Ideal and Nonideal Theory

Philosophy and Public Affairs

Volumn 38, Issue 1, 2010, Pages 5-36

  Simmons, A John ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA   (United States)

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EID: 77951974378     PISSN: 00483915     EISSN: 10884963     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1088-4963.2009.01172.x     Document Type: Article

References (50)

1. The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
2. Samuel Freeman, Rawls (New York: Routledge, 2007).
3. Thomas Pogge, John Rawls: His Life and Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)
4. Catherine Audard, John Rawls (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007). An early exception to this neglect was Joel Feinberg's paper, "Duty and Obligation in the Non-ideal World," in Rights, Justice, and the Bounds of Liberty (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 252-64.
5. An early exception to this neglect was Joel Feinberg's paper, "Duty and Obligation in the Non-ideal World," in Rights, Justice, and the Bounds of Liberty (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 252-64.
6. "Despite the clarity of the distinction between ideal and non-ideal theory ." (George Sher, Approximate Justice: Studies in Non-ideal Theory [Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997], p. 2).
7. "The distinction itself is relatively unproblematic (and useful). ." (Alistair M. Macleod, "Rawls' Narrow Doctrine of Human Rights," in Rawls' Law of Peoples, ed. Rex Martin and David A. Reidy [Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2006], p. 145).
8. Sher, Approximate Justice: Studies in Non-ideal Theory, and Liam Murphy, Moral Demands in Nonideal Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
9. A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971) (hereafter TJ ), p. 245.
10. The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999) (hereafter LOP), p. 89.
11. The basic structure of a society is its "major social institutions," i.e., its "political constitution and the principal economic and social arrangements" (TJ, p. 7)
12. Rawls later characterizes the basic structure as "the background social framework within which the activities of associations and individuals take place" ( Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, ed. Erin Kelly [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001] [hereafter JAF ], p. 10).
13. Rawls at one point suggests that a realistic utopia concerns the "practically possible here and now," meaning what is practically possible in the "historical conditions of our age." The conditions of our specific age include "reasonable pluralism" (within liberal democracies) and diversity of culture and tradition between nations (LOP, pp. 11-12)
14. although neither of these "conditions" seems exactly to concern either human nature or the nature of political and legal institutions. This, of course, reflects Rawls's concern that his account of social stability in A Theory of Justice failed to take adequate note of the ineliminable pluralism of our age-pluralism both within liberal democratic societies and between the nations of the world (Political Liberalism [New York: Columbia University Press, 1993][hereafter PL], pp. xv-xviii)
15. And an institutional scheme that is unstable is not "practically possible" (in Rawls's sense of that idea). As a result, Rawls's conception of domestic justice is recast in Political Liberalism as a conception that could be accepted by proponents of all of the reasonable "comprehensive conceptions of the good" that are likely to flourish in a liberal society, while his "law of peoples" is similarly fashioned in order to be acceptable to all reasonable nations (or peoples) in the world. Oddly, however, Rawls appears to suggest as well (in the middle of The Law of Peoples) that although "the specific conditions of our world at any time" affect the appropriate conclusions of nonideal theory, they should not influence ideal theory (LOP, p. 90).
16. For further discussion of the point of the strict compliance assumption, see Zofia Stemplowska, "What's Ideal about Ideal Theory?" Social Theory and Practice 34 (2008): 331-40.
17. Rawls first suggests the idea of an international original position, so conceived, at TJ, p. 378. The idea is fully fleshed out in The Law of Peoples
18. By the time Rawls wrote Justice as Fairness, he appears to have conceived of the three parts of ideal theory differently, identifying "three levels of justice": "first, local justice (principles applying directly to institutions and associations); second, domestic justice (principles applying to the basic structure of society); and finally, global justice (principles applying to international law)" ( JAF, p. 11)
19. Domestic justice has priority over "local justice" in the sense that the former's principles "constrain (or limit), but do not determine uniquely" the latter's ( JAF, pp. 11-12)
20. Since the principles governing the ways in which individuals may associate locally (and the subsequent duties imposed on individuals by the rules of the voluntary associations they create) are only some of the moral constraints suitable to individuals in societies, I take the principles of "local justice" to be just one subpart of the more general category of principles for individuals. I suspect that Rawls's reluctance to continue directly discussing the more general principles for individuals stemmed from his concern that such language would encourage the (by this point rejected) idea that political philosophy was just one application of a more general, comprehensive moral theory, one that included the principles governing interpersonal life. But even after Rawls's insistence on the autonomy of political philosophy, he was, of course, still free to articulate a set of ideal principles for individuals. The only requirement was that these principles be conceived of as principles governing the behavior of citizens of just societies (rather than the behavior of persons in all settings), principles deriving from the needs of the just institutions defined by his autonomous political philosophy.
21. "The principles of paternalism are those that the parties would acknowledge in the original position to protect themselves against the weakness and infirmities of their reason and will in society" (TJ, p. 249).
22. I say "primarily" here, because the general conception, by itself, does not identify any departures from the ideal as more or less "grievous" than any other. And, as we have seen, the "grievousness" of injustices, as measured by the lexical order of the principle the injustice violates, is to serve as a priority rule in nonideal theory (see below). So Rawls writes, "When we come to nonideal theorywe do not fall back straightway upon the general conception of justice. The lexical ordering of the two principles suggest[s] priority rules ." (TJ, p. 303).
