Imagine you have to design a new and better society. One question you might ask is, ‘Who gets what?’ If you live in a beautiful mansion with an indoor swimming pool and servants, and have a private jet waiting to whisk you away to a tropical island, you might well conjure up a world in which some people are very rich - perhaps the ones who work hardest - and others much poorer. If you are living in poverty now, you’ll probably design a society in which no one is allowed to be super-rich, one where everyone gets a more equal share of what is available: no private jets allowed, but better chances for people who are unfortunate. Human nature is like that: people tend to think of their own position when they describe a better world, whether they realize it or not. These prejudices and biases distort political thinking.
His central idea is very simple: design a better society, but do it without knowing what position in society you’ll occupy. You don’t know whether you’ll be rich, poor, have a disability, be good looking, male, female, ugly, intelligent or unintelligent, talented or unskilled, homosexual, bisexual or heterosexual. He thinks you will choose fairer principles behind this imaginary ‘veil of ignorance’ because you won’t know where you might end up, what kind of a person you might be. From this simple device of choosing without knowing your own place, Rawls developed his theory of justice. This was based on two principles he thought all reasonable people would accept, principles of freedom and equality.
The first principle was his Liberty Principle. This states that everyone should have the right to a range of basic freedoms that mustn’t be taken away from them, such as freedom of belief, freedom to vote for their leaders, and extensive freedom of expression. Even if restricting some of these freedoms improved the lives of a majority of people, Rawls thought, they were so important that the freedoms should be protected above all. Like all liberals, Rawls put a very high value on these basic liberties, believing that everyone had a right to them and that no one should take them away.
Rawls’ second principle, the Difference Principle, is all about equality. Society should be arranged to give more equal wealth and opportunity to the most disadvantaged. If people receive different amounts of money, then this inequality is only allowed if it directly helps the worst off. A banker can only get 10,000 times more than the lowest-paid worker if the lowest-paid worker benefits directly and receives an increased amount of money that he or she wouldn’t have had if the banker was paid less. If Rawls were in charge, no one would earn huge bonuses unless the poorest got more money as a result. Rawls thinks this is the kind of world reasonable people would choose if they didn’t know whether they would be rich or poor themselves.
For Popper a key feature of any hypothesis is that it has to be falsifiable. He used this idea to explain the difference between science and what he called ‘pseudo-science’. A scientific hypothesis is one that can be proved wrong: it makes predictions that can be shown to be false. If it is unfalsifiable it is not a scientific statement at all.
Popper thought that many statements about psychoanalysis were unfalsifiable this way. He thought they were untestable. Consequently, Poper argued, psychoanalysis wasn’t a science.
Human life is full of anguish. The anguish comes from understanding that we can’t make any excuses but are responsible for everything we do. But the anguish is worse because, whatever I do with my life is a kind of template for what anyone else should do with their life. If I decide to marry, I’m suggesting that everyone should marry; if I decide to be lazy, that’s what everyone should do in my vision of human existence. Through the choices I make in my life I paint a picture of what I think a human being ought to be like. If I do this sincerely it is a great responsibility.
Sartre’s advice was a bit frustrating. He told the student that he was free and that he should choose for himself. If Sartre had given the student any practical advice about what to do, the student would still have had to decide whether or not to follow it. There is no way to escape the weight of responsibility that comes with being human.
Another important theme of existentialism was the absurdity of our existence. Life doesn’t have any meaning at all until we give it meaning by making choices, and then before too long death comes and removes all the meaning that we can give it. Sartre’s version of this was to describe a human being as ‘a useless passion’: there is no point to our existence at all. There is only the meaning each of us creates through our choices.
