The Tyranny of the Ideal

by Gerald Gaus

  45 See Farrelly, “Justice in Ideal Theory: A Refutation.”

  46 Estlund, “Prime Justice.”

  47 This is not to say that it ever must have occupied such a sphere.

  48 See Wiens, “Demands of Justice, Feasible Alternatives, and the Need for Causal Analysis.”

  49 Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483; 74 S. Ct. 686; 98 L. Ed. 873 (1954). The court specifically cited a social science study on doll choice by children: white dolls were chosen consistently over black dolls.

  50 Farrelly, “Justice in Ideal Theory: A Refutation,” pp. 846–47.

  51 For their differences, see Estlund, “Utopophobia,” pp. 129–30.

  52 Cohen, Rescuing Justice and Equality, pp. 20–21, chaps. 6 and 7.

  53 Ibid., p. 221. Emphasis added.

  54 Ibid., p. 1. Note Cohen’s rather interesting reading of Marx as a utopian socialist. Certainly Cohen seems to qualify as one. Recall Engels’s characterization of the utopian socialists: “To all these socialism is the expression of absolute truth, reason, and justice. … And … absolute truth is independent of time, space, and of the historical development of man.” Engels was not a great fan of such views. “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,” p. 693.

  55 See here Habermas, “Reconciliation through Public Reason,” p. 129.

  56 Rawls, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” pp. 595ff.

  57 “(I) Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system for all. (II) Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both: (a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, consistent with a just savings principle [the difference principle], and (b) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity.” Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 266.

  58 See §V.3 on the charge that this confuses justice with “rules of regulation.” The point here is that even if one seeks to sharply distinguish principles of justice from some of their institutional embodiments, an ideal cannot be simply equated with maximal fulfillment of principles of justice.

  59 Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, p. 20.

  60 See, for example, List and Pettit, Group Agency. For worries that there may be much more diversity within group agency than List and Pettit’s model accommodates, especially concerning moral responsibility, see my “Constructivist and Ecological Modeling of Group Rationality.”

  61 Estlund, for example, writes that “requirements of social justice morally require things of societies as such.” As he recognizes, this means that collective responsibility is a matter for ideal justice. “Human Nature and the Limits (If Any) of Political Philosophy,” p. 210.

  62 Sen, The Idea of Justice, pp. 21, 210. Drawing on the philosophic tradition of India, Sen associates these ideas with niti—a severe, rule- or principle-based approach to justice. See §IV.1.2.3.

  63 Ibid., p. 20. Emphasis added.

  64 But see Sen, “A Reply,” pp. 327–28.

  65 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, pp. 57–58. Emphasis added.

  66 Rawls, Justice as Fairness, p. 50.

  67 Ibid., p. 26.

  68 Ibid.

  69 Rawls, “Themes in Kant’s Moral Philosophy,” p. 499.

  70 Ibid., p. 500.

  71 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 295. See also Weithman, Why Political Liberalism?, p. 53, and my “The Turn to a Political Liberalism.”

  72 This second route is taken by Barry and Valentini, “Egalitarian Challenges to Global Egalitarianism,” p. 509.

  73 Wiens, “Against Ideal Guidance”; “Will The Real Principles of Justice Please Stand Up?”; “Prescribing Institutions without Ideal Theory.”

  74 Wiens, “Against Ideal Guidance,” p. 436.

  75 Ibid. The quoted phrase is from Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 16.

  76 “All social values—liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the social basis of self-respect—are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any, or all, of these values is to everyone’s advantage.” Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 54. The general conception has a diminished place in the revised (1999) edition of Theory; note that it appears in the 1971 edition under the final statement of his principles (1971, p. 302), but is omitted from the relevant passage (p. 267) in the 1999 edition.

  77 Compare Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 3; Cohen, Rescuing Justice and Equality, pp. 302ff.

  78 Cohen, Rescuing Justice and Equality, p. 7; see also generally chap. 2.

  79 We might say that although Cohen seeks to save justice from Rawls, he seeks to do so by diminishing it.

  80 Cf. Gilabert and Lawford-Smith: “It is ways of implementing principles in the world that are feasible or infeasible, not principles themselves.” “Political Feasibility,” p. 811. See also Barry and Valentini, “Egalitarian Challenges to Global Egalitarianism,” pp. 507–11.

  81 Cohen, Rescuing Justice and Equality, p. 22. See also §V.3.

  82 I consider the idea of defeat at some length in Justificatory Liberalism, chaps. 5–7. On foundationalism, see pp. 91ff. What I say in the following paragraphs is not directly applicable to (nor is it entirely irrelevant to) Cohen’s “fact insensitivity of principles” thesis, which involves a number of claims about the structure of justification and the role of “principles” per se. A detailed discussion of this much-discussed thesis would take us too far afield here; my concern is simply whether (i) a claim that some principles are the correct account of justice can be defeated by facts about their social realizations, not whether (ii) the justification of those principles depends on social facts. The relation of claims (i) and (ii) is too complex to explore here.

  83 Cf. Estlund, who seems to grant that only facts about impossibility could defeat a claim of justice. “Human Nature and the Limits (If Any) of Political Philosophy,” e.g., p. 210. It is not clear, however, whether Estlund is arguing that a principle of justice immune to facts about dire social realizations is plausible, or simply not incoherent.

