Prof: So this morning
we're going to start talking
about Edmund Burke and the
anti-Enlightenment.
And one prefatory note is that
when thinking about political
theory as opposed to everyday
political argument I think it's
very important not to get hung
up on labels such as left wing,
or right wing,
or liberal, or conservative.
And I think the occasion of
beginning to speak about Burke
is a good moment to make this
point.
After all, I think it'd be fair
to say that before you walked
into this course if you had
looked down the syllabus and
somebody had said,
"Who is the most radical
thinker on this syllabus?"
 
most of you would have picked
out Marx.
But as we've seen,
Marx is actually a footnote to
the Enlightenment.
 
Marx is not,
he's not somebody who engages
in a radical departure from the
ideas that were developed by
Locke and the other thinkers
that shaped the main ideas of
the Enlightenment.
 
Burke, on the other hand,
is generally thought of as a
conservative politically,
and indeed he was a
conservative politically,
but philosophically he's a much
more radical thinker than Marx
was.
He is somebody who really goes
to the root of accepted
assumptions in his critical
questioning.
Burke completely rejects the
Enlightenment project as I have
described it to you today.
 
Let me say a little bit about
who he was.
He was born in 1829,
so that makes him,
I mean 1729,
sorry.
I gave him a hundred years
there.
He was born in 1729,
a quarter of a century after
Locke died,
and the main work for which he
is most known,
his Reflections on the
Revolution in France,
was published in 1790 almost
exactly a century after,
actually more like 110 years
after Locke's Second
Treatise.
Well, I should say it was
published a hundred years after,
but it was written a 110 years
after because we now know that
Locke wrote The Second
Treatise in the early 1680s.
But what motivated Burke to
write his reflections on the
French Revolution was the
appalling carnage that
eventually resulted from the
French Revolution.
The French Revolution was not
planned as a revolution.
It was really street riots that
escalated in Paris,
but escalated to the point of
the complete destruction of the
whole society,
the inauguration of a massive
terror,
which appalled Burke.
And so he wrote this,
what started out as a pamphlet,
but became this very famous
book on the Reflections on
the Revolution in France
, and that becomes a
basis of Burke's outlook.
 
He wasn't a professional
scholar or academic.
He was actually a public person.
 
He would eventually become a
Member of Parliament and has
some things to say about
democratic representation that I
will come back to when we get to
the theory of democracy.
But at the time he wrote the
Reflections on the Revolution
in France,
which is what I had you read
excerpts from today,
he was mainly preoccupied with
what had happened,
what had transpired across the
Channel in 1789.
 
And he was, in particular,
concerned to establish against
people like Richard Price,
who's one of the people who he
engages there,
that 1789 was in any sense a
logical follow-on of 1688 in
England;
1688, of course,
when we had the revolution in
England,
the glorious revolution of 1688
when William was put on the
throne,
which Locke defended,
but from Burke's point of view
that was a minor palace affair
not a fundamental or radical
revolution.
 
And in this sense Locke's
view--I'm sorry,
Burke's view of the English
Revolution,
for those of you who are
historians here you might be
interested to know,
is very much at odds with the
big new book called 1688
just recently published by
Professor Pincus in the history
department here,
a very interesting book which
argues that 1688 was a much more
radical break with the past than
people thought at the time,
and certainly than Burke
thought because Burke thought
that 1688 was not a radical
break with the past whereas 1789
in France was a radical break
with the past.
And I think that another thing
to say before we get into the
particulars of Burke's view is
that,
unlike everybody else you've
read in this course,
Burke really does not have a
theory of politics.
He does not have a set of
premises that you can lay out,
conclusions to which he wants
to get and then change of
reasoning that get him from A to
B from the premises to the
conclusion.
 
There is no theory of politics
in Burke.
With Kant we talk about
universalizability.
Locke we talk about this
commitment to principles of
scientific certainty.
 
Burke has, rather than a
theory, he has an attitude or a
disposition,
an outlook, and that outlook is
informed first and foremost by
extreme distrust not only of
science,
but of anybody who claims to
have scientific knowledge.
 
