The Tyranny of the Ideal

by Gaus, Gerald;

  In this chapter I have explored a model of these types of searches—rugged landscapes, which have been developed in other contexts in different ways. Some model along these lines, I have argued, is implicit in the very idea of ideal theory as a distinctive and necessary approach to political theory. To be sure, the model I have developed is a simple one; for example, “directionality” has been assumed to be unidimensional (there is only one overall dimension of similarity). This, of course, is an “idealization” (i.e., simplification), but if we make the model more complex (say by assuming that we could move north, south, east, or west, rather than simply to the right or left),114 the problems for the ideal theorist become more, not less, difficult. In this simple model I have supposed that ideal theory identifies a perspective on justice that, in principle, generates a terrain of justice for a set of possible social worlds; the aim is to find the global optimum while also making improvements in justice in the less-than-perfectly just social worlds that confront us.

  The critical claim of this chapter is that in this terrain the ideal theorist confronts the Neighborhood Constraint: we have far better information about the realization of justice in our neighborhood than in far-flung social worlds. I have tried to show that a variety of considerations lead to this conclusion: the correlation of the justice values of proximate locations in moderately rugged landscapes (which are the sort that ideal theory must be supposing); error inflation as models of complex social dynamics depart from observed social worlds (and ideal theory must be assuming moderate complexity); the fact that our models are calibrated to our social world; the mass of empirical evidence about the dynamics of our social world; and the differential costs of discovery about our neighborhood and far-flung worlds. Despite all this I have found that philosophers often simply deny the Neighborhood Constraint (given the status of Plato in the profession, perhaps this should not be surprising). Distant possible social worlds, they have insisted, may be quite simple to understand and model, and so we know them better than our neighboring worlds. I know of no systematic analysis that supports this conclusion: it is at best a mere, not terribly plausible conjecture. The question, I have stressed, is not whether a philosopher can “invent” a simple world of perfect justice that looks like a camping trip or a perfectly competitive market in private security firms, but rather the philosopher’s grounds for concluding that the realization of this social world, with the features ascribed to it and the assumed parameters, will behave in the simple way that is predicted. Admittedly, the theorist can fix the parameters to ensure this result, while acknowledging that this simple world is unrealistic and could not be implemented. But even if this is acceptable for “the ideal” it cannot be acceptable for all worlds outside of our neighborhood, for if the parameters are not ones that are plausible for us to meet in any of these further-off worlds, then ideal theory cannot recommend movement outside of our neighborhood. The ideal becomes mere dreaming or lamentation, as it no longer orients our efforts at reform (§I.1.4).

  Because of the terrain of justice, which motivates the Orientation Condition, local optimization often points in a different direction than pursuit of the ideal. We then confront what I have called The Choice: should we turn our back on local optimization and move toward the ideal? Given the Neighborhood Constraint our judgments within our neighborhood have better warrant than judgments outside of it; if the ideal is outside our current neighborhood, then we are forgoing relatively clear gains in justice for an uncertain prospect that our realistic utopia lies in a different direction. Mill’s revolutionaries, certain of their own wisdom and judgment, were more than willing to commit society to the pursuit of their vision of the ideal; their hubris had terrible costs for many.

  For the ideal theorist to make a reasonable Choice in favor of pursuit of the global optimum, it would seem that much better information is needed about the terrain of justice, at least mitigating the asymmetry of knowledge expressed by the Neighborhood Constraint. I have briefly examined two important proposals: actual social experiments and internal diversity of predictive models. In the context of pursuit of a given perspective’s view of optimal justice, both have shortcomings. I concluded with the possibility of expanding the neighborhood, perhaps bringing better optima into our neighborhood.

  Although this last inquiry—into how the boundaries of the neighborhood might be expanded—was in one way modest, in another way it was the first step to a more radical solution. In expanding the neighborhood we varied the distance metric, which was an element of the perspective. So rather than searching under simply one common, normalized perspective on justice, we now have multiperspectival searching. In recent years powerful analytic treatments have demonstrated that under some conditions multiperspectival searching has tremendous advantages over single perspective searching in rugged landscapes. We now turn to these results, and their application to the search for ideal justice.

