The Tyranny of the Ideal

by Gaus, Gerald;

  6 Economic freedom data are taken from Economic Freedom in the World 2013 Annual Report.

  7 Government functioning data are drawn from the 2014 Freedom House Freedom in the World 2014 Report.

  8 My example has the same structure as that given by Page, The Difference, pp. 139–43.

  9 Hong and Page, “Groups of Diverse Problem Solvers Can Outperform Groups of High-Ability Problem Solvers”; Hong and Page, “Problem Solving by Heterogeneous Agents.” I am giving here an intuitive presentation of a complex formal model. Thompson (“Does Diversity Trump Ability?’) has pointed out problems in a version of the proof. She also has made a rather extreme claim that “the attempt to equate mathematical quantities with human attributes is inappropriate” (p. 1029). The logic of the analysis discussed here is not affected by Thompson’s critique.

  10 I am following Page, The Difference, pp. 159–65. The application of the proof to political life has been admirably defended by Hélène Landemore against a wide variety of objections in her “Yes, We Can (Make It Up on Volume).”

  11 Landemore, Democratic Reason, p. 102. Cf. Page, The Difference, p. 160.

  12 Landemore, Democratic Reason, p. 102.

  13 Hong and Page, “Problem Solving by Heterogeneous Agents,” pp. 149–51.

  14 Page, The Difference, p. 162.

  15 Hong and Page, “Groups of Diverse Problem Solvers Can Outperform Groups of High-Ability Problem Solvers,” p. 16386.

  16 Landemore, Democratic Reason, chap. 4.

  17 Landemore and Page, “Deliberation and Disagreement,” p. 6. They add: “This assumption can be equated with Habermas’ claim that the ‘unforced force of the better argument’ will triumph in an ideal speech situation (that is, the superiority of the ‘right answer’ will appear as such to all).”

  18 To remind ourselves: a mapping function takes the evaluative standards (ES) and applies them to a social world, i, as specified by WF, yielding a justice score for world i, the social world described by its world features. The mapping function has two parts. (i) It must employ a model or models that predict how the justice-relevant features of a social world (WF) will interact to produce a social realization. This is the modeling task. (ii) It must take the set of evaluative standards (ES) and determine their relative importance in such a way that they provide a single evaluation of this social realization. This is the overall evaluation task.

  19 Landemore and Page, “Deliberation and Disagreement,” p. 10.

  20 This example is repeated in ibid., p. 7.

  21 Landemore, Democratic Reason, p. 99.

  22 Page, The Difference, pp. 257–58.

  23 Landemore and Page, “Deliberation and Disagreement,” p. 13.

  24 Ibid., pp. 9ff.

  25 See appendix B.

  26 Landemore, Democratic Reason, p. 102.

  27 Page, The Difference, p. 47. On Mount Fuji landscapes, see §II.2.1.

  28 Bellamy hints at this: “As every schoolboy knows, in the latter part of the nineteenth century the [socialist] civilization of to-day, or anything like it, did not exist, although the elements which were to develop it were already in ferment.” Looking Backward, p. 3.

  29 Page is certainly well aware of this. The Difference, p. 48.

  30 See Locke, A Letter concerning Toleration, pp. 245–46. See also my “Locke’s Liberal Theory of Public Reason.”

  31 Think here of our height example, §II.2.1.

  32 “Laissez-faire” is a misnomer; as Rawls describes this system it includes a “rather low social minimum.” Rawls, Justice as Fairness, p. 137. His description suggests the classical system in political economy, which was most definitely not a laissez-faire system—laissez-faire was characteristic of the Manchester School and French Physiocrats. It is unfortunate that, despite the efforts of historians of political economy, this confusion is still common. See Robbins, The Theory of Economic Policy in English Classical Political Economy. See also my “Mill’s Normative Economics.”

  33 What Wiles calls a “Soviet-type” system. Economic Institutions Compared, esp. chaps. 4, 11.

  34 Rawls, Justice as Fairness, p. 136.

  35 It is suggested by Chapman, “Justice, Freedom and Property.”

  36 These features are: “Do citizens enjoy freedom of travel or choice of residence, employment, or institution of higher education? Do citizens have the right to own property and establish private businesses? Is private business activity unduly influenced by government officials, the security forces, political parties/organizations, or organized crime? Are there personal social freedoms, including gender equality, choice of marriage partners, and size of family? Is there equality of opportunity and the absence of economic exploitation?” Freedom House Freedom in the World Report, 2014.

