The Tyranny of the Ideal

by Gerald Gaus

  In this book my criticism of this posture is largely internal: I try to show that under the conditions of human existence, we cannot know what such an ideal would be—unless we disagree about it. Only those in a morally heterogeneous society have a reasonable hope of actually understanding what an ideal society would be like, but in such a society we will never be collectively devoted to any single ideal. The ideal of the realistic utopia of the well-ordered society tyrannizes over our thinking, preventing us from discovering more just social conditions. And, as Sen rightly observed, we will see that ideal theory forces a morally unattractive choice on us: fix local justice or pursue the ideal.

  But, then, what is the moral status of an open, diverse society that is constantly disagreeing about justice? Chapter IV sketches a defense of the moral bases of the Open Society; I try to show how different moral perspectives can converge on a practice of moral responsibility and, importantly, how they can share each other’s insights to work toward improvements in the basic moral framework of the Open Society. I also indicate how societies that disagree about the ideal are morally more secure than those that have traveled significantly toward “well-orderedness.” The Open Society is not a chaotic cave; we should refuse to follow the philosopher who promises a path to a final end of moral agreement, the ideally just society. The Open Society is a moral achievement of the first order, allowing highly diverse perspectives to share a public world of moral responsibility, sometimes clashing, but often interacting in ways that make the world better for all, and allows us to better understand our different moral truths. Or so I shall argue.

  I have been extremely fortunate in having been able to refine these ideas before a number of diverse audiences. Some material from chapter IV was delivered as the Brian Barry Lecture at the London School of Economics. Other parts of the project were presented at the Copenhagen Conference on the Epistemology of Liberal Democracy, the Workshop in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at George Mason University, the Kings College (London) Political Economy seminar, the 2011 Dubrovnik Conference organized by the Ohio State University Philosophy Department, the workshop on Fairness and Norms at the University of Tilburg, the University of Rijeka Scientific Colloquium, the Groupe de Recherche Interuniversitaire en Philosophie Politique workshop at McGill University, the Center for Human Values at Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania PPE workshop, the workshop on public reason at Darmstadt Technical University, the “Whither American Conservatism?” conference held at the University of Texas-Austin Law School, the Workshop on New Directions in Public Reason at the University of Birmingham, and meetings of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association and the American Political Science Association. My thanks to all the organizers and participants, whose objections and questions really have been critical in helping refine these ideas.

  It was a treat and honor to discuss with Professor Sen the relation of these ideas to his own approach at the Rutgers Law School Symposium “The Idea of Justice.” Along the way, Christian Coons, Dave Estlund, Javier Guillot, Alan Hamlin, Mike Munger, and Shaun Nichols have offered valuable advice. I am particularly grateful to have had the opportunity to work away on these problems while visiting the Public Choice Research Center at Turku University and the Philosophy Department at the National University of Singapore; again presentations to those groups were most helpful in thinking these issues through. Keith Hankins and I coauthored a paper exploring some parts of this project, which we presented to the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill PPE workshop and the Workshop on Political Utopias organized by the Bowling Green State University Philosophy Department. Important material in chapter IV is drawn from my work with Shaun Nichols. My thanks to Keith and Shaun for letting me draw on this joint work.

  The University of Arizona Philosophy Department is a truly wonderful place to think about a variety of issues in unorthodox ways; I am still astounded by the depth and breadth of our political philosophy group. Early on in this project Tom Christiano, Keith Lehrer, and I read Scott Page’s The Difference; the reader will be able to discern how important that was for my thinking. Later, Dave Schmidtz and I taught a graduate seminar on ideal theory and diversity; Dave and the graduate students constantly forced me to think of things in different ways, as any diverse group should. One of the wonderful things about great graduate students is that, no matter what the subject, they raise cool points that get you to think about your work in new ways. Consequently, my graduate seminars on Rawls, moral and social evolution, Hobbesian political thought, and norms and conventions, as well as the Social Choice Group, all made important contributions to this book. I am especially grateful to members of the Social Choice Group for reading a version of the manuscript—and finding problems. I hesitate to single out specific graduate students, for fear I will overlook someone who offered important advice. But he who hesitates is lost. My very special thanks, then, to Sameer Bajaj, Jacob Barrett, Piper Bringhurst, Joel Chow, Kelly Gaus, Adam Gjesdal, Keith Hankins, Brian Kogelmann, Attila Mráz, Julian Müller, Jeremy Reid, Greg Robson, Stephen G. Stich, John Thrasher, Kevin Vallier, and Chad Van Schoelandt.

  Throughout this project, my longtime friend Fred D’Agostino has, time and time again, given me helpful advice and encouragement. His paper “From the Organization to the Division of Cognitive Labor” in many ways spurred the entire project. The other critical influence was the work of Ryan Muldoon. When I read Ryan’s dissertation, “Diversity and the Social Contract” (University of Pennsylvania) I was awestruck at its originality and thoughtfulness. The reader will see that I have some important disagreements with Ryan, and he would object to much of the analysis, but these, I think, pale in comparison to our agreement as to what a political philosophy for a diverse society must accomplish. My deep thanks, then, to Fred and Ryan. I am also very grateful to Rob Tempio of Princeton University Press for his early interest in this somewhat unorthodox project. I have greatly benefitted from the comments and suggestions of Princeton’s readers; the final draft is considerably better thanks to their ideas. Lastly, I would like to thank Paul Dragos Aligica, not only for encouraging my work, but for helping me see its relation to that of the Ostroms and institutional analysis. Paul’s work, coming from economics and political science, confirmed to me that diverse perspectives really can converge on the benefits of diversity and a defense of the Open Society.

