Figure 3-1. Searching for justice on an economic perspective
The Fractured Ideal
Searching with Diverse Perspectives
And they said, Go to, let us build us a city, and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven. …
And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do. …
Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.
—GENESIS 11
1 ATTAINING THE IDEAL THROUGH PERSPECTIVAL DIVERSITY
1.1 From Full to Partial Normalization
IN THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER WE SAW THAT A SINGLE, FULLY NORMALIZED perspective confronts The Choice: it must choose between local improvements in justice and the pursuit of the ideal. The necessity for The Choice follows from the very core of ideal theory, that the Social Realizations and Orientation Conditions can give different answers as to what social states are “closer” to ideal justice. The Social Realizations Condition measures the justice of a social world in terms of its inherent justice (so, in one sense, the more just a social world, the closer to the ideal), but the Orientation Condition measures proximity to the ideal in terms of the similarity of the underlying structure of the social world, and so a reform that moves us closer to the ideal on the Social Realizations Condition can lead away from it given the conception of proximity expressing the Orientation Condition. The Choice is made much more troubling by the Neighborhood Constraint. If we had comprehensive knowledge of the entire landscape of justice, we would at least know, when we turn our backs on local improvements, just where the ideal lies, and just how ideal it really is. Perhaps the main worry then would be the feasibility of getting to the ideal (§II.1.3).1 But the Neighborhood Constraint implies that we almost certainly do not have such knowledge; we know near social worlds better than far-off ones. If the ideal is not in our neighborhood, no single perspective can be very confident just where, or what, it is.
As I have noted, all too often ideal theorists respond to this with sheer denial. We do, they assert, have comprehensive knowledge of far-off social worlds; we know how utopia would work as well as how America in 2016 does. I join Popper in dismissing this as sheer delusion; the case for deep uncertainty in our understanding of the workings of far-off worlds is overwhelming. However, there is a much more sophisticated response available to the ideal theorist. A proponent of the ideal may acknowledge that we do not have comprehensive knowledge of the landscape of justice—no single perspective on justice could ever have a complete knowledge of the justice of all social worlds. Every perspective is always learning, searching the landscape, trying to find better optima—better utopias. At the close of the last chapter we saw, though, that a diversity of perspectives can mitigate some of the constraints faced by a single perspective in searching the optimization landscape (§§II.4.2–3). This insight has been elegantly and powerfully developed by Lu Hong and Scott E. Page, who demonstrate that—under what, prima facie, seems to be a modest set of conditions—a certain group of perspectives that agree on some parts of perspective Σ but disagree on others will locate the ideal.2 Specifically, what the work of Hong and Page suggests is that such a group of perspectives is one that concurs on the core elements of Σ’s normative theory of justice, but disagree on how they understand the similarity of social worlds in the domain {X}. Let us call such a group of perspectives evaluation-normalized versions of Σ. These perspectives all concur on the evaluative standards (ES), justice-relevant features of the worlds to be evaluated (WF), and the mapping function (MP). They disagree, however, in the similarity ordering of the worlds (SO) and the distance metric (DM), which determine the similarity of any two social worlds in {X}. Recall that ES, WF, and MP jointly satisfy the Social Realizations Condition, which requires that social worlds must be compared in terms of their inherent justice (§II.1.1); these have a sound claim to being deemed the core value elements of a perspective. Those who agree on these three elements agree on what each social world looks like (its justice-relevant features) and the overall justice of each world. Looking at some world, they would always agree on its features (WF) and on how just it is (ES, MP). Thus core normative agreement is secured by agreement on these three parts of a perspective. Let us denote all perspectives that share these evaluative elements of Σ, ΣV. Perspectives that include ΣV can have radically different similarity orderings of the domain of worlds to be evaluated and distance metrics; in terms of our basic landscape model, all perspectives in this evaluative core of perspective Σ agree precisely on the justice score of every world, so they concur about the placement of every world on the y-axis; but they may disagree about any world’s location on the x-axis. Given this, Hong and Page’s analysis would appear to show that members of ΣV, working together, will outperform any single member of the ΣV family in locating the ideally just social world, as all members of ΣV understand it. Thus an ideal theory that refuses to fully normalize its perspective, but opts instead for only evaluation normalization (ΣV), seems able to find the ideal without making claims that any single perspective (one composed of all five elements) has comprehensive knowledge of the landscape of justice.
1.2 Diversity of Meaningful Structures and Finding the Ideal
Before turning to the details of Hong and Page’s analysis, we can get an intuitive grasp of how a team of sophisticated ideal theorists (who share an evaluative core of a perspective) might employ their work by considering a real-world example. Suppose that instead of searching for the most just social world among a set of possible worlds, our team is searching for the most just state within a domain or set of actual states. If they are genuinely searching, of course, they do not yet know which is the most just state. They know that there is a most just state in the domain, but not what member it is. Because team members concur on the evaluative core of a perspective (state features, evaluative standards, and mapping function), they all concur on where any given state should be placed on the y-axis. However, because they do not share the similarity ordering and/or distance metric, they may disagree on a state’s location on the x-axis. Suppose one member of the team has a straightforward economic similarity metric, which arrays states simply in terms of per capita GDP; a state is similar to another if and only if it has a similar per capita GDP.3 Figure 3-1 uses this perspective to search for the most just state among a group of twenty selected current states: Brazil, Bulgaria, China (PRC), the Czech Republic, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Jordan, Macedonia, Madagascar, Mexico, Moldova, Pakistan, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Serbia, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe. Justice is understood in the classical liberal sense of the best protection of individual rights and autonomy.4 (Note: figures 3-1 to 3-3 label only the states in the group that are “local optima” on a perspective—states at the top of a gradient.)
Note that on the economic perspective in figure 3-1 there are nine local optima. Although there is certainly some correlation between high GDP and protection of individual rights, seeking justice on this perspective does not create a smooth optimization problem. Suppose a perspective searches for the ideal via a simple climb-the-gradient strategy: if it finds itself on a slope, this strategy instructs it to climb up to the peak, but it will never go down a gradient.5 Such a procedure will thus never embark on a path that leads to worse results—it “climbs” only “upward.” The downside to this strategy, however, is that it will get stuck at the first local optimum it comes to, which are rather abundant on this perspective. To be sure, if the search commences with the very richest states, the global optimum (the Czech Republic) will be quickly hit upon; but from any other starting point there is a deep valley between the global optimum and all other states. Suppose that another member of the team has a different, more libertarian, perspective that arrays states according to their economic freedom, as in figure 3-2.6
Note that for every state, this perspective fully concurs with the first with regard to justice scoring. This perspective, however, employs a different similarity metric; as a result it eliminates local optima at Honduras, Moldova, and Madagascar, while adding optima at Mexico and Guyana. Assume the simple per capita GDP perspective is stuck at Honduras, Moldova, or Madagascar and it asks the economic liberty perspective, “Can you see any way that goes up from here?” The economic liberty perspective will, since it will still be on a gradient; in contrast, the GDP perspective will never get stuck at Mexico or Guyana, so the two perspectives can assist each other. Nevertheless, we have quite a few shared local optima; if they are both on one of these neither can see a way upward. Now add a third member of the team, employing a more political perspective. On this third perspective the underlying structure of the relevant aspects of states concerns how well their government functions, whether its elected leaders determine economic policy, whether the government is free from corruption, and so on.7 Figure 3-3 gives this perspective on the problem.
The only optima shared by all three perspectives are the Czech Republic, Brazil, and Serbia: if each perspective can rely on the other members of the team to get it over its own local optima, (and, we shall see that is a very big “if”), our diverse team is bound to at least get as high as 13 on the individual rights protection scale. (At Brazil or Serbia none of the three perspectives can see a way upward.) Notice that alone, no single perspective can be assured of doing that well. This is true even though the third perspective is in an obvious sense the best perspective; its understanding of the similarity of states tracks the underlying structure of the rights protection problem better than the others (it has fewer local optima). As we shall see, this is an important point: under certain conditions a diversity of perspectives does better than even the best alone.
The crux of our example is how searching a rugged landscape can be improved by what we might call a handing-off-the-baton dynamic.8 A perspective takes the baton (it takes charge of the search) and runs uphill as far as it can, to a local peak. But on some other perspective this is not a peak, so the baton can be handed off to it, and then it will run uphill until it comes to one of its local optima, where it will hand off the baton to yet another perspective that is still on an upward gradient. Hong and Page have identified conditions under which this general type of dynamic is guaranteed to find the global optimum—when the ideal is guaranteed to be discovered.9 At least in some of its core suppositions, their theorem fits well with the model of ideal theory developed in chapter II, as they (i) suppose precisely the sort of rugged landscapes that underlie ideal theory (§II.2.4.) while (ii) showing under what conditions a diverse community will locate the ideal. They thus appear to prove the conditions that guarantee locating utopia! No small feat.
