Some of the most-ref­er­enced West­ern polit­i­cal thinkers—like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Thomas Jef­fer­son—have tak­en hier­ar­chies of class, race, or both, for grant­ed. Not so some of their more rad­i­cal con­tem­po­raries, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Paine, who made force­ful argu­ments against inequal­i­ty. A strain of utopi­anism runs through more egal­i­tar­i­an posi­tions, and a cal­cu­lat­ing prag­ma­tism through more lib­er­tar­i­an. Rarely have these two threads woven neat­ly togeth­er.

In the work of 20th cen­tu­ry polit­i­cal philoso­pher John Rawls, they do, with maybe a knot or a kink here and there, in a unique phi­los­o­phy first artic­u­lat­ed in his 1971 book A The­o­ry of Jus­tice, a nov­el attempt at rec­on­cil­ing abstract prin­ci­ples of lib­er­ty and equal­i­ty (recent­ly turned into a musi­cal.)

Like the Enlight­en­ment philoso­phers before him, Rawls’ sys­tem of dis­trib­u­tive jus­tice invokes a thought exper­i­ment as the ground of his phi­los­o­phy, but it is not an orig­i­nal myth, like the state of nature in near­ly every ear­ly mod­ern thinker, but an orig­i­nal posi­tion, as he calls it, of a soci­ety that lives behind a “veil of igno­rance.” In this con­di­tion, wrote Rawls:

No one knows his place in soci­ety, his class posi­tion or social sta­tus, nor does any­one know his for­tune in the dis­tri­b­u­tion of nat­ur­al assets and abil­i­ties, his intel­li­gence, strength, and the like. I shall even assume that the par­ties do not know their con­cep­tions of the good or their spe­cial psy­cho­log­i­cal propen­si­ties. The prin­ci­ples of jus­tice are cho­sen behind a veil of igno­rance.

Clear­ly, then, this idea pre­sup­pos­es the oppo­site of a mer­i­toc­ra­cy built on labor, con­quest, or nat­ur­al supe­ri­or­i­ty. In fact, some of Rawls’ crit­ics sug­gest­ed, the “orig­i­nal posi­tion” pre­sup­pos­es a kind of noth­ing­ness, a state of inco­her­ent nonex­is­tence. What does it mean, after all, to exist with­out his­to­ries, dif­fer­ences, attrib­ut­es, or aspi­ra­tions? And how can we visu­al­ize an equal­i­ty of con­di­tions when no one expe­ri­ences any­thing like it? What kind of posi­tion can pos­si­bly be “orig­i­nal”?

To clar­i­fy his the­o­ry and answer rea­son­able objec­tions, Rawls fol­lowed A The­o­ry of Jus­tice with a 1985 essay called “Jus­tice as Fair­ness: Polit­i­cal not Meta­phys­i­cal.” This rethink­ing coin­cid­ed with a series of lec­ture class­es he taught at Har­vard in the 80s, which were even­tu­al­ly pub­lished in a 2001 book also titled Jus­tice as Fair­ness, a promised “restate­ment” of the orig­i­nal posi­tion.

Now we can hear these lec­tures, or most of them, with the rest to come, on Youtube. Get start­ed with the first lec­ture in his 1984 sem­i­nar “Phi­los­o­phy 171: Mod­ern Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy,” at the top, with lec­tures two and three above and below. There are six addi­tion­al class­es on the Har­vard Phi­los­o­phy Department’s Youtube chan­nel, with a final two more to fol­low. (Get them all here.)

In these talks, Rawls explains and expands on his core prin­ci­ples: equal­i­ty of oppor­tu­ni­ty and the “dif­fer­ence prin­ci­ple,” which states that any and all inequal­i­ty should ben­e­fit the least well-off mem­bers of a soci­ety. Rawls’ brand of polit­i­cal lib­er­al­ism (also a title of one of his books) has influ­enced pres­i­dents, judges, and leg­is­la­tors with argu­ments direct­ly con­trary to some of the right’s ide­o­log­i­cal archi­tects, many of whom in fact wrote in reac­tion to Rawls. We are free to accept his claims or not, but Rawls’ sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tion to the terms of mod­ern polit­i­cal dis­course is inar­guable.

