The Tyranny of the Ideal Read online

  The Tyranny of the Ideal

  The Tyranny of the Ideal

  JUSTICE IN A DIVERSE SOCIETY

  Gerald Gaus

  PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

  Princeton and Oxford

  Copyright © 2016 by Princeton University Press

  Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

  In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

  press.princeton.edu

  All Rights Reserved

  ISBN 978-0-691-15880-8

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016930321

  British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

  This book has been composed in Linux Libertine

  Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For my graduate students, with thanks for all they have taught me

  For those who have eaten from the tree of knowledge, paradise is lost.

  —KARL POPPER, The Open Society and Its Enemies

  Summary of Contents

  Preface

  xv

  CHAPTER I

  The Allure of the Ideal: Orienting the Quest for Justice

  1

  CHAPTER II

  The Elusive Ideal: Searching under a Single Perspective

  42

  CHAPTER III

  The Fractured Ideal: Searching with Diverse Perspectives

  105

  CHAPTER IV

  The Nonideal: The Open Society

  150

  CHAPTER V

  Advancing from the Citadel

  241

  Appendixes

  251

  Works Cited

  265

  Index

  279

  Contents

  Preface

  xv

  CHAPTER I

  The Allure of the Ideal: Orienting the Quest for Justice

  1

  1 Orienting to Utopia

  1

  1.1 Beyond the Contemporary Debate and Its Categories

  1

  1.2 Of Paradise

  3

  1.3 Climbing

  5

  1.4 Dreaming

  11

  1.5 Recommending—Rescuing Justice from Uselessness

  16

  2 Social Realizations and the Ideal

  18

  2.1 Perfect Principle Conformity and Ideal Societies

  18

  2.2 Justice and Its Social Realization

  21

  2.3 How Well Justified Are Our Principles of Justice?

  26

  3 Modeling the Ideal (and Nonideal)

  29

  3.1 Setting the Constraints Regulating Coherent Social Worlds (One Sense of Feasibility)

  29

  3.2 The Aim of Ideal Theory

  34

  3.3 Abstraction and Idealization

  36

  4 Two Conditions for Ideal Theory

  39

  CHAPTER II

  The Elusive Ideal: Searching under a Single Perspective

  42

  1 Perspectives on Justice

  42

  1.1 Evaluative Perspectives and the Social Realizations Condition

  42

  1.2 Meaningful Structures and the Orientation Condition

  51

  1.3 Why Not Feasibility?

  56

  2 Rugged Landscape Models of Ideal Justice

  61

  2.1 Smooth v. Rugged Optimization

  61

  2.2 How Rugged? High-Dimensional Landscapes and the Social Realizations Condition

  67

  2.3 How Rugged? Low-Dimensional Landscapes the Orientation Condition

  72

  2.4 Ideal Theory: Rugged, but Not Too Rugged, Landscapes

  73

  3 The Neighborhood Constraint and the Ideal

  74

  3.1 Rawls’s Idea of a Neighborhood

  74

  3.2 The Social Worlds We Know Best

  76

  3.3 The Neighborhood Constraint and the Ideal

  80

  3.4 Progressive v. Wandering Utopianism

  84

  4 Increasing Knowledge of the Landscape and Expanding the Neighborhood

  89

  4.1 Experiments in Just Social Worlds

  89

  4.2 Improving Predictions: Diversity within, and the Seeds of It between, Perspectives

  93

  4.3 Introducing Explicit Perspectival Diversity

  98

  5 The Limits of Like-Mindedness

  101

  CHAPTER III

  The Fractured Ideal: Searching with Diverse Perspectives

  105

  1 Attaining the Ideal through Perspectival Diversity

  105

  1.1 From Full to Partial Normalization

  105

  1.2 Diversity of Meaningful Structures and Finding the Ideal

  107

  1.3 The Hong-Page Theorem

  111

  2 Dilemmas of Diversity

  114

  2.1 The Neighborhood Constraint (Again)

  115

  2.2 The Theorem and Actual Politics

  116

  2.3 The Utopia Is at Hand Theorem

  120

  2.4 The Interdependence of the Elements of a Perspective on the Ideal

  122

  2.5 The Fundamental Diversity Dilemma

  130

  3 The Benefits of Diversity

  133

  3.1 The Fundamental Diversity Insight

  133

  3.2 The Deep Insight of Hong and Page’s Analysis

  134

  3.3 Modular Problems

  135

  3.4 Recombination

  137

  3.5 Improving Predictions

  138

  4 Escaping the Tyranny of the Ideal

  139

  4.1 The Tyranny of The Choice

  139

  4.2 From Normalization to Deep Diversity

  144

  4.3 A Liberal Order of Republican Communities?

  145

  CHAPTER IV

  The Nonideal: The Open Society

  150

  1 Justice without Normalization?

  150

  1.1 Normalization and Determinate Justice

  150

  1.2 Sen’s Partial Normalization Theory

  154

  1.3 Muldoon’s Nonnormalized Contract

  165

  1.4 Not All Liberal Justice Is Fit for the Open Society

  173

  2 An Artificial, Open, Public Social World

  177

  2.1 On Creating a Public Social World

  177

  2.2 Polycentrism

  184

  2.3 Liberty, Prohibitions, and Searching

  187

  2.4 Reducing Complexity through Jurisdictions

  198

  2.5 Markets

  202

