Justice: A Citizen's Guide to the 21st Century

Suppose that some terrorists have planted a bomb on an airplane.

There are 300 passengers on board the plane, and in one hour the bomb is going to go off.

TIMER BEEPS

The authorities have apprehended someone they suspect is the leader of the terrorist plot.

He won't reveal where the bomb is. It's going to go off in an hour.

TIMER BEEPS

Do you think it would be right to torture the terror suspect

to get the information about where the bomb is?

SHOUTING

-No, I don't think so.

-No, I don't think you should torture people.

Yes, I would.

SHOUTING AND ROARING

Absolutely not.

Yeah, I think it's right if it saves lives.

Torture would not be justified or condoned.

-What about the 300 people?

-300 people against our human rights?

It sounds pretty cold, but human rights are for everyone.

TIMER BEEPS

Let's step back from this discussion

and notice how many objections have we heard to what they did?

We heard some defences of what they did...

'My name is Michael Sandel

'and I teach political philosophy at Harvard University.'

To me, philosophy is not only a subject for the classroom.

It's a way of thinking through

the hard moral choices we make and debate all the time.

Should minorities always bend to the will of the majority?

Should you lie to protect a friend?

Is torture ever justified?

To answer questions such as these, we need to think about justice.

To do so, I'd like to invite you to join me on a journey to meet three philosophers.

Each had a different answer to the question, what is justice?

For Jeremy Bentham, justice means seeking the greatest happiness

for the greatest number of people.

Immanuel Kant disagreed.

He argues that justice means respecting human dignity.

Aristotle took a different view.

For him, justice is about cultivating virtue and a good life.

So who was right?

And what do these philosophers have to say to us and to our world?

We begin in London with Jeremy Bentham.

Though he lived in the 18th century, you can visit him today.

A rather eccentric character,

he instructed in his will that his body be preserved and put on display.

An auto icon, he called it.

So here's Jeremy Bentham.

Jeremy Bentham, yeah. The auto icon of Jeremy

has been here for many years in this particular part of the college.

It was part of my duties, I used to be the head beagle at the front lodge there

and I used to open him up on a daily basis

and close him up on a daily basis,

which normally entailed about 7:30 in the morning until six at night.

Those were his unofficial hours.

What do you call him? Do you call him Mr Bentham or Jeremy?

Mr Bentham, I address him as.

-You're not on first name terms after all these years?

-THEY LAUGH

Every morning once I opened him up,

I used to say, "Good morning, Mr Bentham. Another quiet day ahead."

THEY LAUGH

Jeremy Bentham was born in 1748.

He was a child prodigy who went to Oxford at the age of 12 to study law.

So this is one of the manuscripts in Bentham's hand?

That's right, an original manuscript dating from about 1798.

Bentham wrote prolifically.

His works, which will ultimately fill 68 volumes,

are still being edited at University College, London.

He started off as a legal philosopher,

and he discovered his principle of utility in 1769,

when he was 21 years old,

and started to apply it to legal practice.

As he went on he found it could be applied universally, really.

What did he mean by utility?

It was a shorthand, really,

for happiness or pleasure.

The way he would put it was that someone who was an adherent of the principle of utility would be a

person who supported the increase of pleasure and the diminution of pain.

In his book on The Principles of Morals and Legislation, Jeremy Bentham set out the central

idea of his utilitarian philosophy - seek the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.

On the basis of this simple idea,

Bentham proposed various schemes to improve British society.

He wanted to reform the legal system

so as to serve what he saw as the rational principle of utility.

He called for homosexuality to be decriminalised

and he approved of any activity that added to the sum of human happiness.

He was an early proponent of animal welfare,

arguing that animals suffer pain just as humans do.

But his moral calculus left no room for universal principles of human rights.

Even torture could be acceptable.

You can never rule anything out with Bentham's utilitarianism.

You can never absolutely say that something is always

and universally right and something is always and universally wrong.

-Even torture?

-Even torture.

Bentham's proposals for reforming the poor laws

also reflected the harsh face of utilitarianism.

He thought that the sight of beggars in the street offended the sensibility

of good citizens by evoking the pains of sympathy and disgust.

His solution was to pay those good citizens to round up beggars at 20 shillings per head

and place them in workhouses, where they would be required to labour for their keep.