  1 Rawls, Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, p. 226.

  2 Ibid., pp. 229ff.

  3 Ibid., p. 224.

  4 Ibid.

  5 See Page, The Difference, pp. 30ff.; Muldoon, Diversity and the Social Contract.

  6 See §I.2.1.

  7 On specifying possible worlds in a theory of justice, see Wiens, “Against Ideal Guidance,” pp. 437ff.; Lawford-Smith, “Non-ideal Accessibility”; Goodwin and Taylor, The Politics of Utopia, pp. 210–14; Elster, Logic and Society.

  8 They thus give rise to deontic judgments, partitioning acts into the permissible, required, and impermissible. On the contrast between deontic and optimizing evaluations, see Wiens, “Against Ideal Guidance,” pp. 437ff. Such deontic judgments are crucial to Estlund’s and others’ evaluations of ideal justice. See, for example, Estlund’s “Human Nature and the Limits (If Any) of Political Philosophy” and Lawford-Smith, “Non-ideal Accessibility.” It is important to stress that such deontic judgments may well be a part of the principles and rules that partially constitute a social world and its evaluation; the point is that the overall evaluation of the justice of the world, required by the Social Realizations Condition, employs a richer classification system.

  9 Broome, Ethics Out of Economics, p. 164.

  10 For an argument that our moral thinking is characterized by such cycles, see Temkin, Rethinking the Good.

  11 The Condorcet Paradox is the core case of this. If, however, individuals are evaluating the options {x, y, z} in terms of a single dimension of evaluation (say, on a left-right continuum), intransitive social preferences over the triplet cannot arise. See my On Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, pp. 154–64. See also D’Agostino, Incommensurability and Commensuration.

  12 Somewhat weaker conditions than full transitivity would suffice to avoid this outcome. See Sen, Collective Choice and Social Welfare, pp. 7–20.

  13 Which is to say that the mapping function, MP (part ii), need not be linear with respect to the satisfaction of the evaluative standards. This is another reason to distinguish the mapping relation (MP) from the evaluative standards (ES); two theories could share the same evaluative standards and the same understanding of the relevant features of social worlds (WF), but one evaluates worlds in a strictly linear way in relation to their satisfaction of the principles while another is distinctly nonlinear, yielding very different perspectives on justice.

  14 See here Hamlin and Stemplowska, “Theory, Ideal Theory and the Theory of Ideals,” pp. 53ff.

  15 I have greatly benefitted here from Wiens, “Against Ideal Guidance.”

  16 Gilabert, “Comparative Assessments of Justice, Political Feasibility, and Ideal Theory,” p. 45.

  17 See Wiens, “Will the Real Principles of Justice Please Stand Up?”

  18 The case for an optimization model of the ideal has been powerfully advanced by Wiens. See his “Against Ideal Guidance” and “Will the Real Principles of Justice Please Stand Up?” In this latter essay Wiens seeks to identify principles of justice with the widest possible application to, as I put
it, the domain of worlds to be evaluated.

  19 As I pointed out at note 13, it could be nonlinear, giving very high scores to “pretty just situations” and very low scores to “less than pretty just social worlds.”

  20 This would imply a one-to-one mapping of social worlds on to realizations. Should an ideal theory have such confidence, it can be included in the model.

  21 This is, perhaps, one sense in which a theory can be “utopian” without being “unrealistic”—when examining a set of features the theory assumes that they all work in, if not the best possible way, something very near to it. This, for example, is a manifest feature of Bacon’s New Atlantis, where the ship arrives at what seems to almost be a “Land of Angells” (p. 12).