  1 As one famous philosopher once remarked to me, “if it has figures in it, it isn’t ethics.”

  2 See Landemore’s helpful reply to critics of “model thinking”: “Yes, We Can (Make It Up on Volume),” pp. 197–202.

  3 See Robeyns, “Ideal Theory in Theory and Practice”; Brennan, “Feasibility in Optimizing Ethics”; Schmidtz, “Nonideal Theory.”

  4 Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 17 (chap. 4, ¶4); Hobbes’s entire argument in ¶¶22–34 of chap. 47, comparing the Roman Church to the realm of fairies, is itself thoroughly metaphorical.

  5 Cohen, Why Not Socialism?

  6 Rubinstein, Economic Fables, esp. chap. 1.

  7 Sen, “The Possibility of Social Choice,” p. 73.

  8 The work of Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson is an exemplar of developing simple models, appreciating their insights, and then moving on to more complicated models that build on the simpler ones. See the progression of their models in The Origin and Evolution of Cultures.

  The Tyranny of the Ideal

  CHAPTER I

  The Allure of the Ideal

  Orienting the Quest for Justice

  A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at.

  —OSCAR WILDE

  1 ORIENTING TO UTOPIA

  1.1 Beyond the Contemporary Debate and Its Categories

  THERE ARE NUMEROUS UNDERSTANDINGS OF SO-CALLED IDEAL POLITIcal theory—so many that the literature has now reached the stage in which taxonomies of the ideal/nonideal distinction are being presented. Laura Valentini identifies three different ways in which the contrast is e
mployed—“(i) full compliance vs. partial compliance theory; (ii) utopian vs. realistic theory; (iii) end-state vs. transitional theory”1—while Alan Hamlin and Zofia Stemplowska identify other “dimensions”: (i) full v. partial compliance; (ii) idealization v. abstraction; (iii) fact sensitivity v. insensitivity; and (iv), perfect justice v. local improvements.2 Although such “conceptual cartography”3 is helpful in organizing the now-large literature, it has important limitations. If we become too focused on classifications and distinctions, we are apt to miss how these different dimensions can be integrated (in various ways) into an overall, coherent, and compelling articulation of an ideal political philosophy. To be sure, when an idea is “messy”4 because of its many dimensions the resulting debate may be confused; philosophers are apt to talk past each other. Here drawing sharp distinctions between different questions will be valuable. However, often philosophy is messy because the elements of the mess are intertwined in complex ways in a coherent view of the problem. We will see that almost all these different dimensions will come up in this book, as I explore a compelling, but somewhat complex, view of what a theory of an ideal may be, and when and why it is attractive.

  Moreover, if we focus too much on the current debate, its categories and concerns, we are apt to fall into the all-too-common error of supposing that somehow these issues “have all originated in response to the methodological paradigm set by John Rawls.”5 No doubt the current round of literature has been spurred by themes in Rawls’s work, but many of these issues have arisen, and been investigated, throughout the history of political thought, both recent and distant. In 1982 Barbara Goodwin and Keith Taylor presented a sophisticated answer to whether “utopian” thought must be realistic,6 employing possible world analysis, inquiring whether an ideal world must be realistically achievable in one move, or could be reached in several moves as one navigates through intermediate possible worlds (an idea that I shall develop in detail in chapter II).7 And other scholars have shown that the two millennia of utopian thought was often concerned with articulating ideals that provided the goals of progressive thought and practice.8 Indeed, Karl Kautsky famously praised More’s Utopia as articulating a socialist ideal, which satisfied important “realization” constraints. “More conceived of the realization of his ideals: he was the father of Utopian Socialism, which was rightly named after his Utopia. The latter is Utopian less on account of the inadequacy of its aims than on account of the inadequacy of the means at its disposal for their achievement.”9 I certainly do not wish to deny that the recent debate has stressed some new and important issues and has achieved new insights, but contemporary philosophers too often see their concerns as new and unique when, in fact, they are echoes, as well as developments, of a long line of political thinking.

  We thus need to be cognizant of the current debates, while stepping back and keeping in mind that we are exploring a larger and more enduring theme in political thinking. My aim in this chapter, then, is not to analyze or enter into the current debate, though I too shall engage in a bit of classification and line drawing (I am, after all, a philosopher). I shall identify several different enduring models of utopian-ideal thought, arguing that one stands out as meriting closer investigation. I argue that this is an attractive understanding of utopian-ideal theory, that it makes sense of the theory’s appeal, and why those such as Oscar Wilde (in our epigraph) thought ideals are a necessary part of any “map” of political reform. I believe this understanding is broad enough to include a wide range of traditional utopian theory, as well as many current ideal theories. It also makes sense—if I may say so, much better sense—of many of the current facets of the ideal theory debate among contemporary philosophers, such as that between Amartya Sen and Rawls on the importance of ideals in pursuing justice. After I articulate this theory and its appeal in this chapter, the next two chapters analyze it in considerable depth. I certainly do not claim that all who would deem themselves “ideal theorists” or “utopians” are involved in this long-standing project, though I do think many more are committed to it than they realize. And it is a project that demands the attention of those of us who are skeptical that our diverse societies should be arranged around any conception of utopia.

