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ОглавлениеIdeal and Nonideal Moral Theory
This book is an exercise in “ideal moral theory” insofar as it tries to lay out the fundamental structure of morality. Ideal theory, conceived of as describing a perfectly just polity or a complete set of fundamental moral principles, recently has been unfavorably contrasted with “nonideal” theory, which it is claimed, unlike ideal theory, attends to particular injustices and moral wrongs. The contrast and criticism are not new. Marx’s critique of “utopian” socialism and orthodox pragmatists’ reluctance to define “the good,” are motivated by many of the same concerns that inform contemporary arguments against ideal theory.1
There are three basic complaints about ideal theory. The first is that the proposed ideals are useless because they are impossible for us. They are castles in the air, populated with fully reasonable beings, which we are not, shaped by uncorrupted institutions, which we don’t have, and immaculately conceived outside of history, which nothing is. In a word, the ideal is unreal, and only the realistic is valuable.
The second complaint is that imagining the ideal makes one blind to actual injustices, or at least unresponsive to them. So, for example, because racism would not be part of any proposed ideal world, the construction of an ideal gives no guidance for a just response to racism. The ideal theorist, it is claimed, doesn’t begin with our experience of actual injustices, and therefore will tend to finish without addressing our strongly felt moral intuitions.
The third criticism leveled at ideal theorizing is that ideal theory envisions a perfected condition (that is what makes a theory ideal), but our norms are and ought to be conceived as evolving, constantly subject to reformation due to new experience and new knowledge. The good is never achieved, and it is a mistake to even imagine it achieved. Nonideal theorists, especially from the pragmatic tradition, argue that the fixity of the ideal in ideal theory misconstrues the source of value.
These criticisms are not without merit when directed against certain ideal theories, or when directed against certain misapplications of any ideal theory, but they fail as a general indictment of imaging and defending ideal moral institutions and practices.
To begin with, in an important sense, all normative theory “idealizes,” whether “ideal” or not. Unless the theory is of the “whatever is is right” variety, it moves beyond reality. Theories which merely describe the actual and explain how it came to be and operate are not normative theories. The normative evaluates the actual and compares it to some possibility, or compares some possibilities to each other. What is not the case, at least not yet the case, is always part of the normative theory mix. So the mere unreality of the ideals of ideal theories is no fault insofar as they are normative theories. Attempting to conceive of the best is simply the most extreme form of normative thought. Complaints that ideal theory departs from reality are complaints against doing any kind of normative theory.
If the charge is that the ideal trucks in impossibilities, then that is a different matter. Ideal theory should recommend the best possible world, but no better. Perfection in normative theory should be conceived of as good as it can get, not as as good as we might want. “Impossible!” is a grave accusation, and if warranted, a fatal offense. However, the charge of impossibility can only be sustained against a particular ideal theory combined with a theory of the possible. Possibility is always relative to a set of constraints delineating the possible. The logically possible may be physically impossible, the physically possible, biologically impossible. When a theorist claims some ideal normative construct is impossible, we need to ask which constraints she takes to be fixed. Just which unchangeable laws condemn Thomas More’s Utopia to remain nowhere? Since all normative theory strays from the actual, the realists must state the boundaries they set for wandering. Ideal theory usually is explicit in the constraints it accepts.2 Such methodological honesty sets a good example for nonideal theory’s less totalizing normative endeavors.
Constraints that critics are entitled to take as fixed in their critique of ideal theories are where we have been and where we are now. A possible good, which we cannot get to given our past journey and current location, might as well be nowhere. Without knowing how a condition might be achieved by us, its description and justification might be of aesthetic value, but is of no practical value. The sensible heart of the criticism of ideal normative theories is that they lack transition programs, and without a detailed itinerary, we cannot have any confidence that their destination is a possibility for us. There may be no way to get there from here.
This criticism points out ideal theory’s incompleteness as a blueprint for reaching the good, but it does not establish ideal theory’s irrelevance, let alone its baneful effects. And while ideal theories typically offer no complete transition program, nothing about them dismisses this work. Doing ideal theory does not imply that we can ignore formulating educational programs and political strategies rooted in our best social theories and most informed historical understanding. Idealizing may be only one of the theoretical tasks contributing to moral and social betterment, but it is a useful one. Like the more specialized or narrowly focused theoretical work, ideal theory can help us understand how to achieve a more perfect world. Ideal theory’s vision sets a direction for the next concrete step. There can be no transition program without knowing what we are transitioning to.3 That ideal theory provides no detailed instructions for the journey only shows that it is not the only theoretical work needed for moral progress. But who said it was?
