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PROFESSOR: OK, so as you know,
we've moved in our discussion
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to the question of what sort
of social structures are
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either legitimate or
contributory to the well being
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of humans, given our nature.
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And we ended last lecture by
having a game theoretic
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representation of what I
called the cooperation
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dividend, which you'll recall
involves the case of two
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individuals who, fearful that
the other will attack their
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resources, expend a certain
amount of energy walling off
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Where if they were somehow to
find themselves in a situation
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where they could cooperate and
trust themselves to cooperate,
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their energy could be devoted,
instead of to the protection
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of their goods, to
the production of
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other sorts of goods.
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Those required, as Hobbes says,
"for commodious living"
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and for things like
navigation.
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Goods that would allow both
of them to be better off.
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And in the last two lectures we
looked at the writings of
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Thomas Hobbes in the context of
his work, Leviathan which
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explored both why it is that
the cooperation dividend is
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expected to be to the advantage
of all and also why
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it is that in order to hold
cooperation in place, certain
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sorts of external enforcement
mechanisms--
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in Hobbes's mind, a Leviathan,
a monarch or leader who has
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absolute power--
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is required to hold this sort
of cooperation in place.
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What we're going to turn to
in the lectures today and
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Thursday is a contemporary
version of this question,
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which asks us to think about--
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if we are considering not merely
the cooperation or lack
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of cooperation between two
people, but rather the
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distribution of goods and
responsibilities across a
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larger community--
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how it is that such a society
should be structured if we
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take as our basic picture
something similar to Hobbes.
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Namely the idea that cooperation
is beneficial to
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all in a way that competition
isn't, but that stably
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promoting cooperation requires
certain sorts of
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And so what we'll look in
particular today is discussion
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by the 20th-century philosopher
John Rawls who
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lived from 1921 to 2002 and
who taught at Harvard
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throughout his career.
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We encountered Rawls writings
already in a very early paper,
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the 1955 paper on punishment
that we looked at where he
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introduced the idea of a
two-level justification of
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And what we'll be looking at in
today's lecture is Rawls'
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discussion in his enormously
influential 1971 book, A
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