Page provides an excellent informal discussion of the conditions of the proof.10 (i) The optimization problem has to be sufficiently difficult such that no single perspective always finds the global optimum. I stressed this point throughout chapter II; if the optimization problem is smooth, then a single perspective will climb to the global optimum on its own. But then, as I have stressed, orientation via the ideal is not necessary for the search for justice. (ii) At the same time, the problem cannot be too complex. Page glosses this as “the problem solvers are smart,” and this parsing is at the heart of Hélène Landemore’s use of the Hong-Page theorem in her excellent account of democratic deliberation—indeed, as she puts it, the problem solvers cannot be “too dumb.”11 Recall our perspective on height, which sees the underlying meaningful structure in terms of the alphabetical ordering of first names (§II.2.1). This perspective created maximal ruggedness; the height measure (y-axis), is uncorrelated with the name ordering (x-axis). It thus gets constantly caught at local optima; a group of perspectives like this cannot make much progress on the problem of finding the tallest person. However, this assumption is not really only about whether perspectives are “dumb” but also about whether the problem is “easy enough.” The real question is whether perspectives understand the problem as posing a very high-dimensional landscape (a maximally rugged one) (§II.2.2). In such landscapes there really are no gradients (each point’s justice is uncorrelated with its neighbors), and so no one can really make progress in solving the optimization problem. In maximally rugged landscapes there are a great number of poor local optima at which the group can get stuck.12 Under conditions of maximal complexity, then, increased diversity does not promote optimization.13 We can understand the gloss of this condition as the problem solvers are “not too dumb” in the sense that they find the problem sufficiently tractable—they possess perspectives in which the underlying structure is correlated with the optimization problem. Nevertheless, I believe it is better to focus on the question of complexity: if we are confronting Kauffman-like complexity catastrophes (§II.2.2) we may all be “dumb.”
Notice that Hong and Page’s conditions (i) and (ii) are essentially the conditions that, on other grounds, I have argued are presupposed by ideal theory: the landscape is not too smooth and not too rugged (§II.2.4). Too smooth and the optimization problem can be solved by simply “climbing” the gradient; Sen’s climbing model is perfectly adequate to this task. Too rugged, and we are all “dumb.” Given this convergence of the conditions of the proof with the underlying problem ideal theory presupposes, the proof appears manifestly apropos to the modeling of ideal theory.
(iii) The third condition supposes that in the relevant group of problem solvers, the only element of the domain that is an optimum for each and every member of the group is the global optimum. Think back to our searching for the best rights-protecting state (§III.1.2). By the time we included our third perspective, the team shared three optima: the global optimum (the Czech Republic), and two lower optima (Brazil and Serbia). Our team with three perspectives thus did not meet condition (iii), and that is why it is not certain they would find the global optimum. If we add other perspectives in which neither Brazil nor Serbia are optima, then the handing-off-the-baton dynamic will inevitably lead to the Czech Republic, as it would be the only optimum shared by all perspectives.
(iv) This brings us to the fourth condition: our collection of ΣV perspectives, seeking to solve the problem, must be drawn from a large and diverse set of perspectives, in particular a diverse set of similarity orderings. ΣV itself must be a goodly sized group; the more difficult the problem, the larger the group should be. This fourth condition allows that the group of problem solvers certainly need not be the whole population (the transaction costs of joint problem solving in such a large group would be very high), but our collection of ΣV perspectives must still be diverse and “contain more than a handful of problem solvers.”14
Given conditions (i)–(iv), Hong and Page derive the “Diversity Trumps Ability Theorem”: in our terms, a randomly selected group of ΣV perspectives will outperform a more homogeneous group composed of the “best problem solvers”—those perspectives with the smoothest optimization landscapes. Moreover, Hong and Page’s simulations show that even if these conditions are not perfectly met, “a random collection of agents drawn from a large set of limited-ability agents typically outperforms a collection of the very best agents from that same set.”15 For our purposes the crucial point is not the formal theorem’s specification of the conditions under which randomly selected ΣV perspectives are guaranteed to beat the best perspectives, but the dynamic that drives diverse groups to generally outperform homogenous perspectives, even very good ones.
When I analyzed the elements of a perspective in chapter II (§1), some may have thought that similarity and distance measures would be difficult to devise, and so are controversial. The Hong-Page theorem indicates that this is all well and good. If adherents of an ideal theory could agree on the evaluative standards, relevant world features, and mapping relations, but came to different conclusions about the similarity ordering and the distance metric, they could more effectively locate the ideal than if they had agreed on all five elements. The core lesson to be learned is that different ways of looking at an optimization problem are more effective than looking at it in the same way, even if that is the best way.
Hong and Page’s work on diversity is important and remarkable; I certainly do not wish to disparage it. Indeed, political philosophers should pay it much more attention. Landemore’s excellent work has led the way, making a powerful case for the applicability of Hong and Page’s work to political problem solving.16 Nevertheless, as I shall show in this section, it relies on critical additional assumptions that are not always clear; when we interrogate these assumptions, we shall find that its implications for ideal theory are far less sanguine than first appears.
2.1 The Neighborhood Constraint (Again)
The most obvious limitation of its results for thinking about ideal theory is that it does not recognize a Neighborhood Constraint (§II.3). As was explicit in our example of the search for the best rights-protecting state, each perspective has full knowledge of the justice scores of each element in the domain. We supposed that each perspective, when some world is brought to its attention, knows how that world scores in terms of justice (the y-axis). And this is critical to the analysis: when the per capita GDP perspective proclaims that it is stuck at Moldova with a score of 9, the economic liberty perspective locates Moldova on its perspective, agrees that it is a 9, sees that it is not a local optimum, and so can carry the baton further than 9, and (as it turns out) can go up to Macedonia, which scores 11. Now if the set of worlds to be searched is itself a neighborhood on which all perspectives converge, then within that neighborhood the Hong-Page theorem is applicable to our problem; it nicely shows how diverse ΣV perspectives can better explore a common neighborhood. But the rub here is that diverse perspectives tend to disagree on the neighborhood—which is precisely why they can help each other. A neighborhood of the domain {X} is a function of a perspective’s similarity ordering (SO) and its distance metric (DM). To put the point somewhat simplistically: it is precisely because diverse ΣV perspectives concur on the ordering of the elements on the y-axis (the justice scores) while disagreeing on the ordering of the x-axis that the diverse group can climb up the y-axis. But the diversity of the x-axis, unless very constrained, inevitably produces a diversity of neighborhoods. If we again go back to our perspectives on rights protection, on the GDP perspective Brazil and Romania are neighbors, while on the economic liberty perspective they are far apart; it is this very diversity of neighborhoods that drives the result, but which severely limits its applicability to ideal theory. Let us call this:
The Neighborhood Diversity Dilemma: Diversity of ΣV perspectives improves the search within a neighborhood, but as we increase diversity of ΣV perspectives, they disagree about what our current neighborhood is.
Given that the heart of the Hong-Page theorem is the benefits of high diversity, but high diversity almost surely means the perspectives disagree on the neighborhoods, its applicability to our problem seems limited indeed.
2.2 The Theorem and Actual Politics
It needs to be stressed that this does not imply that the Hong-Page theorem is of limited applicability in all political contexts, such as collective deliberation. If a group concurs on the domain of options and the scores of each option are known by (or agreed to by) all, Hong and Page’s analysis gets real traction in explaining why collective decision making is apt to outperform individual judgments—even expert ones—in actual deliberative contexts. Landemore and Page have recently argued that consensus in identifying the best solution to a problem is a plausible assumption in many political contexts. “We assume then that participants have already reached consensus on the criteria for evaluation [ES] and how those criteria will be weighted [MP (part ii)].”17 Note that they suppose agreement on some of the elements of a perspective as understood in this work, the evaluative standards and the mapping function’s weighting task.18 Given this, they argue that we should expect consensus on what constitutes the best solution (the global optimum); indeed, given how we have understood a perspective here, this may seem to follow.
The problem, however, is that agreement on simply the evaluative standards and the weighting procedure will produce agreement in the overall evaluation of options only if the evaluation does not depend on predictive modeling of how the features of the option will actually function together. As Landemore and Page note—and as we have seen in §II.4.2—in predictive tasks disagreement may lead to better results than consensus.19 If, however, Alf’s conclusion about the ultimate value of an option depends on predictions about how that option will function, and so how well its functioning will meet the shared evaluative standards, Betty will always agree with him on the global optimum (and the value of less-than-optimum solutions) only if she also shares his predictive models.