As to the claim that ideal theorizing is insensitive to our moral intuitions and pressing moral concerns, I’d claim that rather than blind us to actual injustice, ideal theory illuminates them. We judge an ideal theory by how well felt injustices are explained and unfelt ones revealed. If the felt injustices aren’t accounted for it is a deficiency of the ideal theory under consideration, not of ideal theorizing as such. If we are not sensitized to previously unfelt wrongs, the theory is of little help in making moral progress, but other ideal theories might helpfully uncover many and deep real injustices unnoted by contemporary moral consciousness.
Does ideal theorizing commit us to a stultifying vision? I do not dispute that our conception of the good changes, but ideal theory need not deny this. Justifying an ideal does not disallow future justifications of modifications of that ideal. An ideal theory need not claim its ideals are the last word in ideals, and it can even incorporate openness to new values and norms into its idealization. Ideal theory gives direction to our first steps. It strategically informs what is to be done now. But setting a direction does not lay rail tracks onto an unbending utopia parkway.
Related, but subtler criticisms of ideal theories are provided by Elizabeth Anderson. She argues, although she doesn’t put it quite this way, that idealizing leads to inadequate or positively harmful transition programs, or rather, that thinking of moral progress as implementing a transition program is misconceived. She claims that even tentatively held ideas of “the best,” are unnecessary and may misdirect us away from what is actually better; knowledge of the “best” is not needed for knowledge of the better, and what’s worse, may prevent improvement.4
It is quite true that we need not know what is best to know what is better, but we must know what is good to know what is better, and trying to understand what is best is a way of getting clear on what is good. Nothing is justifiably believed better than anything else without a conception(s) of the good and reasons to think that the “better” condition has more of the good(s) than the “not as good.” However tentatively held, an idea of goodness is required to believe things could be better. But how, asks the critic, does inquiry into what is best clarify what is good? Might it not instead defame or obscure the goods that are at hand, and ignore or acquit present evils?
Granted, idealizing can, as Anderson fears, distort evaluation and moral judgment; it can be dismissive of perspectives that would not ideally exist (e.g., the perspectives of members of an unjustly despised group),5 but do exist and need to be heeded. It can ignore a good that is only good in the nonideal context (affirmative action?), or endorse one that is only good in the ideal context (open borders?). But nothing essential to ideal theory entails such mistakes. Ever conscious of the context of constraints it works within, well done idealizing will be highly alert to the morally relevant changes wrought by further constraints. In a world without homophobia, perhaps it is just to refuse on a whim to sell a couple a wedding cake. It might be useful to know that given the delight humans take in indulging their whims, an ideal society would allow the whimsical refusal to sell wedding cakes. However, knowing that does not prevent us from knowing justice must weigh different considerations in a world burdened by homophobia. The idealizing might even highlight the injustice of refusing to sell same sex couples wedding cakes by making explicit the conditions that justly permit giving wide latitude for whimsical desires and how the absence of those conditions forbid whimsical discrimination.
Ideal theory’s relation to nonideal theories is similar to nonideal theories’ relation to reality, and serves a similar function—it describes what is better.6 Insofar as any distinction can be made between nonideal and ideal theorizing, the latter simply takes on only the constraints the theorist believes will always be inescapable for rational beings, or slightly less idealized, human beings, while the former takes on constraints the theorist believes early twenty-first century humans are stuck with for the time being.
The utility of doing ideal theory is made more perspicuous if we conceive of it not as attempt at constructing the “best”—that of which there can be no better—but instead as an of unending striving to imagine the “still better.” The transitive nature of “the better” relationship enables ideal theory to shed light on the comparative worth of more immediate options. So, for example, if two reforms promise equal, but different advances to a more just society, but only one of them offers a feature, which although of no value now, would be a virtue in an ideal society, that gives us some reason to pursue the reform that includes the potentially virtuous feature. Suppose we could increase satisfying, productive employment through investment in dedicated vocational programs or in vocational tracks embedded in liberal arts schools, and had little evidence that one would be more effective than the other. If a liberally educated general population is part of our ideal, then we have a reason to prefer integrating vocational training into a liberal educational context.
