SKEPTICISM ABOUT UNCONSTRAINED UTOPIANISM

Abstract:

In this essay, I critically engage with a methodological approach in contemporary political theory — unconstrained utopianism — which holds that we can only determine how we should live by first giving an account of the principles that would govern society if people were perfectly morally motivated. I provide reasons for being skeptical of this claim. To begin with I query the robustness of the principles unconstrained utopianism purportedly delivers. While the method can be understood as offering existence proofs, because we can devise other situations in which morally flawless decision making would unearth alternative sets of principles, I argue that such proofs tell us surprisingly little about how we should live in general. Drawing on this point, I contend that normative models that wish away certain phenomena that are uncontroversially central to any account of politics cannot plausibly claim to tell us how we should live in political society. I conclude by offering a more positive sketch of why avoiding this brand of utopianism might not represent a problematic capitulation to the morally nonideal and suggest that theorizing in light of certain constraints may be a precondition of good normative theorizing itself.

An influential strand of contemporary analytic political theory tells us how we should live by offering an account of the principles that would govern society if people were perfectly morally motivated. Even though we are obviously not morally flawless beings, advocates of this approach, which I refer to as unconstrained utopianism, hold that it is only when we grasp the nature of such principles that we can rigorously diagnose what is wrong with our politics as it currently is and comprehend the nature of the kind of ideal society that we should either aspire toward or bemoan our inability to achieve. This methodological stance accordingly assumes that political theorists can have a profitable discussion by outlining their visions of a morally perfect society and using these visions as preliminary blueprints for political design.

In this essay, I scrutinize this way of doing political theory. First, I query the robustness of the principles that unconstrained utopianism purportedly delivers. While the method can be understood as offering existence proofs — that is, as offering reasons to think that there are possible worlds in which various moral principles capture how we would ideally live — when we devise other situations in which morally flawless decision making would unearth alternative sets of principles, it reveals that such proofs tell us surprisingly little about how we should live in general. Second, I then argue that if we are to choose between the principles that competing models of morally perfect decision-making deliver, we need to decide which model best represents the kind of practice we are seeking guidance about. As a result, political theorists should not wish away certain phenomena that are uncontroversially central to any account of politics. ¹ I conclude by offering a more positive sketch of why avoiding this brand of utopianism might not represent a problematic capitulation to the morally nonideal; in fact, theorizing in light of certain constraints may be a precondition of good theorizing itself.

I. What is Unconstrained Utopianism?

Theorists who endorse unconstrained utopianism deny that the principles that tell us how we should live are constrained by any factual considerations about how we are likely to act, or what kinds of political institutions we can realistically be expected to achieve. ² This is because they stress that “there are lots of things we can’t do or might not be able to do that we know are good to do.” For example, as Jason Brennan observes, “even if it were impossible to cure AIDS we know that it would be better if we could.” ³ As a result, unconstrained utopians hold that “we judge practical rationality, as we judge justice, and the normative in general, independently of factual possibility.” ⁴

This conceptual claim about the nature of moral thinking leads unconstrained utopians to argue that if we are to answer the question “How should we live?” we must uncover the most intrinsically morally desirable way of living together; this in turn, requires us to consider what would be best if people had “morally perfect motivations” because in the best possible society all people would be committed to acting as morality demands. ⁵ Taking various kinds of moral imperfection into account cannot tell us what is truly morally desirable because it allows “ignoble human motivations to constrain the content of our theories.” ⁶ As a matter of logic we must therefore begin our theorizing by positing utopian situations in which “people always do the right thing for the right reason, know what they are doing, and feel the right way about it.” ⁷ If we do not, our normative theories will be tainted by our morally imperfect motivations and the less than ideal status quo we find ourselves in.

