The Tyranny of the Ideal

by Gerald Gaus

  If we take the Social Realizations and Orientation Conditions together with the Neighborhood Constraint, we have seen that an ideal theory is almost certain to be confronted with

  The Choice: In cases where there is a clear social optimum within our neighborhood that requires movement away from our understanding of the ideal, we must choose between relatively certain (perhaps large) local improvements in justice and pursuit of a considerably less certain ideal.

  We considered various ways to mitigate The Choice; diversity of perspectives can expand our neighborhood and move high optima into it. But we have seen in this chapter that anything but modest forms of diversity result in deep disagreement about the justice of social realizations and the ideal; if we keep anything near the normalized evaluative perspective supposed by any given ideal theory T, the Neighborhood Constraint can, at best, be modestly mitigated, and so The Choice will still confront T.

  If the ideal theorist always refuses to choose the ideal over local improvement the ideal is not necessary for recommendations; it may still be an interesting intellectual exercise, but such an ideal political philosophy will fail to provide “a long-term goal of political endeavor, and in working toward it [give] meaning to what we can do today.”65 If the ideal is to be such a long-term goal, the ideal theorist must sometimes—one would think often—stress that we should pursue the ideal and so forgo possibilities to create a more just social world by moving away from the ideal to some near social arrangements. It is critical to stress that this must be the case: if the ideal theorist denies that such choices need ever be made, then Sen is right and we can do very well without knowing anything about the Mount Everest of justice, and should simply climb the hills that confront us. But if we really do need the ideal, then we must press: why should we forgo opportunities to create a more just social world so that we can pursue an uncertain ideal? Those who bear the cost of this pursuit will live in a less just world—their pleas must be discounted. The ideal theorist is convinced that we can give meaning to our political lives by pursuing an inherently uncertain ideal, turning our backs on the pursuit of mundane justice in our own neighborhoods. A tyrant rules in a manifestly unjust way; for us to be under the sway of an ideal theory is for us to ignore relatively clear improvements in justice for the sake of a grander vision for the future. And yet this grand vision is ultimately a mirage, for as we move closer to it, we will see that it was not what we thought it was, and in all probability we can now see that a better alternative lies elsewhere.66

  Ideal theorists in the academy today are good democrats who would never think of taking political power in their own hands67 to pursue their visions of the ideal. But for those who remember their twentieth-century political history, the position that such theorists have talked themselves into is far too reminiscent of less democratic idealists. Recall that Lenin explicitly argued that his Marxian socialism “subordinates the struggle for reforms … to the revolutionary struggle for liberty and for Socialism.” He admonished those who advocated climbing models of “stages” from current injustice to socialism; “by coming out at this moment, when the revolutionary movement is on the upgrade, with an alleged special ‘task’ of fighting for reforms, … [they are] dragging the Party backwards and … playing into the hands of both ‘economic’ and liberal opportunism.”68

  Even in democratic settings, we must seriously question an approach to political life that inherently encourages its adherents to neglect what, on their own view, are clear improvements in justice for the sake of pursuing an ideal, the pursuit of which gives meaning to their political lives or fulfills their dreams. When The Choice is made to pursue the ideal, the opportunity cost is the persistence of a less just condition, one that we can have higher confidence would be alleviated by moving to near social worlds. Surely, though, normative political philosophy should provide a reasoned response to deficits in justice, not a justification for ignoring them so we can seek “Paradise Island.” Political philosophers have not paid sufficient heed to Sen’s fundamental insight: what moves most of us, “reasonably enough, is not the realization that the world falls short of being completely just—which few of us expect—but that there are clearly remediable injustices around us which we want to eliminate.”69 To be moved by the former to the disregard of the latter is an all-too-common vice of the grand theorist, who demands too much from political philosophy—a firm orientation in understanding where our world stands in the conceptual space of justice, meaning in political life, a reassurance that humans are not too corrupt for justice, to feel at home in the political world, or to seek a social world where, finally, all is as it should be within the limits of human nature.70 These are noble aims, and certainly, all things equal, most of us would value securing them. However, under the very conditions that render ideal theory a distinctive and alluring project, pursuit of these noble aims often “subordinates the fight for reforms” to the pursuit of utopia. As I have been stressing, Sen would be entirely right, and the ideal would be unnecessary to the pursuit of justice, if our road to the global optimum did not confront us with The Choice.

