Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T23:42:46.189Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Taking Politics Seriously

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 December 2018

Charles Blattberg
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

John Rawls’ gamification of justice leads him – along with many other monist political philosophers, not least Ronald Dworkin – to fail to take politics seriously enough. I begin with why we consider games frivolous and then show how Rawls’ theory of justice is not merely analogous to a game, as he himself seems to claim, but is in fact a kind of game. As such, it is harmful to political practice in two ways: one as regards the citizens who participate directly in it, and the other as regards those who do no more than follow it.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 94 , Issue 2 , April 2019 , pp. 271 - 294
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Letters from a Stoic: Epistulae Morales Ad Lucilium, trans. Campbell, Robin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 97Google Scholar.

2 Berlin, , ‘From Hope and Fear Set Free’, in Liberty: Incorporating Four Essays on Liberty (ed.) Hardy, Henry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 278–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 See, for example, Berlin, ‘Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century’, in op. cit. note 2, esp. 64; Williams, Bernard, ‘Politics and Moral Character’, in Hampshire, Stuart (ed.) Public and Private Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978)Google Scholar; and Hampshire, Stuart, Innocence and Experience (London: Penguin, 1989), esp. 170–77Google Scholar.

4 Rawls, , A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999, rev. ed.), 462Google Scholar; see also Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005, exp. ed.), 204Google Scholar. Others refer to chess, camping trips, or swimming races: Denyer, Nicolas, ‘Chess and Life: The Structure of a Moral Code’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 82 (1) (June 1982), 59–68Google Scholar; Cohen, G.A., Why Not Socialism? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), chs 1–2Google ScholarPubMed; and Dworkin, Ronald, Justice for Hedgehogs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 287–89, 309, 371Google Scholar. Cohen, it should be said, identifies himself as a pluralist in his Rescuing Justice and Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 4–6Google Scholar; on page 37 of the later book, however, his position is agnostic between pluralism and the monism that would be realised if, as he hopes, the principles underlying camping trips were fully compatible with each other.

5 See Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 37–39.

6 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 178–79; see also 214.

7 See Rawls, A Theory of Justice, § 13-14.

8 See my ‘Dirty Hands: The One and the Many’, The Monist 101 (2) (Apr. 2018), 1–20, 11, 13Google Scholar.

9 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 127, 129. Unsurprisingly, Rawls has gone no further than expressing an agnostic position as regards comprehensive views’ claims to moral truth, such as when he describes Thomas Nagel's discussion of the ‘fragmentation of value’ as ‘not implausible’. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 57 n.10.

10 ‘Any system of social institutions is limited in the values it can admit so that some selection must be made from the full range of moral and political values that might be realized.’ Rawls, Political Liberalism, 57.

11 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 129.

12 See Rawls, Political Liberalism, 240ff.

13 On Hume, see Baier, Annette, ‘Doing without Moral Theory?’ in Postures of the Mind: Essays on Mind and Morals (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985)Google Scholar. And see Berlin, , ‘The Divorce between the Sciences and the Humanities’, in Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (ed.) Hardy, Henry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013, 2nd ed.)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Williams, , ‘Consistency and Realism’, in Problems of the Self: Philosophical Papers 1956–1972 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973)Google Scholar, where he contrasts conflicts of obligations with conflicts of belief; and Williams, , Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 111–12, 138–40Google Scholar. It is in his Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1978)Google Scholar that Williams coins the expression ‘absolute conception’ and, on page 248 of that book, he makes clear that he is willing to accept its viability only as regards natural science. Descartes himself went all the way, which is why when Roland Hall describes his ontology as a ‘partial monism’, given Descartes’ conception of matter but not mind as a unitary substance, it is evident that Hall is using the term ‘monism’ in a strictly numerical sense: ‘Monism and Pluralism’, in Edwards, Paul (ed.) The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 5 (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 363Google Scholar. Descartes’ belief that all matter and mind can be joined into one, thanks to God, means that, in the sense in which I am using the term, his monism is anything but partial: The Principles of Philosophy, part I, art. 60, in Meditations and Other Metaphysical Writings, trans. Clarke, Desmond M. (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 135Google Scholar.

14 This holism, it is worth mentioning, is also behind why we consider the things we encounter in our practical lives as real – including, of course, those things that we do not experience directly (for we sense that our visual field, say, continues on behind our backs). See Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, ‘The Film and the New Psychology’, in Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Dreyfus, Hubert L. and Dreyfus, Patricia Allen (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 51Google Scholar.