He recognised that this might make some beggars unhappy,

but according to his calculus the good would outweigh the harm.

What about the unhappiness of the beggar?

Bentham's view was that it was in the beggar's interest as well as in the community's

interest that the beggar became a productive member of the community rather than wasting their time,

annoying people on the streets.

What do they think of Bentham on the streets of London today?

So that was his idea.

-What do you think of it?

-I think it's a rubbish idea.

-Yeah? Why do you think so?

-Why don't they just send people out with guns

and let them shoot all the homeless? That would also

solve the problems. And who was these people to decide who could be dragged

into the workhouses?

The only thing I can say is Bentham was right

on just about everything else, so he might be right.

-But it's fraught with problems.

-You're cutting people off.

You're saying put them people in a place like that,

and you're cutting them off from society. That's all you're doing.

This is what the government is trying to do with the Olympics.

"Get all of the homeless off the streets, because we don't want the tourists seeing how it really is."

So what do you think of Bentham's philosophy, that the way the law

should be should depend on whatever makes the greatest number of people the happiest?

-What do you think about that idea?

-No.

-It's rubbish.

And why? What's wrong with that idea? Tell us what's wrong.

Because I think in society, you have a responsibility to care for the more weakest and more vulnerable,

and if you sort of go along with whatever makes more people happy...

What if it makes more people happy that they don't see any old people because they smell?

"Let's put all them away. And disabled people.

"I don't really like looking at them. Let's put them away."

Where do you stop with that?

Then you're sort of moving into Nazi Germany, don't you, and let's have the wonderful, perfect race.

One of the strongest arguments against utilitarianism is that it fails to respect individual rights.

For example, suppose a big majority strongly dislikes women wearing burkas.

Does that mean the burka should be banned?

In France, they think so.

In 2010, backed by huge public support,

the French government passed a law banning the burka in public,

claiming that it violates France's secular tradition.

If a woman is wearing a burka or or niqab on the street,

the police will come and take her home back, you know?

If there is a second attempt, she will certainly be taken back again,

and certainly will get a fine.

Peter Singer is one of the world's leading utilitarian philosophers.

If a big enough majority is made very unhappy by women wearing burkas on the street,

is it right that they should be banned according to utilitarianism?

If millions of people are made seriously unhappy and there's

no way they can get around their unhappiness or adjust to the presence

of women in burkas on the street,

then certainly the numbers ought to prevail in that situation.

But what about religious liberty?

For a utilitarian, religious liberty is not an absolute.

Utilitarians don't find any list of rights somehow written up

in heaven or self evidently delivered to our minds.

They're not going to say that there's just an absolute

right to religious liberty which trumps utilitarian considerations.

On the contrary, they'll say rights are things that we devise and draw up

and enforce where they conduce to the larger,

long term benefit of everyone affected.

# La donna e mobile

# Qual piuma al vento... #

Bentham's focus on maximising happiness

led him to reject the distinction between high and low culture.

According to Bentham, it's not for us to judge some pleasures as higher or more noble than others.

Some people like to go to the opera.

Others like to watch football or dog fighting.

What matters is the quantity, not the quality of the pleasure.

States often put a lot of money into opera, and I wonder why, when it is

for rather a small group of clientele who are supporting it.

And I think states ought to be more concerned about

the happiness and welfare of all of their citizens, not of a minority.

But this is the question I want to press you on, Peter.

Is it just a matter of taste, of subjective preferences?

Surely the reason states subsidise opera or the arts generally is the view that cultivating

an appreciation for the arts is something that is intrinsically worthy?

I have trouble with the idea of intrinsically worthy here.

I can see that some things do stimulate us to think about

other things, but the idea that it is more intrinsically worthy,

independently of those consequences, is something

that I'm not sure exactly what that is supposed to mean.

All right, but suppose, Peter, you've got these people who love dog fighting.

You take them to football matches and you try to change their tastes.

You may even take them to the opera and persuade them that they would like that even more.

But you fail.

They've been to the football match,

they've gone to the opera, they've heard your arguments,

but they say, "We still love dog fighting.

"Yes, it creates some suffering for the dogs, but there aren't that many

"dogs and there are thousands upon thousands of us." Then?

You're trying to make it very tough, and it is tough, because

I still think that dog fighting is something we ought to get rid of,

because I think it has a brutalising effect, not only on these small

number of dogs there, but on people's attitudes to animals in general.