To see this better, consider Landemore’s example in which she postulates a problem for the French government in selecting a city for an experimental program.20 “Three députés are deliberating, one from Calvados, one from Pas de Calais, one from Corrèse. They are aware of different possible solutions …, each of which have a different value for the experiment. On a scale of 0 to 10, a city with a value of 10 has the highest objective value for the experiment. Each of the cities that a given député might offer count as a local optimum. … The goal is for the group to find the global optimum, that is, the city with the highest objective value.”21 The députés and their perspectival optima are summarized in figure 3-4. We can see that, as required by assumption (iii) of the Hong-Page analysis, the only optimum shared by all three is Caen, the global optimum. On something like Landemore’s version of the story, as given in figure 3-4, Alfred might get stuck (indicated by 
) at his local optimum at Marseille; Betty can carry the baton to Paris, but she gets stuck at a local optimum there (); Charles can take it to Grenoble before halting at a local optimum () but Alfred can take the baton back, and arrive in Caen.
The important assumption here is not simply that the députés agree on their evaluative standards and trade-off rates, but that all three députés, when they run their predictive models of how well each city will serve these agreed-on weighted evaluative standards, concur on the best city. This would be the case only if, as I have said, they all share an evaluation normalized perspective ΣV, which includes the same predictive models, and so once a particular solution is pointed out, all members of ΣV concur on the predicted value of the option. This is why, I think, the example looks a bit contrived as a case of actual politics. What we would expect is variance of predicted outcomes when they apply different predictive models. Even if they share the same fundamental values, then, people who employ different predictive models are apt to disagree on the value of options.22 Their different predictive models will lead them to disagree on the overall value of the options—their ordering along the y-axis, not just how they array them along the x-axis. The assumption that they all share the ΣV perspective, and so entirely agree about the scoring of each option in the domain, turns out to be very strong indeed, at least in many instances of actual politics.
At this point we might invoke the Diversity Prediction Theorem (§II.4.2), and hold that the députés could pool their predictive models. As Landemore and Page consider, the députés might engage in a high-level deliberation about the comparative benefits of their different models, which can improve the toolkits of each. But Landemore and Page are hesitant about recommending a procedure that leads to consensus on predictive models: “it need not be more advantageous to reach a greater consensus following deliberation in the predictive context.”23 As they show, if each predictor moved a step closer to the average prediction, no gains in group prediction would be generated.24 This is a consequence of the Diversity Prediction Theorem; even if Alfred’s moving toward the average prediction increases his predictive reliability, the group as a whole has lost an element of predictive diversity, and given that a unit of predictive diversity is equal to a unit of predictive accuracy, the average predictive performance of the group will not be increased.25 We might imagine a deliberation in which the députés would first make their models explicit, discuss how they work, pool them for some purposes, but also continue using their original, divergent, predictive models. Thus in one sense they agree (insofar as they are using the pooled results), and in another sense they disagree (because they continue to use their diverse predictive models), as to which city would work out best for the experiment. It is hard to see how this would work in practice, much less as an approximation of actual politics.
We thus must wonder about the broader persuasiveness of Landemore’s claim that the “four conditions for this theorem are not utterly demanding.”26 Although this may be plausible if we restrict ourselves to simply the formal conditions (i)—(iv), the worry is about the supposition that all share, or can be brought to share, the full ΣV perspective. For us to be confident that Hong and Page’s model really applies in a case such as this, the different perspectives must employ predictive models that agree about the scores of each city. Of course it does not follow that as soon as any disagreement on the scoring of the elements is introduced the Hong-Page search model becomes irrelevant, but it does mean that the more it is the case that the perspectives score the options differently, the less applicable the theorem. When perspective Betty announces that she has moved from Marseille at 7 but is stuck at Paris with a score of 8, Charles might reply “pas question!”—you just moved from 7 to 6!
2.3 The Utopia Is at Hand Theorem
Although the Hong-Page Theorem does not recognize neighborhoods in which confidence about the terrain is much higher than in outlying areas, Page discusses a second theorem that can do so. According to what he calls the “Savant Existence Theorem … for any problem there exist many perspectives that create Mount Fuji landscapes.”27 There are always arrangements of the elements in {X} (social worlds) that create Mount Fuji landscapes. Showing this is trivial in our simple one-dimensional similarity space: take the ordering of scores on the y-axis from high to low, and rearrange the x-axis to correspond to this ordering. This will yield a Mount Fuji landscape. There are many such possible landscapes for any optimization problem. If we can show that our problem is a smooth optimization landscape, the conflict between local and global optimization is entirely obviated (§II.2.3). Note that in principle for any landscape, no matter how rugged, there exist alternative arrays of the x-axis that generate a smooth optimization problem. This is, I think, the motivation behind interpreting the second condition of the Hong-Page theorem in terms of the smartness of the perspective rather than the difficulty of the problem: there is, in principle, some perspective that turns every difficult problem into a simple one.
A more modest version of the Savant Existence Theorem might be called:
The Utopia Is at Hand Theorem: There are in principle ΣV perspectives according to which Σ’s ideal is within our current neighborhood.
This is a “more modest” version of the Savant Existence Theorem as it does not require a reordering of the similarity dimension such that for all social worlds in {X} there is a smooth optimization landscape. It requires “only” that a subset of {X}, which includes the current world and the global optimum (and we assume some other nearby social worlds) are ordered such that they form a neighborhood. Neither does it require that within this neighborhood there is a smooth, Mount Fuji landscape. “All” that is required is that Σ’s global optimum is within our current neighborhood. We have a potentially compelling result: there is in principle always some ΣV perspective on the problem of ideal justice that shows that Σ’s utopia is in the neighborhood of our current social world. This would mean that The Choice (§II.3.3) may be avoided—pursuit of the ideal and of local justice can be one and the same.
In the abstract it may seem easy to rearrange the elements of a domain. What is not easy is to arrange them in a way that expresses an intelligible similarity ordering of the features of the relevant social worlds (WF)—to show that this new arrangement of the domain {X} exemplifies a meaningful structure that relates social worlds (§II.1.2). If I think that, say, a socialist camping trip—like utopia—is far away from our current world, and you arrive at a perspective in which it is adjacent, this could be immensely enlightening—if I can agree that the way you have structured the worlds really does capture similarities that mine has missed. And then I may come to the conclusion that I can share your deeper knowledge of the ideal, as it is much more like our current world than I ever contemplated.28 But if your perspective on {X} seems arbitrary or implausible, or misses critical characteristics, I will dismiss your “savant” perspective, and its claims to have brought the ideal into my neighborhood. It is no mean feat to impose a meaningful structure on social worlds in a way that brings very close what looks, on my current perspective, to be very far away.29
In social thought such revolutionary changes in perspective have no doubt occurred. Perhaps liberalism itself was such a reconceptualization. At one point Western societies faced the problem of which false religions to tolerate. Even in his Letter concerning Toleration, Locke still was struggling with this view. While he thought it would promote the good of the commonwealth to tolerate dissenting Protestants, extending toleration to Catholics might decrease justice (an England that tolerated Catholics was far from his own); and extending toleration to atheists would be even a further social world.30 But, no doubt without being fully aware of it, Locke was pushing toward a more Mount Fuji liberal landscape, in which each additional right of conscience and speech advanced justice. Eventually the early modern problem of which false creeds to tolerate was transformed into the problem of increasing freedom of thought and belief, where the options of which creeds to tolerate were arrayed in something much closer to a smooth optimization landscape. Once one arrays the social worlds in terms of their liberty of conscience, the world in which Catholics are tolerated is very close to that in which Protestant dissenters are, and tolerating atheists is just a step beyond that.
However, this revolution was not simply rearranging worlds with a fixed set of justice-relevant properties and social realizations: it was coming to revise some judgments about the ways social worlds work (for example, social worlds that insist on uniform religious practice were not more harmonious and stable, as was traditionally thought), as well as coming to appreciate new evaluative standards, such as personal dignity. That is, the change did not just occur within a stable ΣV perspective: it revised some of the core normative elements of the perspective itself—the evaluative standards, the world features, and the mapping relation. This example raises an important question: how radically can the similarity ordering of domain {X} be rearranged without also revising the perspective’s evaluative core (ES, WF, and MP)?
2.4 The Interdependence of the Elements of a Perspective on the Ideal
We have defined the ΣV perspectives as agreeing on the standards of evaluation (ES), the properties of the social world (WF), and the mapping function (MP). These perspectives secure agreement on the overall evaluation of the justice of all social worlds in the domain. The core results we have been examining derive from allowing the similarity ordering (SO) and the distance metric (DM) to freely vary while holding the other elements constant. It is important to stress that a great deal of variation in the similarity ordering is required to yield strong conclusions that we are very likely to find utopia, or that the ideal can be “brought” within our neighborhood.
Hong and Page’s results manifestly presuppose that the similarity ordering can be varied freely without affecting the evaluative core of a perspective, including its overall justice judgments of a social world. This is the main lesson of our example of the search for the best rights-protecting states. The GDP, economic liberty, and political functioning perspectives radically rearranged the similarity ordering, but they had the same set of evaluations over the same set of options. However, this sort of complete independence of the similarity orderings from the evaluative core cannot occur on the model I have been developing, for the similarity orderings are based on the perspective’s nonholistic evaluations of the justice-relevant features of social worlds.