  22 Thus dystopias. In contrast to utopias, which are typically worlds far distant from our own (for an exception, see Bellamy, Looking Backward), dystopias are usually worlds (too) close to our own where things work out about as badly as we could fear. Orwell’s 1984 is a prime example. In contrast to 1984, in Rand’s dystopic novel, Anthem, the hero’s self is not destroyed; this could be understood as not depicting the worst possible realization, or a difference about the internal feasibility of thoroughly soul-destroying realizations.

  23 See Brennan’s “Feasibility in Optimizing Ethics” for a model that seeks to weigh the probabilities of good and bad realizations.

  24 Similarity thus understood is a pairwise relation between overlapping pairs, a common idea. See Morreau, “It Simply Does Not Add Up,” p. 484. Morreau’s definition is somewhat different but also focuses on pairwise relations among pairs. See also Keynes, A Treatise on Probability, p. 36. For further specification of the properties of such an ordering, see appendix A.

  25 Weitzman, “On Diversity,” p. 365.

  26 Page, The Difference, pp. 48, 33.

  27 Weitzman, “On Diversity,” p. 365.

  28 Read as “the distance between i and j.” I assume in (4) that i, j, and k are different social worlds. See Weitzman, “On Diversity,” pp. 364–65. Weitzman develops distance metric of similarity with attractive features.

  29 Condition (4) ensures that the distance metric is constrained by the similarity ordering.

  30 Simmons, “Ideal and Nonideal Theory,” p. 35.

  31 See Brennan and Pettit, “The Feasibility Issue.”

  32 Gilabert and Lawford-Smith, “Political Feasibility,” p. 812.

  33 See Wiens, “Political Ideals and the Feasibility Frontier,” p. 12.

  34 Ibid., p. 7.

  35 Ibid., p. 14.

  36 Ibid., p. 12.

  37 See Hamlin, “Feasibility Four Ways.”

  38 Rawls, The Law of Peoples, p. 138.

  39 Brennan, Eriksson, Goodin, and Southwood, Explaining Norms, pp. 107, 128–29.

  40 See here Gilabert, “Comparative Assessments of Justice, Political Feasibility, and Ideal Theory,” pp. 47ff.

  41 Elster, Logic and Society, p. 57. For a discussion see Goodwin and Taylor, The Politics of Utopia, pp. 213–14.

  42 As I pointed out in §I.1.3, ideal theorists often wrongly charge Sen’s “pairwise” comparison approach with being “incrementalist.” I do defend incrementalism in chapter IV, so this lack of transitivity of feasibility is entirely consistent with the view I shall defend.

  43 Räikkä, “The Feasibility Condition in Political Theory,” p. 30. Emphasis in original.

  44 Rawls, The Law of Peoples, p. 16.

  45 See, for example, Tomasi’s Free Market Fairness.

  46 Thanks to Fred D’Agostino for suggesting this case.

  47 The classical work exploring these problems is Kauffman, The Origins of Order, especially chap. 2.

  48 Kauffman, The Origins of Order, pp. 45ff.

  49 In this case the reliance on the “theorem of the second best” (§I.1.4) is appropriate—arranging a world so that it almost instantiates ideal social structures does not tend to yield an almost-ideally just social world. However, in other cases, such as low-dimensional optimization problems (§II.2.3), it is by no means a fallacy to suppose that coming close to ideal structures will approximate ideal justice. One of the great benefits of the model developed here is that we can distinguish when it makes sense to seek an approximation to the best and when it does not, going beyond rather vague invocations of the theorem of the second best. Note also that our model is derived from the analysis in chapter I of the inherent structure of ideal theories, rather than simply seeking to import analysis of economic efficiency into a theory of ideal justice.

  50 Kauffman, The Origins of Order, p. 47.

  51 Ibid., p. 52. See also McKelvey, “Avoiding Complexity Catastrophe in Coevolutionary Pockets,” esp. pp. 301–2.

  52 Scanlon, What We Owe Each Other, p. 214. See also Estlund, “Utopophobia,” p. 121.

  53 See Gavrilets, “High-Dimensional Fitness Landscapes and Speciation.” The issues here are complex. If we consider landscapes in which data points are individuals and species are groups of points spread over an N-dimensional area, high-dimensional landscapes can display fitness ridges that provide paths from one optimum to another. I have greatly benefitted from discussions with Ryan Muldoon about these matters.