  1.2 Of Paradise

  Right from the beginning political philosophy has sought to describe the ideal state, which, even if not fully achievable, gives us guidance in constructing a more just social world. As Plato, the first of the ideal theorists, acknowledged, it is in “the nature of things that action should come less close to truth than thought,” and so our ideal constructions will not be “reproduced in fact down to the least detail.”10 On this view, as Ingrid Robeyns has put it, the ideal functions as “a mythical Paradise Island” that tells us where “the endpoint of our journey lies.” Although the ideal does not “necessarily tell us anything about the route to take to Paradise Island,” it orients our journey.11 Only after identifying the ideal can we take up the task of figuring out how to get there (or, if we cannot quite get to the ideal, to come as close to it as possible). As Rawls says, “By showing how the social world may realize the features of a realistic Utopia, political philosophy provides a long-term goal of political endeavor, and in working toward it gives meaning to what we can do today.”12 To this he adds, “[the] idea of realistic Utopia is importantly institutional.”13 We wish to identify the institutional structures and patterns of interaction of an achievable ideally just social world, for it is this that ultimately provides the guidance we need to reform our own social world’s institutions. Of course, we may never arrive at the ideal social world, but with an ideal guiding us the hope is that we can rest assured that our efforts to secure justice have at least moved us in the right direction.

  If the goal of the ideal is to orient our navigation through less-than-ideal social worlds, we need to understand where we are now in relation to it. The ideal can orient us only if we have some idea of where it is, and where we presently are. Consequently, this orienting function of ideal political philosophy seeks not only to inform us about the long-term goal of creating a perfectly just society, but also to ground at least some significant class of judgments as to whether a move from, say, our present social world to a near social state moves us closer to, or further from, the ideal.14 Rawls believed that ideal justice provided guidance for thinking about justice in our nonideal societies, assisting to “clarify difficult cases of how to deal with existing injustices” and to orient the “goal of reform,” helping us to see “which wrongs are more grievous and hence more urgent to correct.”15 Existing institutions are thus to be judged in light of ideal justice, and ideal theory thus provides a goal for societies that pursue justice.16 Famously, the back cover of Justice as Fairness (2001) informs us that “Rawls is well aware that since the publication of A Theory of Justice in 1971 American society has moved further away from the idea of justice as fairness.”17 Rawlsians thus not only seek to depict a perfectly just society but can employ this knowledge to orient their comparative judgments about, say, the justice of American society in 1971 and 2001.

  1.3 Climbing

  We shall discover in chapter II that this orienting function of the ideal turns out to be surprisingly complicated. It seeks to combine two tasks—(i) identification of the ideally, optimally, or perfectly just society, and (ii) comparative justice judgments of less-than-ideal societies. Our all-things-considered judgments about what changes are recommended by justice (§I.1.5) critically depend on judgments about where the ideal is, and how far from it (in a sense that needs to be explained) we are. As Amartya Sen observes, this implies that to make an all-things-considered judgment as to whether justice recommends a move from our current world to nonideal world a, or nonideal world b, we must know which is closer to the ideal, utopian point u.18 We may have firm grounds for concluding that a is more just than b, but unless we also know where a and b are in relation to u, we do not know whether moving to a or b would be recommended by justice. Given these complexiti
es, Sen argues that we should simply focus on what we are really concerned about, the relative justice of a and b, and forget about comparing them to u, which is not only difficult but, happily, unnecessary. He writes:

  The possibility of having an identifiably perfect alternative does not indicate that it is necessary, or indeed useful, to refer to it in judging the relative merits of two alternatives; for example, we may be willing to accept, with great certainty, that Mount Everest is the tallest mountain in the world, completely unbeatable in terms of stature by any other peak, but that understanding is neither needed, nor particularly helpful, in comparing the peak heights of, say, Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount McKinley. There would be something off in the general belief that a comparison of any two alternatives cannot be sensibly made without a prior identification of a supreme alternative.19

  This passage is crucial for understanding the contrast between ideal theories and Sen’s comparative approach. An ideal theory begins with identifying an ideal within a set of possible worlds—or, using a somewhat more formal language, a “global optimum” in the domain {X}—and evaluates all options in relation to it, whereas Sen’s analysis does not concern itself with an ideal but only “whether a particular social change would enhance justice.”20 The latter, Sen frequently tells us, is a comparative, essentially pairwise, exercise. What we need to know is whether a is more just than b (whether Mount McKinley is higher than Mount Kilimanjaro); we need not know anything about u (or Mount Everest) to make this decision. We seek a theory that allows us to make comparisons about “the advancement or retreat of justice.”21