Even though such theories will probably generate principles that we are highly unlikely to meet, unconstrained utopians insist that their methodological approach does not violate ought implies can. This is because a moral principle can be unlikely to be met with compliance without demanding more of us than we can do. ⁸ Consider David Estlund’s example of a situation in which someone “pleads that he is not required to refrain from dumping [household garbage by the side of the road] because he is motivationally unable to bring himself to do it.” ⁹ As Estlund argues, it is absurd to think that this person’s motivations are a constraint on how we should morally demand that the person act because can’t will is not coextensive with can’t do. This is because “a person is able to (can) do something if and only if, were she to try and not give up, she would tend to succeed.” ¹⁰ Given that someone would succeed in not dumping her garbage by the side of the road if she tried not to, we can coherently say that she could refrain even if she will not actually refrain. As a result, unconstrained utopians hold that “the inability to bring oneself to do something (to will to do it) might coexist with an ability to do that thing.” ¹¹ They accordingly claim that there is nothing wrong with a normative theory that refuses to “concede any facts that represent moral failings,” even if they are basic features of human nature. ¹² The key issue we must address when we are confronted by various factual considerations about human motivation or moral incapacity is “whether or not those incapacities are, for all their naturalness, forms of morally deficient will or concern.” And as Estlund notes, “vicious, or complacent, or selfish concerns are not somehow morally sanitized if they should happen to be characteristic of humans.” ¹³

In consequence, unconstrained utopians argue that even if various facts about human incapacity can rightly exclude us from endorsing highly idealistic institutional proposals, this does not mean that highly idealistic principles fail to capture the truth about how we ought to live. For example, even if it would be foolish to institute garbage policies that ignore the prevalence of ignoble motivations, it does not follow that the principles that underwrite such proposals fail to capture what we should do. Consequently, unconstrained utopianism holds that when any principles are rejected due to our motivational capacities “we may then ask what we should say about the putatively excluded principle on the counterfactual hypothesis that it could be obeyed. And it is only when we thus clear the deck of facts about capacity and get the answer to that counterfactual question that . . . we reach the normative ultimate.” ¹⁴ For this reason, the only pertinent factual obstacles facing the principles we derive from thinking about situations of moral perfection are ones of design, and such obstacles should not affect our assessment of a principle’s moral desirability. ¹⁵ Allowing our normative theorizing to be constrained by considerations that only arise due to our moral flaws, causes us to misunderstand the ideal and the merely feasible, and this “leads to confusion, and confusion generates disoriented practice.” ¹⁶

I think that we can only evaluate unconstrained utopianism as a methodological approach by examining the character of the first-order argumentation it engenders. Accordingly I now turn to the illustrative examples of such theorizing offered by G. A. Cohen and Jason Brennan. ¹⁷ Cohen’s Why Not Socialism? attempts to offer a compelling moral argument for thinking that a form of socialism represents the best way that we could live together. To do so Cohen asks us to imagine the best possible camping trip. On such a trip, Cohen argues that the resources the campers use — pots and pans, oil, coffee, fishing rods, canoes, a soccer ball, decks of cards and so forth — are under collective control and that the campers have shared understandings about when and why particular campers will use them based on their enjoyment of or aversion to particular activities. ¹⁸ For example, if I enjoy fishing but you enjoy cooking we may decide to carry out these tasks exclusively. The collectivist and voluntarist spirit of the trip ensure that “there are no inequalities to which anyone could mount a principled objection.” ¹⁹ This makes the trip uniquely enjoyable: each camper enjoys “a roughly similar opportunity to flourish, and also to relax, on condition that she contributes, appropriately to her capacity, to the flourishing and relaxing of others.” ²⁰

Cohen contends that two key socialist principles are realized on this camping trip. The first, socialist equality of opportunity, “seeks to correct for all unchosen disadvantages, disadvantages that is, for which the agent cannot herself reasonably be held responsible, whether they be disadvantages that reflect social misfortune or disadvantages that reflect natural misfortune.” ²¹ It prevails when “differences of outcome reflect nothing but difference of taste and choice, not differences in natural and social capacities and powers.” ²² The second, the community principle, “constrains the operation of the egalitarian principle by forbidding certain inequalities that the egalitarian principle permits.” ²³ For example, suppose that when a dozen campers arrive at the campsite for one night of camping there are six state of the art, single-person trailers they can choose to use, and that to maximize overall utility the group agrees to decide who will use them by drawing straws. Although this does not violate the socialist principle of equality of opportunity, the resulting difference in comfort between the winners and losers would violate the principle of community because that principle captures the fact that on the best possible camping trip each camper takes care to ensure that none of their number labors under challenges the others do not face. ²⁴

Cohen also imagines a camping trip governed by capitalist norms of private property and market exchange. For example, he posits a situation in which one of the campers stumbles across a huge apple tree during a walk but only agrees to share the apples with the others if they reduce her labor burden. He also posits a scenario in which the campers come across a cache of nuts abandoned by a squirrel, and another camper, who alone knows how to crack the nuts, says she will only share that information for a price. ²⁵ Because this is such unattractive behavior, Cohen claims that socialist norms are rather obviously “the best way to run a camping trip.” ²⁶ Cohen notes that we cannot simply infer from the fact that these principles are desirable on the camping trip that society-wide socialism is desirable. ²⁷ However, he thinks that there are no serious obstacles — other than obstacles of feasibility — facing these principles. As a result, his argument is premised on the idea that we can, in fact, infer that society-wide socialism is desirable.