  37 It would not significantly alter what is said here if the perspectives agreed on the set of world features and then each picked one feature from that set as the sole basis of its similarity ordering.

  38 See D’Agostino, “From the Organization to the Division of Cognitive Labor.”

  39 Landemore and Page, “Deliberation and Disagreement,” p. 6. “The oracle assumption requires only that if alternative y is better than x, then each individual’s model must also rank alternative y above alternative x. Individuals need not know the exact values, they need only to be close enough.” Ibid., pp. 7–8.

  40 Page, The Difference, pp. 172–73. I consider in more detail the sense in which we might still agree in §IV.1.3.1.

  41 Page is aware of this. The Difference, p. 49.

  42 Weber and Camerer, “Cultural Conflict and Merger Failure: An Experimental Approach.” For a model showing that meaningful propositions emerge from shared overall perspectives, see Hazelhurst and Hutchins, “The Emergence of Propositions from the Co-ordination of Talk and Action in a Shared World.”

  43 Page observes this interaction as well: “We bias our interpretations [the categories employed by WF] towards what we believe most important [our evaluative standards.] If Tom cares about energy conservation, he may ask to see the heating bills before buying a house. If Bonnie cares about internal light, she may count the number of windows and their sizes. Because their preferences [ES] differ, so do their interpretations.” Page, The Difference, p. 292.

  44 Even in Page’s analysis they are not fully independent: “sometimes one type of diversity creates another and … the contexts to which they apply overlap, and their effects intertwine.” Ibid., p. 285.

  45 Ibid., p. 289.

  46 Cf. Santos-Lang, “Our Responsibility to Manage Evaluative Diversity.”

  47 D’Agostino, Naturalizing Epistemology, p. 1.

  48 Recall: “This assumption can be equated with Habermas’ claim that the ‘unforced force of the better argument’ will triumph in an ideal speech situation (that is, the superiority of the ‘right answer’ will appear as such to all).” Landemore and Page, “Deliberation and Disagreement,” p. 6.

  49 See Wiles, Economic Institutions Compared, pp. 85ff., chap. 6; Ward, The Ideal World of Economics, pp. 246–53.

  50 D’Agostino, Naturalizing Epistemology, pp. 128–32.

  51 The famous “Clause IV” of the Labour Party constitution, written by Sidney Webb, which called for “the common ownership of the means of production,” was dropped in 1995.

  52 See Schneider, The Conservative Century, pp. 54–60.

  53 Meyer, “Freedom, Tradition, and Conservatism,” p. 22.

  54 Meyer, “In Defense of John Stuart Mill,” p. 168. Compare Kirk, The Conservative Mind, pp. 265–75.

  55 Meyer, “Freedom, Tradition, and Conservatism,” pp. 26–27.

  56 These words, of course, are from Barry Goldwater’s acceptance address at the 1964 Republican convention. “Extremism in the Defense of Liberty,” p. 245. In The Conscience of a Conservative (p. 13), Goldwater insists: “the Conservative’s first concern will always be: Are we maximizing freedom?” Meyer agrees: the principles of political right require “a state capable of maintain
ing order while at the same time guaranteeing to each person in its area of government the maximum liberty possible to him short of his interference with the liberty of other persons.” In Defense of Freedom, p. 98.

  57 Hobhouse, Liberalism, p. 87.

  58 Ibid., p. 54.

  59 See Dewey, Individualism, Old and New, esp. chap. 6, “Capitalist or Public Socialism?” The fusion of liberalism and Marxism is an ongoing project; note how Cohen, whose early work was firmly in the Marxist tradition, entered mainstream liberal political philosophy by the end of his life, though the mix in this particular fusion is not clear. See his Rescuing Justice and Equality, esp. pp. 186ff.

