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A REALISTIC POLITICAL IDEAL

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 December 2016

David Schmidtz
David Schmidtz*
Affiliation:
Philosophy, University of Arizona
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Abstract:

Over the past decade, political philosophers and political theorists have had a common purpose: to reflect on the merits of realism and idealism when theorizing about the human condition and the nature of justice. We have settled that no one is against being realistic or against being idealistic per se. The contributions to this volume represent a conversation about what would make one attempt to articulate ideals better than another.

Type
Introduction
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 33 , Issue 1-2 , Fall 2016 , pp. 1 - 10
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2016 

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References

1 Readers familiar with the literature will know that this terminology is inspired by David Estlund. His influence is apparent throughout this volume. Most of the papers in this volume reflect on Estlund’s contributions, and rightly so. Estlund’s own contribution to this volume reflects on conversations over drafts of these essays in turn, and accordingly is a new and constructive chapter in this debate. See Jacob Levy’s essay in particular, which emerged in part from exchanges of successive drafts with Dave.

2 Ed Hall’s essay effectively makes a more general point about what it takes for an idealization’s implications to be political implications.

3 The realm of the metaphysically possible sounds like a large space, and yet visions (utopian or otherwise) have a way of failing to anticipate possibilities whose realization was just around the corner. Indeed, we can hardly imagine capabilities already realized. Many people have a sense that, for example, the quality of food has improved, but have no idea that container shipping reduced the time that food typically spends sitting at docks from two weeks to two hours. When it comes to our theoretical specialty — figuring out how to distribute goods — the imagination of visionaries is nothing compared to what reality dreams up every day. For related discussion, see the essay by Mike Huemer.

4 Estlund, David, Democratic Authority (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 217.Google Scholar

5 Particular examples illustrate particular points. What is illustrated here is the difference between being faux-unable to choose for myself and being genuinely unable to choose for others. If the point were to distinguish between choosing moves within a game and choosing the basic structure of the game, there would be better examples.

6 For more on this, see James Woodward’s treatment of this distinction.

7 Note: I regard Plan B as the best I can do under the circumstances, but I do not regard Plan B as ideal. Instead, when I give up on the plan to make lasagna and switch to Plan B, I do so with regret about a solution that seemed within reach and that would have been better. If I restock the missing ingredient so that lasagna will be a real option next time, that confirms that Plan B is merely best under the circumstances, not ideal.

8 Notice that information about my guest’s allergy changes my thinking about what is ideal for tonight’s dinner without changing what I imagine would have been ideal under different (under ideal) circumstances. Also, I can ask what is best given what is available or I can ask what would have been best if the realm of the feasible had been different (that is, if I had possessed all the ingredients). I also can ask what would have been best if the realm of the desirable had been different (that is, given guests without allergies). You can see how the latter question would seem meaningful to some and vacuous to others. See the essay in this volume by Sayre-McCord and Brennan, as well as the essay by Stemplowska.

9 Jenann Ismael’s essay is an immense contribution to our understanding of the subtleties of this point. I do not employ Onora O’Neill’s distinction between abstraction and idealization here, but see her Towards Justice and Virtue. A Constructive Account of Practical Reasoning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

10 Rawls, John, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 12.Google Scholar

11 Sometimes, the surprising upshot of idealization is that the factor we set aside turns out to be where the action is. That too is a valuable exercise. Consider the Coase Theorem, which showed that transaction costs are economically pivotal by demonstrating that everything changes when we set them aside.

12 Rawls, John, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999) 90.Google Scholar

13 Suppose an asteroid were about to collide with Earth. What would be an ideal response? Hypothesis: we first need to ask, what would be ideal under ideal conditions? Leading our list of ideal conditions: ideally, there is no asteroid about to collide with Earth. Having noted that ideally there is no asteroid, which of these is an ideal response? (1) Strive to make it true that there is no asteroid, or (2) Do what would be ideal in the ideal world in which there is no asteroid. The second response seems confused, of course, but not because it is internally inconsistent or otherwise fails on its own terms. Rather, it fails to distinguish what is ideal from what would be ideal under ideal conditions. See the essays by Eric MacGilvray and Andrew Mason.

14 Jerry Gaus’s essay offers a realistic approach to public reason, and to the fact that our conclusions regarding justice do not converge. A society devoted to a single ideal is the antithesis of human society at its best. See also Gerald Gaus, The Tyranny of the Ideal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).

15 It matters that the impact of incentive structures on behavior is twofold. First, people respond to incentives. Second, people anticipate other players responding to incentives; crucially, it is not defective of you to ponder what you will do when the Carens Market’s logic leads your employees and suppliers to stop showing up.

16 Rawls, Law of Peoples, 119. Perhaps that is why Rawls invited us to see “I cut, you choose” as a paradigm of fairness among separate agents who have destinations of their own, yet see the point of cooperating. “I cut, you choose” is a norm of fairness that generates its own support in a strategic world. Now imagine someone proposing “I cut, I choose” as a norm of fairness. But “I cut, I choose” is not an ideal of fairness, and we cannot turn it into an ideal of fairness by stipulating away every feature of the human condition that makes “I cut, I choose” unfair.