Jason Brennan’s Why Not Capitalism? aims to prove, contrary to Cohen, that various capitalist principles capture the best way of living together. To do so, Brennan chooses a different thought experiment, the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse Village. ²⁸ In the village, Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, Daisy Duck, Goofy, Clarabelle Cow, Pete, Professor Ludwig Von Drake and many other characters live together. Various facilities exist that help them to carry out their projects. Hence, there are “communal spaces, such as amphitheatres, racetracks, obstacle courses, and parks” and the villagers “avail themselves of the facilities collectively.” Much like Cohen’s campers, the villagers also “have shared understandings of who is going to use them and when, under what circumstances, and why.” ²⁹ However, certain objects and resources are privately owned. The villagers’ moral perfection ensures that they all “work hard to add to the social surplus” by trading “value for value.” ³⁰ As a result, each villager “is free to pursue his or her vision of the good life without having to ask permission from others” but “all the villagers are extremely kind. If anyone has any unmet needs, the others line up to help him or her,” and for this reason “force is not necessary to maintain social order.” ³¹ Because of these perfect motivations, the villagers “live together happily, without envy, glad to trade value for value, glad to give and share, glad to help those in need, and never disposed to free ride, take advantage of, coerce, or subjugate one another.” ³²

Five capitalist principles are realized when the villagers live like this. The first is the principle of voluntary community, which holds that “people should live and cooperate with one another without resorting to violence or threats of violence” with the result that “no one is coerced or threatened into behaving well or cooperating with others.” ³³ The second, the principle of mutual respect, is that “the villagers are tolerant of one another and their differences in taste and attitudes . . . villagers take joy in the diversity of life experiences and perspectives the others bring to the table.” ³⁴ The third principle realized is the principle of reciprocity: the “villagers always pitch in to help with others’ misfortune . . . they do not primarily confront one another as creatures of need. Rather, they trade value for value with one another in all of their relationships.” ³⁵ The fourth principle is the principle of social justice: the villagers “live under a set of rules designed to ensure that no one, through no fault of his or her own, will lead a less than decent life.” This is because the village’s “norms of trade, private property, respect, and so on, ensure that everyone has sufficient opportunity, wealth and freedom to have a good chance to live out his or her individual conception of the good.” ³⁶ Finally the village realizes the principle of beneficence because the villagers “are always willing to help those in need.” ³⁷

Because the villagers respect these principles, they take care to ensure that they “do not make themselves objects of charity by choice — that would violate the spirit of reciprocity.” If they are unfortunate enough to suffer from bad luck, Brennan argues that their fellow villagers will “come together to ensure that any such crisis is resolved” because each villager is prepared to “undertake personal sacrifices for the sake of the common good for others.” ³⁸ Because this is a morally inspiring vision of collective coexistence, Brennan insists that “even if the limits of human motivation are not a constraint, we should still advocate capitalism, not socialism.” ³⁹

II. What’s Wrong with Unconstrained Utopianism

We have three options regarding how to judge the Cohen-Brennan dispute:

1. 1) That Cohen’s socialist principles capture the morally ideal way of living together.

2. 2) That Brennan’s capitalist principles capture the morally ideal way of living together.

3. 3) That neither Cohen’s socialist principles nor Brennan’s capitalist principles capture the morally ideal way of living together.

In this section of the essay I will defend (3). My skepticism derives from a worry about the method Cohen and Brennan endorse rather than concerns about the internal plausibility and consistency of their argumentation. The problem is that by stipulating what perfect moral motivation consists of and creating thought experiments in which all inhabitants happily comply with contrasting principles of property ownership, it is difficult to think about how we can defend one set of principles over the other. ⁴⁰ This in turn calls into question the idea that unconstrained utopianism can tell us how we can best live.