  60 This is an especially interesting case. It seems that libertarianism arose partly as a reaction to the fusion of liberal and socialist ideals in “the new liberalism”—bleeding heart libertarianism pretty explicitly seeks to fuse a classical liberal view with that earlier fusion. See Tomasi’s Free Market Fairness. The possibilities are endless.

  61 Page, The Difference, p. 286.

  62 Plato, The Republic, p. 178 [v. 473].

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

  64 Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 1, p. 167. Emphasis in original.

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

  66 Cf. Simmons, “Ideal and Nonideal Theory,” p. 24.

  67 Well, perhaps they would think of it; recall Cohen’s remark that his “own inclinations are more liberal” (Rescuing Justice, p. 186), and so he rejects the Stalinist approach to assigning occupations; he wrestles with freedom v. Stalinism in Rescuing Justice and Equality, chap. 5.

  68 Lenin, What Is to Be Done?, p. 269. Emphasis added.

  69 Sen, The Idea of Justice, p. vii.

  70 See Rawls, Justice as Fairness, p. 104. For an insightful and sympathetic treatment of Rawls’s political philosophy as a “naturalistic theodicy,” see Weithman, Why Political Liberalism?, chap. 1. See also chapter V of the present work.

  71 Ward, The Ideal Worlds of Economics, p. 468.

  72 D’Agostino, Naturalizing Epistemology, p. 138.

  73 Ibid., pp. 138–41.

  74 The classic analysis is Watts and Strogatz, “Collective Dynamics of ‘Small-World’ Networks.”

  75 For some of these perplexities, see Mack and Gaus, “Classical Liberalism and Libertarianism.”

  76 Muldoon, Borgida, and Cuffaro, “The Conditions of Tolerance.”

  77 Passmore, The Perfectability of Man, p. 200.

  78 Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, p. 23.

  79 MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, p. 6.

  80 Rawls, Political Liberalism, pp. xxvi, 4.

  CHAPTER IV

  The Nonideal

  The Open Society

  It takes all sorts to make a world.

  —ENGLISH PROVERB

  1 JUSTICE WITHOUT NORMALIZATION?

  1.1 Normalization and Determinate Justice

  CHAPTER II EXPLORED THE DEEP DILEMMA AT THE HEART OF THE “NORmalized” approach to ideal justice: the very normalization that defines the “correct” perspective in political philosophy leads to the conclusion that this correct perspective on justice cannot effectively identify its own ideal. Chapter III analyzed ways to ease this tension—abandoning a fully normalized perspective in favor of various partial normalizations. We saw that when a partial normalization generated enough diversity to drive effective searching it ultimately engendered disagreement on the ideal itself. It would seem—at least on first inspection—that we must choose between full normalization, which yields a definite theory of justice but makes it most unlikely that we can find the ideal, and relaxing normalization, which improves the chances that many will find better alternatives, but which yields disagreement about what ideal justice is.

  This “first look” conclusion resonates with the trajectory of Rawls’s work. Throughout most of his career Rawls supposed that a theory based on a shared (or, which comes to much the same thing, a single) evaluative point of view will generate a determinate social contract. From the 1960s through the 1980s, philosophical inquiry into justice was largely dominated by the pursuit of such an “Archimedean point”: a description of an impartial, normalized chooser such that his choice would identify the correct principles of justice. As David Gauthier pointed out, “Archimedes supposed that given a sufficiently long lever and a place to stand, he could move the earth. We may then think of an Archimedean point as one from which a single individual may exert the force required to move or affect some object. In moral theory, the Archimedean point is that position one must occupy, if one’s own decisions are to possess the moral force to govern the moral realm. From the Archimedean point one has the moral capacity to shape society.”1 This normalized chooser was to identify a single, determinate ranking of social states. Rawls explicitly justifies the introduction of the veil of ignorance and maximin reasoning as a way to overcome what he saw as a gross deficiency in his 1958 “Justice as Fairness.” In that first version of his social contract, the second principle of justice was simply a Pareto condition that required inequalities to fall on the Pareto frontier of mutual benefit.2 The principle, however, did not say anything about where on the Pareto frontier society must settle. By the time Rawls wrote “Distributive Justice” he was convinced that this indeterminacy was a serious problem. “There are,” he wrote, “many such [Pareto-optimal] distributions, since there are many ways of allocating commodities so that no further mutually beneficial exchange is possible. Hence the Pareto criterion, as important as it is, admittedly does not identify the best distribution, but rather a class of optimal, or efficient distributions. … The criterion is at best an incomplete principle for ordering distributions.”3 Rawls’s work leading up to Theory, which shaped much of contemporary political philosophy, was to identify a normalized choice perspective that provided a theory of justice (“justice as fairness”), specific enough to give authoritative, determinate rankings of social states and/or institutions. By Political Liberalism this project is abandoned:

  The view I have called “justice as fairness” is but one example of a liberal political conception; its specific content is not definitive of such a view. … The point of the ideal of public reason is that citizens are to conduct their fundamental discussions within the framework of what each regards as a political conception of justice based on values that the others can reasonably be expected to endorse and each is, in good faith, prepared to defend that conception so understood. This means that each of us must have, and be ready to explain, a criterion of what principles and guidelines we think other citizens (who are also free and equal) may reasonably be expected to endorse along with us. We must have some test we are ready to state as to when this condition is met. I have elsewhere suggested as a criterion the values expressed by the principles and guidelines that would be agreed to in the original position. Many will prefer another criterion.4

  At this point, then, the argument from the original position is one test as to what reasonable people may be expected to endorse: it yields what Rawls calls “justice as fairness.” But “many will prefer” a different test; perhaps a differently described original position, yielding a different conception of justice. Those who wish to minimize the fundamental importance of this shift content themselves with saying that in Rawls’s later work a “family” of liberal views is still justified, one member of which is “justice as fairness.” Two observations are in order.

  (i) In 1958’s “Justice as Fairness” a “family” of distributive views was also justified, and Rawls saw this as a core weakness in a theory of justice, which aimed at a well-ordered society that could agree on a determinate ranking of claims. On the original version of the contract we would have no shared conception of justice to resolve distributive disputes. In Theory Rawls searched for a well-ordered society: that is, “a society in which (1) everyone accepts and knows that the others accept the same principles of justice, and (2) the basic social institutions generally satisfy and are g
enerally known to satisfy these principles.”5 As Samuel Freeman notes, it is anything but clear that this ideal of a well-ordered society survives the last developments of political liberalism.6 This surely is a fundamental change.

  (ii) It is not as if Rawls identifies a single original position with a single normalized perspective that yields a “family” (i.e., set) of conceptions as its conclusion.7 Rather, Rawls suggests that different “tests”—say versions of the original position, employing different plausible normalizations of the choosers—will arrive at different conceptions of justice. So at the end we seem to be left with multiple reasonable original positions, or we might say, a set of arguments that, together, presuppose partial normalizations: choosers are not fully normalized across all original positions, since they differ in various reasonable original position set ups. In an interesting yet somewhat puzzling way, we are confronted with a family of liberal theories of justice—a variety of reasonable perspectives on liberal justice. Rather than a theory that gives rise to a family, it seems more apt to say that we have a family of theories.

  One has to be an especially devout disciple of Rawls not to conclude that by the close of his political liberalism project the theory of justice was in disarray.8 Rawls insisted that a theory of justice was characterized by choice from a certain normalized perspective, but his later view allows multiple partially normalized perspectives that yield different conceptions of justice. However, if one acknowledges that there are other reasonable normalizations that yield inconsistent conceptions, in what sense can one plausibly claim that one has identified the principles of justice for the definitive ordering of social claims in a well-ordered society, based on one’s preferred normalization? To be sure, one can conjecture that, say, justice as fairness is the most reasonable,9 but in all our reasonable disputes one believes that one’s views are the most reasonable—that is, after all, why one holds them over competing views. But if “citizens will of course differ as to which conceptions of political justice they think the most reasonable,”10 on what grounds can I insist that others, who uphold differing reasonable conceptions, must conform to mine? Of course I can hope that “an orderly contest between them over time is a reliable way to find which one, if any, is most reasonable,”11 but that does not tell me what to do, here and now, when faced with reasonable disputes about justice. “Go ahead and impose your own preferred theory” does not seem especially attractive for a public reason view, even if one employs majoritarian methods or the Supreme Court to do so.