He thinks that human society is
way too complicated for us ever
to get completely to the bottom
of it.
That we are kind of carried
along on a wave of very
complicated history that we
understand only dimly,
if at all, and that that's not
going to change.
The human condition is a
condition first and foremost,
of fumbling in the dark.
 
He says, just to give you a
flavor of this),
"The science of
constituting a commonwealth,
or renovating it,
or reforming it,
is,
like every other experimental
science,
not to be taught a priori."
So here you can see a complete
resistance to the logical
reasoning that drove Hobbes and
Locke in thinking about the
structure of mathematics and a
system of axioms of the sort
Bentham tried to come up with.
 
"No,"
says Burke, "Nor is it a
short experience that can
instruct us in that practical
science;
because the real effects of
moral causes are not always
immediate,
but that which in the first
instance is prejudicial may be
excellent in its remoter
operation;
(so when we think we see
something bad it might be having
a good effect) and its
excellence may arise even from
the ill effects it produces in
the beginning.
The reverse also happens;
and very plausible schemes,
with very pleasing
commencements,
have often shameful and
lamentable conclusions.
In states there are often some
obscure and almost latent
causes,
things which appear at first
view of little moment,
on which a very great part of
its prosperity or adversity may
most essentially depend."
So the world is fundamentally
mysterious and murky.
And things that look good might
have bad consequences.
Things that look bad might have
good consequences.
The effects of our actions are
going to be realized in the
distant future in ways that we
can't possibly imagine.
And so that being the case the
most important characteristic of
thinking about politics is
caution.
We should be cautioned.
 
"The science of government
being,
therefore, so practical in
itself, and intended for such
practical purposes,
a matter which requires
experience,
and even more experience than
any person can gain in his whole
life,
however sagacious and observing
he may be,
it is with infinite caution
that any man ought to venture
upon pulling down an edifice
which has answered in any
tolerable degree for ages the
common purposes of society,
or on building it up again
without having models and
patterns of approved utility
before his eyes."
So what they did in the French
Revolution was the antithesis of
what Burke recommends,
because they swept everything
away and decided to build again
tabula rasa.
Burke is deeply suspicious of
all attempts to do that and he
thinks they'll end in disaster
because the people who undertake
them will not know what they're
doing,
and even more dangerous,
they're not smart enough to
know how dumb they are.
 
They're not smart enough to
realize that they really do not
know what they're doing.
 
They're not smart enough to
understand that they will
unleash forces which they will
not be able to control.
So Burke is,
in that sense,
a conservative who thinks about
social change in a very cautious
and incremental way.
 
He's not a reactionary in the
sense of being someone who's
opposed to all change.
 
He's a conservative.
 
I think one of the nice
definitions of conservatism in
Burke's sense was actually put
forward by Sir Robert Peel in
the nineteenth century when he
said--
he defined conservatism as,
"Changing what you have to
in order to conserve what you
can."
Changing what you have to in
order to conserve what you can,
as distinct from a reactionary
view which would be just flat
resistance to all change.
 
Now, of course,
this idea of conservatism as
valuing tradition is very
different from the libertarian
conservatism of Robert Nozick
that we looked at earlier in the
course.
 
The libertarian conservatism of
Robert Nozick is anti-statist,
anti-government,
and resistance to authority
being imposed on you,
hence the notion of libertarian
conservatism.
 
Burke is a traditionalist
conservative.
He thinks that tradition is the
core of human experience,
and he thinks whatever wisdom
we have about politics is
embedded in the traditions that
we have inherited.
"They have served us over
centuries,"
this is his view writing at the
end of the eighteenth century,
"they have served us for
centuries.
They have evolved in a glacial
way."
As I said, people make
accommodations to change,
but only in order to conserve
the inherited system of norms,
practices and beliefs in
institutions that we reproduce
going forward.
 
So that's the sense in which
it's a conservative tradition;
to conserve,
the basic meaning of the word
conserve, conservative.
 