17 See Annette Förster’s essay.

18 Cohen, Gerald A., Rescuing Justice and Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 268.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 Let’s not confuse this with talking about policy as opposed to theory. To say political theory is theory about what holds communities together and makes them worth holding together is not to propose a policy; it is to identify political theory’s subject matter. See, for example, the essay by William Galston.

20 At one time, John Rawls saw his theoretical framework as neutral between capitalism and socialism. Theories can be neutral, but reality is not. Reality does not speak in an unequivocal voice, since no empirical result has only one explanation. Yet, reality does speak. In 1989 it spoke against the socialism that G. A. Cohen (and his father before him) had spent a lifetime defending. The test was not a clean test. No empirical test ever is. Still, it left us needing to decide how to react to seeing socialism turning out as it did. One internally coherent option is to say, “socialism does not work, but we are in the realm of philosophical analysis, not a realm subject to empirical testing. Ideals cannot be disconfirmed.” Realists, of course, ask for more than internal coherence. See the essay by Michael Frazer.

21 Justice has to do with what we ought to be able to expect from each other, and what we ought to be able to expect from each other will have conventional aspects specific to a given time and place. Obviously, justice will have universal aspects, too. Justice will always have something to do with what people are due, for example, and there will never be a time when punishment is what innocent people are due.

22 Neera Badhwar, along with William Galston and others, stresses that, on that particular point, they agree with Estlund and Cohen.

23 Estlund, Democratic Authority, 209.

24 Estlund says, “People could be good, they just aren’t. Their failures are avoidable and blameworthy, but also entirely to be expected as a matter of fact. So far, there is no discernible defect in the theory, I believe. For all we have said, the standards to which it holds people might be sound and true. The fact that people won’t live up to them even though they could is a defect of the people, not of the theory” (Democratic Authority, 264).

25 David Estlund (forthcoming in Kevin Vallier and Michael Weber, eds., Political Utopias, Oxford University Press) supposes, “prime justice might be utopian, in the sense that the standards are so high that there is strong reason to believe they will never be met.” But how would we know whether utopian justice is a high standard? Is there any test? If I find myself thinking that imposing my principles would be fine if only people weren’t so defective, how do I know when to infer not that my standards for people are way too high but that my standards for principles are way too low? For related discussion, see the essay by Neera Badhwar.

26 One issue for realists, not an artifact of utopian theorizing by any means, is that solutions to today’s problems shape tomorrow’s problems. That can affect whether today’s problem is worth solving. We use topological metaphors to represent such issues. The topological metaphors suggest that path-dependent, piecemeal problem solving can lead to our converging on local rather than global peaks. There has to be a grain of truth to the metaphor, even if we have never seen a local peak from which human beings cannot make upward moves. If we represent the terrain as jagged in that way, then we probably also should represent human beings as able to leap from one slope to another. I thank Matt Sleat for helpful discussion without presuming that Matt would be on board with these remarks.

27 Alexander Rosenberg offers his own playful (and brilliant) amendment, asking us to imagine that the terrain is itself actively rolling in rubbery ways, somewhat unpredictably bouncing us around as we dance toward what seems at the moment to be higher ground. Rosenberg thus takes the metaphor in the direction of a different (if not uncongenial) point: namely, what once was relatively high ground need not always be so. Moreover, the very terrain will have the shape it has at a given moment partly because it is responding to our trying to make a place for ourselves within it.

Presumably, the human condition does not evolve rapidly enough for justice’s basic content to change much, and justice will never change in such a way that it could become just to punish a person for being innocent. So, Rosenberg’s metaphor does not presuppose that justice is wildly unstable, but only that it need not be timeless. Justice is, perhaps, a framework of mutual expectation whose content evolves as needed to remain what helps us be what the people around us need us to be.

28 I see this as part of Bernard Williams’s distinction between political realism and political moralism. (Robert Jubb’s essay is helpful here.) As Williams puts it, conditions of trust and cooperation must be settled before we can answer or even ask questions of justice. Perhaps Williams saw justice as narrowly a question of how to divide the pie, in which case questions about how to respect bakers would be prior questions about trust and cooperation but also, arguably, questions about justice in a broader, more dynamic, more realistic sense. But perhaps I quibble here. Probably Williams was also thinking about conditions prior even to broader questions of justice — that is, how to get past a state of Hobbesian war so we can afford to begin talking about what treating each other with respect would involve. See the essays by Matt Sleat and David Miller in particular. See also Williams, Bernard, In the Beginning Was the Deed (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).Google Scholar

29 If there is no political peak, there may yet be moral peaks. We can each have our own mountains to climb — our own destinations — in which case justice arguably needs to be about coordinating on something other than picking the same mountain.

30 See especially the essays by Simon Hope, Andrew Mason, and Gerald Gaus.