  2.6 The Moral and Political Constitutions

  206

  3 Rules We Can Live With

  208

  3.1 On Choosing without Agreeing on the Best

  208

  3.2 The Socially Eligible Set

  211

  3.3 Abandoning the Optimizing Stance

  215

  3.4 The Social Space of the Open Society

  220

  4 Imperfect Coordination on the Moral Constitution

  223

  4.1 Coordination as Diversity Reducing

  223

  4.2 The Cha
nging Moral Constitution

  226

  4.3 How Diversity Maintains the Open Society

  230

  4.4 The Perspectives of Reform and Order

  237

  CHAPTER V

  Advancing from the Citadel

  241

  1 Recounting the Journey

  241

  2 Adieu to the Well-Ordered Society

  245

  3 The Citadel of the Ideal

  248

  Appendix A. On Measuring Similarity

  251

  Appendix B. On Predictive Diversity

  261

  Works Cited

  265

  Index

  279

  Preface

  POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY IS AMBIVALENT ABOUT THE USE OF MODELS. FOR almost fifty years one model—the original position—has been a mainstay of political philosophy. From their nearly half-century obsession with the veil of ignorance and maximin, one might think that political philosophers love nothing more than an apparently interminable modeling dispute. The original position, however, is the grand exception: for the most part political philosophers have been wary of formal models.1 To be sure, some models have become part of the canon—the social contract, the Prisoners’ Dilemma, Arrow’s theorem—but for the most part, advances in modeling the problems of social and political philosophy have been made by political scientists and, especially, economists. To name just some of the towering figures, Kenneth Arrow, Ken Binmore, James Buchanan, Herbert Gintis, Russell Hardin, John Harsanyi, William Riker, Amartya Sen, and Robert Sugden have done remarkable work formalizing key problems in social and political philosophy. Happily we political philosophers can claim Cristina Bicchieri, Fred D’Agostino, David Gauthier, Jean Hampton, Gregory Kavka, Brian Skyrms, and Peter Vanderschraaf. Some younger political theorists—such as Hélène Landemore, Michael Moehler, Ryan Muldoon, and David Wiens—have developed innovative and insightful formal models, helping us to better understand the relation between disagreement, consensus, and pursuit of ideals in political life. Yet, overwhelmingly, the insights of all these thinkers have been resisted by mainstream contemporary political philosophy.2

  It is not that political philosophers do not employ models—they simply prefer narrative to more formal models. The use of metaphors, for example, pervades political philosophy, especially in recent writings on ideal theory. We find important analyses depicting ideal theorizing in terms of voyages of discovery, tunneling from the present to the ideal, filling in maps of social worlds, and, crucially, mountain climbing.3 Rather than being (as Hobbes claimed) simple abuses of speech4 or substitutes for good arguments (which they can indeed be), when they are useful, metaphors present informal models of problems in political theorizing. Think of G. A. Cohen’s camping trip, which without a doubt models a certain type of social world for us, and which political philosophers seem to have little reluctance to discuss.5 As Ariel Rubinstein has powerfully argued, we constantly employ narratives that model some important feature of the social world; they abstract from some variables and tell tales of simplified social worlds that bring out fundamental social and normative considerations, or social dynamics, that are easily overlooked, and they help make intelligible what seems unclear or mysterious—or show what seemed so clear is really deeply problematic.6 When we construct a more formal model we are not really doing something fundamentally different than in our informal ones: we are doing much the same thing in a more rigorous way, trying to better understand just what assumptions our narrative model was making, and where our narrative actually leads. We are still telling tales of possible worlds, but we can better see just how our tales work—why they work the way they do. In this book I analyze various formal models of how we might orient our understanding of justice by aiming at the ideal, how the ideal might orient our attempts to bring about a more just social world, and how we might understand the Open Society that forsakes a collective ideal of justice. These models are developments of familiar narrative models, such as I examine in chapter I. Although the basic ideas are continuous with familiar narratives, in chapters II–IV of this book I am more explicit in stating the assumptions of the various models, and where I think those assumptions take us. And, yes, the models will abstract and idealize (§I.3.3), as all theory must; when we formalize our models we are aware of where, and in what way, we have idealized or abstracted.

