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 concur 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.

In this book my criticism of this posture is largely internal: I try to show that under the conditions of human existence, we cannot know what such an ideal would be—unless we disagree about it. Only those in a morally heterogeneous society have a reasonable hope of actually understanding what an ideal society would be like, but in such a society we will never be collectively devoted to any single ideal. The ideal of the realistic utopia of the well-ordered society tyrannizes over our thinking, preventing us from discovering more just social conditions. And, as Sen rightly observed, we will see that ideal theory forces a morally unattractive choice on us: fix local justice or pursue the ideal.

But, then, what is the moral status of an open, diverse society that is constantly disagreeing about justice? Chapter IV sketches a defense of the moral bases of the Open Society; I try to show how different moral perspectives can converge on a practice of moral responsibility and, importantly, how they can share each other’s insights to work toward improvements in the basic moral framework of the Open Society. I also indicate how societies that disagree about the ideal are morally more secure than those that have traveled significantly toward “well-orderedness.” The Open Society is not a chaotic cave; we should refuse to follow the philosopher who promises a path to a final end of moral agreement, the ideally just society. The Open Society is a moral achievement of the first order, allowing highly diverse perspectives to share a public world of moral responsibility, sometimes clashing, but often interacting in ways that make the world better for all, and allows us to better understand our different moral truths. Or so I shall argue.

I have been extremely fortunate in having been able to refine these ideas before a number of diverse audiences. Some material from chapter IV was delivered as the Brian Barry Lecture at the London School of Economics. Other parts of the project were presented at the Copenhagen Conference on the Epistemology of Liberal Democracy, the Workshop in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at George Mason University, the Kings College (London) Political Economy seminar, the 2011 Dubrovnik Conference organized by the Ohio State University Philosophy Department, the workshop on Fairness and Norms at the University of Tilburg, the University of Rijeka Scientific Colloquium, the Groupe de Recherche Interuniversitaire en Philosophie Politique workshop at McGill University, the Center for Human Values at Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania PPE workshop, the workshop on public reason at Darmstadt Technical University, the “Whither American Conservatism?” conference held at the University of Texas-Austin Law School, the Workshop on New Directions in Public Reason at the University of Birmingham, and meetings of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association and the American Political Science Association. My thanks to all the organizers and participants, whose objections and questions really have been critical in helping refine these ideas.

It was a treat and honor to discuss with Professor Sen the relation of these ideas to his own approach at the Rutgers Law School Symposium “The Idea of Justice.” Along the way, Christian Coons, Dave Estlund, Javier Guillot, Alan Hamlin, Mike Munger, and Shaun Nichols have offered valuable advice. I am particularly grateful to have had the opportunity to work away on these problems while visiting the Public Choice Research Center at Turku University and the Philosophy Department at the National University of Singapore; again presentations to those groups were most helpful in thinking these issues through. Keith Hankins and I coauthored a paper exploring some parts of this project, which we presented to the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill PPE workshop and the Workshop on Political Utopias organized by the Bowling Green State University Philosophy Department. Important material in chapter IV is drawn from my work with Shaun Nichols. My thanks to Keith and Shaun for letting me draw on this joint work.

The University of Arizona Philosophy Department is a truly wonderful place to think about a variety of issues in unorthodox ways; I am still astounded by the depth and breadth of our political philosophy group. Early on in this project Tom Christiano, Keith Lehrer, and I read Scott Page’s The Difference; the reader will be able to discern how important that was for my thinking. Later, Dave Schmidtz and I taught a graduate seminar on ideal theory and diversity; Dave and the graduate students constantly forced me to think of things in different ways, as any diverse group should. One of the wonderful things about great graduate students is that, no matter what the subject, they raise cool points that get you to think about your work in new ways. Consequently, my graduate seminars on Rawls, moral and social evolution, Hobbesian political thought, and norms and conventions, as well as the Social Choice Group, all made important contributions to this book. I am especially grateful to members of the Social Choice Group for reading a version of the manuscript—and finding problems. I hesitate to single out specific graduate students, for fear I will overlook someone who offered important advice. But he who hesitates is lost. My very special thanks, then, to Sameer Bajaj, Jacob Barrett, Piper Bringhurst, Joel Chow, Kelly Gaus, Adam Gjesdal, Keith Hankins, Brian Kogelmann, Attila Mráz, Julian Müller, Jeremy Reid, Greg Robson, Stephen G. Stich, John Thrasher, Kevin Vallier, and Chad Van Schoelandt.

Throughout this project, my longtime friend Fred D’Agostino has, time and time again, given me helpful advice and encouragement. His paper “From the Organization to the Division of Cognitive Labor” in many ways spurred the entire project. The other critical influence was the work of Ryan Muldoon. When I read Ryan’s dissertation, “Diversity and the Social Contract” (University of Pennsylvania) I was awestruck at its originality and thoughtfulness. The reader will see that I have some important disagreements with Ryan, and he would object to much of the analysis, but these, I think, pale in comparison to our agreement as to what a political philosophy for a diverse society must accomplish. My deep thanks, then, to Fred and Ryan. I am also very grateful to Rob Tempio of Princeton University Press for his early interest in this somewhat unorthodox project. I have greatly benefitted from the comments and suggestions of Princeton’s readers; the final draft is considerably better thanks to their ideas. Lastly, I would like to thank Paul Dragos Aligica, not only for encouraging my work, but for helping me see its relation to that of the Ostroms and institutional analysis. Paul’s work, coming from economics and political science, confirmed to me that diverse perspectives really can converge on the benefits of diversity and a defense of the Open Society.

1 As one famous philosopher once remarked to me, “if it has figures in it, it isn’t ethics.”

² See Landemore’s helpful reply to critics of “model thinking”: “Yes, We Can (Make It Up on Volume),” pp. 197–202.

³ See Robeyns, “Ideal Theory in Theory and Practice”; Brennan, “Feasibility in Optimizing Ethics”; Schmidtz, “Nonideal Theory.”

⁴ Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 17 (chap. 4, ¶4); Hobbes’s entire argument in ¶¶22–34 of chap. 47, comparing the Roman Church to the realm of fairies, is itself thoroughly metaphorical.

⁵ Cohen, Why Not Socialism?

⁶ Rubinstein, Economic Fables, esp. chap. 1.

⁷ Sen, “The Possibility of Social Choice,” p. 73.

⁸ The work of Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson is an exemplar of developing simple models, appreciating their insights, and then moving on to more complicated models that build on the simpler ones. See the progression of their models in The Origin and Evolution of Cultures.