The Tyranny of the Ideal: Justice in a Diverse Society

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 Changing 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