To defend my claim about the futility and normative indeterminacy of unconstrained utopianism I will now elaborate a further thought experiment which asks what decisions morally perfect people would make in a different context. I will argue that an answer to this question delivers a third set of ideal distributive principles. This is meant to function as a reductio ad absurdum of unconstrained utopianism as a method for telling us how we should live.

Flat in The City

Three perfectly morally motivated acquaintances — Gavin, Kajal, and James — have just graduated from Provincial University. Because none of them enjoys living alone, they have decided to rent a flat together when they move to The City to begin the graduate training program at The Company. ⁴¹ That summer in The City only one three bedroom flat with identically sized bedrooms is available to rent, although various studio flats are available. Graduate trainees at The Company earn £5 per month. However, in addition to their salary, Gavin and Kajal will receive an additional £10 per month each from a fund they created to invest some money they won when they were members of the Provincial University Poker Society. Having grown up in a religious household that outlawed gambling, James did not join the Provincial University Poker Society but devoted his free time to writing unappreciated poetry.

According to The City’s statistical office, after housing costs £2 is the minimum amount of income someone requires to have a decent standard of living, while £4 gives that person the resources to have a good chance of enjoying a flourishing life. The flat’s rent is £9 a month. Gavin, Kajal, and James need to decide how to pay the rent. They consider the following options:

1. 1) The group decides to split the costs evenly as Gavin and Kajal have no reason to help James enjoy anything above a decent standard of living. Therefore, after paying the rent Gavin and Kajal have £12 while James has £2.

2. 2) So that James can have a good chance to live a flourishing life, and because neither of them enjoys doing it, Gavin and Kajal decide they will pay £4 and James will pay £1 but only if he agrees to do all the housework. Therefore, after paying the rent Gavin and Kajal have £11 while James has £4.

3. 3) So that James can have a good chance to live a flourishing life the group decides that Gavin and Kajal will pay £4 and James will pay £1. Therefore after paying the rent Gavin and Kajal have £11 while James has £4.

4. 4) The group decide to collectivize their income of £35 and deduct the rent from the flat’s wealth fund. Therefore, after paying the rent £26 remains. This is distributed by the flat’s spending committee according to its judgment of each flatmate’s needs.

How would Gavin, Kajal, and James choose to pay the rent if they were perfectly morally motivated? It strikes me as reasonably uncontroversial to hold that morally perfect flatmates would not choose (1) as they would want James to have a good chance of living a flourishing life rather than a merely decent one at little cost to themselves. ⁴² However, I also think that Cohen and Brennan’s principles deliver this verdict, so this does not help me to build my case. Option (2), however, is perfectly compatible with the spirit of Brennan’s capitalist principles. Indeed laboring in this way appears to be the only way that James can satisfy Brennan’s reading of the capitalist principle of reciprocity. However, it is implausible to think that if Gavin and Kajal were perfectly morally motivated they would want James to labor for them in their shared home in this way because this would sully the relations that obtained between the flatmates. It therefore appears that Brennan’s capitalist principles would not be chosen by perfectly morally motivated flatmates.

Cohenite socialists would find (3) problematic because James’s reasons for not gambling are outside of his control as they are the result of an upbringing for which he should not be disadvantaged. ⁴³ Therefore, Cohen would urge us to adopt (4). However, there are plausible reasons for thinking that a perfectly morally motivated James would not want to opt for (4). For one thing, he might not want to lay claim to the benefits that Gavin and Kajal enjoy from being talented poker players who have taken care to hone their talents. James might also acknowledge that adults make different choices in life and that even though these choices are often conditioned by factors outside of their control, they can sometimes deserve their results. ⁴⁴ James accordingly might think that in certain situations, provided people do not fall below some minimum baseline, expecting them to bear the burdens of their decisions is not worrisome even if inequalities in outcome result. He therefore might not want to treat Gavin and Kajal’s winnings as a collective resource, and might even claim that doing so would violate his sense of self-respect by diminishing his ability to take responsibility for his religious beliefs and literary aspirations. ⁴⁵

If a morally perfect James might take this position, we have reason to hold that perfectly morally motivated flatmates would opt for (3) over (4). In the spirit of Cohen and Brennan let me stipulate that the decision to choose (3) realizes two social democratic principles which hold that justice requires us to (a) ensure that no person falls below the minimum baseline at which he or she can expect to have a good chance of living a flourishing life and (b) strive to create social relations that enable all people to maintain their self-respect (rather than aiming to correct for all unchosen disadvantages) by ensuring that no one should labor under burdensome challenges that others do not face, or be forced to be subservient to the wills of others, if these burdens could easily be alleviated via unobjectionable redistributive strategies.