It would be the same if instead of dogs we would have picked some

despised racial minority and make them fight, as the Romans did with the gladiators.

Wasn't a racial minority, perhaps, but it was captives.

We have to think about the attitude that that inculcates,

to think that it is OK to treat people like that for our amusement.

If the only reason you condemn it and reject it is that

in the long run it will produce less happiness, isn't something missing?

Don't you want to say it's wrong in itself, isn't it, quite apart from how the calculus works out?

I want us to have an instinctive reaction that says "You must never do that."

But as philosophers,

I think we also want to ask further questions about

what does this instinctive reaction really show?

Probably it shows something about the way we've evolved to

care for others in our community, and that is something that is good and we want to encourage.

But does it show some kind of

absolute moral right that people have not to be treated as a means to the ends of others? I don't think so.

Jeremy Bentham left us with more than his eternal physical presence.

He also left us with two big questions of moral and political philosophy.

First, should we respect individual rights only insofar as doing so promotes human happiness?

Or is there a principle of human dignity above and beyond utilitarian considerations?

And second, is happiness just a matter of pleasure, of satisfying our subjective preferences?

Or does happiness mean living a life that helps us see

certain preferences, certain values, as higher, as worthier than others?

One of the most powerful responses to the question of rights came from Immanuel Kant.

Kant was born in 1724 in the Prussian town of Koenigsberg.

He was a university professor who lived in the era

of Frederick the Great when Prussia was becoming

a cultural and political powerhouse.

Immanuel Kant rejected utilitarianism.

He didn't think morality was a matter of satisfying our preferences.

According to Kant, morality requires using our reason

to arrive at a universal moral principle

that doesn't depend on any of our wants and desires.

The principle he argued for, he called the categorical imperative.

The categorical imperative tells us that we must always treat one another with dignity and respect,

and never use anyone simply as a means to an end.

For Kant, morality is not about calculating the consequences of our actions.

It's about acting out of duty, out of principle,

doing the right thing for the right reason.

He illustrates this by asking us to imagine

an inexperienced customer, say a child, who goes into a shop to buy a loaf of bread.

Guten Tag.

-Ein brot, bitte.

-Ja.

The child doesn't know a 50-euro note from a five-euro note, so the shopkeeper could easily cheat him.

So why does she give him the correct change?

A calculating shopkeeper thinks she will gain something in the end.

She believes that a reputation for honesty is good for business.

This calculated honesty lacks moral worth.

That's because the shopkeeper is acting not out of principle, but only out of self interest.

For Kant, what matters is the motive.

In a famous moral conundrum, Kant explored the duty to tell the truth

in a much debated story about lying.

According to Kant, telling a lie, even to spare someone's feelings, is wrong.

It's at odds with the categorical imperative.

But suppose a friend is hiding in your house and a murderer comes to the door looking for him.

Do you have a moral duty to tell the truth even to the murderer?

Ist Manfred hier?

It seems you have only two choices, both bad.

Tell the truth, in which case you are helping the murderer...

Ja.

Or tell an outright lie...

Nein.

..thereby violating the categorical imperative.

Kant's hard line against lying,

even to the murderer at the door, seems difficult to defend.

But is there something to it?

Carolin Emcke is a war reporter and a leading German intellectual.

Look, I don't want Kant to sound like

completely unrealistic, irrelevant philosopher.

If we come up with this example of the murderer,

everybody looking this will say, "What an idiot!

"Of course you'd lie."

I want to defend the rigourism

of adhering to values no matter what the circumstances, not because I

think we would never lie in such moments - of course we would lie.

But in order to say what would happen

if we would defend this. What Kant reminds us of with his rigourism,

though, is to say you lose something.

You something when you lie,

not just the respect of the other person, also the dignity of yourself.

Kant's emphasis on human dignity

has led him to be called the father of human rights.

And his influence remains strong in modern Germany.

The first article of the constitution declares that

human dignity shall be inviolable, never to be compromised.

But what happens when respecting someone's dignity

prevents us from acting to save an innocent life?

In 2002, Jakob von Metzler,

the 11-year-old son of a prominent German banking family, was kidnapped.

A few days later, the police arrested Magnus Gaefgen after he had collected the ransom money.

But he refused to say where his victim was hidden.

