GOOD NEWS

I just learned that I will be able to give a series of lectures in the next few months in the UNC philosophy department on the use and abuse of formal methods in political philosophy. As things now stand, I shall  be giving six weekly two hour lectures.  The department has found me a handicap accessible classroom and I am good to go. It will be fun to be back in the classroom yet again.

Here is the flyer I wrote yesterday announcing the lectures:

The Use and Abuse

Of Formal Methods in Political Philosophy

A series of lectures

by Robert Paul Wolff

 

In the past 100 years or so, the ancient disciplines of ethics and political philosophy have been significantly changed by the incorporation of formal materials introduced from logic, mathematics, and economics. Rational choice theory, collective choice theory, and Game Theory have all played a significant role in recent literature, perhaps most notably in the work of John Rawls.

 

Sometimes the introduction of these formal materials has made for greater precision and power in argumentation, but all too often the result has been confusion rather than clarity, and ideological rationalization rather than greater understanding. In fields as far apart as legal theory, nuclear deterrence theory, and political philosophy inadequate understanding of the formal methods has resulted in ideological rationalization of questionable normative claims.

 

The purpose of these lectures is twofold: First, to present the foundations of these formal methods with sufficient precision and clarity so that students can master them and really understand what they are about; and Second, to give examples of the ways in which these materials have been misused through inadequate understanding.

 

In the first part of the lectures, we will develop formally the concept of a utility function, distinguishing ordinal from cardinal utility functions, and we will explore some of the difficulties and complexities of these notions. We will then look closely at the so-called “paradox of majority rule” and examine in some detail Kenneth Arrow’s proof of a powerful theorem generalizing the Condorcet paradox. We will also go through a proof of an interesting theorem by Duncan Black concerning single peaked preference orders. We will then move on to a formal development of the elements of Game Theory as first developed by John von Neumann.  Included in this discussion will be a formal development of the oft referenced but usually misunderstood notion of a zero-sum game.  We shall, with any luck, also put to rest the confusions concerning the so-called “Prisoner’s Dilemma.”

 

In the second part of the lectures, we shall take a look at some of the misuses of this formal material. Our principal focus will be on a formal analysis of the central argument lying at the heart of John Rawls’s famous book, A Theory of Justice.