  84 And even this is implausible: a person’s percepts may be undefeatable, but not that person’s perceptual beliefs. That the stick looks crooked to me when half immersed in water seems privileged, and I cannot be wrong; that it is a crooked stick is often erroneous.

  85 I go into these matters in some depth in Justificatory Liberalism, chap. 7.

  86 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, pp. 137–38.

  87 Ibid., pp. 216, 211.

  88 “Thus even under reasonably ideal conditions, it is hard to imagine, for example, a successful income tax scheme on a voluntary basis.” Ibid., p. 211. Cf. Cohen, Rescuing Justice and Equality, chap. 1.

  89 We can distinguish numerous applications of the notion of feasibility as applied to worlds u, the ideal, and some other world, a (such as our own), including: (i) in u, are the “oughts” generated by its governing principles feasible for humans (can/will they comply?); (ii) in our present world a, are the oughts that characterize u still true/valid though not feasible?; (iii) is it feasible to move from world a to u?; (iv) is the way that an ideal theory depicts the functioning of world u (and, we can add, a) feasible? The recent literature has tended to focus on versions of (i) and (ii). Importantly (i) is not equivalent to (iv): everyone may obey the “ought” in world u (and so it is feasible to expect them to), yet the upshot may not be as the ideal theorist postulates—the social realizations might not be what the theorist anticipates (my point in §I.2.2). My present concern here is (iv); I consider (iii) in chapter II, §1.3. I have very little to add to the extensive debate about (i) or (ii), which, to my mind, seems more about moral than political philosophy. Feasibility (iv) is much more important than (i); it largely encompasses the interests of political philosophy in (i). Even within, say, (iii) or (iv) there are numerous dimensions of feasibility. Majone characterizes feasibility as a “cluster concept” in “On the Notion of Political Feasibility,” p. 261. See Hamlin’s excellent analysis in
“Feasibility Four Ways.”

  90 This is a reason why the current fascination with “ought implies can” seems unlikely to yield much insight. What one “can do” does not crucially depend on whether a theory defines “can” in terms of possibility or a conditional probability, but rather on the constraints a theory has set. It is this that is critical.

  91 See Gilabert and Lawford-Smith, “Political Feasibility,” pp. 812ff.; Carey, “Towards a ‘Non-ideal’ Non-ideal Theory,” pp. 149ff.; Räikkä, “The Feasibility Condition in Political Theory,” p. 32; Wiens, “Political Ideals and the Feasibility Frontier,” p. 7.

  92 Carey, “Towards a ‘Non-ideal’ Non-ideal Theory,” p. 150.

  93 Malthus, Malthus—Population, p. 4.

  94 Ibid.

  95 Godwin, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice, vol. 2, pp. 850ff.

  96 On his rejection of Malthus’s “struggle,” see Godwin, Of Population, pp. 619ff.

  97 More, Utopia, “Of Their Traffic.” As late as the nineteenth century colonization was seen as a method of population control, which could assist the laboring classes. See Mill, Principles of Political Economy, pp. 194–95, 748–49, 958ff.

  98 Mill was arrested as a young man for handing out instructions for constructing such devices. See Schwartz, The New Political Economy of J. S. Mill, appendix 2, “The Diabolical Handbills.”

  99 Majone, “On the Notion of Political Feasibility,” p. 261. See also Hamlin, “Feasibility Four Ways.”

  100 Kuhn, The Essential Tension, p. 322.

  101 Kuhn notes that this has entered into theory choice in chemistry. Ibid., p. 335. Of course it is obviously relevant to the social sciences.

  102 Ibid., p. 323.

  103 Ibid., pp. 328ff. See also D’Agostino, Naturalizing Epistemology, esp. chaps. 3, 5, and 6.

  104 Rawls, Justice as Fairness, p. 2.

  105 Ibid., p. 3.

  106 Ibid.

  107 This is especially clear in Rawls, The Law of Peoples, §1.

  108 Rawls, Justice as Fairness, p. 4. Rawls, I think, does not mean mere possibility qua not impossible, but a realistic possibility. On the importance of Rawls’s quest to identify a reasonably just social world that is within our grasp, see Weithman, Why Political Liberalism?, pp. 8ff.

  109 Estlund makes much of the possibility constraint in “Human Nature and the Limits (If Any) of Political Philosophy.”

  110 See O’Neill, Towards Justice and Virtue, p. 40. See also O’Neill, “Abstraction, Idealization and Ideology in Ethics”; and O’Neill, “Justice, Gender and International Boundaries.” For discussions focusing on ideal theory, see Valentini, “On the Apparent Paradox of Ideal Theory”; Lawford-Smith, “Ideal Theory—a Reply to Valentini”; Jubb, “Tragedies of Non-ideal Theory”; Estlund, “Utopophobia.”

  111 O’Neill, Towards Justice and Virtue, p. 40.

  112 Ibid., p. 41.

  113 Ibid., p. 45.

  114 See here Hamlin and Stemplowska, “Theory, Ideal Theory and the Theory of Ideals,” pp. 50–51.

  115 The classic defense of “idealization” in economics is, of course, Milton Friedman’s “The Methodology of Positive Economics.”