23. In Colin Farrelly's recent attack on Rawlsian ideal theory, he (oddly) supposes that its inclusion of "the absolute priority of liberty" indicates that Rawls "presumes rights are costless" and ignores "the realities of non-compliance and scarcity" ("Justice in Ideal Theory," Political Studies 55 [2007]: 844-64, at p. 853)
24. Rawls's ideal theory plainly involves presuming only that the "cost of rights" is significantly less than their value in decent economic circumstances, and that in less happy circumstances where this is not the case, principles of nonideal theory are to be followed instead of the lexically ordered principles of ideal theory
25. This organizational scheme seems not entirely adequate to characterizing noncompliance that is neither deliberate nor merely unfortunate-such as (individual) negligent injury of others or the institutional or national analogues of negligent noncompliance. It might, then, be better to divide noncompliance into the "blameworthy" and the "non-blameworthy."
26. The lexical ranking of the principle of justice that is violated by an injustice is to determine the relative seriousness of the injustice and the relative urgency of our response, thus setting a priority rule (TJ, p. 303) to function along with the three other requirements for policies in nonideal conditions.
27. Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, Bk. III, chap. 5, §§2-7. Feinberg discusses what he calls Sidgwick's "paradox of conservative justice" in "Duty and Obligation in the Non-ideal World," at p. 257.
28. The term "transitional justice" will thus be used here rather differently than its more common use to refer to the ways in which states address past human rights violations (during their transitions to social stability).
29. "Ideal Theory in Theory and Practice," Social Theory and Practice 34 (2008): 341-62, at pp. 347, 344-45.
30. As an Editor of Philosophy and Public Affairs pointed out to me, one might also object to Rawls's approach on grounds of intergenerational justice, arguing that the current generation should not have to endure greater burdens so that future generations might enjoy full justice. The Rawlsian response here should be, I think, to reemphasize the "moral permissibility" and "cost" restrictions stated above. An important part of the theoretical work to be done will presumably involve specifying the correct distribution across generations of the costs of doing justice.
31. R. G. Lipsey and Kelvin Lancaster famously argued (in "The General Theory of Second Best," The Review of Economic Studies 24 [1956-57]: 11-31) that if one of the conditions for Pareto optimality cannot be satisfied, the next best solution may involve moves away from what would otherwise be optimality conditions in other areas. But because there is no analogue of fixed, perfect justice in this efficiency model, second-best theory cannot here be transitional in exactly the fashion of Rawlsian nonideal theory
32. Moral Demands in Nonideal Theory, p. 4.
33. Joel Feinberg, Social Philosophy (Englewood Cliffs, Calif.: Prentice-Hall, 1973), pp.70-71.
34. In his discussion of Rawlsian nonideal theory, Feinberg gives no indication of which approach to nonideal theory he favors ("Duty and Obligation in the Non-ideal World,"pp. 256-57).
35. Theories of justice count as intuitionistic in Rawls's sense if "first, they consist of a plurality of first principles which may conflict to give contrary directives in particular types of cases; and second, they include no explicit method, no priority rules, for weighing these principles against one another" (TJ, p. 34).
36. "Duty and Obligation in the Non-ideal World," p. 252.
37. Although I cannot discuss it here, there is also a familiar (contrary) view that Rawlsian ideal theory is not ideal enough, that it is in fact too sensitive to facts about "the human condition," about economics, human psychology, etcetera. See, e.g., G. A. Cohen, Rescuing Justice and Equality (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008).
38. Allen Buchanan, Justice, Legitimacy, and Self-Determination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 61.
39. I leave to one side the fact that Rawls's own ideal theory, during the period between A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism, "evolved" from a theory apparently intended to have universal application to a theory only for the basic institutions of liberal democracies.
40. Justice, Legitimacy, and Self-Determination, p. 61.
41. Farrelly, "Justice in Ideal Theory," p. 860.
42. Charles W. Mills, "'Ideal Theory' as Ideology," Hypatia 20 (2005): 165-84, at pp. 168-69.
43. What needs to be avoided is not all "falsehood" in ideal theory, but rather only those idealizations that "build into a normative theory a false account of the social phenomena the theory itself aims to put under moral scrutiny, in this way severely undermining its potential for guiding action in the real world" (Laura Valentini, "On the Apparent Paradox of Ideal Theory," The Journal of Political Philosophy 17 [2009]: 332-55, at p. 352).
44. For further discussion of the problem of false assumptions in ideal theory, see Stemplowska, "What's Ideal about Ideal Theory?" pp. 326-29.
45. See, e.g., Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
46. "A conception of justice must specify the requisite structural principles and point to the overall direction of political action. In the absence of such an ideal form for background institutions, there is no rational basis for continually adjusting the social process so as to preserve background justice, nor for eliminating existing injustice. Thus ideal theory, which defines a perfectly just basic structure, is a necessary complement to nonideal theory without which the desire for change lacks an aim" (PL, p. 285).
47. Amartya Sen, "What Do We Want from a Theory of Justice?" The Journal of Philosophy 103 (2006): 215-38, at p. 222.
48. Sen has since incorporated these criticisms, favoring a more "comparative" approach over "transcendental" theories of justice (and in the process employing the same "Everest" example), in chap. 4 of The Idea of Justice (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009).
49. For a different and more general criticism of Sen's arguments, see Adam Swift, "The Value of Philosophy in Nonideal Circumstances," Social Theory and Practice 34 (2008): 363-87, at pp. 372-75.
50. Gopal Sreenivasan has defended a conception of "nonideal theory as anticipatory theory," for which "the priority [of ideal theory] assumption fails" ("Health and Justice in Our Non-ideal World," Politics, Philosophy and Economics 6 [2007]: 218-36, at p. 221)