To see why the model developed here is inconsistent with the assumption of complete independence of the similarity orderings from the evaluative core, suppose for the moment we accept the assumption. Assume further that we have an admissible perspective on the ideal, ΣV. Such a perspective, it will be recalled, does not engage in holistic evaluation, as this would result in a high-dimensional, essentially random perspective on justice (§II.2.2). Admissible ideal justice landscapes are moderately rugged; very similar neighbors have correlated justice scores (§II.2.4). Take, then, three worlds from the domain {X}, a, b, k. Assume that on Alf’s version of ΣV b is a world with almost exactly the same world features as a, with only the slightest recognizable difference. Now because of interdependencies between the justice-relevant features of institutions and background facts, worlds that are structurally extremely similar may be significantly more divergent in their overall justice. Nevertheless, on Alf’s version of the perspective two adjacent social worlds, a and b, have very similar justice-relevant features, and because the evaluation of a’s and b’s justice is based on nonholistic evaluations of these justice-relevant features, a and b must have correlated justice scores. Now take some randomly selected world k, and assume some version of the ΣV perspective, Betty’s, that adopts a similarity ordering such that k is between a and b. Our initial assumption (complete independence of the similarity orderings from the evaluative core) says that this is consistent with keeping the evaluative core of this perspective. But note that, because it is randomly selected, k can have any justice score in the entire range allowed by the ΣV perspective. So on Betty’s version of the ΣV perspective, it would follow that even though worlds a and k are adjacent they need not have correlated justice scores. Even though world a is, on Betty’s version of ΣV, very similar to k, knowing the justice of world a tells Betty nothing about the justice of k. The evaluation of any social world is based on its features, but here we see almost identical features result in uncorrelated justice scores. By iteration we could ensure this is true of all pairs in the domain {X} on Betty’s version of the perspective. This would produce a maximally high-dimensional landscape, where there is no correlation between any adjacent elements, and so no neighborhoods (§II.2.2). Such a perspective can result only if (i) the evaluation of the justice of social worlds was not a function of their features (WF)31 or (ii) the evaluation of those features was maximally holistic (any change in features produces entirely uncorrelated judgments). But our model of an admissible perspective on justice precludes both. It denies (i), since justice is indeed the result of the evaluation of world features, and our limitation on admissible perspectives on ideal justice prohibits (ii). Thus we have arrived at a contradiction: we assumed that that ΣV was an admissible perspective, but Betty’s version of it is not. Admissible perspectives cannot allow complete independence of the similarity orderings from the evaluative core.
It does not follow that a stable evaluative core cannot allow any differences in the similarity orderings on our model: differences within the same neighborhood are certainly allowed (§II.4.3). Consider the five economic systems sketched by Rawls, and much discussed in the current literature: “(a) laissez-faire capitalism [the classical system];32 (b) welfare-state capitalism; (c) state socialism with a command economy;33 (d) property-owning democracy; (e) liberal (democratic) [market] socialism.”34 Consider three different similarity orderings of these systems:
Alf: a–b–d–e–c
Betty: a–d–b–e–c
Charlie: e–a–d–c–b
I assume we are at world b (noted in bold above), a capitalist welfare state. Alf’s ordering is an intuitive continuum of economic structures.35 At one end is the classical system of economic freedom (a), embracing a strong system of private property and markets. Next to the classical system is the welfare state (b), keeping both these institutions and leaving property largely unregulated, with the proviso for state provision of basic welfare; property-owning democracy (d) might be seen as a development of welfare state egalitarian capitalism; market socialism (e) a step further away, as it gets rid of private property, while state socialism (c) continues on in this direction, rejecting both markets and property. Now we can imagine that Betty sees, and evaluates, the worlds in the exact same way, but has a somewhat different ordering. As in Alf’s, property-owning democracy is next to our current world, but Betty’s perspective emphasizes its deep reliance on markets and property and thus sees it as neighboring a, the classical world. Moving to market socialism (e) would thus be moving away from private property, thus going in the opposite direction. While the differing orderings of Alf’s and Betty’s perspectives can, I think, be plausibly construed as seeing economic systems in the same way, but with some slight difference in which features are emphasized in making similarity judgments, Charlie’s ordering seems to be picking up on very different features. As Charlie sees it, our welfare state is next to state socialism, which, in turn, is next to property-owning democracy. To explain this, it seems plausible to conjecture that Charlie’s similarity ordering is so different because he fundamentally differs in the features of the economic systems he is picking out. But this means that this difference in similarity must be linked to differences in the evaluative core of the perspective (relevant world features, WF). But if the features to be evaluated differ, then we must suppose that the overall evaluation will as well. Again, the assumption of the independence of the ordering from the core of the evaluative features is most dubious.
Because of its importance and power, it is useful to reflect on what changes in our model would accommodate Page’s understanding of perspectives. If those accommodations are plausible, then perhaps we should alter our initial model (§II.1) rather than dismissing the relevance of the Hong-Page theorem to ideal theory. To clear the way for application of the theorem it is necessary to, as it were, cut loose the similarity ordering from the core evaluative elements. Recall again our initial example of searching for the best rights-protecting state (§III.1.2). The states were ordered along a dimension that did not identify properties that were directly evaluated by the evaluative standards, but by some additional property that the perspectives hypothesized is correlated with a state’s overall justice. Thus one perspective identifies GDP, another economic liberty, and the third political functioning as the basis of similarity judgments, but none apply the evaluative standards to these features: the perspectives all evaluate the same justice-relevant features of states directly relating to personal autonomy and individual rights.36 So, in terms of our model, they do agree on the evaluative standards, mapping functions, and relevant features, but they do not rely on these relevant features when deriving similarity, employing instead some entirely different feature that, they suppose, is correlated with the overall judgments of justice.37 It is in this way that the similarity ordering floats free from the judgments of the evaluative core.
This is a puzzlingly roundabout way of orienting the quest for justice, the distinctive feature of ideal theory. If a perspective has identified the features of a social world that are relevant to evaluating its justice, the best way to orient the quest for justice surely is by focusing directly on these relevant features, rather than selecting some proxy dimension that is not itself to be evaluated for its justice, but is supposed to be correlated with justice. Page’s conception of a perspective makes sense when we are confronted by a different sort of problem: when we have a reliable way of evaluating the overall score of an option, but are uncertain of the features that give rise to the score. Suppose, for example, we are constructing a component for a computer system, and we know that the best product will be one that optimally combines modularity with other components, reliability, and low cost, but we are not certain what underlying features will result in high scores on these dimensions.38 Here a perspective would plausibly postulate some dimension that, it believes, tracks increasingly better solutions, but this would not be a direct function of the underlying features.
Page’s model of a perspective then makes most sense when the investigators agree on how to score a solution, but not on the features on which the scores depend. Thus there is no need to include the relevant features in Page’s notion of a perspective, for, in a fundamental way, those are what we are uncertain of. The diverse perspectives can employ different understandings of the salient features of each member of the domain because they have, as it were, a common test for judging the overall value of each element. As Landemore and Page put it in a recent essay, it is as if all the perspectives assume that there is an oracle who gives the correct answer, which all accept. “A problem-solving task consists then of generating potential solutions and identifying the best from among them. In this pure problem-solving context, we implicitly assume the existence of an oracle, namely a machine, person, or internal intuition, that can reveal the correct ranking of any proposed solutions.”39 So perspectives endorse the same elements to be evaluated and the same oracle but can disagree about the relevant features that give rise to the oracle’s judgment.
Let us consider how the Utopia Is at Hand Theorem (§III.2.3) looks assuming Landemore and Page’s understanding of a perspective, but allowing our basic Neighborhood Constraint. Recall that the crux of the Utopia Is at Hand Theorem is that there is some utopian perspective according to which the ideal, which seems far away from our present world on our current perspective is, as it were, next door on the utopian version. Let us call the utopian version Ulysses’s perspective and the current version Betty’s. Figure 3-5 makes this concrete with an example of a six-world domain, with three-world neighborhoods. Notice first that Betty’s and Ulysses’s perspectives concur on the justice score of each world in the set (column 2), as accepting the same oracle requires. Betty identifies certain fundamental features {f g}, of a, our current social world, as critical; she then draws on some dimension that yields similarity judgments for other possible worlds (in this case b and c) that form her current neighborhood. Thus on Betty’s perspective, the local optimum is b, with a justice of 15. Ulysses sees things differently. He identifies a’s fundamental features as {m n}, and given his similarity judgments, the most similar worlds are e and u. And, of course, u is both the local and the global optimum. So on Ulysses’s perspective the ideal is within the current neighborhood.