And so science is a really bad
idea when applied to political
and social arrangements because
there isn't scientific
knowledge,
and anybody who claims to have
it is either a charlatan or a
fool,
perhaps both.
 
And so, as I said,
he doesn't have a theory
because he's skeptical of the
very possibility of having a
theory.
 
He thinks we should,
as Clint Eastwood says--
I've forgotten in which movie
it is,
I think A Fistful of
Dollars,
maybe--"A man's got to
know his limitations.
Are you feeling lucky?"
 
A man's got to know his
limitations, Burke thinks that
in spades.
 
He thinks we have to understand
that our grasp of the human
condition is very limited and
it's going to stay that way.
So, on the first of our two
prongs of the Enlightenment
endeavor he's completely out of
sympathy.
Now what about the second?
 
What about the commitment to
this idea of the importance of
individual rights?
 
We saw how this developed
initially in Locke's formulation
in a theological way when Locke
argued that God created us with
the capacity to behave in a God
like fashion in the world.
Each individual is the bearer
of the capacity to create
things, and therefore have
rights over his or her own
creation.
 
In Locke's view we're all equal.
 
We're equal in God's sight.
 
He creates us all equally,
and we're all also equal in the
sense,
very important for Locke,
that no earthly power has the
authority to tell us what the
scripture says.
 
Each person must do it for
himself,
and when they disagree they
have to either find a mechanism
to manage their disagreement,
or if they can't,
look for their reward in the
next life.
But basically each individual
is sovereign over themselves.
And that's where modern
doctrines of individual rights
come from.
 
We saw how that played out with
the workmanship ideal,
Mill's harm principle all the
way down through Nozick and
Rawls.
 
Bentham has, I'm sorry;
Burke has a very,
very different view of the idea
of rights.
They're first of all,
they are inherited.
They're not the product of
reason or any contrived
theoretical formulations.
 
They're inherited.
 
"You will observe that
from Revolution Society to the
Magna Carta it has been the
uniform policy of our
constitution to claim and assert
our liberties as an entailed
inheritance derived to us from
our forefathers,
and to be transmitted to
posterity--
as an estate specially
belonging to the people of this
kingdom,
without any reference whatever
to any other more general or
prior right.
By this means our constitution
preserves a unity in so great a
diversity of its parts.
 
We have an inheritable crown,
an inheritable peerage,
and a House of Commons and a
people inheriting privileges,
franchises, and liberties from
a long line of ancestors."
So what we think of when we
talk about rights for Burke,
first of all,
they're not human rights or
natural rights for him,
they are the rights of
Englishmen.
 
They are the rights of
Englishmen;
they are particular rights.
 
They're the result of a
particular tradition.
The idea that there could be
universal rights doesn't make
any sense.
 
It's not an intelligible
question, as far as Burke is
concerned,
to assay what Rawls would say,
what rights would we create for
all people in some abstract
setting?
 
It doesn't make any sense to
him.
So it's the rights of
Englishmen.
And indeed, when Burke was
sympathetic to the American
Revolution,
not the French Revolution,
it was because he thought that
the rights of the American
colonists as Englishmen were
being violated by the English
Crown.
 
And he was also sympathetic to
claims for home rule for
Ireland, again,
on the same sort of basis.
But it's this entailed
inheritance, what we have been
born into as a system of rights
and obligations that we
reproduce into the future.
 
And those rights,
above all, are limited.
Again, just as our knowledge of
the world is limited so our
rights, in the normative sense,
are limited.
"Government is a
contrivance of human wisdom to
provide for human wants.
 
Men have a right that these
wants should be provided for by
this wisdom.
 
Among these wants is to be
reckoned the want out of civil
society, of a sufficient
restraint upon their
passions."
 
We have a right to be
restrained, a very different
notion than a right to create
things over which we have
authority, a right to be
restrained.
"Society requires not only
that the passions of individuals
should be subjected,
but that even in the mass and
body,
as well as in the individuals,
the inclinations of men should
frequently be thwarted,
their will controlled,
and their passions brought into
subjection.
 