The deputy police chief of Frankfurt told this kidnapper

that if he doesn't tell where the child is hidden, he would suffer

in a way that he cannot even imagine.

-He threatened to torture?

-He threatened him with torture, exactly.

The threat worked.

Gaefgen admitted that he had already killed the boy and hidden the body.

He was given a life sentence for murder,

but remarkably, the deputy police chief

was also prosecuted and convicted of violating the kidnapper's rights.

You're trying to save an innocent child, and here you have the criminal who kidnapped him.

The argument against it is that there are some

inherent qualities in a person

that a person cannot forfeit, even by doing the worst deeds possible.

According to Kantian ethics, you're not allowed to just use a person,

to just abuse him, to hurt him, to torture him,

to get something out of him, even if the purpose of this was good.

-Because that's using a person as a means, rather than respecting him as an end?

-Exactly.

Even though he's a criminal?

-A kidnapper!

-Even though he's a criminal, even though we think he didn't really act...

He didn't have much dignity in his own actions, and why should you treat him with respect and dignity?

Exactly. You're not allowed to treat a person as a means for another end.

Now here's what a utilitarian would say.

A utilitarian would say, "You've defended Kant

"on his categorical principle,

"but you've just shown what is morally absurd about the Kantian position."

Within the utilitarian way of thinking about moral issues or moral cases,

you cannot distinguish in the end any more what kind of action is good and what kind of action is bad.

It's totally relative.

In some instances it's good to torture, in other instances it's not good to torture.

What about respect for human dignity?

Well, I again I would say what about respect for the dignity of the child?

Here is a child who is locked up somewhere,

going to die slowly from hunger and thirst.

There's no way that's a dignified thing to do to the child.

As a utilitarian I would say if I know that I can save the child

and I don't, then I'm responsible for that child's death.

That's what, in my view,

Kantians refuse to acknowledge - their responsibility for the things

that they don't do that could save lives.

In the German case, the kidnapping case, they were confident that they had identified the perpetrator.

Let's assume that's the case, but the perpetrators still won't talk, even under torture.

But he would talk if you tortured his 14-year-old daughter.

Would you do it?

That would be a much harder case, on an emotional level.

I think, to torture someone who you know has done something horrible is something

that you can psychologically come at more easily than to torture somebody who is completely innocent.

If it's simply the one on one case here, I would say no,

because the child you're torturing

is just as innocent as the child who is dying.

But if there are 10 children...

If you up the numbers, I suppose I'm going to

come under a lot of pressure and perhaps I will say, I don't know if I could do it, but perhaps I would say

if you really knew that that was going to get the information to save the 10 children,

then the right thing to do would be to torture one to save 10.

Even an innocent girl?

She's innocent, but so are the 10 innocent, of course.

-And it's a matter of numbers.

-It's a matter of numbers in the end.

As a war reporter, I have to say...

I can see...

I speak to people who are victims of this kind of thinking.

If you talk to people who were tortured badly, exactly with that kind of argument...

It's so evident why you need Kantian thinking as the guidance, per se,

to stop people from thinking they could use others as a means.

For me, that's...

I see it on every single trip I make,

to whichever country, wherever I speak to people

who were abused, who were tortured, who were

mistreated with such kind of argument that, "It's for a purpose.

"There's a good end to this. There's a reason why we can torture people."

It's devastating to see that.

So, I'm deeply convinced that Kantian thinking

is the best guidance we have to protect human rights.

The von Metzler case prompted much debate

over Germany's constitutional commitment to human dignity.

Those debates intensified

as Germany and the rest of the world

entered the age of terror.

After the 9/11 attacks, flying was transformed

from a symbol of freedom, into a sign of vulnerability.

All over the world, governments enacted new policies

to combat the threat of international terrorism.

In Germany, one of the most controversial laws

was the Aviation Security Act, which gave the German air force

permission to shoot down any hijacked plane that could be used in a terrorist attack.

The law was heavily debated,

also in constitutional terms.

I don't remember many laws that were so seriously debated before it was enacted, not only in parliament

but in the general public as to its constitutionality.

A year later, however, Germany's constitutional court overturned

the law, saying it violated the dignity of the passengers and crew.

The court interestingly enough used the formula of Kant.

They didn't quote Kant, but it used the formula of Kant, that dignity

means that you may not treat a person as a mere object for other purposes.

