Ethics and politics
Rawls concludes, in A Theory of Justice, that rational, unenvious people behind the veil of ignorance in the original position would all opt for a political system that recognized certain rights and gave them priority.
Nozick's theory of justice, as we saw, also assumes that we have certain fundamental rights, though he says less about why we have these rights. This is surely an important question. Most contemporary people agree that each of us has the right not to be tortured, say, or not to be killed (if innocent), and that we should be allowed freedom of speech and of association. But on what basis do we believe this?In the last chapter, toward the end, we looked at Aristotle's idea of eudaemonia, his notion of a successful life. I said that it was important, in thinking about how we should treat others, to think of each person as having the task of making a success of his or her life. This consideration is particularly important in thinking about political arrangements, and it suggests why any acceptable political system must recognize certain rights. For if each of us is and ought to be engaged in the project of making a successful life, then a government that gets in the way of that project is doing something wrong, and a government that aids us is doing something right. Because a society is a common cooperative project, it must operate fairly, and so any aid a government offers, it must offer on fair terms to everybody; and that presumably means it must do so, in some sense, equally. Starting with these two basic ideas—that each of us has a life to make, and that a fair political system will offer us equal opportunities for making a success of the very different lives we are making—many recent political philosophers have sought to establish what sorts of rights we should have in a just society and what limits on their exercise are reasonable.
Some so-called communitarians believe that because you can make a success of a human life only in a community, there are obligations you have to your community that limit your freedom to make your own life. You are not simply free to set goals for yourself and pursue them as long as you respect the rights of others. Rather, you must aim, in making your life, to give to your community the service that is required if it is to be a community within which you and others can make successful lives.Consider, for example, the question of whether we have obligations to others that are a consequence neither of our having promised to do something nor of their having rights that we must not infringe upon. Many philosophers in the liberal tradition to which Rawls and Nozick belong have held that the government can use force to get us to respect the rights of others, to stop us actively harming them, and to enforce contracts that we have freely entered into. But that would mean that we had few obligations to our parents or to the communities in which we grew up, for we did not freely enter into a contract with our parents or our societies—we were just born into them. No one asked us whether we wanted to be born to these parents or into this society because, of course, no one could have asked. But perhaps we owe our parents and our societies something for giving us life and raising us, even though this was not a contract. After all, no one could have a successful human life without parents and a community that raised them. Here, thinking about what is required for eudaemonia can help us decide what the state ought to do: whether, in particular, it should require us to do certain things we do not want to do (such as looking after aging parents or serving in the military) because doing these things is required if our society is to be able to provide a context for all of us to have successful human lives.
So ethics, in Aristotle's sense, needs to be part of the background to our thinking about political philosophy.
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