The Tyranny of the Ideal

by Gerald Gaus

  The Open Society, I have argued, provides a framework in which these different perspectives can search, share, debate, and, yes, dismiss each other’s insights, while engaging in other cooperative social relations. What constitutes learning and insight is internal to a perspective, but I do believe chapters II and III demonstrate that being cocooned in its own view of the problem condemns a perspective to never really understanding its own ideal and the nature of justice and its optimization landscape. The Open Society, I argued, provides a liberal framework in which different republican communities of inquiry can make up their own minds (dictated by their perspectives) as to whom they will learn from, whose ideas they will borrow and adapt, and whose predictive models they will consider.

  The critical question of chapter IV was whether diverse perspectives could endorse a common moral constitution with its attendant practice of moral accountability. As in so many places, Rawls shows us the way forward—we must construct an artificial, public social world that all can share, given our various perspectives on justice. Critical to securing such a public social world is that perspectives abandon the optimization stance: only the public world that my perspective on justice judges optimal is acceptable. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, most religious citizens over much of Europe abandoned the optimization stance. They accepted that the social world they constructed with their fellow citizens could not reproduce their sectarian perspective on a Godly world. They learned to do what so many contemporary political philosophers insist—in their work if not in their lives—cannot be done: to hold themselves accountable according to rules of justice they do not deem optimal.

  A task of a liberal theory of public reason, I have argued, is to show how a public social world might be constructed that is open to the widest possible range of perspectives on justice. Each perspective on justice has a stake in securing such a social world, for in unexpected ways, diverse perspectives can break through the myopia to which even sophisticated perspectives are subject. Yet, of course, a perspective cannot embrace a public social world that does not adequately express its fundamental commitments. There are limits on the public worlds in which a perspective can participate. I have argued that a highly plausible proposal is that the characteristic institutions of the Open Society are maximally friendly to diversity as such while securing the endorsement of the constituent perspectives. I have followed Berlin and Rawls in acknowledging that the social space of the Open Society has limits. Some perspectives will be convinced that they have nothing to learn from others and take their current perspective on justice as the best that could be attained. The Open Society will have no attractions for them, and so they are apt to take up an uncompromising optimization stance, withdrawing into the illusory certainties of their perspectives of the right, the good, and the holy.

  An Open Society, I have argued, must balance the parties of stability and change. Only a relatively stable public social world is truly open to diversity. If the basic framework of social relations is constantly shifting as new perspectives enter and leave our public world, its inhabitants will be deeply uncertain about the consequences of openness. If current members of the public order do not have the firm expectations about the basis of their future relations, they are apt to see the immigration of peoples and ideas as potentially threatening their plans—the social space they have counted on to live their lives. But the Open Society is not static, caught in the current coordination equilibrium, never able to move to better arrangements. There is no point to encouraging discovery if the terms of our lives together are fixed once and for all. The very indeterminacy of justification of our public social world allows the space within it to push and pull for new equilibriums in the eligible set that move us in directions that are acceptable to all, and are seen as an improvement by many. In this way, perspectives’ convictions about greater justice can spur new moral constitutions.

  2 ADIEU TO THE WELL-ORDERED SOCIETY

  This thesis of this book implies a break with contemporary social and political thought, which has been deeply influenced by Rawls’s ideal of a well-ordered society: a society that “not only is designed to advance the good of its members but … also is effectively regulated by a public conception of justice. That is, it 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 generally known to satisfy these principles.”2 Drawing on a normalized, homogenized perspective, in A Theory of Justice Rawls’s original position yielded a conception that all think is best (since everyone reasons in the exact same way, this is not too surprising). When it is public knowledge that the relevant principles are accepted by all, are satisfied, and known to be satisfied, a well-ordered society obtains. Such a society has the allure of the ideal: our fundamentally divergent views of justice are left behind, and we all can pursue our aims confident that all are devoted to the same principles of justice and we all know our institutions manifest them. And even if, now, mired in our actual societies with deep moral and political disagreements, divided between Red states and Blue states, religiously informed disagreements about justice, and an array of competing ideologies, the ideal of such a society can guide us, and help reconcile us to this conflict-ridden and often manifestly unjust social world.

  I have tried to show that such an ideal is ultimately a mirage, yet one that tyrannizes over our thinking and encourages us to turn our backs on pressing problems of justice in our own neighborhood. It is a mirage because even if we actually had full confidence and complete agreement about the principles of justice, we would disagree about what social states best satisfied them. And even within some perspective, as it approaches the social state in which the basic social institutions generally satisfy these principles, it will discover its estimates of its functioning were wrong, and their realizations are flawed. As we approach what we thought was the end of our journey we find that our destination was not what we envisaged, and yet another ideal arises on the horizon. Yet, to get there we had to make The Choice, forsaking some local improvements to keep our eye on the ideal, the well-ordered society.