15 Todes, , Body and World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, in op. cit. note 2, 213–14.

17 See Erikson, Erik H., Toys and Reasons: Stages in the Ritualization of Experience (New York: Norton, 1977), 17Google Scholar.

18 On their attitudes, see Poliakoff, Michael B., Combat Sports in the Ancient World: Competition, Violence, and Culture (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1987), ch. 6Google Scholar.

19 See Gardiner, E. Norman, Athletics of the Ancient World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), 19–22Google Scholar. However, in so doing Homer, and Nietzsche following him, confuse combatants with mere contestants, competitors, those who struggle within a unity. See Nietzsche, , ‘Homer's Contest’, in On the Genealogy of Morality (ed.) Ansell-Pearson, Keith, (trans.) Diethe, Carol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 2nd ed.)Google Scholar. The Hebrew Bible, by contrast, looks with disfavour upon those who fail to uphold the difference, as when it describes the Philistines as using the term for ‘to play’ or ‘to make sport’ (lesakhek, לְשַׂחֵק) to refer to a fight to the death. See Judges 16:25–27, which some interpret as portraying Samson as having to fight wild animals for the Philistines’ amusement. This is one reason why we can say that, unlike the Homeric poems, the Hebrew Bible is meant to be taken seriously. For others, see Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (trans.) Trask, Willard R. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003 [1946]), ch. 1Google Scholar.

20 See, for example, Republic 487b–c.

21 The Laws of Plato (trans.) Pangle, Thomas L. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 803cGoogle Scholar.

22 As the historian Johan Huizinga, in particular, has emphasized in Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950), esp. 4, 8–9Google Scholar; see also Simmel, Georg, Fundamental Problems of Society (Individual and Society), in The Sociology of Georg Simmel (ed. and trans.) Wolff, Kurt H. (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1950), 42–43Google Scholar. Erving Goffman, however, refuses to accept that games stand apart from our practical social encounters, since he believes that both aim for the same thing, namely ‘euphoria’. See Goffman, , ‘Fun in Games’, in Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1961)Google Scholar. But this is to ignore Aristotle's warning against confusing happiness or well-being with the enjoyment that can come from playing games: Nichomachean Ethics 1176b–1177a.

23 See Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 9. Roger Caillois, in particular, has complained of how Huizinga's definition of games would force us to exclude bets and games of chance: Man, Play, and Games (trans.) Barash, Meyer (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1961), 5Google Scholar.

24 My way of distinguishing between internal and external ends thus differs from MacIntyre's, Alasdair in his After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2007, 3rd ed.), 187–91Google Scholar. To me, values that are strictly internal to given practices are ‘aesthetic’ because, just like those internal to games, they are independent of the goods of practical life as a whole.

25 Riezler, , ‘Play and Seriousness’, Journal of Philosophy 38 (19) (Sept. 1941), 505–17, 511CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 See Sheridan, Heather, ‘Conceptualising “Fair Play”: A Review of the Literature’, European Physical Education Review 9 (2) (2003), 163–84, 170–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It's worth pointing out that the idea of fair play is of relatively recent vintage, it having originated with the crystallisation of certain crude and dangerous sports into ball games with defined rules that took place within the public schools of Victorian Britain. See Tennyson, Charles, ‘They Taught the World to Play’, Victorian Studies 2 (3) (March 1959), 211–22, 212Google Scholar. Of course, this was part of a much deeper and more widespread development. See Taylor's, Charles discussion of ‘the rise of the disciplinary society’ in his A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), ch. 2, parts 2–5Google Scholar.

27 Kierkegaard, , ‘The Seducer's Diary’, in Either/Or: Part I (eds. and trans.) Howard, V. and Hong, Edna H. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987 [1903]), 307Google Scholar.

28 Op. cit. note 25, 505.

29 Searle, , Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 See Wittgenstein, , Philosophical Investigations (eds.) Anscombe, G.E.M., Rhees, R., and von Wright, G.H., (trans.) Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968, 3rd ed.), §66, 68–69, 75–76Google Scholar. For an interesting, if failed, attempt at providing an analytic definition, see Suits, Bernard, The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2014, 3rd ed.)Google Scholar. On why it fails, see Geras, Norman, ‘Games and Meanings’, in de Wijze, Stephen, Kramer, Matthew H., and Carter, Ian (eds.) Hillel Steiner and the Anatomy of Justice: Themes and Challenges (New York: Routledge, 2009)Google Scholar.