But why would they think they are actually talking about the same social worlds, at least when they are not talking about the current one? Given that they do not ascribe the same features to the social worlds, it seems doubtful that they could even communicate to each other which worlds they are describing. Recall figure 3-5 and the world designated as “b.” If Betty’s perspective is analyzing a world composed of {f h} while Ulysses sees the structure as based on {n q}, in what sense are they talking about the same possible social world at all? In our earlier example of states protecting individual rights, we had independent identification of the elements of the domain (existing countries with names); in Landemore’s example there was also a domain (French cities) with names attached. As Page stresses, if there are artifacts that can be independently identified, then we can deeply disagree about their properties while agreeing what we are talking about.40 Although figure 3-5 designated this world as “b,” that begs the question in describing possible social worlds—we do not have names designating each world. A possible social world is designated by its features, and it is precisely about these that Betty and Ulysses disagree. Deep perspectival disagreement, in other words, will prevent them from characterizing certain social worlds in terms that others are capable of understanding as the same “thing.” Betty and Ulysses thus do not agree on the domain, {X}, to be evaluated.
Suppose that this problem could be overcome, and Ulysses and Betty could agree on a way to identify social worlds, say by their causal histories (such as “the world that would be produced by pulling the red lever.”) Nevertheless Betty would be perplexed by Ulysses’s claim to have identified the ideal. His perspective radically disagrees with hers about the relevant features of the social world yet somewhat miraculously concurs on their justice. Why should worlds of {i, l} and of {m, p} have the same justice score? There is no test through which they can run these worlds to determine their overall justice; all they can do is apply their predictive models to these features, and evaluate them according to their evaluative standards and mapping relations. If different features are being evaluated by the same evaluative criteria, then we would expect variance in their justice. Of course there may be cases where the justice of worlds with different features happen to be identical, but it seems a bit fantastical to expect (let alone assume) that this could be true for every social world. Surely Betty’s most reasonable conjectures are either that Ulysses’s perspective is simply erroneous, or that it he is using a different set of evaluative standards too, and, thus, Ulysses does not in fact share Betty’s evaluative standards or weighing system. If, however, Ulysses is confused, or has very different evaluative standards, it is not clear that Betty has much to learn from him. This is different from saying that Ulysses’s perspective does not make sense to Betty; but it is to maintain that she would have a very difficult time making sense that there could be so much difference in what is being evaluated (what the relevant features of the social world are), yet this does not affect their overall justice scores, only the terrain on the x-axis.
2.5 The Fundamental Diversity Dilemma
We can thus see why the Hong-Page theorem, based on their specific notion of a perspective, is inappropriate to ideal theory (but see §III.3.2). A theory of the ideal needs to fix on the justice-relevant features of possible worlds to identify them, and, on the basis of these features, construct a similarity ordering. And so the impressive formal Hong-Page results are not of central relevance to us after all. A more fundamental lesson from the forgoing, though, is that as perspectives become more deeply diverse their ability to communicate with one another is hampered.41 Perspectives that are similar, but see things in somewhat different ways, obviously can help each other to overcome the Neighborhood Constraint. Alf’s perspective may alter the neighborhood or call attention to justice-relevant features that Betty’s overlooks. At some point, however, as the perspectives diverge they simply see things in what will seem to each puzzlingly different ways. Perhaps as with Betty and Ulysses they radically disagree about what constitutes the neighborhood and the features of the world that are relevant. In one way, as Hong and Page show, this should be a great resource, helping perspectives to overcome their own limitations by confronting those who understand the optimization problem differently. However, although embracing deeper diversity improves the odds of identifying the global optimum and/or bringing it into our neighborhood, at the same time it reduces our ability to meaningfully share this information. Betty and Ulysses may disagree about so much that she cannot understand how his purported discoveries are relevant to the ideal that she is trying to find. Empirical analysis tends to confirm this, indicating that those with very different outlooks have difficulty communicating and coordinating with one another.42 Overall, we are apt to disagree about the value of alternative social worlds, the identification of those worlds, and what the reports of other perspectives actually mean. As with the Tower of Babel, our collective effort to reach heaven can collapse into mutual incomprehension.
We thus have arrived at:
The Fundamental Diversity Dilemma: As we increase diversity of perspectives we can bring the ideal closer to our world, but as diversity increases we disagree about the justice of alternative social worlds, including that of the ideal.
A community drawing on multiple perspectives has the potential to increase the effective size of its neighborhood, as well as to bring the ideal closer to it. But perspectives on the ideal are integrated. A perspective has a certain similarity ordering because it sees certain institutional and other features as relevant to justice; these features are the basis of its evaluation of the overall justice of a social world.43 When a perspective applies its mapping relation (including its predictive models) and its evaluative standards to these features it arrives at an overall justice score. Small variance in any of these may not make much of a difference, but substantial diversity in one element reverberates throughout the perspectives. We might call this diversity contagion: diversity is introduced into one element of a perspective, it induces diversity in another, and this in turn produces more diversity. We have seen that the sort of robust independence of elements of a perspective (ordering, features, overall evaluation) supposed by Page’s insightful model of perspectives largely (though not entirely) avoids this contagion;44 however, it is an inappropriate conception of a perspective for the pursuit of the ideal. On the more appropriate model we have developed, if two perspectives on utopia differ much in one respect they substantially differ in others as well. When substantial and systematic differences set in, perspectives end up searching “different landscapes.”45 Thus, instead of seeing themselves as diverse teams exploring the same evaluative core, diverse philosophers create deeply different perspectives and so different landscapes of justice.
The upshot of our analysis is that it is very difficult to “manage” evaluative diversity,46 if this means allowing “just the right” amount of diversity to solve an optimization problem (say, by admitting views that orient the search for justice in helpfully different ways) without introducing deeper diversity (as, for example, about what worlds are the most just). These differences fracture the optimization landscape into multiple landscapes with people searching for divergent ideals, and so our searches often have little interest to others. Ensuring that large groups are diverse enough to effectively find new solutions to shared problems is difficult indeed. Authoritarian regimes have often learned this lesson the hard way. Stuck in the mire of approaching problems of reform in the same orthodox way (employing the orthodox perspective), such regimes have often sought to allow diversity of perspectives within in the limits of the orthodox ideology. Glasnost and Perestroika were the shining examples of the late twentieth century. In the twenty-first century Chinese communistic capitalism is another attempt—its efforts to manage diversity include the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Of course none of this is to say that such efforts cannot succeed, but they seem inevitably to rely on force, intimidation, and oppression.
3.1 The Fundamental Diversity Insight
I have been canvassing some of the problems arising from diverse perspectives, problems that I believe pose insurmountable obstacles to effective use of the Hong-Page theorem in a theory of ideal justice. But that this formal approach is not as helpful as it initially appeared by no means implies that diverse perspectives are not a great boon for a society that seeks greater justice, or better pursuit of the common good. The companion to the Fundamental Diversity Dilemma is
The Fundamental Diversity Insight: Any given perspective Σ on justice that meets the Social Realizations and Orientation Conditions is apt to get caught at poor local optima; other perspectives can help by reinterpreting the problem or applying different predictive models, showing better alternatives in Σ’s neighborhood.
The Fundamental Diversity Insight is the positive lesson to be learned from our examination of Page’s pathbreaking work. While we must be skeptical that the formal Hong-Page theorem is of direct relevance to our problem, an underlying lesson remains. Yes, different perspectives can have great difficulty communicating, especially in ideal theory, where it may be very hard to know whether we are talking about the same social worlds at all. And yes, as perspectives differ, normative disagreement arises, so that in the end the perspectives are exploring different landscapes (optimization problems). A society that embraces deep perspectival diversity will be one of deep normative diversity. But none of this shows, as Fred D’Agostino puts it, that the different perspectives cannot ever “get it together.”47 It shows, rather, that getting it together is the really difficult task; diversity’s benefits are by no means automatic, but neither are they always beyond our reach.
Of course we learn in multitudinous ways from each other. Other perspectives uncover features that our way of looking at the world neglected. In the last generation feminist perspectives certainly have played a fundamental role in alerting almost all theories of justice to features of the social world that were all-but-invisible to them. Feminists explored features of the social world, such as the family and language, that simply did not register as critically important to most traditional political theories. Here, Landemore and Page are certainly correct that the force of the better argument can produce convergence on parts of perspectives.48 Some claims of feminist perspectives have been accepted by liberal, conservative, and other perspectives, while others could not be integrated, and the perspectives remain distinct, pointing to different views of justice. All of this is as important as it is familiar—I shall not seek to rehearse these considerations. Let us focus on those benefits highlighted by our model.
