be more stable. But this debate was driven largely by patriotic preferences rather than solid evidence. (And, of course, subsequent history proved that neither model was ven/ stable after all.) Do we have better comparative information today? We know that no democratic regime did very well. But did other regimes of the afluent age really fare any better? Or were there untried alternatives that would have done better? It is easy to construct ideal theories that would do better than actual democracy. After all, any competent dictator who cared for future people would have done a better job than every affluent government. But hoping for a competent benevolent dictator is not a plan, and stipulating such a dictator is not a theory of justice. Is there any system of government that would have been likely to do better? As we look to our own broken future, how should we protect the interests of future people?

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2. Does democracy embody equal self-government across generations?

The second affluent argument was that democracy is legitimate because it alone embodies the equal consent of the governed. The intergenerational objection is obvious. At any point in human history, future people vastly outnumber present people. Any vote among present people can only provide minority consent. Legitimacy requires majority consent. But future people cannot vote now. So majority consent is impossible, and no government can ever be legitimate. Affluent democrats were surprisingly untroubled by this objection. If pressed, they might have offered three replies. The first would have begun with the observation that it is logically impossible to obtain the consent of future people. But legitimacy cannot require what is logically impossible. (Affluent pundits were found of saying that politics is the art of the possible.) A democracy that obtains consent wherever this is possible must count as legitimate. This reply would not have satisfied a committed libertarian. (After all, Nozick, as we saw, did not feel constrained by what is possible.) If universal consent is essential for legitimacy, and some consent is impossible, then that just proves the anarchist claim that no government is legitimate. A second possible reply, on behalf of affluent democracy, would have been that legitimate government requires only the consent of the governed. Only present people are actually governed by today's regime. Future people are only affected by that regime. Therefore, their consent is irrelevant to the question of legitimacy. Perhaps this reply would have succeeded in its own terms. But what about conflicts between legitimacy and other values? Consider those affluent people who believed (correctly!) that their democratic contemporarieswere creating a broken future. Weren't they obliged to privilege the clear demands of intergenerational justice over any concern for present-day (affluent) democratic legitimacy? If these first two replies had failed, the affluent democrat might have appealed, as ever, to stability. Democracy does involve the consent of everyone, including future people. In a stable democracy, each generation votes in its own time. Everyone has the same democratic rights. We

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can imagine what an affluent democratic might have said: "We could not vote 200 years ago, and we won't be voting in 200 years time. Now is our time to vote. Future people will have their own time later. There is no intergenerational unfairness in our democracy." No doubt this reply would have sounded good in an age when it was assumed that favourable conditions would last forever. But we now realize that different political moments impact very differently on future people. Affluent people benefited from pre-affluent decisions, and then greatly harmed their own descendants. They exercised power over the future as no one had before, and as (quite probably) no one ever will again. From where we sit in our broken world, it seems odd to characterize this pattern of intergenerational impacts as one of "equal power". A more fundamental problem is that this imagined affluent reply works only if democratic institutions do actually endure into the future. This would make future stability a necessary condition of present legitimacy. A democratic constitution would be legitimate only if it could guarantee its own indefinite survival. The fact that our societies are not democratic would then prove that affluent democracy was never legitimate! The problem of intergenerational legitimacy seems especially acute for affluent constitutionalism. Imagine that we are constitution designers in the age of affluence. Our task is to write a bill of rights and then design robust institutions to protect those rights. We have just learnt that a legitimate democratic constitution must be stable. So we endeavour to bequeath our bill of rights and its accompanying institutions to our successors. Suppose (incredibly) that we succeed. Deliberations in our successors'future legislature are constrained by our bill of rights. This looks like a great result. But what if there is fundamental moral disagreement across the generations? What if future people have a different view of rights?Perhaps they balance property, liberty and equality differently. (If we believe in moralprogress, then we hope they will balance those values better than we do.) Or perhaps, despite our best efforts, their future world is broken. If we have cast our afluent view of rights in stone, then these poor future people may be unable to move, as every possible legislativeoption will violate the constitution we have left them. (Imagine trying to govern a broken society using a Rawlsian bill of rights that forbids either leaving any basic need unmet or violating any basic liberty!)