31 Rawls, , ‘Two Concepts of Rules’, in Collected Papers (ed.) Freeman, Samuel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 20 n.1Google Scholar.

32 Op. cit. note 31, 37–38.

33 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 303.

34 Dreyfus, , ‘Holism and Hermeneutics’, in Skillful Coping: Essays on the Phenomenology of Everyday Perception and Action (ed.) Wrathall, Mark (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 129CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 See Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 18–19, 42–45; and Political Liberalism, 89–129. The expression ‘the great game of politics’ is from Rawls, , ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited’, in The Law of Peoples: with ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited’ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 140Google Scholar; and Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy (ed.) Freeman, Samuel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 4Google Scholar. Note that, in the former, it appears in scare quotes and, in the latter, it is accompanied by a footnote indicating that the expression was the name of a column in the Baltimore Sun in the 1920s and ’30s.

36 See Rawls, A Theory of Justice, §69; and Political Liberalism, 35–40.

37 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 35.

38 See Rawls, Political Liberalism, 231–40. Thus whereas current U.S. chief justice John Roberts would probably not agree with the substance of Rawls’ principles, he would concur with the latter's conception of his role. As Roberts declared during his confirmation hearings, ‘Judges are like umpires.’ Quoted in Bruce Weber, ‘Umpires v. Judges’, New York Times, 12th July 2009.

39 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 400.

40 Rawls, ‘The Best of All Games’, Boston Review, 1st March 2008.

41 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 216.

42 See Nicolis, Grégoire and Prigogine, Ilya, Exploring Complexity: An Introduction (New York: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1989), ch. 2Google Scholar, §1–2.

43 Rawls, The Law of Peoples, 12.

44 Huxley, , Brave New World (London: HarperCollins, 1932), 38, 207Google Scholar.

45 Op. cit. note 44, 78.

46 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 6, 7.

47 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 13–14.

48 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 502; see also Mendus, Susan, ‘The Importance of Love in Rawls's Theory of Justice’, British Journal of Political Science 29 (1) (Jan. 1999), 57–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

49 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 12.

50 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 374.

51 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 147; see also A Theory of Justice, 416.

52 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 8; Political Liberalism, 50, 54, 92, 148–49.

53 See Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 302; and Political Liberalism, 12.

54 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 98.

55 See Rawls, ‘Legal Obligation and the Duty of Fair Play’, in op. cit. note 31; and A Theory of Justice, 302.

56 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 97.

57 See Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 96–97. Ronald Dworkin has also called for governments to operate on the basis of principles of fair play. See his ‘Principle, Policy, Procedure’, in A Matter of Principle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 84–85Google Scholar.

58 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 207.

59 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 6.

60 See Abt, Clark C., Serious Games (New York: Viking Press, 1970)Google Scholar. Rawls is well aware of the educational advantages of serious games. During a course lecture about the ‘reasoning game’ (which is how he used to refer to ‘the original position’) he admits that some will object that this is ‘a kind of frivolous way to think about it: it's a game yet this is supposed to be a very important subject of political philosophy, one where we're determining how society is to be run. Now certainly that's important – people fight about it all the time and even kill each other on occasion – so why talk about it as a game? Only so you won't get intellectually confused and start asking questions that are really irrelevant as it will turn out. It helps to think of very important vital things in terms that reduce the emotional involvement.’ From ‘Modern Political Philosophy – Lecture 2’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYvdmizdohE, starting at 28:36.

61 See Rawls, Political Liberalism, lecture VI, § 6.

62 See Sontag, , ‘Notes on “Camp”’, in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966), nos. 18–19, 22–23Google Scholar.

63 For more on the distinction between opponents and adversaries, and on its relevance to dialogue, see my ‘Opponents vs. Adversaries in Plato's Phaedo’, in Patriotic Elaborations: Essays in Practical Philosophy (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

64 Dworkin, , Is Democracy Possible Here? Principles for a New Political Debate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Or as Rawls laments, ‘much political debate betrays the marks of warfare.’ Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (ed.) Kelly, Erin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 118Google Scholar. See also Hunter, James Davison, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic Books, 1991)Google Scholar; and Hunter, , Before the Shooting Begins: Searching for Democracy in America's Culture War (New York: Macmillan, 1994)Google Scholar.