  The well-ordered society is a dangerous illusion. The very aim that the ideal theorist cherished, to know justice and just social states as well as possible, requires an open, diverse society, in which innumerable perspectives simultaneously cooperate and compete, share and conflict. In this society there will be a crisscrossing network of communities exploring and refining moral ideals and gaining insights into their own ideals by their interactions with others. In order to be successful and robust, the Open Society, I have tried to show, must be based on a moral constitution that provides the basis of a practice of responsibility and accountability among a maximally wide array of perspectives, allowing us to reap the fruits of the cooperation and competition that diversity allows. This is the truth retained from the idea of a well-ordered society: we must indeed have a common public moral framework by which to resolve our disputes and hold each other accountable. But this is a working convergence on a common framework from multiple, deeply different perspectives, which are based on very different ideals of justice, not a normalized perspective on justice.

  None of this is to say that life in the Open Society is comforting, or provides a totally satisfying conception of life with others. Indeed, empirical evidence indicates that diverse groups are better at solving problems, yet participants find them less satisfying than homogeneous groups.3 The Open Society makes an offer that we are tempted to refuse: in it, one will find out more about justice as understood on one’s own perspective, but one is not free to simply enact this ideal for the entire society. Hopefully, perspectives can employ this knowledge to improve the moral constitution of the Open Society and seek to convince others that its view of justice is as truly powerful as its adherents find it. But others are apt to be unimpressed with much of the view and are instead devising their own ideals. And they are disappointed that others seem to ha
ve so little uptake of their insights. While the Open Society frustrates the utopian aspiration, it does far better in responding to palpable problems of justice: the oppression, horrendous deprivations, and cruelties that surround all of us. Here diverse perspectives on justice can converge on local improvements, improving the basic rules of justice and in so doing enhancing our practice of responsibility. If we look back on the incredible moral changes in the past century, we have seen the steady elimination of rules that marginalized perspectives never endorsed, but to which they were subjected by power—and very often the power of a dominant normalized perspective, insisting that it was the sole arbiter of justice. It is remarkable—indeed astounding—that after the train of moral and human disasters of the twentieth century, many of which were based on a deep and sincere conviction by rulers that they had uncovered the one correct perspective on justice and could chart a course to “Paradise Island,” so many political philosophers still succumb to the allure of the ideal, and insist that our society should choose to set out for it. The Open Society is not even tempted to make The Choice to pursue the mirage of the ideal rather than to work toward a better public moral constitution, eliminating palpable oppression and seeking ways to improve its rules.

  Life in the Open Society is often frustrating. Convinced that we are at the end of history, and finally know once and for all what is just, we are confronted by disagreement, skepticism, and recalcitrance—about truths we see so clearly. Most of us do not feel at home in the public social world, which by near unanimity is judged imperfect. Yet, because we are not at the end of history, because like other “knowledge,” that of justice is changeable and improvable, the pursuit of justice outside the Open Society is a recipe for dead ends, failures, and even political tyranny. As Popper realized over three-quarters of a century ago, the spell of Platonic perfection and the mirage of the final ideal are powerful influences on the philosophical mind. Yet to pursue such an ideal ultimately is to turn our back on the dynamism and uncertainty of collective inquiry and so the moral improvements for which we all strive.

  3 THE CITADEL OF THE IDEAL

  Finally, many political philosophers will insist that nothing I have said in this work shows that ideals of justice can possibly be improved by life in the Open Society. What I have called the “Social Realizations Condition,” they will say, is only about social “rules of regulation.”4 To be sure, these philosophers will respond, we might learn better ways to institute JUSTICE, but we could never learn more about JUSTICE. The truths of JUSTICE are in our hearts, our deepest “intuitions,” and no mere facts about their realizations could ever cause us to doubt them.5 Should all our attempts to live according to these principles lead to disaster, such experience would never lead us to revise our convictions about JUSTICE. Humans may simply not be up to JUSTICE.

  This thought apparently deeply worried Rawls. He closes his second preface to Political Liberalism with the anguished doubt: “The wars of this century with their extreme violence and increasing destructiveness, culminating in the manic evil of the Holocaust, raise in an acute way the question whether political relations must be governed by power and coercion alone. If a reasonably just society that subordinates power to its aims is not possible and people are largely amoral, if not incurably cynical and self-centered, one might ask with Kant whether it is worthwhile for human beings to live on the earth.”6 Paul Weithman thus describes Rawls’s project as one of a “naturalistic theodicy”7 showing that we are, after all, fit for JUSTICE. There is certainly something akin to the religious about a conception of justice that may be outside the plausible horizons of humanity. As does the theologian, many philosophers see justice as somehow existing apart from humanity, coming down to judge us with its stern standards that, like wayward children, we simply might be too naughty or weak to follow. As Frans de Waal observes, “According to most philosophers, we reason ourselves to moral truths. Even if they don’t invoke God, they’re still proposing a top-down process in which we formulate the principles and then impose them on human conduct.”8 The fundamental convictions at the root of much religion and moral and political philosophy are that “humans don’t know how to behave and that someone must tell them.”9