3.2 The Deep Insight of Hong and Page’s Analysis
Recall Popper’s and Elster’s fundamental insight that a reasonable utopian theory must admit that its ideal is constantly revisable (§II.3.4). However, we cannot suppose—as perhaps Wilde did—that once “humanity” lands at Σ’s utopia, Σ adherents will be able to see from there the “better country” for which they should now set sail. After all, Σ supposed that it was landing at an island with the highest peak. It may be so lucky as to constantly see further and higher, but there is no reason to expect so. The critical feature of Hong and Page’s pass-the-baton dynamic is that, when Σ has done as well as it hoped, some other perspective may share enough while also differing enough with Σ that it can, as we put it, see a way upward (§II.1.1.2). Suppose a traditional socialist perspective saw socialism as the abolition of “capitalism,” understood as “markets-with-private property.” And suppose that socialism thus understood was secured (as it was in much of the world in the early and middle twentieth century). Now enter another perspective, which sees “private property-with-markets” as not a single feature (or two that always march hand-in-hand), but two quite different features, and so “state socialism” could be improved by “market socialism.” In a stylized history of ideas, we might understand this as a claim of the perspective of Tito’s Yugoslavia.49 It shared enough with Soviet state socialism to make intelligible to the Soviets the claim that “according to our understanding, ‘socialism’ should distinguish much more sharply markets and private property, and the improved socialist ideal lies in accepting the former but not the latter.”
A perspective does not need to “land” at its utopia to understand this. What can be done after arrival can be done before—deliberating with allied perspectives to see what properties it has overlooked, or what properties it has mistakenly bundled. And what holds for the highest peak also holds for all peaks from which it cannot really see the “next destination.” It is other, differing but related perspectives, that are most likely to see overlooked superior alternatives—ones that the original perspective can appreciate it has overlooked. This is the great insight of the handing-off-the-baton dynamic, even when the conditions for the formal proof are not met. It is a deep and important idea that we must not overlook, though remaining skeptical of more ambitious attempts to use the Hong-Page model.
This is another case where we tend to learn the most from those whose perspectives have more in common with ours. D’Agostino, though, has fruitfully analyzed the social epistemology of more radical forms of perspectival disagreement. Even perspectives that differ on all five of our elements can, perhaps with modification, adopt solutions from other perspectives to help solve problems. To borrow an idea from D’Agostino, when a problem is of a modular nature, its solution by one perspective can be fitted into that of others.50 One of the noteworthy features of social democratic perspectives in Western Europe and the United States in the 1990s and the first decade of this century was concern about improving the quality of delivery of social services. While traditionally many social democratic perspectives saw the relation between providers and recipients in resolutely antimarket terms, a number of social democratic governments and parties adopted efficiency criteria from more traditionally liberal or libertarian perspectives to improve delivery of public services, such as health care and education. Although these social democratic perspectives did not simply adopt the evaluations of health care and education arrangements of more free market–friendly perspectives, they did see that for some particular problems central to the social democracy, features stressed by free market perspectives (such as aligning agent incentives closer to those of principals) were also features relevant to justice as understood by the social democratic perspective.
As I have stressed earlier, institutions can have important interdependencies (§II.2.1), and so what we take as a “modular” solution may be more embedded in other commitments than we first realized, leading to much more radical changes than initially contemplated. Whether a problem is modular is something we discover. Consider, for example, the evolution of the Labour Party in the United Kingdom, from its early twentieth-century founding to, say, its perspective at the turn of the twentieth-first century. By taking over efficiency and market considerations as part of its perspective, it came to the point of explicitly rejecting what was a fundamental commitment—“the common ownership of the means of production”—as one of its official aims.51 Learning from other perspectives and revising one’s own perspective are deeply intertwined activities. Of course this sort of dynamic is to be expected if we accept Popper’s (and my) basic point—that we learn what our ideal is as we seek it (§II.3.4).
Different perspectives can recombine to form new perspectives. At times this process is carried out radically and quickly, when diverse political perspectives recombine into a new one. One remarkable instance of this was the emergence in 1950s America of “fusion” conservatism, fusing conservative traditionalism with classical liberalism, most notably in the work of Frank S. Meyer.52 Meyer insisted that traditional conservatism “was far too cavalier to the claims of freedom, far too ready to subordinate the individual person to the authority of the state.”53 Whereas traditional American conservatives such as Russell Kirk upheld James Fitzjames Stephen’s critique of Mill’s defense of liberty, Meyer defends Mill: “The only alternative to the moral rule of liberty is to enthrone the sad tendency of human history as right, to glorify with James Stephen ‘the man of genius who rules by persuading an efficient minority to coerce an indifferent and self-indulgent majority.’ … Liberty is the political end of man’s existence because liberty is the condition of his being. It is for this reason that conservatism, which in preserving the tradition of this truth, is only consistent with itself when it is libertarian.”54 It was not only Mill—Meyer insisted that Adam Smith and the Austrian economists such as Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, and Hayek must be integrated into an adequate American conservatism for the twentieth century.55 “Fusion conservatism” had a profound effect on American conservatism in the latter part of the twentieth century and continues to this day. “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. … Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”56 is not the rallying cry of a traditional conservative.
This is but one example. Liberalism has recombined with versions of socialism, producing an egalitarian liberalism, distinctly ambivalent about private property and the market. In the first part of the twentieth century, this “new liberalism” sought to merge the socialist ideas of the United Kingdom labor movement with traditional liberal concerns to produce a “Liberal Socialism.”57 To L. T. Hobhouse, one of its chief architects, liberal “individualism, when it grapples with the facts, is driven no small distance along Socialist lines.”58 In the United States, John Dewey pursued a similar recombination project, more Marxist than Hobhouse’s.59 Recently we have witnessed fusions of feminism or environmentalism with various liberal, socialist, and conservative worldviews. And, as our example of “bleeding heart libertarianism” in §II.2.1 indicates, products of recombination such as egalitarian liberalism themselves can be combined with doctrines such as libertarianism.60 The diversity of perspectives has led to yet more new perspectives, each with their own distinctive understanding of the ideal—ones which, at least to their proponents, are more adequate than the perspectives out of which they arose.
Throughout the last two chapters I have stressed the heavy reliance of ideal theories on predictive models. To evaluate possible social worlds we rely on predictive models as to how their institutions operate—when the worlds are far off, I have argued, we must rely on these predictive models and very little else (§II.3). When the concern is the interaction of the institutions in social worlds very dissimilar from our own, the accuracy of these models is, to be generous, not high. We have already seen how predictive diversity is critical in improving our predictive models (§II.4.2, appendix B). As Page notes, diversity contagion, which led to the breaking up of perspectives—producing different classifications of the relevant features of the world, different understandings of similarity, and so different optimization problems—also encourages perspectives to employ different tools for understanding their (differing) social worlds, with their different problems.61 As our perspectives differ, we develop new tools for modeling and predicting, and diversity of the tools is itself an important force in helping all perspectives better model their landscapes. As has been discussed (§III.2.2), whereas some features of Page’s analysis depend on agreement in perspectives, diversity of predictive models helps everyone better search their own justice landscapes.
4 ESCAPING THE TYRANNY OF THE IDEAL
Let us pause to take stock of some of our conclusions thus far. Recall first that an interesting ideal theory must meet the
Social Realizations Condition: T must evaluate a set (or domain) of social worlds {X}. For each social world i, which is a member of {X}, T evaluates i in terms of its realization of justice (or, more broadly, relevant evaluative standards). This must yield a consistent comparative ranking of the members of {X}, which must include the present social world and the ideal, in terms of their justice.
I claim that this is a condition for an “interesting” ideal theory in the sense that only an ideal theory that meets it identifies an ideal social world that allows us to compare its justice to our world and to intermediate social worlds. It is certainly conceptually possible to have a theory of the ideal that is like a dream (§I.1.4), from which, when we awake, we are uncertain how this dream world compares to our world, or whether there might be other worlds that fall short of the dream world but still are admirably just. But we have set dreaming aside. The Social Realizations Condition also requires that an interesting theory of the ideal be able to give us a prediction of how different worlds, structured by certain institutions and practices, will work out in terms of their overall justice. And that is because we wish to aim at the ideal—even if we cannot actually achieve the ideal “down to the least detail,”62 we can achieve approximations of it (§I.1.5). Recall Rawls’s conviction that “by showing how the social world may realize the features of a realistic Utopia, political philosophy provides a long-term goal of political endeavor, and in working toward it gives meaning to what we can do today.”63 But if we are to actually seek out the ideal—if it is to guide our quest for justice—we must know how this set of social and political institutions will work out under whatever constraints the theory deems morally relevant and fundamental to the human condition.
I added to this:
The Orientation Condition: T’s overall evaluation of nonideal members of {X} must necessarily refer to their “proximity” to the ideal social world, u, which is a member of {X}. This proximity measure cannot be simply reduced to an ordering of the members of {X} in terms of their inherent justice.
If the Orientation Condition does not hold, the ideal is unnecessary to orient our search for greater justice—when it is not met the pursuit of justice can be understood in terms of Sen’s climbing model (§I.1.3). If we could just climb up the Social Realizations ordering we would not need to orient ourselves by locating the global optimum. When the Orientation Condition is fulfilled we cannot simply move up the ordering to more just social states, eventually arriving at (or at least near) the global optimum in {X}. Increase in inherent justice and proximity to the ideal are distinct dimensions. On the model I have advanced, “proximity” is understood in terms of basic structures of the worlds; we have seen that the much-discussed idea of feasibility is unsuitable for the orientation function (§II.1.3).
