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A Critical Examination of Ethical Justifications for Political Power Student Number: 001713572 PhD Thesis Cardiff University 2008 A Critical Examination of Ethical Justifications for Political Power By DaN McKee UMI Number: U585121 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI U585121 Published by ProQuest LLC 2013. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 DECLARATION This work has not previously been accepted in substance for any degree and is not concurrently submitted in candidature for any degree. Signed... (candidate) Date.. STATEMENT 1 This thesis is being submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of PhD. Signed ..........................................(candidate) Date..<<7 ' STATEMENT 2 This thesis is the result of my own independent work/investigation, except where otherwise stated. Other sources are acknowledged by explicit references. Signed.. ..........................................(candidate) Date..?:/!/!. °..L0.^. STATEMENT 3 I hereby give consent for my thesis, if accepted, to be available for photocopying and for inter-library loan, and for the title and summary to be made available to outside organizations. S i g n e d . ................................................(candidate) Date ,.?.7 /.!?/.?!.. STATEMENT 4: PREVIOUSLY APPROVED BAR ON ACCESS I hereby give consent for my thesis, if accepted, to be available for photocopying and for inter-library loans after expiry of a bar on access previously approved by the Graduate Development Committee. S ig n ed (candidate) Date. 1:7. I gratefully acknowledge the generous support received from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in the production of this thesis. THESIS SUMMARY In this thesis I argue that formal political power is a human-created artificiality, erected over previously unfettered lives for a specific purpose. As such, the act of establishing and maintaining political power can be assessed like any other person- affecting act, ethically, and must always bejustified if it is to be considered legitimate. I show that underlying all such attempted justifications for political power is an implicit, but necessary, ethical contract: that political power X is justified only because it makes life ‘better’ for ‘people’ than it would be without it. Utilizing a form of ethical constructivism, I unpack a plausible account of what this universal political teleology can be said to objectively demand, constructing first a reasonable account of which ‘people’ we can justifiably say ought to be considered within the ethical contract (everyone affected), and then, working from that definition, and what we can reasonably claim to know of the shared goals and interests of such people, constructing a plausible account of what could be said to constitute a ‘better’ life for them (the protection and fulfilment of seven basic and universal ‘species- interests’). I use this account as a critical tool, showing that, despite the multiplicity of varied political structures which have historically traded on divergent interpretations of this same underlying contract, once we have unpacked a compellingly objective account of its terms by which to judge each interpretation, there appears to be only one form of political power seemingly capable of fulfilling its requirements and thus achieving the legitimate goals of an objectively justified politics: a form of federated, small- scale anarchism, which I describe as ‘authentic democracy’. CONTENTS 1. Preliminaries: Power, Meta-ethics, and the Rationally Autonomous Self 1.1: A Statement of Intent page 1 1.2: Rejecting Abstract Notions of Power for a Concrete Ethical Theory page 5 1.3: Political Teleology and the Plausible Construction of Fact-Based Values page 18 1.4: Confirming the Rational Autonomous Self page 46 2. Unearthing the Ethical Contract 2.1: Why Political Power Must Be Ethically Justified: The Need for an Enduring Contract page 55 2.2: Traditional Social Contract Approaches to Ethical Justification page 67 2.3: Backing Into the Ethical Contract: The Unavoidability of Political Teleology page 100 2.4: Rawls and Constructing the Hypothetical Contract: Ethics and the Original Position page 107 2.5: Political Teleology Outside of the Social Contract Tradition: The Universality of the Necessary Contract page 121 3. Who Are ‘The People’, And What Is ‘Better’ For Them? 3.1: An Inclusive Definition of ‘People’ page 128 3.2: From Species-Facts to Species-Interests: Making Life ‘Better ’for All page 133 3.3: Rejecting Non-Valid Interpretations of the Universal Contract page 149 3.4: Anarchism and Political Teleology page 155 3.5: Capitalism, Representative Democracy, and Democracy’s Authentic Ideal page 167 3.6: Authentic Democracy is Anarchism; but is Authentic Democracy Possible? page 210 4. The Illegitimacy of Capitalist Representative Democracy. 