Introduction to political philosophy ebook

The next two chapters survey and assess some of the most influential efforts to tackle them. Conclusions This chapter considered several different forms of skepticism about rational justification in politics. But we then confronted an array of more sophisticated and serious worries about whether appealing to ethical ideals can ever show that we have reason to value political practices and actions. We also emphasized the way in which conventional understandings about how justice should be recognized tend to beg the crucial question of whether agents really have 8 Plato , p.

The puzzle of justification reasons to value whatever those understandings mark as just rather than unjust. Since it is precisely this question that successful justifications must answer, we were led to consider the possibility that conventional beliefs about justice lack the capacity to justify anything at all.

In the last few sections, we began to reconstruct a line of argument, first developed by Plato, for overcoming this problem. We will discuss this Platonic argument, and common-good arguments more generally, in more detail in the coming chapters. I end this chapter with a point about the contemporary resonance of the discussion so far. The story I have told about Pacifica and Atlantis is of course fictional and stylized.

Still, it is built up from raw materials that we can easily recognize. In particular, it is important to emphasize the similarity between the Western liberal democracies in which we live and the fictional society of Atlantis. Many contemporary political philosophers are tempted to view this reservoir of shared understandings as a resource that they can exploit to present justifications for various particular political practices and policies. They then inquire into the question of whether or not endorsing these background assumptions commits one to such specific practices as affirmative action, redistributive taxation, the public provision of healthcare, same-sex marriage, overseas aid, the legal enforcement of moral standards, civil disobedience, and so forth.

As we have seen in this chapter, however, there is a serious question about how much arguments of this general form can establish. They seem 31 32 An Introduction to Political Philosophy open to the objection that, at best, they establish which arrangements count as just rather than unjust by the lights of a particular liberal conception of justice, but tend to beg the question of whether we have reasons to value support, defend such arrangements.

Since a successful justification for something must provide us with just such reasons to value it, it is unclear that arguments along these lines are sufficient to justify the things they purport to justify. True, insofar as people in liberal societies believe that justice requires that we treat each other as equals, and so forth, they believe that we have reasons to value social arrangements that are appropriately egalitarian.

But as we mentioned at the start, the fact that people believe something does not show that they are correct to believe it. Readers new to recent debates among philosophers about the implications of liberal ideals would be well advised to keep this worry firmly in view.

I will call theories that follow this strategy common-good arguments. These arguments form a very broad church and have come in many shapes and sizes. Despite these many differences, however, they share a distinguishing feature.

They all assume that the value of political arrangements and forms of collective organization, along with the beliefs about justice and other ethical ideals that hold them in place, must ultimately be explained in terms of their contribution to the well-being and happiness of everyone living within them.

Insofar as they meet this condition, these arrangements, practices, and beliefs are part of a common good, or so theorists in this tradition maintain. Having in this chapter described the contours of this classical perfectionist account of the common good, in the next we shall consider the most influential modern variant of the commongood approach, utilitarianism.

That chapter ends with a critical discussion of some of the problems facing this approach as a whole. Two worlds describing their rewards, That one in tangents, this in chords; Each lives in one, all in the other, Here all are kings, there each a brother. Auden, from New Year Letter January 1, 1 Implicit in these lines is a certain vision of justice, familiar in popular discourse today, centered on a distinction between a public and a private realm.

Justice is, on this view, fundamentally a matter of respecting external boundaries, of preventing 1 Auden , pp. The common good collisions and infringements between individuals and their lives. Each of us must make of it what we will. My life thus becomes my responsibility and your life yours, such that my life is none of your business and vice versa.

Plato also granted that this understanding of justice is attractive and invigorating because of the freedom and diversity it promotes. This led him to draw a famous some would say infamous analogy between just societies and just selves. Each has distinctive functions and generates distinctive desires. Plato distinguished three such elements.

As partly appetitive beings, we naturally seek food, drink, shelter, sexual gratification, physical pleasure, and relief from pain. And as partly rational beings, we seek and can achieve knowledge, wisdom, and understanding. According to Plato, our familiar 2 Plato , p. Since Plato believed that both selves and societies are complex entities in this way, he thought of justice and injustice as possible properties of each.

But we may be inclined to reject it only because we have been raised to accept the democratic view. Perhaps we should not be so ready to take for granted this democratic understanding of our respective roles and responsibilities, and its account of what counts as unjust mutual interference.