This can only be done by a
power out of themselves,
and not, in the exercise of its
function,
subject to that will and to
those passions which it is its
office to bridle and subdue.
 
In this sense the restraints on
men, as well as their liberties,
are to be reckoned among their
rights."
The restraints on men,
as well as their liberties,
are to be reckoned among their
rights.
"But as the liberties and
the restrictions vary with times
and circumstances and admit to
infinite modifications,
they cannot be settled upon an
abstract rule (take that John
Rawls);
and nothing is so foolish as to
discuss them upon that
principle."
So we have a right to be
restrained.
We have a right,
most importantly,
that others are going to be
restrained,
and that our passion should be
controlled is something that he
insists is an important part of
what we should think of under
the general heading of what it
is that people have rights to.
"One of the first motives
to civil society,
and which becomes one of its
fundamental rules,
is that no man should be the
judge in his own cause.
By this each person has at once
divested himself of the first
fundamental right of
uncovenanted man,
that is, to judge for himself
and to assert his own
cause."
 
That's not that different from
Locke, that first part.
After all, Locke talks about
the state of nature as being
exactly a state in which we get
to judge in our own cause,
but for Locke we give it up in
a conditional way.
We never lose the right to
revolution if society doesn't
protect us, and that's what he
thought was triggered in 1688.
Burke says no.
 
"He advocates all right to
be his own governor.
He inclusively,
in a great measure,
abandons the right of
self-defense,
the first law of nature.
 
Men cannot enjoy the rights of
an uncivil and of a civil state
together.
 
That he may obtain justice,
he gives up his right of
determining what it is in points
the most essential to him.
That he may secure some liberty;
he makes a surrender in trust
of the whole of it."
 
This, to some extent,
has a Hobbesian flavor that
Hobbes says,
"If we don't have law
we'll have civil war,
and so we have to give up
freedom to authority."
 
The difference is even in
Hobbes's formulation there's
ultimately the recognition that
if society does not provide you
with protection you have a
reasonable basis for resistance
and for overthrowing it.
 
But in Locke's case,
I mean, in Burke's case he
doesn't want to concede even
that.
Because we cannot,
once we've made the transition
into civil society,
we cannot go back.
There is no turning back.
 
We are part and parcel of this
system of entailed inheritances
and that is the human condition
all the way to the bottom.
He doesn't reject completely
the metaphor of the social
contract, but he makes it
indissoluble.
He says, "Society is
indeed a contract.
Subordinate contracts for
objects of mere occasional
interest may be dissolved at
pleasure (if I make an agreement
with you to do something we can
agree to dissolve our
agreement)--
but the state ought not to be
considered as nothing better
than a partnership agreement in
a trade of pepper and coffee,
calico or tobacco,
or some other such low concern
to be taken up for a little
temporary interest,
and to be dissolved by the
fancy of the parties.
 
It is to be looked on with
other reverence (the
"it"
here is the state) - because it
is not a partnership in things
subservient only to the gross
animal existence of a temporary
and perishable nature - it is a
partnership in all science;
a partnership in all art;
a partnership in every virtue,
and in all perfection."
"As the ends of such a
partnership cannot be obtained
in many generations,
it becomes a partnership (now
this is the most famous sentence
Burke ever wrote) not only
between those who are living,
but between those who are
living, those who are dead,
and those who are yet to be
born."
 
A very different idea of the
social contract,
partnership between those who
are living, those who are dead
and those who are yet to be
born.
"Each contract of each
particular state is but a clause
in the general primeval contract
of eternal society."
So, the "law is not
subject to the will of those
(this is a flat rejection of
workmanship),
who by an obligation above
them, and infinitely superior,
are bound to submit their will
to that law.
The municipal corporations of
that universal kingdom are not
morally at liberty at their
pleasure,
and on the speculations of a
contingent improvement,
wholly to separate and set
asunder the bonds of their
subordinate community,
and to dissolve it into an
unsocial,
uncivil, unconnected chaos of
elementary principles."
 