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If we are smart, we will design a flexible constitution with mechanisms for future amendment. (All affluent constitutions had some flexibility. In one extreme case, a constitution originally designed to perpetuate slavery was later amended to outlaw it.) But any future amendment must require more than a simple majority. (Otherwise, nothing is really entrenched, there is no constraint on the legislature, and our democratic constitution is actually majoritarian.) We might stipulate that any constitutional amendment requires a two-thirds "super-majority" vote in the legislature. But now a future majority might find itself unwillingly constrained by a constitution that it cannot amend. Affluent majoritarians would have rejected this intergenerational despotism. By what right do we impose our view of future rights on future people themselves? Why not let them choose for themselves? Why should each generation be held back by the "dead hand of the past"? (How would you feel if our distant ancestors, living in the affluent age, had saddled us with a constitution that entrenched one of the theories of justice we have studied in this course?)

3. Enfranchising future people No affluent democratic constitution did well by future people. The problem is that, in any world facing a broken future, decisions taken by present people who are largely self-interested will neither benefit future people nor respect their right to self-governance. Theoretically, the best solution would have been for representatives of future people to directly participate in affluent democratic decisions. This would have given future people all the benefits of democratic participation and eliminated the special problem of intergenerational legitimacy. Some affluent philosophers did develop proposals to appoint representatives for future people. They suggested that seats in the legislature be reserved for future representatives; that special bodies of future representatives be given the right to veto, postpone or query legislation detrimental to future interests; or that special future-oriented officials should issue reports, warnings or advice to voters and legislators regarding the likely future impact of policy proposals.

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These proposals were never seriously implemented. (Philosophers' proposals seldom are.) So we have no empirical evidence of their effectiveness. No affluent democracy seriously tried to enfranchise future people. The obvious barrier is that unless voting booths are sent through holes in the space-time continuum, future people can never choose their own representatives. (Have any of you ever been canvassed by time-travelling affluent candidates?)So who would have represented future people?And how would these anointed representatives have known what was best for us? Many affluent groups and individuals sought to appoint themselves as representatives of future people. All such attempts encountered the perennial affluent problem of disagreement. Consider just two disputes. (There were many more.) Some affluent groups opposed genetically modified crops, while others saw them as essential for future food security. Some thought that affluent economic development was good for future people, while others favoured ecological preservation and climate stability. Of course, in both cases, we know who was correct. But how could affluent people themselves have known? And what could possibly have qualified any particular affluent person to represent future people?

4. Constitutionaliringthe future

A second obvious affluent model was to use an entrenched constitution to force affluent legislaturesto respect future people's rights. This sounds great in theory. But could it ever have been effectively implemented in practice?(We know that it was not implemented. But perhaps that failure was merely contingent.) Imagine, once again, that we are constitution designers in the affluent age. Now we are determined to protect future rights. We must first select those rights. We will have no shortage of suggestions. As we have seen throughout this course, affluent moral theory offered many compelling reasons to protect the interests of future people. Libertarians, utilitarians, feminists, Marxists, liberals, egalitarians, cosmopolitans, communitarians and others all offered their own lists of vital future rights.

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Consider just the first affluent philosophy we encountered in this course. A libertarian might insist that we recognize future property rights. As we saw in the previous lecture, affluent democrats argued that a state can legitimately appropriate a person's property without her consent, so long as most people consent. But, as we have seen in this lecture, this justification necessarily fails for future people. None of them consent. If future people now have property rights, then perhaps those rights sharply restrict the present government's legitimate options. Nozick himself denied that future people have any property now. But, of course, we saw that Nozick himself could not have coped with a broken future. Perhaps a consistent affluent libertarian, faced with a broken future, would have recognized the present rights of future people. She might have said that the earth belongs in common to all generations. All resources are held in trust by one generation for their descendants. Each generation owns a share of each non-renewable resource. Present people can only use their share, and must fully compensate future people for any overuse. More ambitiously, our imaginary affluent libertarian might have granted future people property rights relating to global goods such as a stable climate or ecological diversity. Present environmental damage is always unjust whenever it violates those rights. As affluent constitution designers, we will find that compiling a list of suggested rights is the easy part. Our next task is not easy. We must now draw up a concrete bill of rights to be entrenched. But affluent people disagreed as much about future rights as about their own rights. All the debates of this course will re-emerge. At best, we might hope to get agreement on some very basic set of future needs that must be protected. (Even this would not have satisfied affluent libertarians. But nothing ever did.) Our final task is to choose some present (affluent) people to act as the guardians of future people. But how can we select those people? Suppose a controversy erupts over whether or not some proposed legislation threatens future needs. Who should adjudicate? Affluent people usually entrusted this task to lawyers. But were affluent lawyers really more reliable than anyone else at judging justice, let alone future needs? We can easily imagine climate sceptics persuadinga scientifically ill-informed panel of affluent judges to strike down all attempts to reduce carbon

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emissions! More broadly, how can we be confident that any specific individual, profession or group will be better guardians of the future than the population as a whole?