Have I just proven that social democracy and not socialism or capitalism occupies the moral high ground? While my thought experiment has as much claim to have done so as Cohen’s camping trip can claim to deliver the moral superiority of socialism, and Brennan’s village the inherent value of capitalism, I do not think I have done any such thing because I deny that unconstrained utopianism can deliver such truths. This is because, although I think morally perfect flatmates would indeed opt for (3), Cohen is also surely right that the best possible camping trip would be governed by the type of socialist norms he elaborates, and Brennan gives us reason to believe that the capitalist principles he adduces would play a valuable role in ensuring that the clubhouse villagers live lives of meaning and contentment. If this is the case, and each thought experiment is compatible with unconstrained utopianism’s theoretical strictures, it appears that affirming socialist, capitalist, and social democratic principles are all possible outcomes of perfectly morally motivated decision making in different contexts. This calls into question unconstrained utopianism’s claim to be able to deliver compelling judgments about the inherent moral superiority of competing distributive principles over their alternatives because these sets of principles are in tension with one another.

The most powerful way to show that any one of the three options is the intrinsically best way to live would be by demonstrating that adhering to its principles would also generate the best possible camping trip, village, and rental decision. However, the fact that Brennan chooses to employ a different thought experiment from Cohen’s to showcase the moral value of capitalism strikes me as tacit acknowledgement that he knew he could not better Cohen’s thought experiment on its own terms. Likewise, I did not seek to show that my social democratic principles would create happier campers or cartoon villagers. As a result, why think that the clubhouse village, or the camping trip, or the decision that perfectly morally motivated flatmates would make, teach us anything about how we should live in general? Yet this is what unconstrained utopianism claims to do as it purports to show us the intrinsically morally desirable way we could live together, and holds that if a set of distributive principles really was intrinsically morally desirable, these principles would represent the best possible way morally ideal people could choose to regulate their conduct. ⁴⁶ Yet neither Cohen, nor Brennan, nor I can be said to have shown that about our favored principles absent further argumentation.

This demonstrates one of the most pressing problems with unconstrained utopianism: if political theorists can stipulate perfect moral motivation, happiness, and merry compliance, an array of competing distributive principles are likely to look morally inspiring from within the strictures of the thought experiments these theorists create, so long they are competent thought experimenters. However, as soon as we ponder the general desirability of the principles by applying them to different contexts, where agents are by stipulation also perfectly morally motivated, it is highly likely that their attraction diminishes. ⁴⁷ It is accordingly very difficult to give conclusive reasons for favoring one of the set of principles we are currently considering over the other two simply by reflecting on the thought experiments in their own terms. In each case the denizens of the thought experiments live flourishing lives and none of them experience any resentment because they happily comply with the principles adduced.

To this end, perhaps we should interpret Cohen and Brennan as offering existence proofs — that is, as offering reasons to think that there are possible worlds in which socialist or capitalist principles capture how we would ideally live. However, if I am right, when we devise other situations in which morally flawless decision making would unearth alternative sets of principles, it becomes obvious that such proofs tell us surprisingly little about how we should live at a more general level. In this regard, we can be skeptical of unconstrained utopianism’s claim to tell us how we should live by doubting the robustness of the principles it purports to deliver. ⁴⁸ To wit, any decision in favor of socialism, capitalism, or social democracy simply on the basis of our reactions to the three thought experiments will be the consequence of one of the thought experiment’s ability to generate more of our approbation, awe, or veneration than the others. And that reaction, absent further justification, is clearly deeply idiosyncratic. ⁴⁹

If unconstrained utopianism is to move us beyond this situation of normative indeterminacy, it must enable us to come to a judgment about which thought experiment, if any, delivers the general truth about how we should live — a truth we can then employ to determine which set of distributive principles we should ideally endorse in political society. To what considerations might we appeal to make this decision? Roughly speaking two options confront us. One is compatible with unconstrained utopianism’s methodological stance, but will probably fail to lead us to any determinate conclusions about which set of principles captures the truth about how we should live in general. The other may lead to a determinate conclusion but it appears to be incompatible with unconstrained utopianism as a methodological stance.