65 Dworkin, Is Democracy Possible Here?, 155; and see Dworkin, Justice for Hedgehogs.

66 Dworkin, Is Democracy Possible Here?, 5.

67 See my From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics: Putting Practice First (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), esp. ch. 3Google Scholar; and ‘Patriotic, Not Deliberative, Democracy’ and ‘From Moderate to Extreme Holism,’ both in op. cit. note 63.

68 Dworkin, Is Democracy Possible Here?, xi.

69 See op. cit. note 68, 143–47.

70 To Dworkin, when it comes to deciding hard cases judges must ask about legislative purposes and underlying legal principles, just as referees must ask about the point and character of the game that players have consented to play. Notice how those who apply and those who dispute the application of the rules remain separate, in contrast to Rawls’ vision. See Dworkin, , ‘Hard Cases’, in Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 101–10Google Scholar; and Rawls, Political Liberalism, ch. 6.

71 Rawls, Political Liberalism, xxi.

72 As I argue in From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics, ch. 7. On why rights talk of the kind favoured by neutralist liberals is inappropriate even for negotiation, see Glendon, Mary Ann, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (New York: Macmillan, 1991)Google Scholar.

73 Applbaum, , Ethics for Adversaries: The Morality of Roles in Public and Professional Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 114Google Scholar. See also Shields, David Light and Bredemeier, Brenda Light, ‘Moral Development and Behavior in Sport’, in Singer, Robert N., Hausenblas, Heather A., and Janelle, Christopher M. (eds.) Handbook of Sport Psychology (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2001, 2nd ed.), esp. 592–93Google Scholar.

74 See Applbaum, 121–35.

75 ‘The primacy of hearing’, Gadamer, Hans-Georg has written, ‘is the basis of the hermeneutical phenomenon.’ Truth and Method, trans. Weinsheimer, Joel and Marshall, Donald G. (New York: Crossroad, 1989, 2nd ed.), 462Google Scholar. Readers may have noticed the affinities between those I am calling ‘spectators’ and ‘audience members’ and those who attend what Bertolt Brecht has called ‘dramatic’ and ‘epic’ theatre, respectively. See Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic (ed. and trans.) Willett, John (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), chs. 8, 13, 18, 20, 53–54Google Scholar; and ‘Theatre for Learning’, (trans.) Anderson, Edith, in Martin, Carol and Bial, Henry (eds.) Brecht Sourcebook (New York: Routledge, 2000)Google Scholar. Gadamer, however, fails to distinguish enough between spectators and audience members because he blurs aesthetic and practical, fun and serious forms of play: see Truth and Method, part I, section II.1(A), esp. 109. Charles Taylor does the same when he writes about how someone experiencing his first live symphony concert can be ‘enraptured not only by the quality of the sound [something aesthetic], which was as he had expected quite different from what you get on records, but also by the dialogue between orchestra and audience [something practical].’ Taylor, , ‘Cross-Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate’, in Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 191Google Scholar. Finally, Jeffrey Edward Green overlooks the distinction altogether given his focus on political engagement with one's ‘eyes’ in contrast to one's ‘voice’: The Eyes of the People: Democracy in an Age of Spectatorship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

76 ‘One facet of [modern] specialization was the separation of roles that put increasingly skilful players on the field and increasingly unpracticed spectators on the sidelines.’ Guttmann, Allen, Sports Spectators (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 83Google Scholar.

77 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 204.

78 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 215.

79 See Edelman, Murray, Constructing the Political Spectacle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), ch. 5Google Scholar; Compton, James R., The Integrated News Spectacle: A Political Economy of Cultural Performance (New York: Peter Lang, 2004)Google Scholar; and Brettschneider, Frank, ‘Horse Race Coverage’, in Donsbach, Wolfgang (ed.) The International Encyclopedia of Communication, vol. 5 (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008)Google Scholar.

80 See Rawls, Political Liberalism, 142; and A Theory of Justice, 436–38.

81 Dreyfus, , On the Internet (New York: Routledge, 2009, 2nd ed.), 87Google Scholar.

82 Kierkegaard, , ‘The Present Age’, in Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age, A Literary Review (eds. and trans.) Howard, V. and Hong, Edna H. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 94Google Scholar.

83 My thanks to Daniel A. Bell, Yves Couture, Andrew Lister, and Daniel Weinstock for comments on previous versions of this paper.