The Tyranny of the Ideal

by Gerald Gaus

  Recall that our problem is creating an overarching “liberal” framework for “republican” communities of moral inquiry and experimentation (§III.4.3). The liberal theory of justice can provide a framework for diverse moral perspectives only to the extent that those communities endorse the liberal framework as a bona fide just way to relate; the aim is to uncover a theory of justice that diverse perspectives can, to paraphrase Rawls, see as something they can live with.64 Now an open, liberal framework seeks to accommodate two realms of diversity. First, it seeks to accommodate the array of existing eligible perspectives in a society so that all of them can, in some way, endorse the claims of overall, interperspectival justice. In Sen’s impartial spectator model this is achieved via the Paretian rule: if all the eligible spectators hold that a is more just than b, then that is the conclusion of interperspectival justice. Note that in this case the interperspectival claim is necessarily endorsed by all perspectives. In Muldoon’s account, interperspectival justice is a rational bargain or compromise among all the relevant perspectives; it would normally not be the precise view of any one of them, but all presumably could endorse the compromise as rational from its own perspective. Second, however, a liberal framework accommodative to diversity seeks to be open to new perspectives, ones generated either internally or through immigration. It seeks to accommodate and harness the diversity not only of existing perspectives, but of new and yet unthought-of ones. It is the accommodation of this diversity that is the basis of a liberal society’s openness to inquiry and change—its accommodation of diversity is not tied to a specific array of diversity.

  An open and just liberal society would simultaneously like to maximize its accommodation to both types of diversity, being respectful of current perspectives while being open to new ones. If a liberal order was concerned only with the first sort of diversity, Muldoon’s social contract would be a compelling solution: under a broad range of circumstances, each member of the social order can engage in bargains with all others, producing a contract which, in our terms, each perspective can endorse. But if a liberal order accommodates the diversity of existing perspectives by tying interperspectival justice very closely to the existing array of perspectives, it will be able to accommodate new perspectives only by altering the basic liberal framework of interperspectival justice. If the current framework is, as it were, constructed out of the specific materials present in the current array of perspectives—if it is responsive to that specific diversity configuration—it seems doubtful that new perspectives will generally fit in without significant, perhaps major, shifts in the liberal framework. Thus we might have a diverse society with a justified liberal framework that would nevertheless not be an especially open society, for innovation and immigration may well pose fundamental threats to its conception of justice. It may prefer to be what Rawls calls a “closed system.”65 This, I would venture, is no mere theoretical possibility, but a feature of many current liberal societies, whose very framework of shared life is threatened by inclusion of new perspectives not part of the current settlement.

  However, another possibility presents itself. A liberal framework might be good at accommodating the existing array of perspectives because it is good at accommodating diversity per se. The framework’s success is not so much in accommodating its current set of diverse perspectives, but in accommodating diversity itself. Having developed an interperspectival conception of justice that does well at achieving the endorsement of diverse perspectives, additional diverse perspectives can be relatively easily accommodated. It is so good at working with difference that new and more difference is not a great challenge. On this view, a society can reach a point where, having developed a diversity-accommodative understanding of interperspectival justice, it has no difficulty being open to further perspectives. Here the liberal society is also an open society.

  We are now in a position to refine our inquiry into a justified liberal framework: under what conditions can we live under a shared moral framework that is diversity accommodative because it is accommodative to diversity per se, and so is an open society? I shall argue (§2 of this chapter) that such a framework of liberal diversity seems most likely when our public social world is shaped by a set of characteristic features of the Open Society. I believe that we now have had sufficient experience of life in diverse societies that we can at least draw some tentative conclusions about the sorts of institutional structures and principles that are friendly to diversity per se. Of course, like any claims about social realizations these may prove wrong, but that, I take it, is a benefit of, not a worry about, the analysis. However, I shall argue in §3 of this chapter that even these diversity-friendly arrangements cannot make room for all perspectives; I try there to make some progress in identifying the limits of liberal diversity, and why these limits make sense in the context of defending the Open Society.

  2 AN ARTIFICIAL, OPEN, PUBLIC SOCIAL WORLD

  2.1 On Creating a Public Social World

  2.1.1 The Idea of a Public Moral Constitution. Although it is seldom noted, Rawls’s later works are rife with references to the idea of social worlds. He employs the idea in various ways, two of which are of importance for our current discussion. On the one hand, Rawls refers to social worlds in a manner that suggests that they are broadly sectarian: when we are alienated, Rawls, says, “we grow distant from political society and retreat into our social world.”66 On the other hand, Rawls stresses that from the perspective of the original position “the parties in effect try to fashion a certain kind of social world; they regard the social world not as given by history, but, at least in part, as up to them.”67 Or, as he says in Political Liberalism, “insofar as we are reasonable, we are ready to work out the framework for the public social world.”68