  “Those who are suspicious of formal (and in particular, of mathematical) models of reasoning,” observes Amartya Sen in his Nobel Prize Lecture, “are often skeptical of the usefulness of discussing real-world problems in this way.”7 As Sen goes on to point out, however, often our informal analyses of our problems do not fully appreciate their complexities: features of the problem that are almost invisible on an informal treatment can be brought clearly into the foreground when we think in more disciplined terms. This is especially the case with ideal theory, which, we shall see, makes complex claims about how the ideal seeks to orient our quest for justice. Chapters II and III show that once we get clearer about what way ideal theory is a distinctive alternative (say, to Sen’s resolutely nonideal approach), we shall uncover some rather surprising features of ideal theorizing, features that in my opinion show it to border on incoherence. Only a society that disagrees about the ideal can effectively seek it, but such a society will never achieve it. This is a strong claim; I will work up to it in small, and I hope, clear and careful steps. And more specifically in relation to Sen, chapter IV will show how his formal work in social choice aggregation reveals a path through some of the most perplexing tangles concerning social morality in a diverse society.

  Political philosophers opposed to a formal model often point out that some relevant variable has been omitted, some possible strategy not included. Now by their nature all models are incomplete: they build possible worlds that we understand by reducing complexity. The aim is to gain understanding of our complex world through understanding a simpler one that captures key elements, which are obscured when we consider the problem in all its complexity. Good modeling has two features: it is aware of when and where it has simplified and, having explored the insights of simpler models, moves on to look at how things change when we add a bit more complexity.8 I shall proceed in small steps, trying to capture more and more complications as the analysis proceeds. So a plea for patience on the part of the reader—the analysis of chapter II commences with a fairly simple model, the inadequacies of which will be the focus of later discussions. Of course, even at the end, the analysis will capture only some things, not everything. The fundamental question for philosophic modeling, as it is for all philosophy, is whether we have gained insight through constructing a clear analysis.

  One reason that political philosophers often recoil at more formal approaches is that we (and I do mean “we”) are not typically math whizzes. As in my On Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, I seek as far as possible to present these formal models (as a game theorist friend of mine puts it) “in words.” When words fail me, I employ graphical representations; only in one or two places do I employ (simple) algebraic equations. I have also used extensive examples—both contrived and actual—to clarify the various points; and I have built in some redundancy regarding statements of the core ideas. Any political philosopher should be able to work through the presentation; no doubt some pausing and rereading will help, but I have tried to minimize the need for it. When readers disagree with me, they should know precisely on what point and why. I take this to be an advantage, not a liability.

  While my method is considerably more formal than the standard in political philosophy (although informal in the context of other disciplines), my aims are not simply analytic, but normative (at least on my understanding of normative). As Karl Popper stressed in his great, frequently disparaged The Open Society and Its Enemies, political philosophy has often been under the spell of a Platonic conviction that there is an ideally just social arrangement, that wise people would eventually concu
r on it, and that our actual political practice should orient itself by this ideal. We may not be able to achieve it down to the last detail, but it should be an aspiration that guides, and gives meaning to, our political existence. Popper wrote when Marxism, the great twentieth-century ideology of the ideal, was a powerful political program, threatening the very existence of the Open Society. I count myself as immensely fortunate that this particular pursuit of the ideal is no longer a practical political worry. It no longer threatens political tyranny over us. But within the academy, and especially current Anglo-American political philosophy, the allure of the ideal is as powerful as ever. The sophisticated work of G. A. Cohen, of David Estlund, and even that of John Rawls (who, we will see, has a much more ambiguous place in ideal theorizing) inspires political philosophy to imagine perfectly just, morally homogeneous, “well-ordered” societies where we all agree on the correct principles, our institutions conform to them, and we all are committed to them. In comparison to this ideal of final justice and moral homogeneity, our actual diverse societies, with diverse religious, moral, and political perspectives, look like life in the chaotic cave. If only we could make some progress on a collective quest to the ultimate end of the homogeneity of the perfectly just well-ordered society.