The first option is simply to engage in even more utopian theorizing. Perhaps we should postulate more thought experiments populated by morally perfect/flawless agents and consider which of the three sets of distributive principles would generate better results overall. However, the reasonable conclusion to draw on this front (based on past experience) is that convergence is very unlikely. This is because the ability of different principles to generate the kind of hypothetical results of which we will maximally approve is just as likely to depend on the nature of the thought experiments as the inherent moral superiority of the principles themselves. This is why, as we have seen, different principles capture the actions and decisions that morally perfect campers, cartoon villagers, and flatmates would make. Moreover, as Brennan demonstrated by offering his account of the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse Village and as I demonstrated with my discussion of the rental decision, the number of internally coherent candidate principles is likely to proliferate in line with the number of theorists seeking to ground their favored political programs by constructing their own utopian thought experiments. For this reason simply engaging in more utopian theorizing is unlikely to deliver a concrete judgment about how we should live.

The second option is to argue that one of the thought experiments better models something theoretically relevant about the context to which it is meant to apply, and that this gives us reason to take its findings more seriously as a guide for how we should live. Miriam Ronzoni argues that Cohen’s thought experiment is inadequate on such grounds precisely because:

The camping trip is distinct from everyday life and society in two . . . morally important respects: (1) the fact that, for the duration of the camping trip, the realization of its communal and frugal values are the central goal of its participants, rather than being something that needs to be balanced with other legitimate and valuable competing goals that people may have, and (2) its discontinuity in time. ⁵⁰

To this end, Ronzoni argues that “the rules of the camping trip might be desirable for the camping trip given its point and purpose and specific features of its constraints and participants — and yet not be appropriate for other scenarios.” ⁵¹ For that reason, Brennan might allege that we should endorse his capitalist principles because the clubhouse village is much more analogous to the kind of society we are interested in theorizing. For one thing, its social arrangements will last for an indefinite period whereas camping trips are, as Ronzoni notes, short with a definite end point. In addition, Brennan’s villagers explicitly do not display the kind of goal monism Cohen’s campers do and this captures something morally significant about free societies. ⁵²

Nevertheless it does not follow from the fact that Brennan’s thought experiment is a more adequate model than Cohen’s that it is adequate enough. If we can only choose between competing internally consistent accounts of moral perfection by asking which model best applies to the practice we are reflecting on then we have to think hard about what that practice is like. This is because what perfect moral motivation requires varies according to the practices or relationships we are considering — as we all know, a perfect family member will display different motivations toward you than a perfect colleague. ⁵³ Thus, if we are to decide which of Cohen’s, Brennan’s, or my principles tell us about the nature of the ideal society, we need to think hard about politics and social order. ⁵⁴ Unconstrained utopianism’s practitioners are strangely insensitive to this issue because while they claim to be reflecting on the principles that should govern society, they make little or no effort to focus on any of the specificities of politics. This problematizes their attempt to tell us how we should live because if they do not endorse and seek to idealize an underlying conception of the political that has some plausibility, they can, at most, claim to tell us how a set of agents who display few of our characteristics could live well in a series of dissimilar contexts. And to put it polemically, while it might be interesting to know how morally perfect campers or cartoon villagers or flatmates would act (although equally it may not) such knowledge is not especially important.

Although it is foolish to hope to give an exhaustive definition of the political, ⁵⁵ there are certain phenomena that seem uncontroversially central to any account of politics, but that are notably absent from all of the utopian thought experiments we have considered thus far. First, it is uncontroversial to state that politics is about exercising power to settle disputes. ⁵⁶ Second, it is “integral to political rule to invoke at least some claim to authority and thereby to legitimacy . . . which implies some recognition of this on the part of citizens.” ⁵⁷ To this end, political authority, unlike warfare or Mafioso coercion, is a “relationship of command and compliance where compliance is not elicited by threats, persuasion, or incentives, but by the subject or citizen acknowledging that those who rule have a right to do so.” ⁵⁸ If the above purposefully broad, and obviously incomplete, characterization of some constitutive features of the political is, at least as far as it goes, reasonably incontestable, this represents a serious problem for Cohen’s and Brennan’s brand of unconstrained utopianism because their thought experiments make no reference to these features of the practice of politics. If I am right, this omission compromises their claim to deliver principles we can employ to assess our political societies. ⁵⁹