-Everybody is a purpose in himself or herself.

-An end in himself?

An end in himself and herself, and you may not treat a person as a mere object for other purposes.

But you see a plane flying into the World Trade Center

and you decide not to shoot it down, because you respect the passengers as ends in themselves.

What about thousands of people

who in a few seconds will die in the World Trade Center?

Aren't they also ends in themselves?

Oh, yeah, they are also ends in themselves.

But I think it makes a difference whether the state acts or does not act.

I know, of course, that not acting is also a way of acting.

But I think if the act is killing, if the act is killing

innocent people, I think it has a different category than letting things happen.

Why don't the numbers matter morally, a few hundred on a plane verses tens of thousands

on the ground, especially when those few hundred on a plane are going to die in a matter of minutes anyhow?

You are not allowed to really think, well, this life only lasts a few more hours or minutes whereas the life of

the others who might be killed by that plane or live in a city might have lasted many more years.

That is irrelevant. It is unconditional.

I think this is a Kantian tradition gone crazy and I think it also shows

the danger of having constitutional courts,

that proclaim absolute rights in the face of what might be

major public policy needs.

Presumably, if they think that is a right, they would think the same would be true if you had to

kill one innocent hostage to stop a nuclear bomb going off in the midst of Berlin.

Even though when the bomb went off the hostage would be

blown to pieces as well as five million other people.

This is the problem with rights and this is where utilitarianism has such a huge

advantage over rights, because if you get into an absolute right mode you could be saying these things

whereas the utilitarian would say, five million lives lost or one life, which anyway won't last much longer?

Obviously better to take one life now and save the five million.

Germany today still bears the marks of its morally burdened history.

The remnants of the Berlin Wall that divided the city during the Cold War.

The stark lines of Nazi architecture.

And now, a massive work of public art a few hundred metres from the German parliament.

The memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe.

The genocide of six million.

For Germany's post-war generations, the insistence on human dignity

is one way of coming to terms with the horror of the Holocaust.

My generation is still morally responsible for the Holocaust.

I think it doesn't matter if I committed the crime or whether it was...

It doesn't even matter whether my grandparents personally committed any crimes, or were guilty

of committing such crimes. That is irrelevant.

These were so outrageous crimes and they were not just committed

by individuals, they really were committed by an entire society.

It was a collective crime that was committed.

That explains why there's collective responsibility.

When I was a child, we travelled on a school trip

to Denmark and the children in Denmark would throw stones at us and yell at us as Nazi kids.

You know, they were right.

Taking responsibility for the sins of past generations

is a powerful moral idea.

But it's not clear that Kant's philosophy can make sense of it.

For Kant, we are responsible only for the acts we freely choose,

not for our country's past or for the crimes of our grandparents.

Do you think this idea

that you have articulated so eloquently of identity being shaped

by nation, culture, history,

could Kant make sense of it morally?

Probably not. I think for a number of reasons.

A, because Kant did not have, I think,

as strong an understanding of psyche.

He is not a psychologically informed philosopher.

To some extent that's irrelevant, he would consider the idea of

the sense of guilt, I think,

or the sense of shame or the sense of inheriting something from

generations before you.

I don't think he would even have thought about this.

Would he go even further and have a principled reason

not to attribute any moral responsibilities?

Probably. It's interesting.

He doesn't speak about this so we are speculating.

You're right, to some extent he probably would have been

against a generation taking responsibility from a previous one.

Because somehow that would also mean

that generation is just an instrument of an earlier generation.

Kant's insistence that morality means stepping back

from our particular identities raises a difficulty.

If all morality is something I will or choose, what about obligations of solidarity?

Obligations bound up with the history of my people and my country?

And there's a bigger question. Is it possible to define justice

without first figuring out the meaning of the good life?

Without first reflecting on the best way to live?

These days we try to avoid bringing questions of virtue into debates about justice and politics.

People disagree, after all, about the best way to live.

But can politics really be neutral on moral and spiritual questions?

To explore this, we turn to what may seem an unlikely place.

2,500 years ago in ancient Athens, we find a more demanding idea of

citizenship and of politics than is familiar these days.

For Aristotle, politics was not just about maximising GDP or even protecting individual rights.

It was about the good life.

Aristotle lived and taught in Athens in the fourth century BC.

