>> So today we're going to be talking
about Charles Darwin, and a very different
kind of writing, and a different political
and historical context.
Darwin is writing in the middle of the
nineteenth century, so we leave behind
Emma Bovary and Flaubert's art for arts
sake, and the, the beginnings of modernism
in France, to go back in time a little
bit, because we're going to go back to
even before 1850 and talk about Darwin and
the culture of enlightenment in England.
How it's a little different actually very
different, [laugh] from France, and
Germany.
So the, the first slide that we're showing
you today is, is has a, has a quote from
Darwin in 1839.
And he says, it is difficult to believe in
the dreadful but quiet war lurking just
below the serene facade of nature.
And, and, and we use it as a header this
week, because, for Darwin, the facade of
nature was very important.
He paid attention to surfaces.
This is really key for Darwin.
He, he, he is not someone who, who thought
that surface was, completely deceptive,
and somehow, you had to get through
illusion to get to the truth.
Darwin thought, a the truth was there.
On the surfaces of things, on the
appearance of things, but you just had to
learn how to read those appearances
properly.
Darwin's faith in the capacity to
understand the surfaces of things, the
appearances of things really comes out of
a long tradition of empiricism in England,
and, back to the really to the days, of
the glorious revolution the revolution of
1688.
For our purposes and, and, and you can
read and watch more about these things in
various textbooks and encyclopedia of
European history.
For our purposes the intellectual history
of the period owes so much to John Locke,
a figure instrumental in the late in the
revolution of 1688, and, and the late 17th
century more, generally.
The enlightenment in England was less
confrontational than it turned out to be
in, in France, less confrontational and as
I said, more empirical.
More concerned with sensation, with how
things feel and the truth that one could
derive from, from how things feel.
For Locke we should just get some key
concepts on the table.
Again, all of this is, is background for
Darwin's work in the nineteenth century.
For Locke, consent was a, a major category
that is, he wasn't, as concerned, with the
critique and, with, subversion, or,
unmasking.
For, for Locke, consent was a key
category.
Because for, in Locke's political
philosophy, the social contract was based
on the consent of the governed, and that
consent was a rational decision by the
governed to exchange a portion of their
freedom for increased security.
But Locke did argue that there was a right
to revolution, that is that, there were
times where the government was so abusive
that, that exchange of, of freedom for
security, wa, was tilted out of balance.
And therefore one had a right to change
government.
That was certainly a, a radical notion in
the late 17th century.
And he also believed in the Locke believed
in the Natural rights that were the
underpinning of the social contract.
The natural rights that would be so
important actually for the founding of the
American Constitution at the end of the
eighteenth century.
Limited government is, is, part of Locke's
political philosophy moderation, li,
limited government, and, most importantly,
toleration.
Locke comes at the end of a, the 17th
century, when, Great Britain had undergone
a series of, of rebellions and civil wars,
and many of them grounded in, religious
disputes.
And, Locke develops a political
philosophy, very different from the rest
of continental Europe, arguing for,
toleration, so that, people could agree to
disagree, without, fighting.
They could agree to disagree without
thinking their advocating some essential
duty to convince everybody else they were
right.
We take a lot of these things for granted
today, but in Locke's time and argument
for toleration for, the coexistence of
very different religious beliefs within a
single country was, a, a was a radical
notion, a, a, notion that was, was a
departure from the status quo.
So, just to, to put a, a point on the
differences between this English approach,
and the French and the Germans.
For the French thinkers now into the 18th
century, custom was the enemy, the status
quo.
Custom was something that was duplicitous,
and the philosoph, the intellectual, had
the good sense to see through custom.
In Germany they view nature with
suspicion.
And in England there is a confidence both
in custom and in nature.
That both custom and nature are seen to
be, important, building blocks for a
legitimate, government, and important
building blocks for a reasonable
philosophy.
And now, that's really, the kind of,
distant background to our subject this
week.
And we'll get a little closer in the
eighteenth century with Jeremy Bentham.
Jeremy Bentham, that's a name that will be
familiar to many of you as the father of
Utilitarianism.
And, when we talk about this material in
class I, I, I have an opportunity to ask
people before he got into it,.So what do
you think utilitarianism is, and a spirit
of utility, what does that mean?
And, we don't have an opportunity to have
Conversation in, in a online course.
But you might stop for a minute and, and,
and write down a couple of things that you
think utilitarianism might mean.
And, and then start the tape off again to,
to, to hear one of, some of the ideas that
were key, for Bentham who, who lived from
1748 to 1832.