4.1: Capitalism and Ideology 1: Corporate Obstacles, Democracy and Education page 219 4.2: Capitalism and Ideology 2: Authentic Democracy and the Media page 243 4.3: Demystifying the ‘War on Terror’ page 256 4.4: Democracy Without the Demos: Continuity Theory, Corporate-Interests and Species-Interests page 269 4.5: A Critical Examination of Ethical Justifications for Political Power: A Conclusion page 288 vi APPENDIX Ideology and the First Gulf War page 297 BIBLIOGRAPHY Books page 302 Articles page 314 Websites page 317 Other Media page 320 vii A Critical Examination of Ethical Justifications for Political Power 1. Preliminaries: Power, Meta-ethics, and the Rationally Autonomous Self ‘Obedience or subjection becomes so familiar, that most men never make any enquiry about its origin or cause, more than about the principle o f gravity, resistance, or the most universal laws o f nature. Or if curiosity ever move them; as soon as they learn, that they themselves and their ancestors have, for several ages, or from time immemorial, been subject to such a form o f government or such a family; they immediately acquiesce, and acknowledge their obligation to allegiance. ’ - David Hume, O f the Original Contract1 1.1: A Statement of Intent This thesis has several aims. The first aim is to make clear the understanding that political power is not a natural and inevitable phenomenon in the world, but rather a human-created artificiality, erected over previously unfettered lives for a specific purpose. As such, I will argue, the act of establishing political power, and of maintaining it, always has to be justified in some way if it is to be considered legitimate, and can therefore be judged like any other act we might attempt to evaluate ethically, in terms of whether or not the act is ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘right’, or ‘wrong’ for the people it affects. Further still, as I shall show, acknowledgement of this often obscured truism is embedded implicitly within any articulated endeavour to try and justify and legitimate ’Hume, D. Of The Original Contract, in, 1987.Essays Moral, Political and Literary, p. 470. (Liberty Fund; Indianapolis) a political power to the people over whom it has been established. Indeed, underlying all attempted justifications for legitimating the existence of political power over and above pre-political life, is a universal ethical and, specifically, contractarian argument: that political power X is justified only because it makes life ‘better’ for ‘people’ than it would be without it. Alongside exposing the necessary existence of this universal ethical contract, I aim to show that such an argument has two important implications. Firstly, it implies the existence, within any legitimate structure of political power, of a necessary justificatory purpose or, as I shall be calling it, apolitical teleology: that is, an ethical goal of politics on which its justification rests, and thus a concession that legitimate political power is not natural, absolute and unaccountable, but synthetic, limited and conditional; there to serve a specific and certain purpose - that of making life ‘better’ for ‘people’ than it would be without it - and if it fails to authentically fulfill this teleological role, then its legitimacy can no longer be ethically justified. Secondly, and the reason that the words ‘better’ and ‘people’ have thus far been written in scare-quotes; once we have unearthed the terms of the ethical contract - that political power X is justified only because it makes life ‘better’ for ‘people’ than it would be without it - then we have the rudimentary apparatus to start developing a plausible account of what fulfilling such a contract must objectively entail. A coherent political teleology must be built upon an equally coherent teleological conception of the goals and purpose of those people to whom political power is contractually obliged to make life better. By working out who, therefore, must count as ‘people’ in this context, we can then look at those ‘people’, so defined, and see what we can claim to objectively know to be true about their goals and interests, in 2 order to help define what, then, could be reasonably said to make life ‘better’ for them.2 I will attempt to do precisely that, utilizing a form of ethical constructivism to construct first a reasonable account of which ‘people’ we can justifiably say ought to be considered within this political teleology; and then, working from that definition, and what we can objectively claim to know of the goals and interests of such people, constructing a logical account of what could therefore be reasonably said to construe a ‘better’ life for them. This process will, in turn, further help confirm or deny our original designation of who should count as ‘people’, thus further sharpening our depiction of what would make life ‘better’, and so on, until a harmonization between the two terms is met.
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