Aristotle, the great philosopher of Athens.

He was not from Athens.

Where was he from?

He was from northern Greece, he was born in a

small city in northern Greece, in Macedonia, Stageira it's called.

So he was known as a Stagirite.

He came to Athens at age 17.

-What brought him here?

-To study at Plato's academy.

Apparently, he studied for 20 years.

He did the full course of study, which means...

20 years to get a degree?

To get the degree to join the teaching body.

Even our graduate students don't spend that long!

-Well, they studied better in that period!

-Probably!

-THEY LAUGH

For Aristotle, morality is not about absolute rules and abstract principles.

It's about developing good character and virtue.

This is something we learn by doing.

By acquiring good habits and by emulating the behaviour of virtuous people.

For Aristotle, justice means distributing things according to virtue.

According to the relevant excellence.

For example, who should receive the best musical instruments?

The best bouzoukis? Aristotle's answer?

The best musicians.

They excel in the relevant virtue.

Aristotle extends this reasoning to politics.

Who should receive the highest offices and honours,

who should wield the greatest influence in the assembly?

Aristotle says those who are greatest in civic virtue.

Those with the best political judgment and the deepest commitment to the common good.

For Aristotle, we are, by nature, political beings.

We can only develop our full human capacities

by participating in a political community.

Or polis.

This is the Agora, the heart of ancient Athens.

It included the marketplace, the civic buildings

and public spaces where citizens gathered.

Aristotle tells us that the purpose of politics or the

political community is not just to provide us

with security and not just to ease commerce and exchange.

The point of politics, the purpose,

the telos of the political community, is the good life.

What does he mean by that?

A good and full life.

That is the fullness of human potential.

Which includes

public service, especially exercising responsibility in public life.

But also a full intellectual life.

So the life of political participation,

the life of the polis, was not only to make the policies

and make them well,

it was to provide a civic education for the participants?

Civic education which would lead

to the maturity of personality.

The personality grows through this process of public exposure and public action.

So participating in politics was a way of improving your character, even? Shaping our character?

Shaping and improving our character and realising our natural sociability.

In Athens today, some still believe

that modern Greek politics could learn a lot from Aristotle's ideas.

The political life does not mean what we have today.

Just politics. It means civil life,

it means civic association and everything that

goes with it. Being a part of a group as well as an individual and not just

an individual who is a number in a huge mass or a huge structure.

-Taking your pleasure with the others.

-With the others?

Sharing in the common good?

-Not just pleasure.

-No, but also pleasure.

-Also pleasure.

-Pleasure in deliberating, pleasure

in deciding. Pleasure in obeying.

That kind of pleasure takes place in the Assembly rather than in the shopping mall?

Not just the Assembly. The Assembly is a tool.

It is the life of the polis that is important.

Politics is the tool for

taking and realising this life and bringing it to its utmost potential.

In a purely private life...

That is probably the main difference between ancient Greece and modern

European culture. The individual does not exist

in ancient Greek culture.

The notion of liberty does not exist in ancient philosophy.

-Of individual liberty?

-Of the individual.

The notion is idiotic, the private person...

-An idiot?

-An idiot.

-It is the word. Same.

-Someone who has a purely private life?

The etymology of the world idiot means a private person.

He who chooses to be private is an idiot.

What is wrong with a good, upright, private life,

-according to Aristotle?

-There is nothing wrong with it.

Except that it remains incomplete,

it remains limited to the level of domestic household activity.

And that is not good enough.

If you want to be a full person, a mature person,

you have to participate in politics and you have to participate in politics in a virtuous manner.

It's not enough to go and try to sway public opinion, you have to be

mature enough and knowledgeable enough to be able to guide public opinion.

This is the Assembly, where the citizens of Athens would

gather to debate and decide the big public questions of the day.

6,000 to 10,000 of them would fill this open air assembly

and they would listen to speakers, sometimes great orators.

The orators would stand up here on this platform

and they would make their case,

they would advance arguments on all sides of public questions.

Deciding, for example, whether to go to war with Sparta.

It was a remarkable kind of direct democracy.

Because if the people decided to go to war, they knew that they would be

the ones, in a matter of days sometimes, to go off and fight it.

CHANTING AND SHOUTING

These days, Athens is not threatened by Sparta.

But the current global economic crisis has caused Greece to go to war with itself.

