G. A. Cohen on Incentives, Inequality, & Community (1991)

[@qqww2905]

God yes upload all there is from Cohen please!!

[@Rymana]

GA Cohen--hell yeah!!

[@authenticallysuperficial9874]

Choosing to thieve less from me is not to create an incentive for me to work more, but rather to eliminate some part of the wicked disincentive to work which you previously thought to place upon me.

[@Gabriel-pt3ci]

Beautiful exposition! Nice technique that one of counting the unavailability of a plausible justification for an argument as raised by specific speakers (instead of its general validity in third-person shape) as a metric of soundness for the argument. It's a move that shows a lot his early background as a student of Gilbert Ryle. On a more substantive note, it is beautiful that he disentangle that there is an implicit inequality in just proposing a change in states of affairs that cannot be equally justified by any member of the society. The other thing I want to praise is how he construes the socialist passion as both an issue of relative and absolute positions of people in the scale of resources, income or what have you. "Why should this people have to be so badly off when this other people is so well off" instead of "Why this people should have to be worse off than this other people." Key point. Amazing!

[@roberthockett270]

A beautiful man and a beautiful thinker. How doubly terrible to have lost him when he was still young.

[@dionysianapollomarx]

Awesome

[@Danyel615]

I like that he is very organized in his thinking and realizes some flaws/holes in his ideas. That question around 1:10 was a full death blow. You can tell by his answer and how he just dodged/ignored it completely

[@Danyel615]

By the way I meant 01:10, so around the 1h, 10 mins mark!

[@Sazi_de_Afrikan]

@@Danyel615 he didn’t have to address it since Cohen is a Marxist

[@roberthockett270]

It is not only no 'death blow,' it is altogether irrelevant to the argument Jerry is making in this lecture series. For he is not here arguing for an egalitarian distribution of benefits or burdens (he does that elsewhere), he is rather arguing that one would-be justification that some LIBERALS (starting with Rawls) proffer for IN-egalitarian distributions is in a certain sense INCOHERENT. This is of course what he says in reply to the query, after first pausing, as Jerry OFTEN does, to decide how to make this point graciously. (Since merely saying to this woman, 'you have missed the point of the lecture entirely,' would be ungracious.)

[@jemandoondame2581]

@@roberthockett270 I was just about to write the same thing.

[@scush]

he ignored the question because, as he explained (meaning he did essentially answer the question anyway), it was not relevant to the particular philosophical inquiry he was interested in here … did you, like, even listen to the part you linked? he even says that it’s fine if you disagree with him about it, just that the egalitarian or non-egalitarian question is a different conversation altogether. since the dead-brained conservatives in the audience keep pestering him about it, he even responds later, somewhat aggravated about them missing the point so completely, saying that the non-egalitarian generalisation/extrapolation about human nature from a misanthropic and cynical starting point is not compatible with his nor an empirical understanding of how humans act and have acted in practice. some people act that way but not all do, and so if your argument is based on the fact that you think you have figured out that humans are all machiavellian evil masterminds trying to get to the top and keep people under them by law of the universe then your argument is based on bad logic and data because it is so easily falsifiable with plenty of counter-examples of both individual humans and entire communities acting altruistically throughout our existence as a species. we aren’t fundamentally good or evil, we are neither or both, depending on how much you want to base your statement on moral judgement.

[@djl8710]

Good!

[@masonkerr8359]

The Q&A is hilarious. Flabbergasted conservative audience. "But, if you keep upping the tax rate, what's to stop it going up to 100%?" Yes. Abolish billionaires.

[@scush]

yeah i was amazed cohen could stay that civil … i would have huge difficulties keeping my composure when the reaction to a lecture this dense is so superficial, intellectually stunted and misses the point entirely. the way cohen didn’t flame out even when the one guy started insulting him is really commendable.

[@authenticallysuperficial9874]

I don't agree with the kidnapper argument

[@robhuhges]

Economic inequality is not a new thing in any society. You don't need to just look at capitalism to find economic or any other kind of inequality.

[@stevepaxton2607]

What has led you to believe that Cohen thinks pre-capitalist inequality isn't important? He wrote at length about about ways to think about the differences between inequality before capitalism and inequality under capitalism.

[@jimbrown1576]

This advocate of (Marx and) Rawls and proponent of his own version of altruism believed that the measure of value, the purpose of human life, is that which makes others better off. Cohen had his own ideas and opposed others' about the best means of grinding down the life of the individual to make others better. But like all altruists, Cohen has no time nor taste for the individual, instead, the community is the unit of value and purpose. His syllogisms supporting his version are a maze of rationalism par excellence- he really did spin the yarn here for his students. But so too did Rawls for his students. It is typical for anyone who chooses to detach themselves from reality and the fundamental facts of human nature to sound like they've lost their minds. If you might doubt this conclusion, listen to this lecture or read Rawls.

[@scush]

he said he did not, in fact, have an answer, philosophically, to whether individual freedom or communalism are more important guiding principles for a society and that that answer is left to “greater philosophers” than himself to figure out. he admits his leanings, but that is all … the whole lecture is about the contradictions in logic that left-liberal arguments for egalitarianism have and that they are not coherent-so he explicitly goes against rawls. i don’t know where you’re getting all this from or if you listened to the lecture, because a lot of the stuff you dismiss him for is dealt with in it … he even addresses your common caricature/strawman that egalitarians are only interested in “the best means of grinding down the life of the individual to make others better,” like you say: he does not personally claim this and it is a logical fallacy that the life of the super wealthy or even the middle class must necessarily be worse simply to make the lives of the very bottom of society better. do you know how much surplus our society produces … ? there is so much food and clothing that is simply spoilt or burnt because our system is not interested or incentivised to distribute it to those who could benefit from it because there is no profit to be made on this level. how exactly would rich people be worse off if a person at the very bottom doesn’t die of starvation because there existed a hypothetical state or communal system to get that person to not die that day because it gave them a meal for free? the one does not logically follow from the other; especially not in such modest proposals as that one.