The problem is that unconstrained utopianism’s practitioners insist that if we are to find out how we should live, we must posit a situation in which all people are perfectly morally motivated and ask what principles would govern their interactions. However, we cannot choose between the conflicting normative principles delivered by competing models of moral perfection without asking which model best relates to the practice we are seeking moral guidance about. This means that any utopian theory that reasonably purports to capture a set of principles we can use to assess our political societies must make some claim to be idealizing political society rather than some other practice like a camping trip or a cartoon village. If any adequate normative model of political society must acknowledge that beyond small-scale, close-knit groups, power will have to be exercised to settle disputes, we can conclude that by imagining away the exercise of power, Cohen’s and Brennan’s brand of utopian thinking is incapable of offering a plausible account of the principles that ideally ought to govern our political societies. This is because the attractiveness of living in accordance with the principles Cohen and Brennan adduce is dependent on the voluntaristic nature of their models. Such models cannot tell us in their own terms what principles should regulate the exercise of power or what forms of authoritative social order are the most normatively appealing.

III. Working from within

The foregoing argument paves the way for a more constructive sketch of how we should theorize that is not entailed by my critique of unconstrained utopianism but which has an elective affinity with it. I will attempt to vindicate this claim by examining an issue that sheds light on how to responsibly idealize certain relationships and practices — the question of how we could best theorize the features of an ideal or perfect friendship. One possible way of theorizing the character of an ideal friendship would be by imagining a relationship between two morally perfect agents in which the friends’ interests and value-judgments always aligned (due to their perfection), with the result that they never disagreed or fell-out, and then by thinking about the goods that such a friendship would realize (the intimacy generated by a unity of will and judgment, care, closeness, and perhaps an enjoyable sense of shared moral superiority) and the resulting principles that would underwrite the friends’ conduct. Let’s call this the utopian way of thinking about friendship. Alternatively, consider the possibility of theorizing for a case of ideal friendship in a way that is constrained by our experiences of the features of the best friendships we actually enjoy as imperfect moral beings. Theorizing in this way, I surmise, would lead us to realize that an ideal friendship is one that evinces high levels of intimacy, care, and closeness for other-regarding reasons ⁶⁰ despite the fact that great friends may occasionally disagree and fall-out for myriad reasons. The advantage of this latter approach is twofold. First, it grasps, in a way the utopian account cannot, that one of the most valuable things about the best friendships we can enjoy is the knowledge that certain disagreements and fallings-out will not destroy the intimacy, care, and closeness we have built up with our close friends in the way that they might with minor acquaintances. ⁶¹ For this reason, it is only the second approach that can actually understand the nature of the goods that prevail among close friends. Second, we might also think that disagreement and argument is part of a good friendship precisely because we often need someone to tell us to amend our ways, to point out how we might inadvertently have been acting like an arsehole, and to keep us on the straight and narrow. A friendship in which someone did not feel free to disagree and argue with you, in the knowledge that the friendship is secure, would be limited. ⁶²

Arguing that an ideal friendship would display a perfect alignment of interests, desires, and value-judgments, and that ideal friends would therefore never disagree or fall-out, is not a matter of sanitizing some of the nonideal features of the friendships we experience in the real world. Instead, it banishes some things that are incredibly normatively significant about deep friendships — the ability to maintain closeness despite certain kinds of disagreement, and to be called to account by someone you trust — which enable us to understand why those relationships are so valuable in the first place. It will consequently be a very bad guide to what an ideal friendship would be like. As a result, we can see that theories that wish away various features of our lives (the non-alignment of our interests and value-judgments) for merely being the result of our imperfections may fail to understand the nature of the goods that certain practices and relationships can realize.