In 2010, it struggled with the financial crisis that engulfed the world.

The age of austerity brought demonstrations and disturbances all around Europe.

In Greece, the crisis was particularly acute.

Faced with national bankruptcy, the Greek government proposed stringent cuts to the public sector.

This was met with huge demonstrations and violent confrontations.

My sympathies were for the demonstrators and against

all violent actions, that were outside the scope,

the system of simple, non-violent demonstration.

Because a demonstration is one of the possibilities

of civil society to make itself heard.

The violence culminated with the deaths of three employees

who were killed when their bank was firebombed.

I would say that what it certainly refers to, even violence, is a general sense of

incapacity of the population to take decisions about the future.

A sense of disempowerment?

Yes, disempowerment.

A lack of confidence in the political system

and the parties and representative democracy in general.

I would say that my heart was with the problem that many

of the people are facing, because of the austerity measures.

But there is, to me, a small hypocrisy in the sense that we are all part of the problem.

And demonstration is great as a negative message, but

what we need now is positive messages which cannot come from demonstration.

And those, I'm not hearing.

The polarised politics of modern Greece seems

far removed from Aristotle's vision of civic virtue and the common good.

In an age of austerity, it can be hard to see how politics can aim at higher ideals.

Does this mean that Bentham's utilitarianism has won the day?

That Kant and Aristotle have nothing to offer?

Both Kant and Aristotle are defeated.

-They are defeated?

-In numbers.

They are defeated by...?

-By reality.

-By the sheer monstrous and irreversible reality. I'm very pessimistic.

If you were to identify one of the thinkers who has more practice today, I would say it's definitely Bentham.

-Bentham?

-Yes. If we see what's going on around us, who is more realistic?

Absolutely, I agree.

Not whom we agree with more.

But who would say, if he lived today, I told you so.

THEY LAUGH

Utilitarianism is the ethic that fits the modern world?

-Oh, yes.

-That describes it.

-It fits it.

-Yes.

But you think it is an impoverished ideal?

-Yes.

-Of course.

And it is impoverished because?

It is impoverished because I would be very Aristotelian on this.

Because it makes human life something much less than what it could be

in the right context and in the right structures.

Let's say that Aristotle can speak directly to Jeremy Bentham

and Bentham's idea of utilitarianism. What would he say?

Bentham would want a simpler, more straightforward satisfaction of human pleasures.

And this is the democratic approach.

Aristotle has an aristocratic approach, he wants to make people aristeia,

-which means cultivate their excellencies.

-It means?

It means excellent, the best.

Whereas for Bentham, he just takes our preferences as given, whatever

they happen to be, good, bad or indifferent, worthy or unworthy, and says we should maximise...

Try to make as many people happy as possible by satisfying those pleasures.

And from Aristotle's point of view, that is impoverished because?

Because it doesn't give, let's say, a motivation or stimulus for the

cultivation of the better part within us.

Aristotle's ideal of citizenship did not include everyone.

Women were excluded and so were slaves.

And yet, despite these moral blind spots, Aristotle's vision of civic

virtue and political participation can still teach us something today.

It reminds us that there is more to justice than utility and rights.

And more to politics than the pursuit of self-interest.

Aristotle's ancient idea that democracy should aim for

the common good is inspiring a new civic activism in some unusual places.

-OK, so what is a political philosopher?

-A political philosopher is someone who

asks questions, asks questions about the way the world is, and gets people to think.

This is London Citizens. A British organisation that draws inspiration from the Greek polis.

Today, 2,000 students, school children and young people

have crammed into the O2 Centre for their Citizens Youth Assembly.

In this hall, which usually stages rock concerts, they are celebrating

a series of successful campaigns they have organised,

from safer street initiatives to a long-running campaign

to get London employers to pay all their workers a living wage.

In London, life is very expensive.

This is why London Citizens 10 years ago started asking large employers like universities, hospitals,

banks and many others to pay their staff about £2 an hour more than they would normally get.

# She cleans, she scrubs, she rub-a-dub-a-dubs... #

Groups such as this are a model

of what citizenship can mean in a modern world.

They start with concrete problems facing neighbourhoods and communities.

And they start young, educating even these schoolchildren in the hard work of democratic citizenship.

But they aim at something bigger.

A just society and a new politics of the common good.