5. Caring for future people

No affluent democracy either enfranchised future people or offered effective constitutional protection for future rights. Both options faced a dilemma we encountered in the previous lecture. Either present people care about future people, or they do not. If not, then they will never support any amendment to reduce their own influence. On the other hand, if present people do care about future people, then future representatives or guardians are unnecessary. Morally decent voters do not need special experts to make them fulfil their intergenerational obligations. Many late-affluent philosophers and activists argued that the only reliable way to protect future people is to hope that, when electing their own representatives, all voters will take their moral obligations to future people seriously. They argued that voters should choose legislators who represent not their selfish interests, but their moral obligations. Within affluent society, this would have required a moral transformation that tragically never occurred. But perhaps such a transformation was possible. The necessary conceptual tools were available. Affluent moral values could have influenced the deliberations of voters, political parties, elected representatives, civic organizations and other groups. Affluent voters were not always motivated solely by self-interest, and neither were their elected representatives. A political party could have promised to defend the property rights or basic needs of future people. And the personal moral commitments of individual voters could have led them to support such a party. Democracy was only ever a tool for the people to express their will. It never determined that will. The idea that we hold the resources of the earth in trust for future generationswas a very powerful one for many affluent people. They could have applied it to their collective decision-making. Unfortunately for us, and for the future of our world, they did not.

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Reading list

The best place to look for overviews and up-to-the-minute bibliographies is the regularly updated online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP). Two good introductions to contemporary moral philosophy are Stephen Darwall's Philosophical Ethics (1998) and Shelly Kagan's Normative Ethics (1998). Two good introductions to contemporary political philosophy are Will Kymlicka's Contemporary Political Philosophy (2001) and Jonathan Wolff's An Introduction to Political Philosophy (2006). Two introductions to ethics that challenge the affluent consensus discussed in this book are Peter Singer's Practical Ethics (2011) and Dale Jamieson's Ethics and the Environment (2008). An excellent introduction to the ethical challenges of climate change is James Garvey's The Ethics of Climate Change (2008). A more advanced discussion is Stephen Gardiner's A Perfect MoralStorm (2011). Gardiner et al.'s Climate Ethics (2010) is a collection of important philosophical articles.

Part I: Rights The SEP has excellent articles on rights, libertarianism, nationalism and cosmopolitanism.

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Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) is worth reading in full. A good critical introduction is Wolff's Robert Nozick (1991). Susan Okin presents her critique of Nozick in justice, Gender, and the Family (1989), chapter 5. John Locke discusses property in Two Treatiseson Government, Second Treatise, ch. 5. Lecture 5 opens with a quotation from David Miller's On Nationality (1997: 27).

Part II: Utilitarianism The SEP has excellent articles on J. S. Mill, the history of utilitarianism, consequentialism, rule consequentialism, well-being and hedonism. (In recent philosophy, utilitarianism is often discussed under the more general topic of "consequentialism".) Idiscuss utilitarianism at greater length in my Understanding Utilitarianism (2007). For further references, see my "Consequentialism" (2011). The main historicaltexts are Mill's two essays Utilitarianism and On Liberty. Two good introductions are Roger Crisp's Mill on Utilitarianism (1997) and Jonathan Riley's Mill On Liberty (1998). The contemporary works quoted in the text are Robert Goodin's Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy (1995), Brad Hooker's Ideal Code, Real World (2000) and Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons (1984). The affluent utilitarian advocate of animal rights is Peter Singer (see his Animal Liberation [1990]).