  Let us interpret this distinction as one between the social world that characterizes one’s “comprehensive perspective” and the “public social world” of rules and institutions that is collectively created by members of a society. In this latter sense, but not in the former, a public moral framework and basic institutions are a public social world—they compose it.69 We can think of the public social world of rules and institutions as an artificial social world, one whose existence is a feature of the coordinated mental states of its members.70 The critical point is that in a diverse, liberal society, this shared social world does not reflect a basic choice between the competing social worlds of the different perspectives. It does not have significant ontological commitments: it is our social world because these are the rules and institutions that we, collectively, conceive of and act on. As Rawls says, we can “fashion a certain kind of social world” through our joint choices and beliefs. The aspiration is for the various perspectives, each committed to its understanding of the nature of the social world and ideal justice, to find the public social world endorsable. If each perspective can make sense of the categories of the artificial social world and endorse their use (an issue that I put aside until §IV.3), we can have a shared artificial world without normalization. None of the perspectives that can relate to and endorse the artificial social world would find themselves normalized away, for each would be related to the public artificial world in a way that makes sense to that perspective.

  Although I have employed the idea of social worlds extensively throughout this book, we can put much the same point in terms of developing a “public moral constitution” for our society.71 Our shared public social world simply is a stable, shared, moral, and political framework for living together. Its institutional structure provides common categories, and common sources of interpreting those categories, which allow us to share cooperative ventures characterized by what all perceived to be just social relations.72 Nevertheless, it is an institutional structure of our own collective creation.73 This is not to say that each perspective literally participates in its beginnings, but that it is continually maintained as a public perspective by the diverse perspectives that relate to and endorse it; for each participating perspectiv
e, the artificial public world is sustained by the way its categories can be related to the underlying social world the perspective identifies.

  Such a public social world is required for a truly open society, for it provides relatively settled public categories, rules, and interpretations, which provide the necessary fixed points to allow for individual planning and dynamic changes. Just as markets are dynamic only because the rules of property and contract are not constantly being renegotiated, a dynamic and open society has a relatively stable public social world. But this is not a normalized social world, on which we base our theory of public reason. It is a common world that arises out of public reason: it is our collective creation.

  This basic social moral framework for our common social world—our moral constitution—is not to be equated with any specific moral perspective, with its particular understanding of values, rightness, and the morally relevant nature of the social world. Rather, the core of this morality is a set of public, shared rules that provide the basis of shared normative and empirical expectations as to what others will demand of one, and how competing claims will be adjudicated. Such a system of shared expectations is critical in allowing groups of diverse agents to overcome many of the collective problems we face, such as helping us cooperate in “social dilemmas”—situations in which we will all do better if we cooperate than if we all act on what we take as best from our own perspective, but each can do even better by defecting on cooperation and do what is best from one’s own point of view.74 To use Rawls’s phrase, solving these sorts of collective problems is the sort of thing our public framework must do if it is to play its “expected role in human life.”75 Without shared normative expectations (what I expect other people ought to do, and what they think I ought to do) and empirical expectations (what I expect other people will actually do, and what they expect I will do), cooperation is impaired and social conflict aggravated.

  An analysis of what I have called a moral constitution has obvious affinities with constitutional political economy, as developed by James Buchanan. Like the constitutional political economy project, my concern here is how highly diverse agents may converge on a set of rules to regulate their cooperative activities. And like Buchanan, I shall consider what sorts of rules might receive near-unanimous consent in a highly diverse society. On the face of it, one might think that a fundamental difference is that Buchanan’s project supposes selfish agents, concerned only about their own costs and benefits, whereas our concern is a diversity of perspectives on justice. While Buchanan at times does suggest a selfishness postulate, this is not essential to his core analysis, which is critically about our concern: agents who differ deeply in how they order the possible outcomes.76 Nevertheless, it is true that we are concerned here with a far deeper diversity, which goes beyond diversity of preferences to diversity in perspectives. The main difference, however, is that while Buchanan’s constitutional political economy tends to focus on the formal rules of the state—especially second-order rules about how to make and change rules—my concern is the informal moral framework that provides the foundation for state institutions. There is, of course, no sharp break between these; as we shall see, the informal moral framework often calls for legal rules to complete its tasks, and legal rules are typically ineffective without a basis in the moral constitution. Still, differences in emphases are important, and our emphasis is not so much the state but the moral framework that provides the foundation for an effective liberal state in the Open Society.

  2.1.2 A Practice of Accountability. These common social rules, coordinating our empirical and normative expectations, are the warp and woof of our common existence, but unless we hold each other to them, individuals may give in to the temptation to go their own way—acting as they think best, given their point of view. This is not to say that they are selfish; defection from the set of shared rules occurs whenever one acts as one’s perspective deems best, putting aside the shared rules of social life. Consequently, maintenance of this shared set of rules requires a practice of public responsibility: a practice in which we hold each other responsible for failing to abide by our common rules. Maintaining a public moral framework requires maintaining shared expectations—rebuking people who do not act on the shared rules (their actions undermine empirical expectations) and those who make mistakes about what the rules require (and so undermine shared normative expectations). Recent empirical studies have proven overwhelmingly that cooperative individuals do care about policing these rules, often using their own resources to punish offenders.77 And societies where such public responsibility is lacking have sought methods to establish it, as a foundation for enhancing cooperation.78

