Lecture 1 Origin and nature of government Aristotle is obsessed with origins and definitions like any good philosopher The first and most important use of government is the legitimate use of force If you get a group of people together and make them live in close proximity for any length of time someone is going to use force When people live close together someone is gonna use force You want force to be used for the right reason by the right persons and we will be defining what we mean by that Why do they use force The main reason that we want the government to practice the legitimate use of force is to provide security Security from outside invasion from other polities a polity is a technical way to refer to a nation and its government Texas is a polity it s not a sovereign polity but it is a polity the US is a polity When we talk about outside security we are talking about other polities and we also want it to provide internal security This is the police Outside security is the army the military Inside security is the police We want to be secure in our possessions and in our lives We want government to handle the public administration of goods and services Whenever we need something we need student loan we need a driver license whatever you can think of that you want the government to give you roads we want the government to be able to do that To do the public administration of goods and services We want the proliferation of justice It would be good if government used force and provided security and was able to administer goods and services but did so in a just manner We want justice to go along with that We want justice to be a part of the actions of government We want protection of private property This is property we use for ourselves and for our families And then we want legal uniformity We want the law to be applied equally We don t want the rich to escape on everything and the poor to get the maximum penalty even though in most polities that s what happens we would rather have legal uniformity And so how do we judge these purposes whether they are being done One of the considerations is the private interest vs public good The private interest is anything that touches our own personal gain personal security private groups like your church your club your private business your family All of those things are part of what we call private interest Then there s the public good it is for public gain public security public institutions these are the things that we all use together and we expect the government to administer We expect the government to protect our private interests but we are the ones in charge of determining what that interest is and how we seek it The public good is what s good for all of us and it has to be conducted in a way that we all benefit from it The public good is the overall purpose of government Aristotle uses what s called the inductive method where he gets a whole bunch of data and tries to synthesize that to try to find the common elements and differences Purposes of government The first and most important thing that we want government to do is to engage in the legitimate use of force you get a group of people together for any length of time eventually someone is going to use force to try to get what they want And in a society with a legitimate government we want government to be the one using force to provide security To protect us form internal external threats We want the government to use force to accomplish the public administration of goods and services We want the proliferation of justice in general we want our society to be just and so we want the government to promote the proliferation of justice Protection of private property our homes our land our cars We want legal uniformity We want the laws to be applied uniformly Sometimes government is protecting our private interest like our private property but sometimes it s promoting the public good and in fact even when it s protecting our private property and our private interest what the main job of government is to promote the public good Promoting the public good is the main job of government Even when it s protecting our private interest it does that as part of its responsibility to promote the public good Private Interest affect us personally personal gain welfare security businesses families churches interest groups Any private organization Important to us not always align with public good Public good things we use togething things like public gain public security public institutions like state legislatures city counsel the mayor Promoting the public good which is the main and also protecting the private interest In an inductive argument you take the simplest case possible which is sometimes called the trivial case and you expand to the next most simple case to the next most simple case and you keep doing that until you get to the final proof case that you want to get to In an argument about the origins of government we want to start with the simplest social context as possible which is one person and we will build on that to see at what point politics and government show up Inductive argument simple most trivial case and then proceed to the next one know conclusion just proving it step by step One person is the simplest case We don t have politics since there is no conflict of wills no interaction no arguments One person can simply do what they want to do there s no one else to tell them not to do it Family in order to have more than one person you need procreation you need men and women and children There are more degrees of something like politics because we have more than one will Introduction of authority and its for the procurement of the good of the children of Blood related arguments settled by parental authority Tribe extended family several generations of families No politics because all blood related Getting closer because they are not living under the same roof Customs settle disagreements We have even more authority being exercised now because we have multiple sets of parents interacting and when there s disagreements something has to control the interactions and that s custom Most tribes have a chief and that s their decision maker Village small city polis multiple tribes living together Politics because non blood related people living together to find a common method for living together Group of non blooded people living together living together for the shared conception of
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