In addition to these two conditions I have insisted that any ideal theory confronts the Neighborhood Constraint (§II.3): we have better knowledge of the social realizations of near worlds than of faraway worlds. Remember, the Orientation Condition requires that there be a dimension of similarity (the x-axis) that tells us something about the difference in the underlying structures of social worlds; the Neighborhood Constraint insists that our knowledge of justice is not uniform across this structure, but is, in general, a decreasing function of the distance a social world is from our current one. Now, to be sure, many ideal theorists will reject much of the rest of my analysis by simply denying this constraint: they will claim that we have as firm knowledge of the social realizations of institutions in worlds radically different from our own as of those that are very similar to the world we live in. One can say this, but since the Social Realizations Condition requires that we employ predictive models to judge how an interacting set of institutions will function, and since these models are very imperfect, predictions that rely on them alone will be of dubious accuracy. Roughly, in our neighborhood the justice of our current world is correlated with those that are close to it, and so small changes in the basic structure of our social world can be expected to have modest effects on justice within this vicinity. Outside of this area we are relying solely on predictive models that have a marked tendency to decrease in accuracy as we move away from observed conditions. Because any perspective’s understanding of the ideal is based on incomplete information and predictive models of uncertain reliability, its location of the ideal and the estimation of its justice are always subject to revisions, perhaps quite radical ones (§II.3.4). Popper was absolutely correct: “it is not reasonable to assume that a complete reconstruction of our social world would lead all at once to a workable system”64—much less the ideal system—because we simply do not know enough about the ways such a completely different social world would work. If a theory of utopia denies this then, as Popper says, it replaces inspiration for sound social science: as has often been the case, it is more of an exercise in fiction and imagination than an analysis that should seriously inform our recommendations about how to make our world more just.
If we take the Social Realizations and Orientation Conditions together with the Neighborhood Constraint, we have seen that an ideal theory is almost certain to be confronted with
The Choice: In cases where there is a clear social optimum within our neighborhood that requires movement away from our understanding of the ideal, we must choose between relatively certain (perhaps large) local improvements in justice and pursuit of a considerably less certain ideal.
We considered various ways to mitigate The Choice; diversity of perspectives can expand our neighborhood and move high optima into it. But we have seen in this chapter that anything but modest forms of diversity result in deep disagreement about the justice of social realizations and the ideal; if we keep anything near the normalized evaluative perspective supposed by any given ideal theory T, the Neighborhood Constraint can, at best, be modestly mitigated, and so The Choice will still confront T.
If the ideal theorist always refuses to choose the ideal over local improvement the ideal is not necessary for recommendations; it may still be an interesting intellectual exercise, but such an ideal political philosophy will fail to provide “a long-term goal of political endeavor, and in working toward it [give] meaning to what we can do today.”65 If the ideal is to be such a long-term goal, the ideal theorist must sometimes—one would think often—stress that we should pursue the ideal and so forgo possibilities to create a more just social world by moving away from the ideal to some near social arrangements. It is critical to stress that this must be the case: if the ideal theorist denies that such choices need ever be made, then Sen is right and we can do very well without knowing anything about the Mount Everest of justice, and should simply climb the hills that confront us. But if we really do need the ideal, then we must press: why should we forgo opportunities to create a more just social world so that we can pursue an uncertain ideal? Those who bear the cost of this pursuit will live in a less just world—their pleas must be discounted. The ideal theorist is convinced that we can give meaning to our political lives by pursuing an inherently uncertain ideal, turning our backs on the pursuit of mundane justice in our own neighborhoods. A tyrant rules in a manifestly unjust way; for us to be under the sway of an ideal theory is for us to ignore relatively clear improvements in justice for the sake of a grander vision for the future. And yet this grand vision is ultimately a mirage, for as we move closer to it, we will see that it was not what we thought it was, and in all probability we can now see that a better alternative lies elsewhere.66
Ideal theorists in the academy today are good democrats who would never think of taking political power in their own hands67 to pursue their visions of the ideal. But for those who remember their twentieth-century political history, the position that such theorists have talked themselves into is far too reminiscent of less democratic idealists. Recall that Lenin explicitly argued that his Marxian socialism “subordinates the struggle for reforms … to the revolutionary struggle for liberty and for Socialism.” He admonished those who advocated climbing models of “stages” from current injustice to socialism; “by coming out at this moment, when the revolutionary movement is on the upgrade, with an alleged special ‘task’ of fighting for reforms, … [they are] dragging the Party backwards and … playing into the hands of both ‘economic’ and liberal opportunism.”68
Even in democratic settings, we must seriously question an approach to political life that inherently encourages its adherents to neglect what, on their own view, are clear improvements in justice for the sake of pursuing an ideal, the pursuit of which gives meaning to their political lives or fulfills their dreams. When The Choice is made to pursue the ideal, the opportunity cost is the persistence of a less just condition, one that we can have higher confidence would be alleviated by moving to near social worlds. Surely, though, normative political philosophy should provide a reasoned response to deficits in justice, not a justification for ignoring them so we can seek “Paradise Island.” Political philosophers have not paid sufficient heed to Sen’s fundamental insight: what moves most of us, “reasonably enough, is not the realization that the world falls short of being completely just—which few of us expect—but that there are clearly remediable injustices around us which we want to eliminate.”69 To be moved by the former to the disregard of the latter is an all-too-common vice of the grand theorist, who demands too much from political philosophy—a firm orientation in understanding where our world stands in the conceptual space of justice, meaning in political life, a reassurance that humans are not too corrupt for justice, to feel at home in the political world, or to seek a social world where, finally, all is as it should be within the limits of human nature.70 These are noble aims, and certainly, all things equal, most of us would value securing them. However, under the very conditions that render ideal theory a distinctive and alluring project, pursuit of these noble aims often “subordinates the fight for reforms” to the pursuit of utopia. As I have been stressing, Sen would be entirely right, and the ideal would be unnecessary to the pursuit of justice, if our road to the global optimum did not confront us with The Choice.
4.2 From Normalization to Deep Diversity
The tyranny of The Choice derives from the assumption—which Rawls says is fundamental to the social contract (§II.1.1)—of supposing that we approach political philosophy through a normalized, or common, perspective on justice. As Page stresses, even really insightful perspectives on a problem (for example, the third perspective in our search for the best rights-protecting state, §III.1.2) can get stuck short of the global optimum, and, as I have argued, even insightful perspectives must confront the Neighborhood Constraint. Thus in this chapter I have focused on a collective pursuit of the ideal, drawing on diverse perspectives.
The problem, we saw, is that an evaluation-normalized perspective on the ideal, ΣV, which is necessary for effective collective pursuit of a common evaluative core (with shared evaluative standards, world features, and mapping relations) combined with robust disagreement on similarity and distance metrics is, in the end, an illusion. The parts of a perspective on the ideal are interconnected—as we introduce substantial differences in one element, other elements are affected. Disagreement about one element of a perspective typically supposes, or leads to, disagreement on yet deeper elements of the evaluative perspective. As Benjamin Ward once remarked in the context of economics, “almost every attempt to communicate across world views is an attempt to alter value systems.”71 Unless diversity is “managed”—unless there are institutionalized means for ensuring that some sort of disagreements do not arise, or that if they do, they are suppressed—we cannot expect such a common ideal of justice to arise via diversity. Absent institutions to manage diversity, what we should expect in a free society is that individuals will understand justice in deeply different ways, differing on all the elements of a perspective. Such a society will not agree about the ideal; in effect, different groups will be searching different justice landscapes. But, we might ask, having abandoned a collective search for a common conception of the best, does this mean that deep moral diversity is not an engine of moral improvement?
4.3 A Liberal Order of Republican Communities?
Recall D’Agostino’s distinction between “liberal” and “republican” communities of inquiry (§III.4.2). In a diverse liberal community, each “research team” explores the landscape generated by its perspective, using the heuristics and predictive models it finds most appropriate. “Each team will construct and traverse that region of the space which they find interesting.”72 This is consistent with maximum diversity, but, as we have seen in this chapter, it also encourages “justice teams” to develop views of the problem and solutions that may not be easily translatable into other perspectives. If the diverse perspectives are to put their findings together and so benefit from their diversity, they require something akin to D’Agostino’s “republican approach,” in which inquirers successfully communicate their results because they possess common standards of assessment.73 Given that the interdependence of the elements of a perspective produces a diversity contagion—diversity in one element of a perspective produces diversity throughout the perspective—an open society will not itself form a common, giant, republican community: the very engine of diverse searching leads, at least in the context of justice that has been our concern, to deep diversity according to which different perspectives have disparate views of the nature of an ideally just society.
