PPE 2023

  I want to analyze how the tempered settler contract in North America impacts contemporary legal decisions based on Native land and sovereignty and see if America is on the path towards reparations, which Pateman argues for. First, I will outline Pateman’s argument on the tempered settler contract. Then I want to contextualize the tempered settler contract and analyze its modern legal importance. Pateman considers the right of husbandry alongside a lack of sovereignty to illustrate settlers’ justification for colonizing terra nullius , expropriating native land, and ruling over native people. I will briefly summarize the right of husbandry before more deeply analyzing ideas of sovereignty in North America. Pateman argues that settlers justified claims to terra nullius through the right of husbandry, the idea that land was unowned if it were populated yet uncultivated.  These arguments about the rights of husbandry (which appear in conjectures about private property formation ...

In "The Settler Contract," Carole Pateman questions the legitimacy of modern states. Pateman discusses that political theory and the law of nations use the justification of terra nullius  to legitimatize a state's occupancy and right to the land. Pateman describes terra nullius as "territory that is empty, vacant, deserted, uninhabited..." (36). Land that is terra nullius, therefore, belongs to no one and is uncultivated. There are two justifications for terra nullius. First, the right of husbandry. This means that any land that is uncultivated is open for use. The second is that the inhabitants in terra nullius land had no sovereign government and therefore, were in a state of nature.  However, Pateman argues that terra nullius was used as a form of justification for colonization by North America and Australia. She states that "when colonists are planted in terra nullius... the aim is not merely to dominate, govern, and use but to create a civil society...

In Contract & Domination , Carol Pateman argues that terra nullius was the justification for various colonial endeavors. Pateman cites a slate of scholarly literature from the 1990s that reviewed early justifications for colonization, arguing that terra nullius constituted much of the early justification of colonization (37). Pateman outlines how European powers used terra nullius to occupy land—jurisdiction was granted to the country which occupied it (in other words, the country that exploited, dominated, and pillaged the land and its populace) (41). She argues that terra nullius was employed in two ways. First, defenders of colonization in North America argued that the land was uninhabited (36). Second, they argued that even when the land was inhabited, no sovereign government existed (36). Pateman critiques these two justifications, and much of her argument rests on the idea that North America and Australia at the time cannot be considered terra nullius. I wanted to hone in, ho...

  I want to push back against your claim that identity politics "caused the subjugation of minorities in the first place; rectifying that cannot be based on the same principle." I believe that a legal and societal foundation of white superiority and black suppression subjugated minorities – not identity politics. So, I want to outline where, using Harris' text for support, minority subjugation stems from and then consider the phenomena of identity politics by its origins, not the sensationalized buzzword depiction we commonly see in the media today.  While there are numerous examples of the legal and social framework which subjugates black people in Harris'  Whiteness as Property , I will choose a few examples which best exemplify that American systems, not identity politics, initially subjugated minorities. Harris asserts that there was a transition for whiteness to become property; the evolution "of whiteness from color to race to status to property as a progre...

  Hi Aara and Shaira,   Great blog posts. Your discussion of affirmative action reminded me of the part of the Harris reading where she says: “Whiteness as property continues to perpetuate racial subordination through the courts’ definitions of group identity and through the courts’ discourse and doctrine on affirmative action” (Harris 1758). It also made me think of Harris’s claim that “affirmative action is required on both moral and legal grounds to de-legitimate the property interest in whiteness” (1779). Harris makes a compelling case for affirmative action in principle: if the value of whiteness can be quantified, then affirmative action can be justified to remedy not only past injustice but the current hierarchy of value vis-á-vis social identity. However, I am struggling to apply the theoretical argument for affirmative action (as articulated by Harris and Aara) to prove why the United States should keep/implement affirmative action (from a practical perspective). ...

Whenever I read about arguments in favor of distributive justice or affirmative action, there is always contention about the idea of the burden of proof. Although the two are different concepts, there is this notion, perhaps fallacious, that because both are unjustifiable in placing such measures to rectify past wrongs on people present today, on whom the burden falls. For distributive justice, property or wealth could have to be shifted from one group to another. In the case of affirmative action, as Harris points out in Bakke’s case, there is a belief that opportunity may be withheld from a certain group and given to another.  These two undertakings, in the context of the United States, have fallen on the “innocent white.” I will, however, mainly be focusing on affirmative action in this blog post. The idea of the “innocent white,” struck me, implying that a sort of injustice has been committed against that group in order to create that specific term. If the “innocent white” of t...

Harris grounds her argument for affirmative action in the idea that institutions should seek to "equalize treatment" of racial groups by overcoming the "property interest" of whites whose privilege and historically derived advantages prevent the possibility of a neutral background over which merely "equal treatment" can be justified (1780). Affirmative action therefore seeks to achieve a form of "distributive justice" where resources, such as school admissions, are distributed according to "what would have been the proper allocation in absence of the warp of racial oppression," (1784). She claims that objections to affirmative action are grounded in the property interest of whiteness," and a desire to realize "the settled expectations of whites" to receive preferential treatment, grounded, of course in subordination of other races, and, having been established, requiring only facial neutrality for its maintenance. However...