But it isn’t just neurotic and hysterical patients who have unconscious wishes and memories. According to Freud, we all do. That is how life in society is possible. We hide from ourselves and what we really feel and want to do. Some of these thoughts are violent and many are sexual. They are too dangerous to let out. The mind repress them, keeps them down in the unconscious. Many are formed when we are small children. Very early events in a child’s life can re-emerge in adulthood. For example, Freud believed that men all have an unconscious wish to kill their father and have sex with their mother. This is the famous Oedipus complex, named after Oedipus who in Greek mythology fulfilled the prophecy that he would murder his father and marry his mother (without being aware in either case that he was doing so). For some people, this early awkward desire completely shapes their life without them even realising it. Something in the mind stops these darker thoughts getting through in a recognizable form. But whatever it is in us that stops this, and other unconscious desires, from becoming conscious isn’t completely successful. The thoughts still manage to escape, but in disguise. They emerge in dreams, for example.
For Freud, dreams were ‘the royal road to the unconscious’, one of the best ways of finding out about hidden thoughts. The things we see and experience in dreams aren’t what they seem. There is the surface content, what appears to be going on. But the latent content is the real meaning of the dream. That is what the psychoanalyst tries to understand. The things we encounter in dreams are symbols. They stand for the wishes that lurk in our unconscious minds.
Another way in which we get a glimpses of unconscious wishes is in slips of the tongue, so-called Freudian slips, where we accidentally reveal wishes that we don’t realize we have. Many TV newsreaders have stumbled over a name or phrase, accidentally speaking an obscenity. A Freudian would say this happens too often for it simply to be a matter of chance.
As Pascal put it, ‘If you win you win everything; if you lose you lose nothing.’ He recognized that you might miss out on ‘those poisonous pleasures’: glory and luxury. But instead you’ll be faithful, honest, humble, grateful, generous, a good friend, and will always tell the truth.
Nevertheless, as Pascal points out, on one side you have the chance of hell, but your possible gains don’t compare with an eternity in heaven.
The solution, Hobbes argued, was to put some powerful individual or parliament in charge. The individuals in the state of nature would have to enter into a ‘social contract’, an agreement to give up some of their dangerous freedoms for the sake of safety. Without what he called a ‘sovereign’, life would be a kind of hell. This sovereign would be given the right to inflict severe punishment on anyone who stepped out of line. He believed that there were certain natural laws that we would recognize as important, such as that we should treat others as we’d expect to be treated ourselves. Laws are no good if there isn’t someone or something strong enough to make everyone follow them. Without laws, and without a powerful sovereign, people in the state of nature could expect a violent death. The only consolation was that such a life would be very brief.
Individuals in the state of nature, then, had very good reasons for wanting to work together and seek peace. It was the only way they could be protected. Without that their lives would be terrible. Safety was far more important than freedom. Fear of death would drive people towards forming a society. He thought that they would agree to give up quite a lot of freedom in order to make a social contract with each other, a promise to let a sovereign impose laws on them. They’d be better off with a powerful authority in charge than all fighting each other.
Early Greek Stoics had views on a wide range of philosophical problems about reality, logic and ethics. But they were most famous for their views on mental control. Their basic idea was that we should only worry about things we can change. We shouldn’t get worked up about anything else. They aimed for a calm state of mind. Even when facing tragic events, such as the death of a loved one, the Stoic should remain unmoved. Our attitude to what happens is within our control even though what happens often isn’t.
At the heart of Stoicism was the idea that we are responsible for what we feel and think. We can choose our response to good and bad luck. Some people think of their emotions as like the weather. The Stoics, in contrast, thought that what we feel about a situation or event is a matter of choice. Emotions don’t simply happens to us. We don’t have to feel sad when we fail to get what we want; we don’t have to feel angry when someone tricks us. They believed emotions clouded reasoning and damaged judgement. We should not just control them, but whenever possible remove them altogether.
Why be afraid of savage dogs if you can’t be sure they want to hurt you? Just because they’re barking and baring their teeth and running towards you doesn’t mean they’ll definitely bite. And even if they do, it won’t necessarily hurt. Why care about oncoming traffic when you cross the road? Those carts might not hit you. Who really knows? And what difference does it make if you are alive or dead anyway? Somehow Pyrrho managed to live out this philosophy of total indifference and conquer all the usual and natural human emotions and patterns of behaviour.
We can’t ever now what the world is really like - that’s beyond us. No one will ever know about the ultimate nature of reality. Such knowledge simply isn’t possible for human beings. So forget about that.