Gendler, Tamar. "Social Foundations" delivered at Yale University, Spring, 2011.

A lecture from the Yale course PHIL180: Philosophy and the Science of Human Nature

Professor Gendler begins by recapping the topic of state legitimacy and then offers a way of understanding the disagreement between Rawls and Nozick as one over what states ought to do given the phenomena of moral luck. She then turns to a discussion of how social and cultural structures influence both our characters and our perception of the world. She begins by discussing ways in which this theme plays a role in the work of Aristotle and John Stuart Mill. She then discusses recent empirical work on this question, including a body of anthropological and psychological literature that suggests that individuals raised in societies that are Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic have highly atypical responses in a wide range of cases.

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Yale University