So one way of just driving home
the radical break here between
his thought and the social
contract theorists is to mention
that one of the standard
criticisms that often gets made
of social contract theory is,
well, even if there was a
social contact,
you know, some people think of
the adoption of the American
Constitution as a kind of social
contract.
 
After all it was ratified by
the states.
Actually, the Articles of
Confederation had said it had to
be unanimously ratified,
and they couldn't get that,
so they changed it to
three-quarters of the
confederacy states.
 
Still, there was an agreement
of some sort,
and it was ratified and so on,
but people have often said,
"Well, so what?
 
So those people in the
eighteenth century made an
agreement.
 
I didn't.
 
What has it got to do with me?
 
Why should it be binding on
subsequent generations?"
And that's often been a
critique of the idea of the
social contract.
 
Burke turns that reasoning on
its head.
He says, "Once we see that
this social contract is
multi-generational between the
dead,
the living, and those who are
yet to be born,
who are you (any given
individual),
who are you to think that you
can upend it?
What gives you the right to
pull the rug out from under this
centuries-old evolving social
contract?
What gives you the right to
take it away from those who
haven't even been born who are
part of this (he even uses the
word eternal) eternally
reproducing social
contract."
 
So it's a sort of mirror image
of the critique which says,
"Well, we never made it so
why should we be bound by
it?"
 
He says, "It preexisted
you,
and you're going to predecease
it, and you don't have the
right,
you don't have the authority to
undermine it because any rights
you think you have are the
product of this evolving
contract,
they're contained within
it."
So society is not subordinate
to the individual,
which is the most rock-bottom
commitment of the workmanship
idea.
 
On the contrary,
the individual is subordinate
to society.
 
Obligations come before rights.
 
We only get rights as a
consequence of the social
arrangements that give us our
duties as well.
So whereas the Enlightenment
tradition makes the individual
agent the sort of moral center
of the universe,
this god-like individual
creating things over which she
or he has absolute sovereign
control,
is replaced by the exact mirror
image of the idea of an
individual as subordinate to
inherited communities,
traditions, social
arrangements,
and political institutions to
which he or she is ultimately
beholden.
 
If there was a pre-collective
condition it's of no relevance
to us now because we can't go
back to it,
and any attempt to try,
look across the English Channel
and see what you're going to
get.
That is the Burkean outlook in
a nutshell, and it is,
as I said, the most fundamental
critique of the Enlightenment
it's possible to make.
 
And even though the
Enlightenment tradition,
as we have studied it here,
was unfolding in the
seventeenth,
eighteenth, nineteenth and
twentieth centuries,
this anti-Enlightenment
undertow has always been there
as well.
Not to make the metaphor do too
much work,
but you can really think of
every wave of advancement in
Enlightenment thinking washing
down the beach and producing an
undertow of resistance and
resentment against it,
both philosophically,
and I'm going to start talking
in a minute about
twentieth-century Burkean
figures,
but also politically.
One story about the rise of
fundamentalism,
and jihadism,
and ethnic separatism is this
is all part of the political
undertow against the current
form that the Enlightenment
political project is taking,
which is globalization,
homogenization,
this sort of McDonald's effect
on the world,
produces this backlash against
globalization where people
affirm primordial-looking
attachments,
even though there's probably no
such thing as a genuinely
primordial one,
separatists,
partial affiliations and
allegiances,
connections to doctrines which
deny the scientific and rational
project of the Enlightenment.
 
And so, just as globalization
has been advancing we've seen a
resurgence of separatists,
religious fundamentalists,
nationalists,
and other kinds of identities.
Quite the opposite,
for example,
of what Marx predicted.
 
Marx predicted that things like
nationalism, sectarian
identifications,
would go away,
and Lenin too.
 
They thought that as the
principles of capitalism defused
themselves throughout the world,
things like national
attachments would go away.
 
And indeed on the eve of the
First World War there was the
Second Communist International
where they basically came out
and said to the workers of
Europe,
"Don't get involved in
this national war.
It's not in your interest.
 
You have a common class
interest across nations against
the interest of employers across
nations,"
and of course this fell on
completely deaf ears.
In 1916 the Second
International pretty much
disintegrated.
 