Part Ill: The social contract The SEP has excellent articles on Hobbes, Locke, Rawls, contemporary approaches to social contract, liberalism, liberal feminism and communitarianism. The main historical texts are Hobbes's Leviathan and Locke's Two Treatises on Government. Two good introductions are Richard Tuck's Hobbes (1989) and D. A. Lloyd-Thomas's Locke on Government (1995). John Rawls's A Theory of justice (1999a) is a difficult read. The opening chapters give a flavour of the whole. Section 44 discussesthe just-savings problem. His later works (Political Liberalism [I9961 and The Law of Peoples [1999b]) are slightly more accessible. Samuel Freeman's Rawls (2007) is a thorough introduction, while Freeman's Cambridge Companion to Rawls (2003) is an excellent collection of upto-date essays on all aspects of Rawls. The self-described "disciple" quoted near the start of Lecture 15 is Burton Dreben, from his "On Rawls and Political Liberalism" (2003: 328).

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Part IV: Democracy The SEP has excellent articles on democracy and constitutionalism. Mill discusses democracy in Considerations on Representative Government. The argument that democracy prevents famine is from Amartya Sen's Development as Freedom (1999),ch. 6. Three good representativesof, respectively, the intrinsic argument, majoritarianism and deliberative democracy are Thomas Christiano's The Constitution of Equality (2008),Jeremy Waldron's Law and Disagreement (1999)and John Dryzek's Deliberative Democracy and Beyond (2000). On the debate about enfranchising future people, see Kristian Skagen Ekeli's "Constitutional Experiments" (2009).

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Bibliography

Christiano, T. 2008.The Constitution of Equality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crisp, R. 1997.Mill on Utilitarianism. London: Routledge. Darwall, S. 1998.Philosophical Ethics. Boulder, CO: Westview. Dreben, 8.2003. "On Rawls and Political Liberalism". In The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, S. Freeman (ed.), 316-46. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dryzek, J. 2000.Deliberative Democracy and Beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ekeli, K. S. 2009."Constitutional Experiments: Representing Future Generations Through Submajority Rules". Journal of Political Philosophy 17: 440-61. Freeman, S. (ed.) 2003. The Cambridge Companion to Rawls. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Freeman, 5.2007.Rawls. London: Routledge. Gardiner, S. 2011.A Perfect Moral Storm. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gardiner, S., H. Shue, D. Jamieson & S. Caney (eds) 2010.Climate Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Garvey, J. 2008. The Ethics of Climate Change: Right and Wrong in a Warming World. London: Continuum. Goodin, R. 1995. Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobbes, T. Leviathan. Originally published 1651. Hooker, 6.2000.Ideal Code, Real World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jamieson, D. 2008.Ethics and the Environment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kagan, S. 1998.Normative Ethics. Boulder, CO: Westview. Kymlicka, W. 2001. Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lloyd-Thomas, D. A. 1995.Locke on Government. London: Routledge. Locke, J. Two Treatises on Government. Originally published 1690. Mill, J. S. On Liberty. Originally published 1859. Mill, J. S. Utilitarianism. Originally published 1861. Mill, J. 5. Considerations on Representative Government. Originally published

1861. Miller, D. 1997.On Nationality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mulgan, T. 2007.UnderstandingUtilitarianism. Stocksfield: Acumen. Mulgan, T. 2011."Consequentialism". Oxford BibliographiesOnline. Nozick, R. 1974.Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Oxford: Blackwell. Okin, S. M. 1989.Justice, Gender, and the Family. New York: Basic Books. Parfit, D. 1984.Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rawls, J. 1996.PoliticalLiberalism, exp. edn. New York: Columbia University Press. Rawls, J. 1999a.A Theory of Justice, rev. edn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rawls, J. 1999b.The Law of Peoples. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Riley, J. 1998.Mill On Liberty. London: Routledge. Sen, A. 1999.Developmentas Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Singer, P. 1990.Animal Liberation, 2nd edn. London: Jonathan Cape. Singer, P. 2011.PracticalEthics, 3rd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tuck, R. 1989.Hobbes: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Waldron, J. 1999.Law and Disagreement. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wolff, J. 2006.An Introduction to Political Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wolff, J. 1991.Robert Nozick. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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Index

Aristotle 206 Bentham, J. 78-9,93-4,200f202,211 broken world, defined 8-12 Chamberlain, W. 26 communitarianism 170 cosmopolitanism 69,171 democracy 198-220 constitutionalism 200,204-5,209, 216-17,218-20 defined 199-201 deliberative 201, 205, 213 future people 211-20 instrumental arguments 201-5, 211-14 intrinsic arguments 206-10, 215-17 majoritarianism 200, 204-5, 209-10,217 stability 212-14, 215-16