Bentham, reads Locke, but he reads Locke
in a, in a dramatic way.
For Bentham, you, you want to get rid of
all of the things that you can't,
quantify, that you can't put into a
rational system, through which you can
measure your results.
And that means, you get rid of a concept
of human nature, you get rid of the notion
of the order of the universe, which is
still important to lock, and perhaps most
importantly and most surprisingly Bentham
say's get rid of precedent.
Take a more extreme example if we, we
think there's is a terrorist plot and we
have a feeling that the terrorist plot is
based in Alpha delta phi, my own, my old
stomping grounds.
And so, we go in there and we just start
torturing people, to find out because,
the, the, we only had tortured 19 people
at most, and the benefits are for
thousands and thousands of people.
I think what you meant by what would be
morally suspect is, it's wrong to, it's
wrong to torture even one person, to
benefit thousands.
And from the utilitarian perspective,
that's not morality that's superstition.
Unless you construct an argument that in
the long run, it's better for everybody.
But it should be, it's, it's not a
question of violating that person's rights
as there are no human rights, there are no
natural rights, it's a, what benefits the
most people.
And there are times when there will be
conflict between, you want to knock down a
coin and I what to flip it, and, and some
of them can be solved and some of them
can't be solved.
But what you can't, what Bentham doesn't
want us to do, is to solve it by going,
well, that's the way we always did it, or
solved it by saying, there's a deeper
moral perspective, it's always wrong to
kill, it's always wrong to torture.
Because to prevent them, those are just
customs Okay, their not reasons.
He famously said, antiquity is no reason.
This is very important in England because
there is no written constitution there,
and, and the notion of common law is very
important.
And that means that the, the legal system
is based on a reading of the past that,
which allows a judge to say, well its
always been this way or its been this way
for quite a long time, therefore it should
be that way.
And Bentham rejects this kind of reason,
says it's, it's irrational.
Antiquity, age is no reason.
We have to find a measurable reason why a
certain practice is legitimate.
That's a key for utilitarianism.
So they're against, utilitarians are
against the concept of human nature, you
just can' really prove what it is.
They're against this notion of an order of
the universe, God's purpose or anything
like that, again you can't prove what it
is, and they're against the notion of
precedent.
So what is utilitarianism for?
They're for developing a rational schema
for evaluating all practices and beliefs
without recourse to any essences or
substances.
That is, any foundation that, you
couldn't, substantiate or prove.
And they want to, use a rational schema,
while avoiding as scrupulously as
possible, those things that can't be
measured.
So in your philosophy, get rid of concepts
you can't prove, and get of rid of
techniques you can't measure.
That's key for Bentham.
And, if you know one thing about
utilitarianism, you probably know the
saying the greatest happiness for the
greatest number.
That's the, that's what the one sentence
people seem to know about utilitarianism.
Just like with Marx, the one sentence is
the history of all hitherto existing
society is the history of class struggle.
In Bentham, it's, the greatest, happiness
for the greatest number.
We should ask ourselves, what does that
mean?
It, it really means trying to develop a
calculus for measuring pleasure of any
kind.
What happiness really is for Bentham about
the, the pleasure one gets out of certain
activities.
And the critique that will be made of
utilitarianism then, as now, is, is really
around the, the, the inability of
utilitarianism to say, are some pleasures
better than others.
The utilitarianians say we, we can't
measure that.
We, you say you like watching pornography,
someone else says the, she likes what,
measuring to opera.
That's, that's a measure of taste.
What matters to us is, how much pleasure
you get from it.
Some people get pleasure out of doing
things that we say our morally bad.
Well that's to, let's, that's not, that's
not our business as utiliatrians.
And utilitarians are really interested in
a calculus of pleasure, that would allow
us to say what provides the greatest good
to the greatest number.
Without saying, without ranking, without
ranking what goods are, are, what, what,
what one is higher than the other.
Now utilitarianism is, a powerful engine
for thinking about social life, but it
gives rise in the beginning of the 19th
century, really the end of the 18th and
beginning of the 19th century to,
romanticism in England, which is a
rejection of this, this focus on the
things that can be measured.
For the, the romantics what's really key,
are the things you can't measure.
The romantics want us to pay attention to
the things that really matter, because you
can't measure them.
Pricely because you can't measure them.
The things that Bentham and the
utilitariamists, the utilitarians seem to
reject.
There's a whole group of English
romantics, but the most important ones for
our purposes are, are Wordsworth and
Coleridge.
And I just say again a word about each of
them because we, we're really going back
to Darwin later in this lecture.