  Not only is the public moral constitution sustained by a practice of mutual responsibility, but, critically, it provides the necessary foundation for the very practice that sustains it. As Peter Strawson famously showed us, our social moral practices are inescapably about our reactions to what we perceive to be the goodwill or ill will of those with whom we interact. We make demands on them, and they on us; and we hold them (and ourselves) responsible for failure to meet these demands.79 The reactive attitudes—resentment, indignation, guilt, and so on—are fundamental to these relations of responsibility; we experience resentment because those who fail to meet our demands manifest an ill will toward us; we are indignant when, as a third party, we view others as the objects of such ill will. Strawson stressed that we do not really have the option of deciding whether or not we should care about the attitudes of others toward us in these practices: we cannot help but react to the ill will of those with whom we interact.80 Thus understood, the moral constitution is not centrally about objective judgments of the rightness or wrongness of the actions of others (and ourselves): it is a system of expectations embedded in our attitudes toward others, and our judgments of their intentions and attitudes toward us. When I hold another responsible I do not simply judge his action against some standard; I react to his ill will, his lack of respect or consideration.

  However, if the other does not share my perspective on justice, the reactive attitudes are easily undermined.81 Even supposing that I have the correct perspective, so that I know what justice truly requires, if I live in a social milieu of reasonable diversity of perspectives—I acknowledge that others, entirely reasonably, have different perspectives on justice—I am thwarted in ascribing ill will to others. I demanded that they conform to a rule because it is part of a more just social world, but I acknowledge that on their perspective this is not so. Unless I think their perspective is manifestly unreasonable (and so we are on our way back to normalization), I must admit that their lack of uptake of my appeal to the rule does not manifest ill will. They just do not see that justice calls for conformity to it. And because they do not manifest ill will, the reactive attitudes, and so the practice of responsibility, do not get a grip. Thus simple appeal to my perspective on justice is not sufficient to sustain a practice of responsibility. However, a shared justified82 moral constitution, which articulates our shared normative expectations of each other, provides just this: when we possess such a constitution we endorse these shared expectations, and so violators are prime targets of the reactive attitudes. You knew that our moral constitution, which you endorse, requires conformity to the rule, and yet you failed to conform. Now that does typically manifest an ill will, a lack of due regard.

  This relation of mutual support between the reactive attitudes and a public moral constitution is fundamental to a moralized social life. We require a public moral constitution to live cooperatively given our diverse moral perspectives; we maintain it through a practice of mutual responsibility. Following Strawson we can call this an analysis from the objective perspective on our constitution and the attendant practice of moral responsibility. But, as Strawson stressed, as participants in moral relations—when taking up the transactional or interpersonal view—we cannot help but make demands on them for consideration, and react when these demands go unheeded. From this view a p
ublic moral constitution endorsed by the diverse members of the social order grounds the very reactive attitudes it requires for its (objective) success.

  2.1.3 Functionalism. From the objective (but not from the transactional) perspective the rules of the public moral constitution can be understood as serving a function. As I have just said, we can analyze the conditions that the constitution requires to successfully do its job. Again, it must be stressed that this functional character of the public constitution is not a general claim about morality, or admissible perspectives on justice, per se. Many perspectives on justice embrace an antitechnology conviction, namely that justice is not a technology to enable human cooperative social life—justice does not have functions or roles. A framework for the Open Society does not affirm or deny this conviction—it is a matter that is internal to a perspective on justice. Our concern here is not to identify the correct perspective on justice (which would simply add one more perspective into the mix), but to reflect on the public social world that we create in order to productively and cooperatively live together and to search our disparate understandings of justice. And that is a matter of creating what might be called a social technology of cooperative life.

  The public moral constitution’s fundamental task of providing the framework for social life and cooperation can be achieved only when we coordinate on a common set of moral rules. Because the public moral constitution has the job of coordinating our normative and empirical expectations, it is to no avail for each to have a unique, idiosyncratic view of it. I can have a terrific theory as to what the ideal public moral constitution would be, but for me alone to act on it cannot do the job. Indeed, even if we all happened to share the same view of it (say, R was a rule of justice on all our perspectives) but we did not know this fact (i.e., there was not public knowledge of it), we would not have coordinated normative and empirical expectations about acting on R. What is required is that people actually share, and know that they share, common normative and empirical expectations about each other.83 Because of the functional requirement, a social morality thus has an existence requirement: only if a set of rules in a society is sufficiently widely shared among its members (they have the relevant shared beliefs, intentions, attitudes, and behaviors), and it is sufficiently widely known that they share these, can it be the public moral constitution of the society. The public moral constitution is partly constituted by the coordinated beliefs, intentions, and attitudes of the members of society. It is public not simply in the sense that it pertains to common matters (any morality can have public matters as its content), but it is also public in its constitutive conditions. Thus, a set of rules is the public moral constitution only if a social fact holds: only if the set of rules satisfies the existence requirement is it the “positive morality” of that society, and only if the set of rules is the positive morality of the society can it be its public moral constitution—its normatively justified social morality. That is why a public social world is not simply a matter of what can be justified, but what has been created.84