  4.2 From Normalization to Deep Diversity

  The tyranny of The Choice derives from the assumption—which Rawls says is fundamental to the social contract (§II.1.1)—of supposing that we approach political philosophy through a normalized, or common, perspective on justice. As Page stresses, even really insightful perspectives on a problem (for example, the third perspective in our search for the best rights-protecting state, §III.1.2) can get stuck short of the global optimum, and, as I have argued, even insightful perspectives must confront the Neighborhood Constraint. Thus in this chapter I have focused on a collective pursuit of the ideal, drawing on diverse perspectives.

  The problem, we saw, is that an evaluation-normalized perspective on the ideal, ΣV, which is necessary for effective collective pursuit of a common evaluative core (with shared evaluative standards, world features, and mapping relations) combined with robust disagreement on similarity and distance metrics is, in the end, an illusion. The parts of a perspective on the ideal are interconnected—as we introduce substantial differences in one element, other elements are affected. Disagreement about one element of a perspective typically supposes, or leads to, disagreement on yet deeper elements of the evaluative perspective. As Benjamin Ward once remarked in the context of economics, “almost every attempt to communicate across world views is an attempt to alter value systems.”71 Unless diversity is “managed”—unless there are institutionalized means for ensuring that some sort of disagreements do not arise, or that if they do, they are suppressed—we cannot expect such a common ideal of justice to arise via diversity. Absent institutions to manage diversity, what we should expect in a free society is that individuals will understand justice in deeply different ways, differing on all the elements of a perspective. Such a society will not agree about the ideal; in effect, different groups will be searching different justice landscapes. But, we might ask, having abandoned a collective search for a common conception of the best, does this mean that deep moral diversity is not an engine of moral improvement?

  4.3 A Liberal Order of Republican Communities?

  Recall D’Agostino’s distinction between “liberal” and “republican” communities of inquiry (§III.4.2). In a diverse liberal community, each “research team” explores the landscape generated by its perspective, using the heuristics and predictive models it finds most appropriate. “Each team will construct and traverse that region of the space which they find interesting.”72 This is consistent with maximum diversity, but, as we have seen in this chapter, it also encourages “justice teams” to develop views of the problem and solutions that may not be easily translatable into other perspectives. If the diverse perspectives are to put their findings together and so benefit from their diversity, they require something akin to D’Agostino’s “republican approach,” in which inquirers successfully communicate their results because they possess common standards
of assessment.73 Given that the interdependence of the elements of a perspective produces a diversity contagion—diversity in one element of a perspective produces diversity throughout the perspective—an open society will not itself form a common, giant, republican community: the very engine of diverse searching leads, at least in the context of justice that has been our concern, to deep diversity according to which different perspectives have disparate views of the nature of an ideally just society.

  However, the “liberal” and “republican” approaches are not inconsistent: an overall liberal, open society may contain numerous republican communities which, because they are similar enough, some version of the Hong-Page dynamic can get traction, and so they can reap the benefits of diverse (but not too diverse) searches. They are able to share their results within their communities and so improve their collective understandings of justice. Moreover given the modularity of many problems, the links between different “republican” communities may crisscross the entire community. This can be formalized in the idea of a “small-world network,”74 as in figure 3-6.

  We often suppose that the diverse ideological groups are arrayed along a single left-right dimension (say, from left-justice inquirers to libertarian justice); but this leads to familiar perplexities. Consider the relation between orthodox libertarianism (L), “left-libertarianism” (LL), socialism (S), and conservatism (C). Calling L “right libertarianism” suggests an affinity to conservatism; but to an orthodox libertarian, LL is more statist than is orthodox libertarianism, and so the orthodox libertarian may view LL on the path to statism, in its socialist (S) version, which has affinities with conservative statism (C).75 An alternative to the left-right spectrum is to array the positions in a ring, as in figure 3-6, in which L is in one way next to C, yet it also allows that S is next to C, despite LL being next to S and far from C. Now as Ryan Muldoon, Michael Borgida, and Michael Cuffaro point out, when we model sociopolitical relations with a ring model, we can depict “small-world” networks by communication links between points along the ring.76 For example, L shares problems with C (recall “fusion conservatism,” §III.3.4) as well as with LL (e.g., the nature of Lockean natural rights); in turn LL can work on some problems with S (e.g., understanding equality of welfare). Thus despite the very different justice landscapes of S and L, they are linked via others to a common problem-solving network. The point here is that great diversity of problem-solving communities need not imply sectarian research programs in which the discoveries of very different groups have no benefit outside of one’s own sectarian community. The liberal, open society can form a small-world network, in which the various communities of inquiry are linked in complex ways.