Why, then, did Plato reject it? Why did he insist, as against that democratic conception, that an adequate theory of justice be concerned not only with relations between persons, but with internal psychological relations as well? These mistakes will lead them to pursue inappropriate courses of action, and invest in the wrong projects.

As a result, their lives may be unhappy and unfulfilled. Plato thought that if they are to avoid this fate, agents must somehow come to a sound understanding of their real interests. They must learn to discriminate intelligently between desires and choices that would promote their well-being and those that, if indulged, would be toxic to it.

They also need self-discipline and resolve. But Plato denied that these character traits come naturally or easily to most people. Unless they are exposed to the right guidance, the chances are that they will fail to develop them and that they will make poor decisions for themselves as a result. He doubted whether leaving people to themselves was an adequate way to promote their happiness. It is therefore presumptious for Plato to suppose that he or anyone else could know what would make others happy.

There is only my good understood from my perspective, your good understood from your perspective, his good understood from his perspective, and so on. But this view is very implausible.

Indeed, it often seems painfully true that outsiders are more aware of our own mistakes than we are. And, as we know from our own political culture, democratic citizens do not deny that they often make mistakes of this kind.

What sort of interest do we have in a system of rights that exposes us to an undue risk of a failed life? But if Plato is correct, one can possess justice in this sense and lead a miserable, damaged, self-defeated life.

In that case, what good is democratic justice to me? Rather, it is an argument about the overall social effects of encouraging everyone to think of justice in these terms. As a result, democratic justice may inflict real damage on individuals lives, or so Plato concluded.

The two are, for him, profoundly interrelated. This led him to speculate that other ways of ordering social relations might assist individuals in correctly perceiving and realizing their own good. This, according to Plato, is the role of the philosopher of justice.

For, clearly, in order to make such diagnoses, we need an account of what, exactly, goes awry when people commit such errors. It was in this context that Plato advanced his theory of the tripartite psyche, divided into appetitive, spirited, and rational components. The tripartite self Plato thought that each of these three faculties corresponds both to distinctive capacities and forms of action and to three distinct sets of basic interests that all individuals share. On the capacity side, Plato associated appetite, spirit, and reason respectively with 1.

But for Plato appetite, spirit, and reason also correspond to three sets of interests. In ascending order of importance, we have 1. So Plato contended that we have a hierarchically ordered set of basic interests, and a linked set of human capacities that we can harness to realize them.

For Plato, human well-being involves the realization of these interests, and rational action simply consists in the effective deployment of these capacities in pursuit of this goal. But because he thought they have discrete psychological sources in three disparate parts of our psychological constitution, these goals and the available means for pursuing them are complex. And according to Plato, it is this complexity, and the resulting possibility of internal conflict, that expose human agents to the risk of error and irrationality in their actions and choices.

Matching these capacities and interests in a propitious way requires various complicated forms of coordination. When this coordination goes wrong, we become liable to mistakes and as a result may fail to realize our interests. The question for him was to explain how agents can avoid mistakes of this kind by mobilizing their capacities to promote their well-being successfully. It is psychological in the following sense. Plato insisted that individuals will be able to realize their deepest interests only if the three components of their psychological make-up the appetitive, spirited, and The common good rational parts stand in the proper relation to each other.

This requires a measure of selfdiscipline. For example, the fact that we know that sugary foods are bad for us will not by itself remove the desire to eat them. To follow our reason, we must do more than just listen politely to its recommendations and then disregard them.

We must actually submit to its judgments, and cultivate a settled disposition to do so. So, for Plato, our well-being depends crucially on a politics of the self in which reason is in firm and well-informed control.

Desires and urges originating elsewhere in our psychological system must not be allowed to usurp its authority or meddle in its affairs. They have no business pushing our reason around as it tries to determine our best interests. This explains the sense in which Plato thought that justice within the self each faculty performing its proper role and not interfering with the others was a precondition for correctly perceiving and effectively pursuing our real interests.

For several reasons, Plato thought that individual well-being has deep social preconditions. He denied, for example, that agents are self-sufficient when it comes to the cultivation of the traits and dispositions necessary for the sort of well-adjusted character we have just described.

The efficient deployment of these capacities is a potentiality that requires education, training, and practice to perfect. Others must be involved in this educative process; we need them to provide sound guidance and role-models, and sometimes to impose on us various forms of discipline.