  54 Complexity is often defined as existing at the “edge” of chaos. For an especially clear and up-to-date analysis, see Page, Diversity and Complexity, esp. chap. 1; Waldrop’s popular treatment, Complexity, is a classic, yet still enlightening. For a good overview of complexity applied to different fields, see Auyang, Foundations of Complex-Systems Theories in Economics, Evolutionary Biology and Statistical Physics. For a philosophically informed analysis of chaos, see Peter Smith, Explaining Chaos; for a very accessible (and another classic) treatment, see Lorenz, The Essence of Chaos.

  55 There are complications that might be explored here: for example this might seem to imply that Σ is always correct about the current social world. We could develop more conditions (say, some required reflection or information condition), but this basic idea suffices for present purposes.

  56 Neither is it new. Popper insightfully analyzes the way that holism undermines social experimentation in The Poverty of Historicism, chaps. 20–25.

  57 Rawls identifies such a system in A Theory of Justice, pp. 241ff.; see also Rawls, Justice as Fairness, pp. 135ff. Rawls credits the economist J. E. Meade with the idea, citing a 1964 work. For a later treatment of Meade’s, see his The Just Economy. For a recent collection of essays aimed at philosophers, see O’Neill and Williamson, eds., Property-Owning Democracy. For a critical treatment, see Vallier, “A Moral and Economic Critique of the New Property-Owning Democrats.”

  58 Kauffman, The Origins of Order, p. 243. D’Agostino notes these features in Naturalizing Epistemology, pp. 118–19.

  59 Kauffman, The Origins of Order, p. 60.

  60 Ibid., pp. 62–63.

  61 For an important exception see Satz, “Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice.”

  62 Rawls, The Law of Peoples, p. 128.

  63 Rawls, Justice as Fairness, p. 69.

  64 Ibid., p. 70. Emphasis added.

  65 Marx, Capital, vol. 2, pp. 613ff.

  66 Bellamy, Looking Backward, p. 1.

  67 Cohen, Why Not Socialism? I have argued that Cohen’s small-scale camping trip model does not capture the egalitarianism of small-scale societies—it is not, I think, credible that it models a viable large-scale egalitarian order. See my “The Egalitarian Species,” pp. 18–19.

  68 E.g., David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom.

  69 See Bicchieri, Norms in the Wild.

  70 This includes even relatively close worlds. Tanner concludes his overview of policy interventions by observing, “What is almost a constant, though, is that the real benefits usually are not the ones we expected, and the real perils are not the ones we feared.” Why Things Bite Back, p. 272.

  71 In Sen’s climbing model (§I.1.3), every social world (except those at the top and the bottom of the ordering) is one rank more just than the social world b
elow it, and one rank less just than the world above it, hence the perfect correlation of justice and rank.

  72 Zhou, “Organizational Decision Making as Rule Following,” p. 262. See also D’Agostino, Naturalizing Epistemology, p. 53.

  73 Unless the perspective is a relatively “dumb” one, as in our height example. See §III.1.3.

  74 The analysis here draws on my “Social Complexity and Evolved Moral Principles.”

  75 Though, of course, we cannot assume that all moves in our neighborhood are feasible in all the various senses of that protean concept. However, we do have better grounds for concluding that intervention ϕ would produce outcome O, part of Gilabert and Lawford-Smith’s analysis of feasibility (§II.1.3).

  76 To be sure, there have been some “political theories” according to which what is important is not knowledge of what we are getting ourselves into, but following the will of the leader. Goodwin and Taylor judiciously consider whether such theories can be considered “utopian”—I shall simply set them aside. The Politics of Utopia, p. 18.

  77 But see §III.2.3.

  78 Rawls, Justice as Fairness, p. 2.

  79 Though it is, alas, a case where the ideal is not needed—Sen’s climbing model would suffice.