PHIL 2280 Lecture Notes - Lecture 15: Collectively Exhaustive Events, Communitarianism, Political Philosophy

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Philosophy
• Course: PHIL 2280
• Professor: Omid Shabani

Document Summary

Drawing on marxism (structure of class domination, and the idea of ideology), mills approaches the problematic of race in america. He claims that political philosophy so far has been theorized around a political subject, who is white, male, property owner, and as such, it does not include subjects belonging to the dominated races. Two key insights in social contract thought experiment: 1) society and the polity are human- constructs, and 2) human beings are naturally equal in the pre-polity state, and this equality ought to be translate into egalitarian social-political institutions. Thus, given our equality in the state of nature we should be getting an equality-based scheme in juridical, political and economic sense. The good polity is a just polity, and the just polity is founded on safeguarding our equality as individuals. This quest shows the inadequacy of abstract liberalism and contractualsim. Ideal theorisation needs to be supplemented with the analysis of the actually- existing liberal societies.