Obviously we cannot supply these for ourselves, and when others intervene in the wrong way, they can profoundly damage our prospects for well-being. More controversially, while Plato believed that our three basic interests, and their relative importance, are the same for everyone, he denied that the corresponding three capacities for realizing them are evenly distributed across human populations.

When it comes to their skills and natural capacities, individuals are not all appetitive, spirited, and rational in the same proportion. Some individuals are more naturally suited to activities that engage specifically physical, emotional, and intellectual capacities. The most infamous implication Plato drew from this claim was the suggestion that only intellectually gifted individuals should hold positions of political power. For Plato, only those who prove themselves competent in this academic venue have the expertise to govern society in a way that will benefit everyone.

Rather, in many cases it requires a settled disposition to defer to the rational judgments of better-qualified others. For Plato, therefore, individuals are socially dependent in a strong sense.

The achievement of their well-being depends crucially on the pattern of social forms surrounding them and the terms on which they are encouraged to The common good participate in them. It is in this sense a common good. Perfectionism Clearly, there is much in this elaborate theory with which one might quarrel.

The Platonic objection to democratic conceptions of justice invites several obvious replies. For example, while we may agree with Plato that individuals require guidance and self-discipline to live successfully, we may think that trusting the state, or public officials, to impart these qualities is a terrible idea: these responsibilities are better left to families, churches, and other private institutions.

As John Stuart Mill suggested, errors and mistakes may be necessary conditions for individual and collective progress: we often learn from them.

He was concerned that, in his haste to insure individuals against their own mistakes, Plato left so little to individual initiative and discretion as to transform the citizens of his ideal state into programmed automatons, hardly a satisfactory model for human well-being.

What is of more immediate interest here, however, is the general idea of the common good that Plato launched in making this argument. Indeed, the two critics just mentioned, Aristotle and Mill, took roughly this line. Both embraced 3 Mill , p. Two general aspects of this research program deserve stress. His position is built around a depiction of a perfectly rational agent directed intelligently and effectively toward the fulfillment of her deepest interests, making the best of her life. Having laid out this perfectionist ideal of human flourishing, Plato sought to describe the social and political circumstances likely to promote its realization in as many lives as possible.

If Plato is right, individuals have a reason to support those arrangements necessary for realizing this ideal in their own lives, and to oppose or resist those that would hinder them in this endeavor.

On this basis, the skeptical puzzles surrounding the possibility of rational justification in politics that we extensively discussed in chapter 1 can be dissolved.

As we have seen, Plato insisted that individual well-being is fully attainable only in concert with others. When properly interpreted, the flourishing of political society and the flourishing of the individuals who comprise it are not opposed, but merely aspects of each other.

This implies that insofar as we see an opposition between them, we lack a proper understanding of both. The common good unfortunate enough to be socialized into degenerate forms of political community like democracy. In contrast, Plato and Aristotle thought of the terms on which we cooperate in political community as a potential common good in the following dual sense.

On the one hand, each of us stands to gain or lose in very fundamental ways from this political environment being ordered in different ways. When the terms of human association are organized propitiously, each participant can obtain fundamentally important goods that would have eluded him or her otherwise. Conversely, when wrongly configured, the fulfillment of basic individual interests is threatened, and our common good unrealized. On the other hand, this is not to say that for Plato and Aristotle we are dependent on something other than ourselves, for in the end we are our political environment.

So to say with Plato and Aristotle that individuals depend on their political environment for their well-being is not to say that they depend on some alien agency beyond themselves. Rather, it is to say that they depend on themselves and their own collective resources and assets. The task for the theorist of the common good is to investigate how these internal resources should be disposed so as to promote the flourishing of everyone sharing in political community.

Conclusion Plato and Aristotle developed this project against the backdrop of a very particular model of political community the classical Greek city-state. These were largely self-sufficient, culturally homogenous political communities whose territory comprised the immediate environs of individual cities, like Athens, Sparta, Miletus, Corinth, and Argos.

By modern standards, these city-states were extremely small. The payroll of some multinational corporations today significantly exceeds the total population of Athens in the time of Plato and Aristotle. Because their speculations about how to realize the common good tend to presuppose this now extinct 45 46 An Introduction to Political Philosophy political form, many modern critics have charged that this Platonic and Aristotelian project, inspiring as it is, is of historical interest only.

