# Introduction to Young
## October 19th, 2020
- Okay, your final project won't be a research paper, but you should present a little history to put the problem in context
- I'll be posting optional milestones
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- So, we're in the 3rd and final part of this course, reading Iris Young's "Inclusion and Democracy"
- We've already looked at 2 models of Democracy based on popular sovereignty: that legitimate politics is based around the consent of the governed
- Locke's model is LIBERAL democracy, which believes people come with rights prior to any state and the role of government is to provide some minimal protections to preserve those rights and then leave people free from interference
- Rousseau has a REPUBLICAN understanding of democracy and a different definition of freedom (the freedom "to" obey laws you choose), in which people all agree and try to shape a shared vision of the state
- Locke's view of the "public good" is the combination of private, individual good, while Rousseau thinks this "public good" is instead a shared consensus of what is good
- Iris Young is advocating for the DELIBERATIVE democracy model, which stands somewhere between the "morally thin" liberal model and "morally thick" republican model
- A few comments, then, about this book
- First of all, it's a different kind of book! It's a work of later 20th century professional philosophy, and so it became a lot more professionalized
- Locke and Rousseau were writing for any generally intelligent, intellectual person; since the late 20th century, philosophers tend to write specifically to and for other philosophers in their field
- Young seems to have intended this work to be read by regular people and be relatively accessible, but she still uses many specialized terms and concepts, and you have to fight to understand that a little bit more
- "Young won't define all of these terms, so you'll have to do some inference from context, from dictionaries, etc."
- e.g. "Hegemony" in late 20th century political philosophy has this idea of "domination," of being the single voice in a conversation and so YOU have to adopt my terms and framework, rather than it being a 2-way street
- "This isn't just a philosophy thing, but a general thing across all fields in academia; each field has become more specialized and, well, trying to talk to a professor from another field is COMPLETELY different and difficult. I tried to co-write a paper about fracking with an engineering professor, and he couldn't understand my paper and I couldn't understand his; for a professor who's only talked with other professors at philosophy conferences for 30 years, they kinda forget how to talk to non-philosophers."
- "I'm in the public policy school, so I have to do this translation to politicians and citizens a bit more than other philosophers, so I definitely favor plain old english if possible"
- So, if you struggle with the language in this book, THAT'S TOTALLY EXPECTED; Young is using terms that have 50 years of professional philosophical analysis behind them
- An example here is Young's reference to CRITICAL THEORY, this idea of starting from "existing social relations and processes" and trying to pull out what we like about them and leave behind what we don't like (technically, where these frameworks fall short of their OWN ideal expectations), rather than trying to create new moral frameworks from scratch
- This requires examining existing social structures and systems, and so there's both normative ethics and a sociological element here
- Systems tend to have unexpected emergent behaviors, though; Young would say individuals are "situated" differently in the same structures (i.e. a rich person has a different relation to a system than a poor person)
- Young would critique "identity politics" today, really (how you define yourself doesn't matter), and say instead how you relate to these political structures and how those structures treat you is what's important
- So, within social structures that constrain us in many ways (good and bad), how can we have more democratic decision-making across unequal people groups? We're all situated differently in these structures and unequal, so how do we get closer to "liberty and justice for all"?
- Young, as a critical theorist, is NOT trying to build up democracy from the ground up like Locke and Rousseau; instead, she's taking democracy for granted and saying "what needs fixing?"
- "Importantly, this is NOT a one-party issue; there are people who lean towards both parts of the spectrum who feel they're shut out, whether they're rural people who Washington elites don't listen to or African-Americans who feel they're unfairly judged by police"
- So, Young's model shouldn't FUNDAMENTALLY lean towards one political spectrum over the other
- So, this is a narrower book than what Locke and Rousseau were trying to do
- Also, Young says near the end of the introduction that she DOESN'T consider this to be a whole, complete framework for democracy; it's narrower in scope, and instead tries to address several related issues Young sees in current democracies
- Last aside on Critical Theory: Modern philosophy starting from Descartes has been foundationalist, of starting from NOTHING and trying to get to what is certain and universally true
- This led to some useful stuff but ultimately led to a lot of mischief and kept people bogged down in the weeds and from really moving forward
- Critical theory is a response to this; here, instead, we take the EXISTING systems we have for granted in their ideal form, and say "okay, this is what American Democracy claims to be - how do we get it closer to that in reality?"
- For Young, that means examining social structures and trying to see how those deal with different people and make
- In a weird way, this comes back around full circle to pre-modern, dialectical philosophers like Aristotle, who started with what they had and tried to gain clarity about that
- Okay, see you on Wednesday!