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INDEX

examples/tales "Charity" 83 "Gift" 107 "Hermit" 128 "Mary's choice" 123 "Mere addition" 128 "Nozick's experience machine" 103-5 "Ollie and the oyster" 102,129 "Pig philosophy objection" 102 "Pond" 86,134-5 "Risky policy" 123 "Rocks" 86 "Sheriff" 83,135-6 "Threat" 107 favourable conditions 2, 136-7,161-2,165,182, 212-13 feminism 36,42-5,169-70 Goodin, R. 90

Hobbes, T. 148-53,157-8,178, 198,206 Hooker, B. 89 Hume, D. 14-15,59,156 impartiality 81,125-6 justice circumstances of 14-15,59 defined 14-16 Kant, I. 35,96 liberal egalitarianism see Rawls, J. libertarianism see Nozick, R. Locke, J. 25,44,54,57,153-6, 158-9,178-9,198,207; see also Nozick, R., on Locke's proviso Marxism 36, 38 Mill, J. S. 78-9, 103,108, 113-21, 138-9,163,200,202-4,213 in broken world 121,138-9 on democracy 200,202-4,213 on freedom of expression 119-21 on individuality 108, 116-17 liberty principle 113-21, 138-9, 163 utility principle 79 on well-being 103,108,116-17 nation (and nation-state) 69-76, 172 nations in broken world 74-6 territorial rights of 70-74, 172 Nozick, R. 18-68,70-76,78-80,

87,93-4,96,100,103-5,131, 170-71,208-9,219 in broken future 5641,219 in broken world 62-8,746 on democracy 208-9

experience machine 103-5 on future people 54,56-61,80 on just acquisition 24-5, 47-55; see also Locke's proviso on just rectification 28-31, 61-8 on just transfer 25-8,37-8,43 on Locke's proviso 25,38, 47-68,724,93,100 on the minimal state 22-3, 40-42,71,96,170-71 on national territorial rights 70-76 on ownership of talents 38-40, 170-71 on parental rights 39-40,42-5 on pattern-basedtheories 26-8,30-31 philosophical method 22-3 on Rawls 170-71 on rights 19-22,24-31 on self-ownership 24,3246, 170 on side constraints 21,55,87 on slavery 34-5 and survival lottery 62-8,131 on utilitarianism 32,78-80,87, 96,103-5 on voluntary exchange 25-8, 37-8,43 on the welfare state 40-42,53 Okin, S. M. 42-5 Parfit, D. 122-9,141,176 non-identity problem 122-5, 176 repugnant conclusion 127-9, 141 population policy 46,108, 130-31 Rawls, J. 2,14-15,84,160-96, 200,212,216

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in broken future 181-4 in broken world 18596,216 on distributive justice 166-7,

170-71 on favourable conditions 2,

14-15,161-2,165,182,212 on future people 173-84 on global justice 171-2 on just savings 175-8 on libertarianism 170-71 on liberty 167-8,182-4 original position 161-5,169,

171-2,176,185-8,191-6 philosophical method 1614 on political institutions 168,175,

1814,192,200 on primary goods 164 principles of justice 164-8,175-6,

188 on reasonable pluralism 180,

193-6 on stability 178-80 and survival lottery 189-92 on utilitarianism 84,166-7 rights interest theory of 35-6,38 introduced 18 reproductive 42-5,130-31,183 will theory of 35-6,38 Singer, P. 86 Smith, A. 60 social discount rate 125-6 state of nature 148-50,153-5,

157-9 survival lottery 5,10-11,62-8,

131-2,136,142-6,157-9,187, 189-92

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INDEX

universalizability 81 utilitarianism 78-146,166-7,

201-4 act 81-8,90-92,130,133-6 average 128-9 and broken future 98-9 and broken world 87-8,97-8,

133-46 demands of 83-8,92-4,96-9,

135,139-41 and democracy 1446,2014 and freedom 84,934,113-21,

136-41 and future people 80,122-32 injustice of 83-8,924,1356,

1667 and institutions 90,92-4,1424,

2014 radicalism of 79-80,92,94 and rights 79,946,1368 rule 81-2,89-99,112,130-32,

136-42 and survival lottery 131-2,136,

142-6 total 126-8 well-being 52,100-112,126-9,

141-2 aggregation 1269,141-2 hedonism 101-5,108,110-11 lexical view 129,141-2 measurement 110-12 objective list theory 108-9,

111-12 posthumous harms and benefits

106 preference theory 104-8,

110-11