And, in fact,
one of the big paradoxes of the
twentieth century has been the
persistence of things like
nationalism through the first
two world wars and then in the
last part of the twentieth
century,
this resurgence of religious
and other forms of
traditionalist attachment that
are fundamentally antithetical
to the Enlightenment project.
 
So the Enlightenment has always
produced reaction,
undertow, rejection,
often from the people who don't
benefit from it,
and it's one of the ways in
which I think the proponents of
the Enlightenment have always
been politically na�ve.
 
They've always thought that as
modernization and Enlightenment
diffuses itself throughout the
world these kinds of primitive
thinking will go away.
 
Well, it turns out that they
don't,
and so one of the big tasks of
political science at the present
time is to try and understand
why,
to try and understand what the
dynamics of political
affiliation and identity
attachment really are.
And so that's a Burkean agenda.
 
Now if you fast-forward from
Burke to the middle of the
twentieth century,
I had you read a short piece,
very famous and important
piece,
by Lord Devlin who was an
English judge.
Like Burke, someone with Irish
origins,
though some certain amount of
ethnic ambiguity in both cases
there about just how much Irish
and just how much English,
but we needn't detain ourselves
with that in this course.
And he was commenting upon
something called the Wolfenden
Report,
which was published in 1959 by
a commission that had been asked
to tell the British Parliament
what it should do about
homosexuality and prostitution.
And the Wolfenden Report had
said, "The laws against
them should be repealed.
 
They should both be legalized
on the grounds (they didn't use
these terms but this is the
basic thought or the term we
would use today) that both
homosexuality and prostitution
are victimless crimes."
 
They are, to use the jargon of
our course, Pareto-superior
exchanges.
 
They're voluntary transactions
among consenting adults that
don't harm anybody else.
 
And of course this was put in a
different idiom because it was
the 1950s, but that was
essentially the point.
They don't harm anybody,
so it's just traditional
prejudice, bigotry that leads us
to outlaw these things and we
shouldn't do it.
 
That was what the Wolfenden
Report had said.
And Burkean-to-the-core Lord
Devlin says, "No!"
I don't know how caught up you
are in the reading.
Anyone who has read Burke--I'm
sorry, Devlin,
tell us why he thinks this.
 
Yeah?
 
We need to get you the mic.
 
Why he thinks,
why is it that Lord Devlin
thinks that the mere fact that
there's no harm is not enough of
a basis for legalizing
homosexuality and prostitution.
Yeah?
 
Student:  He claims that
it's not an attack against the
individual but a harm against
society.
Prof: So what does that
mean, though,
when you say it's a harm
against society?
How do you unpack that in your
own mind?
Student:  I guess it's
maybe an attack against the
morals that society tends to
agree to.
Prof: Yeah, well, agreed.
 
Let's put brackets around
agreed.
It's not what we mean by it,
but certainly the morals that
are there.
 
And where do they come from?
 
Where do those morals,
I mean, so we have a moral code
that says homosexuality and
prostitution are wrong,
but where does that come?
 
Anyone?
 
Yeah?
 
Student:  Well,
he put a lot of weight on the
basis of religion for driving
one's morals.
Prof: Correct,
religion, an interesting--look
what he says about religion.
 
He says, "Morals and
religions are inextricably
joined--
the moral standards generally
accepted in Western civilization
being those belonging to
Christianity.
 
Outside Christendom (there's a
1950s word, we don't say
Christendom anymore,
do we?)
other standards derive from
other religions."
Outside Christendom other
standards derived from other
religion.
 
"In England we believe in
the Christian idea of marriage
and therefore adopt monogamy as
a moral principle.
Consequently the Christian
institution of marriage has
become the basis of family life,
and so part of the structure of
our society.
 
It is there not because it is
Christian (this comes to the
point about whether we've
agreed).
It has got there because it is
Christian,
but it remains there because it
is built into the house in which
we live and could not be removed
without bringing it down."
It's there not because it's
Christian, it got there because
it's Christian,
it's a matter of history.
It was a Christian civilization.
 
