Respect for persons and perfectionist politics

Philosophy and Public Affairs

Volumn 30, Issue 4, 2001, Pages 417-442

  Metz, Thaddeus ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34248075451     PISSN: 00483915     EISSN: 10884963     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1088-4963.2001.00417.x     Document Type: Article

References (26)

1. Joseph Chan, "Legitimacy, Unanimity, and Perfectionism," Philosophy & Public Affairs 29 (2000): 5-42. Parenthetical page citations refer to this text.
2. In this article I construe liberalism as a doctrine about civil liberty, specifically, the view that the state may not restrict the civil liberty of citizens in order to promote realization of a certain end. I do not use the term 'liberalism' to refer to any economic view, e.g., to the thesis that the state may take resources from the wealthy in order to promote the ability of poorer citizens to pursue ends in general.
3. John Stuart Mill's On Liberty is of course the classic utilitarian defense of liberalism. For the instrumentalist argument that liberalism would maximize the expected desire satisfaction of each relative to nonliberalism, see Jan Narveson, The Libertarian Idea (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988). A version of the old coliseum case tells against both teleological arguments for liberal rights to live as one sees fit; having a lion eat alive one randomly selected citizen for the entertainment of others could maximize both the general welfare and each person's expected desire satisfaction, supposing the audience were large enough and the selected citizen wanted to see someone eaten alive.
4. For example, John Rawls's contractarian argument for liberalism, in its most defensible form, has the parties select a conception of justice that will treat citizens as free and equal moral persons. See his Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
5. And Robert Nozick's rights-based argument for a neutral state is ultimately premised upon a Kantian injunction not to treat persons merely as a means. See his Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974).
6. In addition, since respect for the ability to make voluntary decisions would, on the face of it, mean letting competent people make stupid decisions, it is prima facie questionable to hold that the state treats citizens respectfully by enforcing policies that could not be reasonably rejected.
7. Things get even worse for the Kantian liberal if the reasoning process is idealized further to consist of perfect inferences from the best (available) reasons. For perfectionists often claim that a fully informed and clear thinking person would accept certain conceptions of the good. For example, Gerald Dworkin maintains that "rational men could reach agreement to limit their liberty even when other men's interests are not affected," and Richard Arneson claims that "an objective theory of the human good supported by best available reasons may well be controversial because rejected by some citizens, but should not be controversial, because it is not in the strict sense reasonably rejectable by anyone." See Gerald Dworkin, "Paternalism, " repr. in Joel Feinberg and Jules Coleman, eds., Philosophy of Law, 6th ed. (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 2000), p. 278;
8. and Richard Arneson, "Welfare Should Be the Currency of Justice," Canadian Journal of Philosophy 30 (2000): 523.
9. However, I argue below that something close is a realistic possibility.
10. Kantian liberals might be tempted to claim that even if all citizens could easily avoid perfectionism and freely chose to live under it, their choice would degrade themselves and hence may not justly determine law. But no Kantian liberal can coherently object on the ground that a perfectionist state's supporters would be degrading themselves in choosing to live under it. Why? A liberal by definition maintains that justice permits people to degrade themselves, so long as they are not directly interfering in the lives of others. Hence, even if one grants the claim that citizens would be degrading themselves in choosing to live under a nonliberal regime from which they could easily opt out, the liberal must admit that this claim does not entail that such a regime is unjust.
11. I do not address whether children must be able to opt out of nonliberal arrangements. It well be easier to answer this question after tackling the normal case of adults. For now I can say that since children are not fully competent agents, nonliberal policies are less suspect when applied to them.
12. See, for example, Lani Guinier, The Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democracy (New York: The Free Press, 1994).
13. I suggest one further condition below in Section V regarding the degree to which the nonliberal policies impinge on the primary goods of citizens. I am also sympathetic to the idea of adding yet another condition requiring that punishment be neither inhumane in quality nor disproportionate in quantity.
14. David Hume, "Of the Original Contract," repr. in Robert Stewart, ed., Readings in Social and Political Philosophy, 2d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 44.
15. We might wonder whether the open perfectionist theory of justice must be tied to the consent theory of political obligation. It need not be, or at least not obviously. Merely having the substantial ability to exit a nonliberal territory and remaining in the territory, even if sufficient for a nonliberal state to be respectful, is probably not sufficient for binding consent to let the state rule. Binding consent typically also requires knowing the fundamentals of what one is consenting to, intending to consent, and indicating this intention. Furthermore, the sort of free choice to reside in a territory necessary for consensually acquiring an obligation to obey a state might be stronger than that required for a perfectionist state to treat dissenters respectfully or otherwise be just.
16. Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 86.
17. See especially chap. 5 of this book, as well as chap. 8 of Kymlicka's Liberalism, Community, and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
18. Cf. John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 93-94.
19. A. John Simmons, Moral Principles and Political Obligations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 99-100.
20. Although Simmons is discussing the free choice necessary for obligation, we may read his remarks as bearing directly on the costs of leaving a state. For others who accept Simmons's reasoning, see Joel Feinberg, "Civil Disobedience in the Modern World," repr. in Hyman Gross and Joel Feinberg, eds., Philosophy of Law, 5th ed. (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1995), p. 130,
21. and George Klosko, "Reformist Consent and Political Obligation," Political Studies 39 (1991): 676-90.
22. As noted above, the Kantian liberal thinks of the burdens relevant to justice as losses of primary goods, not as a lack of any intrinsic goods. Hence, the dialectical argument against Kantian liberalism made in this article requires us, at a political level, to think of the worth of interpersonal relationships in terms of the extent to which they constitute or bring about primary goods. This argument does not suggest that we, at a personal level, properly value relationships only insofar as they promote generally useful means.
23. It might be that the parents are treating the family relationship disrespectfully, but a Kantian is fundamentally concerned with respect for the capacity to choose ends, not with respect for any type of relationship. Hence, even if the conservative parents are not properly valuing the parent-child relationship, this point is not germane to the dialectical argument being made here with respect to Kantian liberalism. The issue is whether the parents are treating their son's capacity for reasoned decision-making disrespectfully.
24. This point might help to ground a stronger claim for open perfectionism than I make in this article. Here I argue that open perfectionism avoids the most powerful objection a Kantian liberal can make to perfectionism; I maintain that open perfectionism is probably just as consistent with a Kantian perspective as liberalism. I do not show that a Kantian has any reason to prefer open perfectionism to, say, Kymlicka's multicultural liberalism (see n. 14). However, if it were true that access to a state is an important primary good, then it would be worth considering whether respect for persons might require granting citizens use of a state to promote a conception of the good. I look forward to exploring this line of argument in future work.
25. Unless such treatment tends to make women feel submissive in a way that would prevent them from exercising their exit options.
26. This slight hedge does not mean that moderate perfectionism alone can be part of a justified open perfectionism. Remember that "moderate perfectionism" refers, roughly, to a state that promotes rationally defensible conceptions of the good without direct coercion. I am claiming, in contrast, that open perfectionist states can be respectful at least if their rationally indefensible and directly coercive (viz., extreme) perfectionist policies do not involve a severe primary good loss.