justice
Harvard's Intro to Political/Moral Philosophy course is now on Youtube. I listened to a couple of lectures while cleaning. One problem with political philosophy is that there's more excitement about the implications of the ideas than about the ideas themselves, and that ruins things a bit, but still, it's kinda entertaining. [1]
While I'm on the subject, is this new technology, Youtube, going to replace university lecturers? I say no. The profession weathered the invention of the printing press. Compared to that, Youtube is nothing.
[1] Sample Sandel story:
When I was in Oxford back in the late 1970s, they still had separate colleges for men and women and the women's colleges had rules against overnight male guests. These rules were rarely enforced and easily violated. Or so I was told. Pressure was growing to relax these rules, which became a subject of debate at St. Anne's, which was then an all women's college. Some of the older women on the faculty were traditionalists. They opposed allowing male guests. They believed in protecting the moral virtue, as they saw it, of their young women students. But times had changed and the traditionalists were embarrassed to give the real reasons for their objection, so they translated their moral argument into an economic one. "If men stay overnight", they argued, "the costs to the college will increase". How, you might wonder? "Well", they said, "they'll want to take baths, and that will use hot water". "Furthermore", they argued, "we'll have to replace the mattresses more often". The reformers met these arguments by adopting the following compromise: each woman could have a maximum of three overnight guests each week provided each guest paid 50 pence a night to defray the costs to the college. The next day, the headline in The Guardian read: 'St. Anne's girls 50 pence a night'. So there you have a lesson in the perils of reducing moral considerations to economic ones.