To be sure, we must be alert to a virtue in ideal conditions being a vice in our actual conditions, or allowing a large virtue in an imagined future prevent the pursuit a slighter but more immediately available good. Perhaps in current conditions mixing a liberal and vocational education would engender student resentment and thwart the training effort, or would diminish its results; the speculative good of a liberal education to the individual or society would seldom justify forgoing an immediately and more certain beneficial policy. Ideals can mislead. But the misuse of idealizing hardly demonstrates its uselessness, and the dangers its abuse poses don’t erase the benefits its circumspect engagement promises.
Finally, Anderson argues that ideal theory cannot learn from experience because it is not judged by experience. Ideal theory, she claims, sets the standards by which experience is evaluated, so our judgments of experience are forced to adjust to our theory rather than our theory adjusting to judgments formed by experience.
I believe this picture misrepresents ideal theory, depicting philosophical method as dogmatic theology. Ideal theory does not, at least not typically, present its findings as revealed truth, or matters of faith, irrefutable by logical or empirical evidence. Ideal theory demands no commitment to evaluate experience on the theory’s terms regardless of the intuitive appeal or consequences of those evaluations. Our moral intuitions are formed by personal, social, and cultural experiences of every type, and those same historically formed moral intuitions have the most prominent jury seats when pronouncing on the plausibility of an ideal theory. To speak of the norms provided by ideal theory as standards external to experience is to describe the formal role they have been nominated for, not the reasons for their election. And even once elected, the norms of ideal theory are liable to impeachment if experience demonstrates they perform poorly in office.
Idealizing, like nonideal theorizing, creates a normative structure and pronounces it good. But unlike God’s pronouncement at the end of each creative day, the ideal theorist declaration of goodness comes with reasons. Our intuitions and ongoing experience not only continually assess those reasons, they assess the practices those reasons have realized.7
NOTES
1. For a sampling of contemporary critiques of ideal theory see Anderson (2010) and Mills (2005). While related, criticisms of ideal theory should not be confused with criticism of the role of theory in morality. There are those who believe all theorizing about morality useless or unhelpful, whether ideal or nonideal. See Fotion (2014).
2. Cf. Rousseau’s (1762) taking men as they are and laws as that might be, Rawls (1971) making men self-interested but envy free.
3. Later I deal with the objection that we don’t need to know the ultimate destination to know where we should go next. The point here is only that we need at least a proximate destination to move at all.
4. Anderson (2010, 3).
5. Anderson (2010, 5).
6. This is more specific than Parfit’s (2011, 95) defense of idealization as revealing of information.
7. In As if: Idealizations and Ideals (2017), Kwame Anthony Appiah offers a similar justification of theoretical idealizations. However, there are three ways in which Appiah’s defense of idealizing differs from mine that are worth noting. Firstly, following Hans Vaihinger, Appiah describes idealizing as treating falsehoods as true. I think that is a misleading and unnecessary characterization. Instead, I think of idealizing, especially in moral and political theory, as treating possibilities as actual. This may seem to amount to the same thing because it is false that the possible is actual. But insofar as moral and political idealization is a species of practical reasoning, that is, figuring out what is to be done, it is future oriented. From our epistemic standpoint, no future event is in fact actual; all events are only possibilities. The decision to treat some current actualities as enduring and others as changeable is not a matter of recognizing some truths and ignoring others. Rather it is a matter of accepting (resigning yourself to?) the inevitable realization of some possibilities (treating them as if they will become actual) and then exploring which other possibilities are compatible with the inevitable ones. Ideal moral and political theory takes the possibilities whose realization appear dependent on voluntary, contingent human action, evaluates them, and commends, ceteris paribus, the best contingent possibilities’ realization. This way of describing idealization removes the connotation that idealizing is irrational because it traffics in falsehoods.
Second, Appiah’s embrace of pragmatism is more hesitant than mine, leaving the justification of idealizing more lightly anchored than it need be. Appiah emphasizes, quite rightly in my view, that idealizing’s justification requires that it be useful (2017, 156). But he offers no general account of utility, relying mostly on a gut pluralism (2017, 111) that claims we know utilities when we see (or imagine) them only in specified circumstances. This approach disallows more comprehensive idealizations because we cannot say what they are good for.
This second difference leads to a third: Appiah is reluctant to say what is good, and as I argue above, however tentative and undogmatic such account is, it is needed to provide an account of the better. While the best may be an enemy of the better, neither is recognizable without goodness. The robust epistemological pragmatism that this book adopts gives a general answer to the question what idealizations are good for—discovering ethical truth—and thereby secures them a central role in normative theory. Ethical truth itself, like all truth, receives its justification pragmatically. What a pragmatic justification of truth amounts to is discussed in chapters 3, 4, and the appendix.