 In "Whiteness As Property," Harris makes the case for viewing what is typically characterized as "white privilege" as property, the same way that one might view membership to an exclusive club. However, I believe that there is this idea that underpins her argument, which I might call identity politics, that provides perhaps the most important takeaways, at least for my understanding of the lessons we can learn from Harris' writing.  Early on, Harris identifies this implicitly when outlining the commonalities between whiteness and property, stating that both fundamentally involve the "right to exclude." (Harris 1714) Later, when enumerating the property functions of whiteness, Harris specifically singles out "The Absolute Right to Exclude" (Harris 1736) as its own category. This "right" of exclusion is crucial because it ensures the "purity" of the group that enjoys the benefits of whiteness.  The distinguishing characteri...

      In "Whiteness as Property," Cheryl I. Harris builds her work on the image of her grandmother and her ability to use "passing" in her labor and daily life (1710). The main advantage of passing, as stated by Harris, is that it "[increases] the [possibilities] of controlling critical aspects of one's life rather than being the object of other's domination" (1713). At this moment, I want to focus on her functions of whiteness which comes after her discussion that whiteness is property through its theoretical descriptions. More specifically, I will digest one attribute of whiteness as property: "the rights to transfer or alienability" (1731).              One of Harris's points is that because theories surrounding property state that it must have the aspect of alienability, it makes whiteness as property more difficult to process. The issue is that "whiteness," as Harris states, "is incapable of being trans...

      I want to use this blog post as an opportunity to explore the implications of Rousseau's argument that social emotions develop as humans exit the state of nature and begin to form communities and then civil society. He claims that as human interaction increased so too "the heart and mind were exercised" (pg. 114) and humans built relationships and became more social. "Each began to look at others and to want to be looked at himself; and public esteem came to be prized" (pg. 114). They began to take notice of the action's of others outside of themselves and make comparisons. Observations and comparisons soon turned into shame, envy, vanity, etc. All of these social emotions as I will call them are directly related to other people. Without interaction and the "measuring" of respective skills these emotions wouldn't exist. Rousseau argues that these qualities are "fatal to happiness and innocence" (pg, 114). This is beginning of in...

On page 111, Rousseau presents a scenario from what is presumably the state of nature: the stag hunt. A group of individuals is hunting a deer. If they catch the deer, they all get to eat. However, if one of them instead sees a hare, believes he can catch the hare and be adequately fed by the hare, “we cannot doubt that he would have gone off in pursuit of it without scruple and, having caught his own prey, he would have cared very little about having caused his companions to lose theirs” (111). In essence, Rousseau is describing the problem of defection. The problem is worsened when each individual recognizes that the others have an incentive to defect and catch a hare, ensuring that there is little chance they will not defect if they see a hare themselves. The outcome in which one of the hunters pursues the hare results in a worse outcome for everyone (even the one who gets the hare) because the stag is a high-value target with lots of meat whereas the hare is not. If the hunters coo...

  I really enjoyed this week's tutorial session discussing Adario's perspective on laws (and the comparison of French and Huron life) and think it is important to compare his conclusions on society with how Rousseau discusses the transition from a state of nature to civil government. Since Rousseau likely read Lahontan's work, I question the extent to which Adario's ideas are present in  A Discourse on Inequality.  To begin, I immediately connected Rousseau's transition from general conventions to laws within society to the different depictions of Adario's Huron life and Lahontan's French customs. In his depiction of nascent government, Rousseau depicts a society of general conventions similar to the Huron way of life. Rousseau describes how, within the first society, there exists a set of norms that "all the individuals committed themselves to observe, conventions of which the community made itself the guarantor towards each individual" (Rousseau ...

(It wouldn't let me post this as a comment under the thread. Apologies for this going up so late as well, the formatting is incredibly weird and still does not seem to be fixed) When reading through this discussion, I kept returning to the idea that most of these conversations revolved around subjective situations; this post brought up a lot of good points, and the comments highlighted how different situations and individuals will yield different answers.  To Umer’s point about separating an idle aristocrat from the past from a modern CEO, the idea of a “deserving” CEO can be ambiguous. A CEO can work their way up from “nothing,” but that is not always the case. I wanted to think about the CEO argument beyond just a mere position at a company and look at the factors that may have led that person to their position. There is a case a) for an individual who, for their whole life, had to support themselves (ex: working to pay for their own education, etc.) who eventually was able “righ...

Hey Umer and Dara, this is a really interesting discussion that I think, contrary to what you said in your original post Umer, gets at a central part of Anderson's argument:  Locke considered inequality to be one of the issues that humans leave the state of nature to address. I agree with Umer that Locke does not necessarily believe scarcity is the only cause for conflict in the state of nature, although I think your argument to that effect makes sense Dara. Locke talks about conflict within the state of nature as resulting from punishing transgressions of the law of nature, which include theft and assault. It's easy to see how these could result from scarcity, but also how they might just be an easier way for someone to get something they want than by justly appropriating the commons, since the latter requires labor.  I think Anderson is reaching here, and not just here. Maybe Locke cared about addressing poverty once the commons have been appropriated, but he certainly cared...