This reveals that theorizing in a way that is sensitive to the non-alignment of interest and judgment, and other all too human characteristics, does not always represent a problematic capitulation to the morally nonideal because we may only be able to grasp the normative significance and character of some relationships or practices — and the nature of the goods they enable us to enjoy — in light of such constraints. This matters when we come to think about how we can responsibly idealize political society, because while power may need to be exercised in response to the kinds of disagreements we experience that result from typical human characteristics, banishing these from our theoretical models may preclude us from adequately grasping the normative characteristics of politics in the same way that it would preclude us from understanding the value of close friendships. In this sense, foregrounding our theorizing in an appreciation of why we need politics, and consequently need power to be exercised, matters because we are unlikely to be able to appreciate the nature of the distinctive renderings of the goods that politics can enable us to enjoy — “order, protection, safety, trust, and the conditions of cooperation” ⁶³ — and at its best social justice, liberty, and toleration — if we postulate the kind of perfect moral motivation that renders opaque our reasons for valuing these goods in the first place. It is equally hard to understand why we would need theories of legitimacy, authority, and maybe even justice if human beings did not repeatedly encounter the predictable problems that result from our need to live together despite our supposed moral imperfections.

This is why refusing to allow our theorizing to be constrained by any of the things that unconstrained utopians dismiss to the domain of the nonideal, imperfect, or morally blemished, is unlikely to help us to think about political values or the principles that tell us the truth about how we should live in political society — just as utopian theories cannot tell us what an ideal friendship would be like or make sense of the values it would realize, unconstrained utopianism cannot tell us what an ideal political society would be like or make sense of the values it would provide. The mistake is not merely that Cohen and Brennan forget that even perfect people would need government, although that is true. ⁶⁴ More significantly they attempt to offer principles to assess our societies by constructing models that, as a result of stipulating an alignment of private moral judgment and motivation, forget why politics is of value to creatures like us. This precludes them from understanding the character of the goods we can reasonably hope to strive for in society, which in turn compromises their claim to tell us what principles ought to regulate our conduct. ⁶⁵

David Estlund holds that complaints like mine, which argue that theorizing for a case of moral flawlessness absurdly assumes “away politics itself,” are impotent because “a lot of work is being done in this objection by a definition” and it simply does not matter if the theory under examination does not count as political philosophy because “this would leave entirely intact its claim to have a correct theory of justice, authority, and legitimacy.” ⁶⁶ However, if the best way to choose between competing, internally consistent, theories of moral flawlessness and the principles they prescribe, is to ask which thought experiment best idealizes the practice it is supposed to apply to, unconstrained utopians cannot evade interpretative considerations about the nature of the practice they claim to be theorizing about. It is unfair to impugn this as a matter of arguing by definition given that if unconstrained utopianism is to generate any determinate considerations about how we should live, we must make recourse to such interpretative claims.

It might also be thought that my view violates what is right in Cohen’s celebrated thesis about the fact-insensitive nature of normative principles. ⁶⁷ Cohen denies that facts can constrain our normative thinking because even if facts sometimes seem to exclude certain principles, ultimate normative principles may have the conditional form: “One ought to do A if it is possible to do A.” ⁶⁸ However, contrary to Cohen’s surmise, objections to this line of thinking need not invoke feasibility constraints. Indeed, my point is not that we should reject some of the ultimate principles unconstrained utopianism adduces because they are politically infeasible per se. It is rather that certain kinds of utopian theorizing fail to idealize the practice they claim to deliver truths about and therefore cannot in good faith claim to tell us how that practice should be. ⁶⁹ Various utopian principles fail to apply to politics because they are derived from models that theorize a different practice — as we have seen, many so-called ultimate normative principles that take a conditional form will only apply to happy campers, Disney cartoon characters, or perfectly morally motivated flatmates. Political theorists are not interested in that kind of stargazing but in uncovering the constellation of principles that apply to politics.

IV. Conclusion

Despite the seductive nature of the arguments in favor of unconstrained utopianism, we should reject the idea that our political theorizing must begin by positing a vision of a utopia populated by perfectly morally motivated people who can do away with political machinery. This is because the principles such theorizing delivers are unlikely to be robust enough to plausibly guide our judgment of how we should live in political society. Moreover, because unconstrained utopianism is incapable of grasping the need for political rule and understanding some of the distinctive goods that politics enables us to enjoy, it is incapable of offering a plausible idealized account of the kind of political society that we should aspire to. Some philosophers may protest that my argument rests on a merely stipulative conception of the political. Be that as it may, as Bernard Williams once remarked, you cannot always “blast someone into seeing the point.” ⁷⁰ And the point that normative political theory should speak to politics rather than some other practice entirely is worth making because the methodological starting point favored by some very influential political philosophers is structurally engineered to obscure it.