This set of lec­tures will be added to our col­lec­tion of 140 Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es, a sub­set of our meta col­lec­tion: 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

via Dai­ly Nous

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A The­o­ry of Jus­tice, the Musi­cal Imag­ines Philoso­pher John Rawls as a Time-Trav­el­ing Adven­tur­er

6 Polit­i­cal The­o­rists Intro­duced in Ani­mat­ed “School of Life” Videos: Marx, Smith, Rawls & More

An Intro­duc­tion to the Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy of Isa­iah Berlin Through His Free Writ­ings & Audio Lec­tures

Jus­tice: Putting a Price Tag on Life & How to Mea­sure Plea­sure

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

What is the mean­ing of life? This may sound sim­plis­tic or naïve, espe­cial­ly in rela­tion to much con­tem­po­rary phi­los­o­phy, which assumes the ques­tion is inco­her­ent and reserves its focus for small­er and small­er slices of expe­ri­ence. And, of course, pri­or to the rise of sec­u­lar moder­ni­ty, the ques­tion was answered for us—and still is for a great many people—by reli­gion. One either believed the answer, through coer­cion or oth­er­wise, or kept qui­et about it. But at least since Søren Kierkegaard, philoso­phers in the West have tak­en the ques­tion very seri­ous­ly, and found all of the answers want­i­ng. By the mid-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, there seemed to thinkers like Albert Camus to be no answer. Life has no mean­ing. It is inher­ent­ly absurd and pur­pose­less.

This Camus con­clud­ed in chal­leng­ing essays like “The Myth of Sisy­phus” and nov­els like L’Etranger, a book most of us know as The Stranger but which Alain de Bot­ton, in his School of Life video above on Camus’ phi­los­o­phy, trans­lates as The Out­sider. Read­ing this book, de Bot­ton observes, “has long been an ado­les­cent rite of pas­sage” since many of its themes “are first tack­led at sev­en­teen or so.” Its pro­tag­o­nist, Meur­sault, an old­er, more nihilis­tic ver­sion of Hold­en Caulfield, illus­trates Camus’ the­sis through his stead­fast refusal to iden­ti­fy with any mean­ing-mak­ing insti­tu­tions or emo­tions, and through a casu­al, sense­less mur­der. But while Meur­sault may see through the pre­ten­sions of his soci­ety, he has failed to see the world as it is.

Col­in Wil­son, anoth­er author many peo­ple read dur­ing intel­lec­tu­al­ly for­ma­tive years—who wrote an exis­ten­tial­ist study also called The Out­sider—describes Meursault’s indif­fer­ence to life as a prod­uct of “his sense of unre­al­i­ty.” Only the loom­ing prospect of death awak­ens him from what Meur­sault calls “a heavy grime of unre­al­i­ty.” Instead of despair­ing at life’s empti­ness, Camus deter­mined that true free­dom required engag­ing ful­ly with life, in the face of futility—with the ulti­mate prospect of death and the option of sui­cide always in view. Camus, says de Bot­ton, “writes with excep­tion­al inten­si­ty… as a guide for the rea­sons to live.” De Bot­ton some­what super­fi­cial­ly prais­es Camus’ sex­u­al prowess, fash­ion sense, and good looks as more than just “styl­is­tic quirks,” but as mark­ers of his psy­cho­log­i­cal health.

But more than just a ladies man, Camus was a “great cham­pi­on of the ordi­nary,” as well as a cham­pi­on foot­baller and Nobel prize-win­ning lit­er­ary star. He was also a ful­ly com­mit­ted jour­nal­ist and polit­i­cal activist for much of his career, who stood by his indi­vid­ual prin­ci­ples even as oth­er left­ist intel­lec­tu­als got swept up in the allure of Sovi­et com­mu­nism under Stal­in. In the doc­u­men­tary above, we learn impor­tant details of many of these qual­i­ties, as well of Camus’ trou­bled ear­ly life. Giv­en his back­ground of impov­er­ish­ment and loss, it is indeed remark­able that Camus—much more so than oth­er, more priv­i­leged philosophers—lived such a rich, ful­ly engaged life.

In a rare tele­vi­sion inter­view above, Camus answers ques­tions about his the­atri­cal adap­ta­tion of Dostoevsky’s The Pos­sessed, anoth­er nov­el that con­fronts head on the ques­tion of life’s mean­ing. He speaks of the novel’s “nihilism,” now “the real­i­ty that we have to face.” Camus does not men­tion that Dos­toyevsky, like the exis­ten­tial­ist Kierkegaard, man­aged to sal­vage a kind of reli­gious faith in the face of empti­ness; the French philoso­pher and writer was con­vinced of the impos­si­bil­i­ty of such a thing. But whether one draws Dos­to­evsky or Camus’ con­clu­sions, both would sug­gest that to live authen­ti­cal­ly, one must seri­ous­ly grap­ple with the prob­lem of mean­ing­less­ness and the real­i­ty of death.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Albert Camus Deliv­er His Nobel Prize Accep­tance Speech (1957)

Albert Camus: Soc­cer Goalie

Exis­ten­tial Phi­los­o­phy of Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus Explained with 8‑Bit Video Games

Niet­zsche, Wittgen­stein & Sartre Explained with Mon­ty Python-Style Ani­ma­tions by The School of Life

Down­load 130 Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es: Tools for Think­ing About Life, Death & Every­thing Between

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness