The Tyranny of the Ideal

by Gaus, Gerald;

  A. John Simmons offers a counteranalysis:

  While Sen’s point about Everest and determining the heights of smaller mountains is obviously true, its use in Sen’s analogy is, I think, potentially misleading. … Which of two smaller “peaks” of justice is the higher (or more just) is a judgment that matters conclusively only if they are both on equally feasible paths to the highest peak of perfect justice. And in order to endorse a route to that highest peak, we certainly do need to know which one that highest peak is. Perhaps for a while we can just aim ourselves in the general direction of the Himalayas, adjusting our paths more finely—between Everest and K2, say—only when we arrive in India. But we need to know a great deal about where to find the serious candidates for the highest peak before we can endorse any path to them from here.22

  If we focus on the metaphor of a mountain range, our aim may be to reach the highest peak; if that is the goal of our journey it will not help much to know which of two local peaks is higher (a or b). Even if a is higher than b, we want to know whether climbing a takes us closer or further from highest peak in the range. We do not only want to know whether the elevation a is greater than b (whether Mount McKinley is higher than Mount Kilimanjaro); we want to know something about the longitude and latitude—whether moving our society to a or b moves us closer to u.23

  The dispute between Sen and Simmons turns on the relevant dimensions involved in deciding whether justice recommends a move to a or b. Here we must introduce more rigor to get beyond instructive, but loose, metaphors and really grasp what the debate is about. As is well known, Sen has made fundamental contributions to axiomatic social theory, which concerns the properties of preference orderings and methods of aggregating two or more such orderings into a social preference ordering. Now individual i’s complete transitive preference ordering Oi is an ordering of options of some option set, such that for any two elements {a, b} in that set, either a is preferred to b, b is preferred to a, or a and b are indifferent.24 What is important about any single Oi is that it is, in the end, unidimensional, in the sense that no matter how many dimensions of evaluation may have been involved in i’s deliberations in coming to her ranking, once she has a well-formed ordering, all the options can be arrayed along a single dimension from best to worst.25 Given this social choice presupposition, Sen is absolutely correct to suppose that the height of the mountains (a metaphor for how highly ranked in terms of justice an option is) exhausts the relevant dimensions, for there is only one dimension in an individual’s ordering and, as we shall see, for Sen, judgments of justice are about the orderings of impartial spectators over social worlds (§IV.1.2).26

  We can give two interpretations—one substantive and one formal—of Sen’s claim that only pairwise judgments are necessary; that is, that in determining the justice of {a, b}, we need not worry about how a and b compare to the best, or optimal, social world, u. On what we might call the inherent binariness of judgments of justice interpretation, Sen is advancing a substantive thesis about justice, according to which a judgment of the relative justice of any two social worlds {a, b} never depends on information about a third alternative, the optimum social world, u. (Or, more strongly, the {a, b} judgment never depends on any third option c, whether or not c = u).27 This is a substantive thesis as it implies that, in evaluating the justice of social worlds a and b, information about the proximity of a and b to u (or any c) is irrelevant. The justice of a and the justice of b depend solely on the features of the states of affairs that constitute them, and this does not include their relation (say in terms of proximity) to other alternative, c. This is perhaps the most natural interpretation of Sen’s advocacy of his pairwise approach, and of many of his criticisms of Rawls’s insistence on the importance of knowing the ideal when making judgments about less-than-ideal social worlds. However, his pairwise approach by no means necessarily assumes it. Another, more formal, interpretation might be called the all-things-considered ordering view. Suppose that person i’s preference ordering of the relative justice of a set of options {a, b, c} depends not only on how well a and b do when evaluated in terms of the relevant standards of justice, but also on the relative distance of, respectively, a and b, to a third, superior option c (which may or may not be the ideal state, u). That is, in thinking through the issue of whether a was more or less just than b, a person considers both the inherent justice of worlds a and b, as well as how “far away” (again, leaving aside for now what that might mean) a and b are from c. If our person i nevertheless arrived at a complete transitive ordering of {a, b, c} in terms of each element’s justice on both these dimensions, the “distance from c” information would already be accounted for in i’s preference ordering, and the place of a and b in it. Given this, it would still be strictly true that given this ranking, to say whether a or b is more just, does not require knowing what social world is at the top of the ordering; knowing the top of the ordering is not relevant to a pairwise choice. Yet, unlike on the inherent binariness interpretation, to arrive at the ordering, distance information would be required, and so knowledge of the ideal would be presupposed in developing the ranking.

  Given that Sen is deeply skeptical that knowledge of the ideal is really of much use at all, we should definitely reject this second interpretation of his social choice approach. However, neither should we saddle him with a pure version of the inherent binariness interpretation. Sen need not be absolutely committed to ignoring all “distance” or “directional” information (again, for now let us use these vague ideas drawn from Simmons). For example, suppose that though a’s features were more just than b’s, small modifications of b would lead to a far more just world, c, while this is not the case with a. Nothing Sen says indicates that he could not take this into account, and so judge that all things considered b is more just than a, because of its “proximity” to c. Nevertheless, it seems safe to read Sen as saying that such judgments are not fundamental to a theory of justice, and for the most part we should focus on the fundamental inherent features of a social world when determining its justice. Thus, basically, in determining the justice ranking of {a, b, c} we should focus on the justice of the inherent (not relational vis-à-vis other worlds) features of each world and how people fare in it. Consequently, knowledge of the ideal is of little or no use when making pairwise comparisons about nonideal worlds. In seeking more justice, we basically wish to climb up the ordering of more inherently just social worlds. To do that we do not need to see the top of the ordering, or make many “distance” judgments. It is essential to realize that Sen’s climbing-up-the-order approach in no way implies that improvements must be incremental or conservative; if we are now at the social world judged fortieth and our option set includes the thirty-ninth and tenth options in our ordering, Sen certainly does not hold that we first move to the thirty-ninth. It is fundamental to distinguish Sen’s claim that judgments of justice are basically binary, and so do not rely on their relation to an ideal point, from the common misunderstanding that they are therefore incremental.28

  Simmons’s counterpoint to Sen is best interpreted as insisting that the social choice ordering model is inappropriate because we should keep distinct at least two dimensions of evaluation in comparing the justice of a and b. Fundamental to thinking about justice is not simply the inherent justice of a’s and b’s social structures, but “how close” in terms of, say, similarity or feasibility,29 a and b are to the ideal point (or global optimum) u. Thus because there are now two dimensions of evaluation being kept separate,30 it is perfectly possible for a to be closer to u on one dimension (say, the justice of its institutional structure), but further away on the distance dimension (in some proximity sense it is further from u than is b).

  On this multidimensional analysis, then, it matters a great deal where the ideal is, because some metric of distance to the ideal is a fundamental element of the overall comparative judgments of whether justice recommends a move to a or b. And the multidimensional analysis allows us to see w
hy the ideal would be necessary in orienting our judgments about justice; we wish to make not only evaluations of the binary inherent justice of two states, but also determinations as to whether one or the other brings us closer in the proximal sense to the ideally just condition. We can now see a way to more rigorously thinking about how the ideal can orient our judgments of justice, a task to which I turn in the next two chapters. In this book, then, I shall explore multidimensional ways of thinking about justice, for they provide the most compelling response to Sen’s elegant unidimensional analysis—an analysis that makes the ideal otiose.

  1.4 Dreaming

  As I have stressed—and as we will see in upcoming chapters—this multidimensional, orienting-through-the-ideal approach to political philosophy is complicated. We need to know the justice of various social states as well as their proximity to the ideal (where these are different, not well correlated, dimensions of justice). One way to avoid the inevitable complications is Sen’s: unleash comparative judgments from reliance on an ideal, and so render the ideal unnecessary.31 Then we need to know only the relative justice of social states. Something like the opposite simplifying strategy is to depict only the ideally just state or condition, and make no claims about the justice of less-than-ideal situations. There is nothing incoherent about this; it could be that all less-than-ideal states are incommensurable or equal (everyone but the winner is equally a loser), and so cannot be ranked in terms of strictly better or worse than one another. It is too strong to say that such a theory is entirely useless,32 but a political philosophy that is unable to describe any but the top, ideal social state, is of little use in helping us sort through the options for justice that confront us.33 It is as if we have developed a clear conception of the ideal square, but are unable to say which of three drawings, a square, a rectangle, or a circle, is closest to it.

  One might contend that a political philosophy that presents a vision only of the fully just society can have value. This contention would seem supported by the historical importance of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Recall, however, that his litany of dreams of justice and harmony in America was offered as a source of hope and faith to help overcome the alienation and bitterness of his audience, arising from the fact that their actual, here-and-now demands for justice were met with contempt and hatred. The speech commenced not with mere dreams, but an assertion that the American founders issued “a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” So, King proclaims to the marchers, “we have come to cash this check—a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.”34 A world where the requirements of complete justice—or perhaps even a world where the commitments of the American founders—are fully met is perhaps an unattainable ideal. I do not claim that a useful ideal theory must posit attainable ideals. But King nevertheless insisted that the ideal orients current political demands. Even if the check that King demanded be cashed was one that fell far short of the promised value, the critical point is that the ideal orients political demands in our manifestly nonideal world. King’s “dream” is not one from which we awake—a dream of a perfect world—that is unrelated to the pursuit of justice in nonideal social worlds. By “dreaming” I mean to isolate a different view of ideal justice that not only proposes an unattainable ideal, but is willing to admit that this ideal may be, and often is, entirely irrelevant to improvements in justice in nonideal conditions.

  Divorced from judgments of justice about the social world in which we find ourselves, and those to which we might move, mere dreams of ideal justice may inspire or give hope, though they may also lead to hopelessness, despair, and cynicism. To wake from a dream of a world of perfect justice and confront the realities of our social world, without any way to connect the dream to the problems and questions arising in our social world, is all too likely to disorient thinking about justice.35 We might think of it as surrealist justice, seeking to depict in our world a vision of a dream world that does not really translate.36 What one “knows” about justice is discontinuous with the questions of justice arising from life in one’s actual and near social worlds. David Miller is quite right: on such a view “there is nothing left for political philosophy but lamentation over the size of the gap that unavoidably exists between the ideals it defends and the actual conditions of human life.”37

  David Estlund upholds such a “hopeless” view of justice:

  Consider a theory that held individuals and institutions to standards that it is within their ability to meet, but which there is no reason to believe they will ever meet. … It would be morally utopian if the standards were impossible to meet, but, again, by hypothesis, they are not. Many possible things will never happen. The imagined theory simply constructs a vision of how things should and could be, even while acknowledging that they won’t be. … So far, there is no discernable defect in the theory, I believe. For all we have said, the standards to which it holds people and institutions may be sound and true. The fact that people will not live up to them even though they could is a defect of people, not of the theory. For lack of a better term, let us call this kind of theory a version of hopeless realism.38

  I have claimed that such a theory is of little use. Estlund admits it may well be: “The value of unrealistic theory is not my point. … The point is that a hopeless normative theory might be the true theory. Admittedly, not all truths are of great value. The telephone book contains many relatively unimportant truths. We are talking about the truth about justice, however, and I am inclined to think that there is more importance here, but perhaps this is only because we would have thought that it would be of practical value.”39 There may well be no realistic prospect that we will do as justice “requires,” and thus it may also be that given this, such justice “might have no practical value at all” once we ask what, given our imperfections, we ought now to do.40 Estlund seems to rather relish this possibility. He makes a great deal of cases where “it ought to be the case that Alf Xs” even though it would be deeply inadvisable for Alf to seek to X, because he is likely to fail, and in trying to X he is apt to bring about worse results than if he had pursued a more “realistic” alternative.41 But Estlund’s thesis is even more radical: it stresses that knowing that X ought to be the case might not be of relevance to practice in the sense of giving some reasons to look for ways to secure X, if not now, then in the future. Thus knowledge that X ought to be the case may have “no practical value at all.”

  Like others, Estlund draws on Lipsey and Lancaster’s “theory of the second best,” according to which if u is the Pareto-efficient state, it does not follow that a state of affairs that is almost identical to u will be almost Pareto efficient.42 Thus, at first blush, it would seem that the goal of approximating the ideal might be ill founded: if we cannot reach it, getting close may be of no use at all in securing justice.43 Knowing ideal justice thus could be more like knowing rather abstruse theorems in mathematics than a guide to action.44

  Estlund’s point is, broadly speaking, a conceptual one: a theory of justice may be the true theory, even if it has no practical value. Others have denied this—it is certainly a live issue.45 It is not, however, my concern to adjudicate this dispute; for the most part, I set it aside. My chief concern is analyzing a class of ideal theories according to which the specification of an ideal is of critical importance in making relative judgments of justice and, in some way, of orienting practice. Still, while not seeking to jump into this particular fray, I am supposing that throughout its long history, political thinkers so often have been drawn to utopian ideals because they have been convinced that they do help orient our less-than-ideal judgments, and do provide recommendations about how to think about social and political change, even when this change seems infeasible now, or even in the near future. This is not a conceptual truth, but a truth about the utopian traditi
on in political philosophy. As I have stressed, it is simply a misreading of utopian thought to equate it with hopeless, unrealizable ideals: it simply does not follow that one who resists a “hopeless utopia” is a “utopophobe.” It is hard not to be worried about a trend in academic philosophy that searches for “true justice” and “utopia” by turning its back on so much of this tradition, resolutely defending the possibility that its subject is utterly useless.

  1.5 Recommending—Rescuing Justice from Uselessness

  In the remainder of this book, then, I set aside ideal theory as mere dreaming; whether or not achieving the ideal is itself hopeless, my concern is the type of political theorizing in which the ideal is not useless—in which the ideal serves as a criterion that assists in regulating, directing, or facilitating less-than-ideal judgments of comparative justice. On these views knowledge of the ideal is informative in making less-than-ideal judgments. But even such a theory of the ideal, which is not mere dreaming—in which knowledge of the ideal informs evaluative judgments about the relative superiority of nonideal conditions—could still be a sort of purely academic enterprise, conveying theoretical knowledge of comparative evaluations that never provides anyone with guidance. From the point of view of working toward justice, such a theory would be useless all the way down: the whole enterprise would result in, perhaps, a beautiful theory of justice that yields evaluations of a wide variety of imperfect social states oriented by the ideal, but never manages to yield recommendations about what actual agents ought to do or strive for. The theory would be thoroughly useless.