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IDEALIZATION, JUSTICE, AND THE FORM OF PRACTICAL REASON

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 December 2016

Simon Hope
Simon Hope*
Affiliation:
Philosophy, University of Stirling
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Abstract:

Current debates about ideal theory and idealization in modern moral and political philosophy do not typically scrutinize the form of reflection itself. This is an unfortunate oversight: assumptions about the form of reflection shape the positions defended in those debates. I argue that the appropriate form of reflection on the nature and justification of standards of justice and morality is the form of practical reason. I further argue that the form of practical reason cannot support many of the idealizations typically deployed in modern moral and political philosophy.

Keywords

ideal theoryidealizationjusticepractical reasonmoral concepts
Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 33 , Issue 1-2 , Fall 2016 , pp. 372 - 392
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2016 

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References

1 This terminology is popularly taken from Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 8.Google Scholar Debates around the issue are actually a lot older: compare Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1962).

2 Contrast, for example, John Simmons, A., “Ideal and Nonideal Theory,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 38, no. 1 (2010): 5–36;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Valentini, Laura, “On the Apparent Paradox of Ideal Theory,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 17, no. 3 (2009): 332–55;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Estlund, David, “Utopophobia.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 42, no. 2 (2014): 113–34;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Cohen, G. A., Rescuing Justice and Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Compare, for example, the very different criticisms offered by Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Charles W. Mills, “Ideal Theory as Ideology,” Hypatia 20, no. 3 (2005): 165–84; Lorna Finlayson, The Political is Political (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015); and Ypi, Lea, Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 O’Neill, Onora, Towards Justice and Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 For representative examples, see: Holly Lawford-Smith, “Non-Ideal Accessibility,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 16, no. 3 (2013): 653–69; Colin Farrelly, “Justice in Ideal Theory: A Refutation,” Political Studies 55 (2007): 844–64; Galston, “Realism in Political Theory,” European Journal of Political Theory 9, no. 4 (2010): 385–411.

6 I have attempted to contribute to them myself: see my “The Circumstances of Justice,” Hume Studies 36, no. 2 (2010): 125–48.

7 I find it striking, for example, how Valentini brackets discussion of “the value of theorizing as such” from her paper: “On the Apparent Paradox,” 341. For an important exception to my complaint, see Mills, “Ideal Theory as Ideology.”

8 I cannot understand how an agent who is just, fair, beneficent, kind, and so on, would consider taking up the slack of others’ wrongdoing to be unfair. To think so would be to view one’s moral obligations as onerous burdens rather than necessary elements of living well. That necessity strikes me as a central part of how the moral agent’s grasp of ethical concepts silences certain considerations as reasons for action. The moral agent may, in severe cases, regret what living well costs him or her, but that is not the same as considering his or her obligations to be unfairly onerous. I take the notion of silencing from John McDowell, “Virtue and Reason,” reprinted in his Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), chap. 3, at 55–56.

9 Liam Murphy, Moral Demands in Nonideal Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), chap. 5.

10 Murphy, Moral Demands in Nonideal Theory, 118–20.

11 Both Onora O’Neill and John McDowell have persuasively noted the ways in which one’s wider ethical outlook is implicated in any individual practical judgment: O’Neill, “Normativity and Practical Judgement,” Journal of Moral Philosophy 4, no. 3 (2007): 393–405, at 402–403; McDowell, “Virtue and Reason,” 65–69.

12 I have tried to draw attention to the significance of this point elsewhere, in my “Kantian Imperfect Duties and Modern Debates Over Human Rights,” Journal of Political Philosophy 22, no. 4 (2014): 396–415; and “Subsistence Needs, Human Rights, and Imperfect Duties,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 30, no. 1 (2013): 88–100.

13 One might think this claim needs qualifying: the bounded scope of possibility is beyond our ability to cognize, but matters would be different for God or an ideal observer. I suspect such a qualification is meaningless, because neither alternative is an alternative for us. See, for careful argument on the general point, Jonathan Lear, “Transcendental Anthropology,” in his Open Minded (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), chap. 11.

14 O’Neill, Towards Justice and Virtue, 39–41.

15 O’Neill, Towards Justice and Virtue, 40. I have found in conversation at several conferences that this clear distinction is widely misunderstood, and the source of that misunderstanding seems to be Henry Shue’s famous paper “Torture in Dreamland,” Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law 37 (2006): 231–39. Shue, acknowledging O’Neill, claims that idealization adds something positive to an example while abstraction deletes something negative (see Shue, 231 and n. 4). Not only is this a misreading of O’Neill, it is also nonsensical. If I stipulate a world without slavery, have I added a positive (more freedom) or deleted a negative (less domination)? If the answer must be one or the other, there is no answer.

16 Stemplowska and Hamlin, “Theory, Ideal Theory, and the Theory of Ideals,” 50; Lawford-Smith, Holly, “Ideal Theory: A Reply to Valentini,” Journal of Political Philosophy 18, no. 3 (2010): 357–68, at 366.Google Scholar

17 Stemplowska and Hamlin, “Theory, Ideal Theory, and the Theory of Ideals,” Political Studies Review 10, no. 1 (2012): 48–62, at 50–51; Lawford-Smith, “Reply to Valentini,” 363–66. Lawford-Smith actually foregrounds a different reason for the flimsiness of O’Neill’s distinction: “we can redescribe bracketing as asserting the absence of predicates” (366). As this is contradicted by O’Neill’s own remarks on bracketing I quoted above, I discard it accordingly.

18 Lawford-Smith, “Reply to Valentini,” 366.

19 Stemplowska, “What’s Ideal About Ideal Theory?” Social Theory and Practice 34, no. 3 (2008): 319–40, at 327.

20 Lawford-Smith, “Reply to Valentini,” 365; Stemplowska, “What’s Ideal About Ideal Theory?” 323. Compare also Valentini, “On the Apparent Paradox,” 354; Estlund, “Utopophobia,” 134.

21 As Maike Albertzart notes in an acute discussion, many accounts of moral realism explicitly draw analogies to scientific reasoning, and many accounts of moral principles explicitly portray principles as akin to theoretical laws: Moral Principles (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 94–95.

22 Following Engstrom, Stephen, The Form of Practical Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 54–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Engstrom’s book is an exemplary discussion of the latter question; Anscombe’s Intention (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000) of the former.

23 Anscombe, Intention, 56.

24 The preceding two paragraphs are heavily indebted to O’Neill, “Modern Moral Philosophy and the Problem of Relevant Descriptions,” in Anthony O’Hear, ed., Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004): 301–316, at 311–13, and Engstrom, Stephen, “Constructivism and Practical Knowledge,” in Bagnoli, Carla (ed.) Constructivism in Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013): 133–52, at 144–46.Google Scholar

25 This is perhaps the most controversial claim I make in this section: surely it is possible for a subject to judge that the bribe should be declined and yet — non-akratically — take the bribe anyway? I think we should deny that possibility and say, with McDowell, that nondefective knowledge of what to do must include knowledge of why one should do it. See “Virtue and Reason,” section 3. I can only gesture here to why we should think this. Crudely, the question of what to do is a practical question: its answer must provide action guidance. And for a reflective creature, who can choose to do whatever they please, action guidance must include a justificatory element: to understand what to do is to understand why one should do it.

26 Many thanks to the anonymous Social Philosophy and Policy reviewer for this helpful example.

27 On this point I am indebted to Anton Ford, “On What Is in Front of Your Nose,” Philosophical Topics, forthcoming 2016; and Anselm Müller, “How Theoretical is Practical Reason?” in C. Diamond and J. Teichman, ed., Intention and Intentionality (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), 91–107. In earlier work I tried to register the point by saying that practical reason’s direction of fit does not run entirely one way (“The Circumstances of Justice,” 140). I now regret the phrasing (it blurs the distinction in form), though not the point.

28 Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals [1785], trans. J. Timmermann, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 4:394.

29 Two prominent examples: John Broome, Rationality Through Reasoning (Oxford: Wiley, 2013), 23–24; and Velleman, David, The Possibility of Practical Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), chap. 10.Google Scholar

30 Rödl, Sebastian, “The Form of the Will,” in Tenenbaum, Sergio, ed., Desire, Practical Reason, and the Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 136–60, at 146–49.Google Scholar

31 My jargon here owes a lot to Aristotle’s distinction between energeia and kinêsis, at Metaphysics 1046b, and especially to Charles Hagen’s interpretation in “The Energeia/Kinêsis distinction and Aristotle’s Theory of Action,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 22, no. 3 (1984): 263–80. Compare Rödl, “The Form of the Will,” 146–47.

32 This possibility is brilliantly examined by Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), see especially 56–62.

33 Compare O’Neill, Towards Justice and Virtue, 164.

34 Following Adrian Moore, “Maxims and Thick Ethical Concepts,” Ratio 19, no. 2 (2006): 129–47, at 135–38.

35 Cohen, Rescuing Justice and Equality, 266–67.

36 See Cohen, Rescuing Justice and Equality, 252–53. What Justinian says is this: “Justice is the set and constant purpose which gives to every man his due.” Institutes I.i, trans. J. B. Moyle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1913). I find it striking that Cohen, after initially accurately glossing the passage, immediately drops the emphasis on giving, and places emphasis on the recipients of justice.

37 Stemplowska, “What’s Ideal About Ideal Theory?” 332.

38 Cohen, Rescuing Justice and Equality, 306–7.

39 Miller, Justice for Earthlings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 232.

40 Compare Michael Thompson, “What is it to Wrong Someone?” in R. J. Wallace, P. Pettit, S. Scheffler, and M. Smith, eds., Reason and Value (Oxford, Clarendon, 2004), 333–84, and O’Neill, Towards Justice and Virtue, chap. 5. To deny this would be to hold the view that there is an intelligible way of saying “She ought to have this and that” where the ought does not depict any practical nexus. Holly Lawford-Smith has asserted that this is intelligible: in the case of a loved one killed in a natural disaster, “[w]e have a strong intuition there that life really ought not to be so unfair as to have let this be the case” (“Reply to Valentini,” 359 n 4).

I cannot make sense of Lawford-Smith’s claim, other than as what she explicitly denies it is: an empty remnant of an enchanted worldview we have discarded. What Lawford-Smith describes is an exercise of purely wishful thinking. As such, it is entirely appropriate to grief and mourning, which are themselves entirely appropriate reactions to the death of a loved one. But that something ought to happen is a matter of the exercise of the will. Willing cannot be purely wishful thinking, and so purely wishful thinking cannot contain a genuine example of an ought. See above, Section II.A.

41 Valentini, “On the Apparent Paradox,” 342 n. 49, also separates the issue of justification from action guidance, though I cannot see her reasoning for it. If what I have said and go on to say is correct, this must be a mistake on her part.

42 It has been put to me, by Sem de Maagt and by the anonymous reviewer, that this argument presupposes the falsity of certain forms of moral realism that defenders of idealization may hold. It would be very interesting to investigate to what extent defenders and critics of idealization rely on differing answers to the question of moral realism. My argument here is not, however, intended to presuppose the falsity of certain forms of moral realism, but to open up one way of rejecting the relevant forms. If my argument from general standards in Section II.B is correct, then reflection on the nature and justification of general standards of practical reason must itself have the form of practical reason. And if it is then accepted that standards of justice and morality are general standards of practical reason, it may be possible to rule out varieties of moral realism that entail that reflection on the nature of normative concepts is theoretical. All this would need a lot more working out. But see also Engstrom, “Constructivism and Practical Knowledge.”

43 Stemplowska, “What’s Ideal About Ideal Theory?” 327–28.

44 Stemplowska, “What’s Ideal About Ideal Theory?” 337.

45 Compare O’Neill, “Normativity and Practical Judgement,” 399–400. I think this is true even of certain negative injunctions that prescribe, as Kant puts it, with mathematical precision (Metaphysics of Morals, trans. M. Gregor [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], 6:375 n). While there is an indeterminate number of ways of killing someone, the only way to meet a prohibition on murder is to never do any of them, as Jens Timmermann once pointed out to me. Yet there are still many possible patterns of action that all exhibit the complete absence of murder.

46 On this see Ford, “On What is in Front of Your Nose,” and O’Neill, “Normativity and Practical Judgement,” 403. Compare Anscombe, Intention, 79: “The mark of practical reason is that the thing wanted is at a distance from the immediate action.”

47 O’Neill, Towards Justice and Virtue, 54ff.

48 Moore, “Maxims and Thick Ethical Concepts,” 146.

49 See further Katrin Flikschuh, “The Idea of Philosophical Fieldwork,” Journal of Political Philosophy 22, no. 1 (2014): 1–26; and my own “Human Rights as One Thought Too Many? The Māori Case,” Jurisprudence, forthcoming 2016.

50 The most famous example must be Rawls’s “four-stage process” for thinning the Veil of Ignorance (A Theory of Justice, rev. ed., 171–76).

51 O’Neill, Towards Justice and Virtue, 182.

52 This is to reach, via a different route, one of Bernard Williams’s famous conclusions: that one defect of theory is that it “represents as many reasons as possible as applications of other reasons [ . . . ] Our problem now is actually that we have not too many but too few” reason-giving concepts. See Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana, 1985), 116–17.