Do you have access to other clips from this particular lecture? I seem to remember one where he's making a point about the ontology of race and goes into an alternate history thought experiment in which Africa conquers Europe in the middle ages.
I was looking for the same one. It seems to have disappeared. I've played it for my students in my Intro to Philosophy class in the past and would love to do so again.
@@philosophy9560 I was looking for it for exactly the same reason, haha. FWIW, there is a version of the same thought experiment in his paper "What are you really?" Not as fun as the video though.
Mills is a great thinker, he's gone to soon and will be sorely missed, but I've always found this point he makes to be terribly uncharitable. CLEARLY Rawls means to say that a society OUGHT to be, or is IDEALLY a cooperative venture for mutual advantage. In some of his papers Mills argues that we shouldn't read Rawls like this because he uses descriptive rather than normative language when making this point, but it is the absolute definition of the violation of the principle of charity to read Rawls as being committed to the view that because the Confederacy, for example, was a society it was therefore also a cooperative venture for mutual advantage. There is SO much in Rawls one could use (including explicit condemnations of slavery) to show that he clearly didn't think a society that permitted something as horrific as slavery could count as a cooperative venture for mutual advantage. Mills contributed so much to political philosophy and the philosophy of race, but he could be very uncharitable when he wanted to be - especially of Rawls.
Indeed. The idea that John Rawls condoned slavery in any way is a gross mischaracterization of his work. It's really disturbing to see the man and his ideas intentionally slandered by a fellow academic.
There's a bit of context missing here. Mills' criticism of Rawls has to do with "ideal theory" versus "non-ideal theory". As you point out, Rawls based all his claims about justice on an "ideal" view of society, on what it OUGHT to be. Mills' point isn't that Rawls confuses "ought" with "is", his point is that by basing political theory on how society ought to be rather than on how it actually is, you very easily end up with a set of prescriptions that are completely divorced from reality and incapable of dealing with the complexity of the real world. For instance, because Rawls is committed to excluding history from moral theory (because history isn't "ideal"), he ends up being hugely incompetent on the question of race (e.g., he says in A Theory of Justice that race is a natural characteristic of people that exists independently of society).
@@200mccsa Rawls only excludes history in the original position for the purpose of coming up with principles of justice that can apply to any all (liberal) societies within the circumstances of justice. He's explicit that the history of particular societies comes right back into the picture as soon as we move to the constitutional stage and legislative stage - where we're concerned with practical applications of the view. Suffice it to say, I think Mills's criticisms of ideal theory miss the mark completely.
@@joeldasilva2905 Isn't that the problem though? I think one of Rawls's weaknesses was that he was able to conceive of an ideal society organised by what were persons who exhibited supposedly universal characteristics that determined their choices, ie.e., people in an ideal, abstract situation. However, the universalizability of those characteristics is not justifiable since they emanate from a real, historical society that prizes and conceives of "individuals" that does not apply to the epistemic frameworks of many other societies. In fact, the social contract tradition assumes that Western culture is the moral exemplar of what social progression looks like. So the question becomes, which of Rawls's assumptions about the nature of the original position actually emanates from his own historical life experience? That's a challenging critique for ideal theory, I think, And one that Mills is at pains to demonstrate.
@@keombebe6243 In the latter half of his career, Rawls was explicit that his theory was an ideal theory of justice for liberal societies. He would be the first to admit that if the values modeled in the original position do not resonate with you, then you're not going to find his theory of justice convincing. Justification must proceed from common ground, so I don't think it's much of a problem that his liberal starting premises ensure that he ends up with a liberal result. He's not trying to answer the question 'why be a liberal?, or argue that everyone should be a liberal, he's trying to come up with a satisfactory ideal theory of justice for those societies in which there is already broad consensus on key liberal premises.