So we have a Christian
conception of morality,
but he's not saying it's true.
 
He's not saying that the
Christian set of beliefs about
religion is true.
 
He has no interest in the
question of whether or not it's
true.
 
He's saying here,
"A different society might
be glued together by a different
religion which wouldn't create
monogamy.
 
It might create polygamy,
and that would have its own
history and its own system of
rights and institutions and
everything that goes with
that."
So it's conservative in the
sense of affirming tradition,
but not conservative in the
sense of saying there are
absolute moral values.
 
Neither Burke nor Devlin
ventures any opinion on that
subject.
 
They say it's not even really
important.
What's important is that the
people in the society believe in
these values.
 
And if the people in this
society don't believe in some
system of values as
authoritative,
the society will fall apart.
 
You can't put together a
society just on the basis of
interest.
 
It needs more.
 
It needs moral glue.
 
So these folks,
you could say when I say they
don't really have a theory in
the sense that we've looked at
theories up until now in this
course,
it's because you could say,
"Well,
they're not political theorists.
 
They're really sort of
sociologists.
They're really sociologists of
stability because they're saying
that it's necessary for a
society to be stable that it's
held together by this kind of
moral glue of authoritative
opinion."
 
So when you say to Lord Devlin,
when he's defending the
outlawing of homosexuality and
prostitution,
"Well, that's just your
bigotry,"
his answer wouldn't be to deny
that it's in some absolute sense
an irrational position,
but he would say,
"Every society needs its
bigotry.
Every society needs its
prejudices."
And so he doesn't appeal to
rationality, but he does appeal
to what he calls reasonableness.
 
And what is reasonableness?
 
It's basically the system of
beliefs, as he puts it,
"of the man on the Clapham
omnibus."
We might today say the woman on
the A train reading the New York
Post.
 
The prejudices of the average
person that is the basic
yardstick,
and if the average person is
appalled by some practices,
then they should be illegal.
And that's the beginning and
end of it.
So what about that?
 
You could fast-forward it since
he talks about homosexuality and
what we call gay rights today.
 
If you look at the American
trajectory,
in 1986 this came up before the
Supreme Court in a case called
Bowers versus Hardwick,
and they essentially took the
Burke-Devlin position.
 
That is that states should be
allowed to outlaw homosexuality
because most people find it
deplorable.
A couple of years ago it came
back to the court and they said,
"Well, mores have evolved
enough since 1986 that we're
going to overturn Bowers versus
Hardwick,"
very Burkean.
 
They're following the man on
the Clapham omnibus.
They're following the woman on
the A train's prejudices,
beliefs and values,
and that's as it should be.
What about that?
 
How many people find this
appealing?
Only two?
 
How many people find it
unappealing?
So we still have at least half
undecided.
What's unappealing about it?
 
Yeah?
 
Student: 
>
Prof: Take the
microphone.
Student:  According to
his perspective we might still
have a system of slavery in this
country.
Prof: According to this
perspective we would still have
slavery in this country.
 
Well, I think he wouldn't
concede the point that quickly.
He would say what I just said
about Bowers versus Hardwick
that if the views of the man on
the Clapham omnibus evolve
enough,
then we can recognize change.
Now you might want to not
accept that because what if they
happen before--Yeah?
 
Student:  Yeah,
to refute that I would just say
that our morals and our ideas of
what is right and wrong are
shaped by the systems that we
were born into and consequently
I feel like Burke and Devlin's
system ascribes a great deal of
value to the moral conceptions
at the beginning of society and
that almost leads us to a system
of stasis in terms of our
morality.
 
There seems to be too much
stasis and no ability to
reevaluate given how our moral
systems are shaped.
Prof: I think that's
right,
and we will pick up with this
on Monday,
but if you think that the basic
society structure is okay you're
likely to find this doctrine
appealing,
but if you think the basic
structure of the society is
deeply unjust then you're likely
to be affronted by this outlook
because one person's reasonable
morality is another person's
hegemony,
and we'll start with that idea
next time.
 
 
 