  116 “In spite of its popularity the notion of ideal theory tends to be employed somewhat loosely, to indicate any theory constructed under false, that is, idealized assumptions, which make social reality appear significantly ‘simpler and better’ than it actually is.” Valentini, “On the Apparent Paradox of Ideal Theory,” p. 332.

  117 See Estlund, “Human Nature and the Limits (If Any) of Political Philosophy.”

  118 To simplify, I shall simply speak of the “most just” social world, but the analysis of this book generalizes to most understandings of “the politically best,” where this includes the realization of values that go beyond justice.

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

  CHAPTER II

  The Elusive Ideal

  Searching under a Single Perspective

  “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

  “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

  —LEWIS CARROLL

  1 PERSPECTIVES ON JUSTICE

  1.1 Evaluative Perspectives and the Social Realizations Condition

  IN HIS Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, RAWLS TELLS US that “a normalization of interests attributed to the parties” is “common to social contract doctrines.”1 This remark is made in the context of discussing Rousseau’s notion of the general will, which is also said to require a shared “point of view.”2 On Rawls’s reading of Rousseau, private individuals are characterized by a variety of different interests that are magnified by self-bias and selfishness. Such individuals can live together under freely endorsed common laws only if they “share a conception of the common good.”3 This shared conception, in turn, is generated from individuals’ shared fundamental interests and capacities, which derive from their shared human nature. As Rawls sees it, these common fundamental interests allow individuals to abstract from their differences and occupy a shared legislative point of view, based on a shared conception of the common good.4 Furthermore, when occupying this common view the parties all have the same basis for their deliberations, and so everyone wills the same laws, and this is what allows them to live together under freely endorsed common laws.

  Rawls is informally articulating the concept of a perspective—or, as I shall say, an evaluative perspective—which has been more thoroughly explored and formally modeled in the last decade.5 The rest of this book develops and analyzes the idea of an evaluative perspective on ideal justice. Although we shall see that evaluative perspectives are implicit in much political theory—especially in thinking about ideal justice—they are unfamiliar to most political philosophers. I try to render some formal ideas intuitive as far as is possible, without sacrificing too much rigor. More formal issues are dealt with in appendixes. Nevertheless, it is a bit of work to understand the idea of a perspective and how it enters into political philosophy, but it will pay off: features of theories of justice that are not obvious come to the forefront once we focus on perspectives.

  As I shall understand it, an evaluative perspective, Σ, includes three fundamental elements (we shall see in §II.1.2 that two additional elements are required for ideal theory):

  (ES) A set of evaluative standards or criteria by which alternative social worlds in a domain {X} are to be evaluated.

  (WF) For all worlds i in the domain {X}, a specification of the world features of i that are relevant to evaluation according to ES, the evaluative standards. Specifying the relevant world features (WF) requires a set of categorizations that constitute the justice-relevant description of world i on perspective Σ. A description of a social world includes its institutions, social and economic dynamics, and relevant background conditions, including relevant economic and psychological facts (§§I.2.1–2, I.3.1). The domain {X} includes the current social world and the ideal, as well as other nonideal worlds in the option space.

  (MP) A mapping function takes the evaluative standards (ES) and applies them to a social world, i, as specified by WF, yielding what I shall call a justice score for world i, the social world described by world features WFi. The mapping function has two roles. (i) The mapping function must employ a model or models that predict how the justice-relevant features of a social world (WFi) will interact to produce a social realization. This is the modeling task of the mapping function (§I.3.1). (ii) The mapping function 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 might be called the overall evaluation task of the mapping function. Given (i) and (ii), a mapping function takes ES and maps it on to a realization based on WF and in so doing generates a justice score for a social world.

  Rawls’s description of the normalized interests supposed by all social contracts seems to refer only to the set
of evaluative standards (ES)—the parties’ shared interests. But without specifying the world’s features to be evaluated (WF) and a mapping function (MP), a shared set of evaluative standards will not suffice for a shared evaluation of a social world’s justice. If individuals are going to adopt a shared point of view they must also agree about precisely what they are evaluating (the basic structure? the family? churches?),6 their ultimate social realizations, and how to apply their shared standards to that which is being evaluated. It is important to stress that these elements of a perspective are not arbitrary, nor simply an artifact of our model: together they satisfy requirements for an ideal theory that we uncovered in chapter I. A theory of ideal justice, T, that includes ES, WF, and MP satisfies the Social Realizations Condition (§I.4), namely:

  T must evaluate a set (or domain) of social worlds {X}. For each social world i, that is a member of {X}, T evaluates i in terms of its realization of justice (or, more broadly, relevant evaluative standards). This must yield a consistent comparative ranking of the members of {X}, which must include the present social world and the ideal, in terms of their justice.

  A theory meeting ES, WF, and MP evaluates a set (or domain) of social worlds {X} in terms of their realization of justice. The cardinal justice score guarantees a comparative (noncyclical) ranking of the members of {X}, which includes the present social world and the ideal.