  This can be a most comforting view to the philosopher. Nothing the children do could ever lead the philosopher to doubt her claims about these standards. That would be as absurd as sin showing that God does not exist, or that His commandments were erroneous. Having retreated to the certainty of her intuitions, she observes humanity and judges whether it is up to her findings. Thus, as perhaps did Plato, the philosopher paints an ideal that she would never want humans to try to implement, because they are not up to the ideal. Indeed, as we have seen, some go so far as to embrace the view that their inquiries into the ideal may well be useless to humans (§I.1.4).

  The alternative view to us not being up to justice is that justice is up to us. Justice is the way that our species has found to live well together, to prosper, and to discover. When one thinks one has hit upon a standard of justice, and finds again and again that attempts to construct “rules of regulation” to implement it have repeatedly led to disaster, the proper response is not to shake one’s head sadly that the children are not yet up to JUSTICE. Rather, the embarrassing fact for the philosopher is he is the one who has erred. He got justice wrong. Only a philosopher or a theologian would think it obvious that, if their ideals lead to ruin, the flaw is not theirs, but in the creatures for whom the ideals were set.

  Of course we all have our convictions and beliefs, and some of these may be based on faith or sentiment that simply cannot be overturned by evidence. But how large groups of humans should live together is not one of these matters. About that we can learn from others, their experiences, their data, their different ways of seeing what to us looks to us so clear. Our ideals of justice are ideals about how our rather unusual species can live in ways that are good or beneficial to all, and about that we have been learning for tens of thousands, nay hundreds of thousands, of years. Political philosophers will have far more to contribute if they abandon their citadels of certain principles and ideals, and acknowledge that they are participants in a process of collective discovery. Perhaps not surprisingly, it was Hayek—an economist, not a philosopher—who truly, deeply appreciated this.

  If we are to advance, we must leave room for a continuous revision of our present conceptions and ideals which will be necessitated by further experience. We are as little able to conceive what civilization will be, or can be, five hundred or even fifty years hence as our medieval forefathers or even our grandparents were able to foresee our manner of life today.10

  1 As opposed to making random jumps around the space and seeing what happens.

  2 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 4.

  3 Ellison and Mullin, “Diversity, Social Goods Provision, and Performance in the Firm.”

  4 See Cohen, Rescuing Justice and Equality, esp. pp. 308, 323ff.

  5 Many political philosophers appear to adopt Mrs. Bunter’s view of facts. “My old mother always used to say, my lord, that facts are like cows. If you stare them in the face hard enough, they generally run away.” Sayers, Clouds of Witness.

  6 Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. lx. Note the lack of recognition of the role that ideals of justice played in the human disasters of the twentieth century.

  7 Weithman, Why Political Liberalism?, pp. 8ff.

  8 de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist, p. 17.

  9 Ibid., p. 23.

  10 Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, pp. 23–24.

  Appendix A

  On Measuring Similarity

  (I) BUILDING UP FROM INTUITIVE PAIRWISE JUDGMENTS

  SIMILARITY COMPARISONS OF POSSIBLE SOCIAL WORLDS ARE FUNDAmental to satisfying the Orientation Condition. As noted in the text, I employ a standard idea of similarity judgments of the form of a pairwise comparison of pairs: “world a is more similar to world b than world a is to world c,” denoted as (a∼b)>(a∼c). T
o yield a complete transitive ordering of the domain {X} additional axioms are required:

  (1) Symmetry: [(a∼b)>(a∼c)]→[(b∼a)>(c∼a)];

  (2) Asymmetry: [(a∼b)>(a∼c)]→ ¬[(a∼c)>(a∼b)];

  (3) Reflexivity: ∀i,j ∈ {X}, where i ≠ j: [(i∼i)>(i∼j)];

  (4) Transitivity: [(a∼b)>(a∼c)] & [(b∼c)>(b∼d)]→[(a∼c)>(a∼d)].

  To see how a perspective could generate a similarity ordering from pairwise comparison of pairs, start with three social worlds, a, b, and c. From this set we can begin by asking: what ordered triplets of the set {a, b, c} are consistent with the intuitive judgment (a datum) that (a∼b)>(a∼c)? On reflection we can see that (a∼b)>(a∼c) is consistent with {a, b, c}, {c, b, a}, {c, a, b}, OR {b, a, c}. We can thus exclude {b, c, a} and {a, c, b}, as those orderings are not consistent with our assumed similarity judgment.