  Figure 3-6. The small world of an open society

  Such an Open Society will not be characterized by a shared ideal. Through the interactions of its constituent “republican” communities it will be a forum of contestation, disagreement, and, sometimes, mutual incomprehension. That it will not share an ideal or even a rough roadmap to an approximate utopia does not, however, mean that its communities cannot come to agree on moral improvement, and point the way to more just social relations. When networks connect diverse perspectives, ideologies that seem entirely at odds can provide important inputs into each other’s searches, leading to common recognition of more just social worlds.

  This may all appear a Pollyanna perspective on diversity. Why should various perspectives on justice, each committed to its own ideal of the just society, endorse the structure of the Open Society, which by its very nature precludes complete attainment of what each treasures—a collective life based on its ideal? Perhaps if we still shared the Enlightenment’s conviction that free inquiry in morality, as well as in science, will eventually lead to consensus on the truth, all perspectives might concur on the liberal framework of free inquiry. “Enlightenment philosophers,” John Passmore observed, were convinced that “mankind had in the seventeenth century lit upon a method of discovery [the scientific method], a method which would guarantee future progress.”77 Each field was awaiting its Newton: “in the eighteenth century there was a fairly wide consensus that what Newton had achieved in the region of physics could surely also be applied to the regions of ethics and politics.”78 And so, as Alasdair MacIntyre noted:

  It was a central aspiration of the Enlightenment, an aspiration the formulation of which was its great achievement, to provide for debate in the public realm standards and methods of rational justification by which courses of action in every sphere of life could be adjudged just or unjust, rational or irrational, enlightened or unenlightened. So, it was hoped, reason would replace authority and tradition. Rational justification was to appeal to principles undeniable by any rational person and therefore independent of all those social and cultural peculiarities which the Enlightenment thinkers took to be mere accidental clothing of reason in particular times and places.79

  Some cling to this Enlightenment faith that free inquiry will lead to moral consensus, but the history of morality in open societies exhibits a far more complex pattern: there has been both remarkable agreement about some improvements (e.g., the wrongness of racial and gender discrimination), together with ever-deepening disputes about the place of humans in the universe, the roles and natures of the sexes, the role of the state, the relative importance of liberty and equality, and indeed the very nature of morality itself. “Western Judeo-Christian society” has not been transformed into a new secular order, but has dissolved into a complex, global pattern of Christian, Islamic, Jewish, and secular orientations—and each of these refracts into a spectrum of versions. Thus Rawls’s core insight: the exercise of human reason under free institutions leads to disagreement. An Open Society, in which each is free to pursue his or her own inquiry into justice, exploring the terrain of justice as he or she sees it, using the methods he or she thinks most fit, will be characterized by continued, deep diversity, with no shared ideal. Given this, can a diverse, open society faced with “intractable struggles” and “irreconcilable” conflicts of “absolute depth” share a common moral existence on terms that are acceptable to all perspectives?80 Can there be a moral, liberal framework for the Open Society, which itself abjures the pursuit of the ideal while providing a framework for diverse individual perspectives on justice? It is to this question that I now turn.

  1 Philosophers working on the debate concerning “ideal v. nonideal theory” have seemed to suppose that feasibility is the main worry about ideal theory. If I am correct, this is a problem pretty far downstream. Before we can know whether it is feasible to seek the ideal, we have to know where it is. It often seems to have been supposed that identifying the ideal is the purview of political philosophers, who can retreat into their studies and identify it; only when we come to implementation questions do social scientists enter. I hope it is clear that this common picture is woefully inadequate.

  2 Hong and Page’s characterization of a perspective is not identical to that presented in §II.1; I consider crucial differences in §III.2.4 For his conception of a perspective, see Page, The Difference, chaps. 1, 3, and 5.

  3 Note that this example does not presuppose that justice is an NK optimization problem, but only that the underlying structure is not perfectly correlated with the justice of the states. See sections II.2.1 and III.2.4.

  4 Rights protection data are drawn from the Freedom House Freedom in the World 2014 Report. GDP rankings are based on 2013 data and are available at http://knoema.com/sijweyg/gdp-per-capita-ranking-2013-data-and-charts.

  5 This is what Page calls a “heuristic.” “Heuristics apply within a perspective. Given a perspective, a heuristic tells a person where to search for new solutions or what actions to take.” The Difference, p. 53.