What so impresses me about everything I have seen today,

is that you are looking injustice in the eye

and you're gathering together to ask hard questions.

In a way, you are, all of you, political philosophers.

But you're ultimately citizens because you're not

only asking hard questions, you are also asking what you can do and what we can do together

to make the world a better place, more just than the way we find it.

So congratulations and thank you very much.

APPLAUSE

Thank you very much. It's been great meeting you.

A very wise man. Take care.

-So we have been Ashley J.

-And I have been TJ.

And this has been the Youth Citizens Assembly at the 02 Indigo.

The success of London Citizens seems to reflect a hunger for a new kind of citizen engagement

which is increasingly being recognised by mainstream politics on both sides of the left-right divide.

John Cruddas and Phillip Blond are leading thinkers of the Labour and Tory parties.

Both of you are critics of Bentham and utilitarianism and individual

subjective preferences being the basis for democratic politics.

Let me read you this passage from Aristotle

and see whether you find that more to your liking and closer to the truth of what politics should be.

Aristotle wrote: "A city is not an association for residents on a common site.

"Or for the sake of preventing mutual injustice and easing exchange.

"But what constitutes a city is an association of

"families and households for the sake of obtaining a truly valuable life."

-Do you agree?

-I totally agree and to me that's the guiding framework of political intervention.

The key to politics is what sort of environment allows

that form of self-fulfilment.

Allows for a different type of life to be lived. There is a danger in urban environments like this that

politics becomes vulcanised around identity and race and geography.

What are the themes that can unify people in terms of a public policy agenda?

That is why, for example, things like London Citizens, the campaign for a living wage, are actually being

organically created in communities with secular and religious elements to it.

What we need is debate about subjective values

and we need to have atheists in there

and humanists in there and we also need to have the religions in there.

And if you debate about the idea of universality, you sort of create

common frameworks between people who didn't think any existed.

What I'm in favour of is a genuine shaping of virtue

around what people feel is most pressing and most needed.

So if you're on an estate, for example, in inner-city London,

and you want to save that estate from criminals and drug dealing,

from deep impoverishment, you form a common cause with your

neighbours and your other residents on that estate.

You might wish to not live next door to crime,

but you can't do anything about it as an individual.

If you're really serious about individual choice, you can only deliver it through groups.

But there's another alternative. Some say in modern pluralist societies, we have to give up

on that ancient project of civic virtue,

the educative political community, and simply live

and let live and have a neutral framework of rights

that doesn't aspire to the good life. That is the alternative.

Yes, and then we retreat into our initial departure point,

-which is selfishness as a guiding human virtue.

-You think that's the only alternative?

That's where you end up. If you give up on that, you give up on politics

as a search for that common good.

Then you end up with quite an empty, isolated conception of how we live our lives.

The political parties have yet to deliver a new politics of the common good.

But the most prominent politicians of our day

are trying to tap into the desire for a more strenuous citizenship,

for a public life of larger purpose.

You can hear it in their rhetoric.

I know what to say to the cynics and the doubters and the smart Alecs

who say to me, there is no appetite for people in this country

to get involved in social action,

there's no commitment to the common good any more, it's each to his own.

There's no spirit of non-state collective action,

it's just me and the Government, not we and the community.

What rubbish that is. Now I say to those people, come here,

look around you, here is the appetite, here is the commitment,

here is the spirit of social action that this country needs,

here is the Big Society right here in this room.

What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility.

A recognition on the part of every American,

that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world.

Duties that we do not grudgingly accept, but rather seize gladly.

Firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit,

so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.

This is the price and the promise of citizenship.

In the end, civic renewal will not come from presidents or prime ministers.

It will only come, as it always has, when we decide to ask more from politics.

And more from ourselves.

When we find our way to a new, more demanding citizenship.

When we learn to engage more directly in the public square with moral questions that matter.

However hard and contested those questions may be.

Which brings us back to philosophy.

Philosophy seems sometimes to take place from on high.

At a distance from the world.

That's because there's always a gap between the way the world is and the way it ought to be.

But if you look at the disagreements we have every day, lying just beneath the surface are big

questions about justice and rights and the meaning of the common good.

Grappling with these questions is not only a job for the philosophers,

it is also what it means to be a citizen.

If you want to find out more about justice and philosophy, go to:

And follow the links to the Open University.

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