They argue that the research program they initiated has been rendered irrelevant by the subsequent development of political organization on an incomparably larger scale. The size, cultural diversity, and complexity of modern nation-states make it implausible to suppose that its citizens could ever share in the sort of rich common good Plato and Aristotle hoped to promote by political means. But the common-good approach did not simply die out with the Greek city-states.

One of the most influential paradigms in recent political philosophy utilitarianism can be thought of as an attempt to revive that research program and to adapt it to the transformed conditions of modern political life. Before we consider some objections to the common-good approach as a whole, it is therefore important to have before us this modern variant of genus. These tasks form the topic of the next chapter. Later utilitarians include Henry Sidgwick, R.

Hare, and Peter Singer. But utilitarian ideas are fundamental to modern economic theory, and partly for this reason they remain firmly ensconced in contemporary intellectual life. In its simplest formulation, utilitarianism asserts a basic principle of justification: actions and practices should be considered justified to the extent that they promote the greatest overall happiness. The overriding utilitarian goal is therefore to seek actions and social practices likely to maximize utility.

Like the Platonic and Aristotelian views discussed earlier, utilitarianism is a consequentialist theory. For utilitarians, we decide whether something is justified by considering its consequences for the welfare of those it affects. Influenced by the Enlightenment enthusiasm for science and mathematics, however, the classical utilitarians especially Bentham aimed to make consequentialist ethics more scientific and precise.

Their hope was that ethical justification might eventually become a matter of scrupulous mathematical calculation, like mechanics and engineering. We first assess the likely effects of some action or institution A on each of the individuals who stand to be affected by it. On this basis, we determine the costs and benefits i.

Assigning equal arithmetical weight to each of these individual utility scores, we next add them up and determine the total amount of utility that would result from A. We then follow the same procedure for each of the available alternatives B, C, D and select the option with the highest aggregate utility. The utilitarian focus on aggregate welfare represents an important departure from the classical conception of the common good, which in contrast favors mutual advantage.

On a mutual-advantage view, in order for something to be justified as a common good, each person involved must be shown to derive some benefit from it. On an aggregate-advantage view, what matters is the overall total of welfare, regardless of whether the position of every individual is improved.

Whatever the merits of this objection, however, utilitarians can still represent themselves as offering an interpretation of the common good. Rules and ethical beliefs Like Plato and Aristotle, utilitarians insist that justifications for political arrangements must ultimately come to rest in judgments about human well-being.

Beliefs about ethical ideals like justice are not, for any of these philosophers, the final tribunal before which we assess the merits of different political arrangements. So, according to utilitarians, the question of which particular beliefs about justice we ought to encourage people to accept and abide by in the course of their political interaction is itself to be assessed on the basis of consequentialist judgments. Utilitarians deny that abstract beliefs about justice and other ethical ideals have any Utilitarianism value apart from their tendency, once inculcated among members of a population, to have beneficial consequences.

That is not to say that utilitarians generally assume that such beliefs are useless and that agents should simply apply the utilitarian injunction to maximize happiness directly to their own choices and decisions without any reference to independent principles of justice or to other sorts of ethical rules. They have more often argued that this strategy is self-defeating: if everyone is left to apply the utility principle themselves, the effect is likely to be a net loss in overall utility.

By acquiring dispositions to abide by certain ethical rules or principles of justice, agents will tend to act in ways that are on balance more productive of utility than otherwise, or so the claim goes. In the absence of such coordinating beliefs, agents will be collectively worse off. This utilitarian understanding of the function of beliefs about justice and other ethical requirements is essentially the same as that of Plato and Aristotle, despite their many other differences.

Insofar as all tend to benefit from the general adoption and observance of the relevant rules, those rules and their inculcation among members of society are aspects of their common good. The problem of incommensurability As with the classical perfectionist position of Plato and Aristotle, utilitarianism is organized around a conception of welfare that it is rational to promote. But utilitarians understand welfare in a distinctive way.

The term that Plato and Aristotle used for wellbeing was the Greek word eudaimonia. Rather, they understood it in terms of the realization of certain basic interests. While they acknowledged that experiencing enjoyment and being free of suffering was among our interests, they also recognized other basic interests for example, in being loved and respected, and in achieving knowledge and understanding that are not simply reducible to our interest in certain pleasurable, or pain-free, forms of experience.

They thought they stood alone as interests in their own right. In this respect utilitarianism presents a contrasting picture. Utilitarians are committed to maximizing happiness. But it makes sense to maximize something only if it can be treated as a single, measurable, magnitude. If we were to place them at adjacent corners, they would be closer together by a measurable degree: the length of the sides of a cube can be compared with the lengths of diagonal lines between its corners.

If the utilitarian injunction to maximize utility is to make sense, human happiness must be measurable in this way. We must be able to measure and compare the different amounts of utility that are produced in different individuals under different circumstances.

Unfortunately, it is not clear how, or that, this is possible. This is the problem of incommensurability, arguably the gravest problem facing the utilitarian project. They thought of the mental states of pleasure and pain as jointly comprising a common denominator by which to determine utilitarian value of anything and to compare it with that of anything else. The resulting account of well-being is therefore quite unlike the perfectionist positions developed by Plato and Aristotle.

They understood happiness in terms of the realization of intrinsically valuable ideals of human flourishing. Like many perfectionists, for example, they claimed that lives rich in esthetic and intellectual pursuits like poetry are better lives intrinsically than those containing only trivial forms of recreation like pushpin , regardless of the amount of pleasure these activities induce.

But on a hedonistic view, well-being does not consist in the realization of any instrinsically valuable ideals of life, but simply in states of arousal that can be experienced to greater or lesser degrees.

Problems with hedonism Despite its obvious curiosities, one can see why the early utilitarians were attracted to this hedonistic view of well-being. That view holds out the prospect of a universal, empirically based, calculative science of human rationality and welfare. By appealing to hedonism, it seems, utilitarians need not rely on more controversial perfectionist ideals of the kind Plato and Aristotle defended. The hedonistic view is nevertheless deeply problematic.

It is not clear, in the first place, whether it really does solve the problem of incommensurability. For example, some philosophers, including Plato, have doubted whether pleasure and pain are mutually commensurable. It is tempting to think that the relation between degrees of pleasure and degrees of pain is analogous to that between degrees of heat and degrees of cold.

It seems equally, if not more, plausible to say that the presence or absence of pleasure is one thing, and the presence or absence of pain another. The same seems true of many pleasures: is the pleasure I derive from a satisfying mathematical proof on a continuum with a sniff of ground coffee? Moreover, even if the amounts of pleasure or pain that I experience in some instance can be compared with those I experience in some other instance, it does not necessarily follow that these judgments are comparable between persons.

This difficulty particularly impressed some of the early neo-classical economists who integrated utilitarian ideas into economic theory. But, provided that the susceptibility was different in a like ratio in all directions, we should never be able to discover the difference. Every mind is thus inscrutable to every other mind, and no common denominator of feeling seems possible. It is a formidable problem facing the hedonistic view, and indeed for any version of utilitarianism.

Even if these problems were solved, however, the hedonistic account would face still other difficulties. Many have doubted, for example, that happiness or well-being can be adequately explained just in terms of quanta of pleasurable experience. Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book.

All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Utilitarianism Nozick thinks that no rational person would choose to plug in on these terms. The example is intended to expose our tacit conviction that there is more to life than experience.

We care not only about feeling things, but also about doing things, and about who we are or what we become in doing them. It also matters to us whether doing those things is genuinely worthwhile independently of their pleasure-promoting capacities. People plugged into the experience machine would have no real access to these goods. They might feel good, but they could not know that what they are doing matters, or take pride in a life of successful accomplishment; indeed, there is no sense in which they do anything.

Nozick suggests that plugging into the machine is therefore tantamount to suicide. Desire-fulfillment theories These difficulties have led some utilitarians to move away from mentalstate conceptions of welfare.

An alternative approach is to understand utility in terms of desire-fulfillment or preference-satisfaction. The satisfaction of a desire need not be understood as a mental state opaque to outside appreciation, but simply in terms of the actual coincidence between what one wants and what one gets. This seems to mitigate the problem of interpersonal comparisons, at least to some degree. Presumably we can on this basis at least compare the number of my satisfied desires with the number of yours. Perhaps a viable utilitarian calculus can still be devised on this model.

A major problem with this alternative is that it equivocates on the question of which desires and preferences should matter. For example, 5 Singer , pp. But even if some users had an unlimited supply of the relevant drug, and so could always satisfy their constantly recurring craving for it, we would be hard put to describe them as models of happiness or well-being. But then it seems that on the actualdesire view one way in which we could make the drug addict happy is simply to eliminate these other desires.

That way, given a guaranteed supply of the drug, the addict could satisfy all of her actual desires and would therefore be optimally happy. But, as an account of human welfare, this is crazy.

It seems better to say, then, that what individuals ought to desire is more important that what they actually desire. This, of course, returns us to the sort of position Plato defended. Aware of these advantages, some utilitarians have tried to rescue the desire-fulfillment theory by helping themselves to this perfectionist intuition. John Stuart Mill provides the best-known example of such an attempt. Similar efforts to integrate perfectionist accounts of human flourishing into utilitarianism were made by G.

Moore and Hastings Rashdall. The price of admitting, with Mill, Plato, and other perfectionists, that the constituents of well-being are complex and diverse is the reintroduction of the problem of incommensurability in a virulent form.

My achieving mastery of some field of study, my becoming a scratch golfer, my commanding the respect of my peers, my dearly loving and being loved by my children, my enjoying good food and wine, my having adequate opportunities for sexual fulfillment, my finding a good therapist to overcome my tendency to depression, all seem to be aspects of my good. But does it make sense to assume that they all enhance my life in some one measurable way to different degrees?

Few perfectionists have thought so. They have usually followed Plato and Aristotle in insisting, rather, that these constituents of human well-being represent incommensurable goods. If they are right, the utilitarian project is fundamentally misguided, because it is fruitless to regard well-being as a measurable quantity that can be optimized.

This is not a point about the technical difficulty of such measurements. The very idea of a measurable common denominator of human well-being may be a chimera.

For example, few would deny although some have 7 that, given a choice, we ought to save a larger rather than a smaller number of lives. More often than not, the particular political claims that utilitarians have historically defended appeal to very basic consequentialist judgments of this sort. Instructive here are the standard utilitarian justifications of the modern liberal state, committed to the rule of law, to the enforcement of prohibitions on force, fraud, and theft.

This most indispensable of all necessaries. There are two points to note about this argument. First, it is not clear that it is a strictly maximizing argument. Plausible as it is, Mill can hardly claim to have established that of all possible forms of political organization 7 See Taurek Utilitarianism the modern liberal state clearly is the one that produces the greatest overall utility.

The argument shows merely that each of us would be fundamentally worse off in the absence of institutions that provide us with a measure of personal security. Archive All posts by date. Advertise With Us. Great Recordings T. All rights reserved. Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman. Open Culture openculture. Please click below to consent to the use of this technology while browsing our site. Close Privacy Overview This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website.

Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. In each case, he shows both why the political philosophies continue to be intellectually compelling and why they are problematic or can be challenged in various ways.

In this sense, Political Philosophy attempts to draw up a balance sheet for political philosophy in the twentieth century, by identifying a canon of towering contributions and reviewing the extent to which they fulfil their intellectual aspirations.

It ranges over an unusually broad range of topics in the field, including the just distribution of wealth, both within countries and globally; the nature and justification of political authority; the meaning and significance of freedom; arguments for and against democratic rule; the problem of war; and the grounds for toleration in public life. It also offers an accessible, non-technical discussion of perfectionism, utilitarianism, theories of the social contract, and of recently popular forms of critical theory.

Throughout, the book challenges readers to think critically about political arguments and institutions that they might otherwise take for granted. It will be a provocative text for any student of philosophy or political science. Dudley Knowles introduces the ideas of key political thinkers including Hobbes, Locke, Marx and Mill and influential contemporary thinkers such as Berlin, Rawls and Nozick. He outlines central problems in political philosophy and encourages the reader to critically engage with all the issues discussed.

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Philosophers are responsible for the Enlightenment and laid the foundations for constitutional governments. This is Philosophy: An Introduction expertly guides students through the fundamentals of philosophy by illuminating difficult, abstract ideas with straightforward language. The second edition of this accessible textbook is organized around seven central philosophical problems, including ethics, the existence of God, free will, personal identity, philosophy of mind, and epistemology.

New to this edition is a chapter on political philosophy that explores the state of nature, anarchy, contractarianism, libertarianism, and the liberal state. These self-contained chapters have been reordered and recalibrated to best suit the needs of introductory philosophy courses, and can be taught independently or in sequence.