However, the “liberal” and “republican” approaches are not inconsistent: an overall liberal, open society may contain numerous republican communities which, because they are similar enough, some version of the Hong-Page dynamic can get traction, and so they can reap the benefits of diverse (but not too diverse) searches. They are able to share their results within their communities and so improve their collective understandings of justice. Moreover given the modularity of many problems, the links between different “republican” communities may crisscross the entire community. This can be formalized in the idea of a “small-world network,”74 as in figure 3-6.
We often suppose that the diverse ideological groups are arrayed along a single left-right dimension (say, from left-justice inquirers to libertarian justice); but this leads to familiar perplexities. Consider the relation between orthodox libertarianism (L), “left-libertarianism” (LL), socialism (S), and conservatism (C). Calling L “right libertarianism” suggests an affinity to conservatism; but to an orthodox libertarian, LL is more statist than is orthodox libertarianism, and so the orthodox libertarian may view LL on the path to statism, in its socialist (S) version, which has affinities with conservative statism (C).75 An alternative to the left-right spectrum is to array the positions in a ring, as in figure 3-6, in which L is in one way next to C, yet it also allows that S is next to C, despite LL being next to S and far from C. Now as Ryan Muldoon, Michael Borgida, and Michael Cuffaro point out, when we model sociopolitical relations with a ring model, we can depict “small-world” networks by communication links between points along the ring.76 For example, L shares problems with C (recall “fusion conservatism,” §III.3.4) as well as with LL (e.g., the nature of Lockean natural rights); in turn LL can work on some problems with S (e.g., understanding equality of welfare). Thus despite the very different justice landscapes of S and L, they are linked via others to a common problem-solving network. The point here is that great diversity of problem-solving communities need not imply sectarian research programs in which the discoveries of very different groups have no benefit outside of one’s own sectarian community. The liberal, open society can form a small-world network, in which the various communities of inquiry are linked in complex ways.
Such an Open Society will not be characterized by a shared ideal. Through the interactions of its constituent “republican” communities it will be a forum of contestation, disagreement, and, sometimes, mutual incomprehension. That it will not share an ideal or even a rough roadmap to an approximate utopia does not, however, mean that its communities cannot come to agree on moral improvement, and point the way to more just social relations. When networks connect diverse perspectives, ideologies that seem entirely at odds can provide important inputs into each other’s searches, leading to common recognition of more just social worlds.
This may all appear a Pollyanna perspective on diversity. Why should various perspectives on justice, each committed to its own ideal of the just society, endorse the structure of the Open Society, which by its very nature precludes complete attainment of what each treasures—a collective life based on its ideal? Perhaps if we still shared the Enlightenment’s conviction that free inquiry in morality, as well as in science, will eventually lead to consensus on the truth, all perspectives might concur on the liberal framework of free inquiry. “Enlightenment philosophers,” John Passmore observed, were convinced that “mankind had in the seventeenth century lit upon a method of discovery [the scientific method], a method which would guarantee future progress.”77 Each field was awaiting its Newton: “in the eighteenth century there was a fairly wide consensus that what Newton had achieved in the region of physics could surely also be applied to the regions of ethics and politics.”78 And so, as Alasdair MacIntyre noted:
It was a central aspiration of the Enlightenment, an aspiration the formulation of which was its great achievement, to provide for debate in the public realm standards and methods of rational justification by which courses of action in every sphere of life could be adjudged just or unjust, rational or irrational, enlightened or unenlightened. So, it was hoped, reason would replace authority and tradition. Rational justification was to appeal to principles undeniable by any rational person and therefore independent of all those social and cultural peculiarities which the Enlightenment thinkers took to be mere accidental clothing of reason in particular times and places.79
Some cling to this Enlightenment faith that free inquiry will lead to moral consensus, but the history of morality in open societies exhibits a far more complex pattern: there has been both remarkable agreement about some improvements (e.g., the wrongness of racial and gender discrimination), together with ever-deepening disputes about the place of humans in the universe, the roles and natures of the sexes, the role of the state, the relative importance of liberty and equality, and indeed the very nature of morality itself. “Western Judeo-Christian society” has not been transformed into a new secular order, but has dissolved into a complex, global pattern of Christian, Islamic, Jewish, and secular orientations—and each of these refracts into a spectrum of versions. Thus Rawls’s core insight: the exercise of human reason under free institutions leads to disagreement. An Open Society, in which each is free to pursue his or her own inquiry into justice, exploring the terrain of justice as he or she sees it, using the methods he or she thinks most fit, will be characterized by continued, deep diversity, with no shared ideal. Given this, can a diverse, open society faced with “intractable struggles” and “irreconcilable” conflicts of “absolute depth” share a common moral existence on terms that are acceptable to all perspectives?80 Can there be a moral, liberal framework for the Open Society, which itself abjures the pursuit of the ideal while providing a framework for diverse individual perspectives on justice? It is to this question that I now turn.
1 Philosophers working on the debate concerning “ideal v. nonideal theory” have seemed to suppose that feasibility is the main worry about ideal theory. If I am correct, this is a problem pretty far downstream. Before we can know whether it is feasible to seek the ideal, we have to know where it is. It often seems to have been supposed that identifying the ideal is the purview of political philosophers, who can retreat into their studies and identify it; only when we come to implementation questions do social scientists enter. I hope it is clear that this common picture is woefully inadequate.
2 Hong and Page’s characterization of a perspective is not identical to that presented in §II.1; I consider crucial differences in §III.2.4 For his conception of a perspective, see Page, The Difference, chaps. 1, 3, and 5.
3 Note that this example does not presuppose that justice is an NK optimization problem, but only that the underlying structure is not perfectly correlated with the justice of the states. See sections II.2.1 and III.2.4.
4 Rights protection data are drawn from the Freedom House Freedom in the World 2014 Report. GDP rankings are based on 2013 data and are available at http://knoema.com/sijweyg/gdp-per-capita-ranking-2013-data-and-charts.
5 This is what Page calls a “heuristic.” “Heuristics apply within a perspective. Given a perspective, a heuristic tells a person where to search for new solutions or what actions to take.” The Difference, p. 53.
6 Economic freedom data are taken from Economic Freedom in the World 2013 Annual Report.
7 Government functioning data are drawn from the 2014 Freedom House Freedom in the World 2014 Report.
8 My example has the same structure as that given by Page, The Difference, pp. 139–43.
9 Hong and Page, “Groups of Diverse Problem Solvers Can Outperform Groups of High-Ability Problem Solvers”; Hong and Page, “Problem Solving by Heterogeneous Agents.” I am giving here an intuitive presentation of a complex formal model. Thompson (“Does Diversity Trump Ability?’) has pointed out problems in a version of the proof. She also has made a rather extreme claim that “the attempt to equate mathematical quantities with human attributes is inappropriate” (p. 1029). The logic of the analysis discussed here is not affected by Thompson’s critique.
10 I am following Page, The Difference, pp. 159–65. The application of the proof to political life has been admirably defended by Hélène Landemore against a wide variety of objections in her “Yes, We Can (Make It Up on Volume).”
11 Landemore, Democratic Reason, p. 102. Cf. Page, The Difference, p. 160.
12 Landemore, Democratic Reason, p. 102.
13 Hong and Page, “Problem Solving by Heterogeneous Agents,” pp. 149–51.
14 Page, The Difference, p. 162.
15 Hong and Page, “Groups of Diverse Problem Solvers Can Outperform Groups of High-Ability Problem Solvers,” p. 16386.
16 Landemore, Democratic Reason, chap. 4.
17 Landemore and Page, “Deliberation and Disagreement,” p. 6. They add: “This assumption can be equated with Habermas’ claim that the ‘unforced force of the better argument’ will triumph in an ideal speech situation (that is, the superiority of the ‘right answer’ will appear as such to all).”
18 To remind ourselves: a mapping function takes the evaluative standards (ES) and applies them to a social world, i, as specified by WF, yielding a justice score for world i, the social world described by its world features. The mapping function has two parts. (i) It must employ a model or models that predict how the justice-relevant features of a social world (WF) will interact to produce a social realization. This is the modeling task. (ii) It must take the set of evaluative standards (ES) and determine their relative importance in such a way that they provide a single evaluation of this social realization. This is the overall evaluation task.
19 Landemore and Page, “Deliberation and Disagreement,” p. 10.
20 This example is repeated in ibid., p. 7.
21 Landemore, Democratic Reason, p. 99.
22 Page, The Difference, pp. 257–58.
23 Landemore and Page, “Deliberation and Disagreement,” p. 13.
24 Ibid., pp. 9ff.
25 See appendix B.
26 Landemore, Democratic Reason, p. 102.
27 Page, The Difference, p. 47. On Mount Fuji landscapes, see §II.2.1.
28 Bellamy hints at this: “As every schoolboy knows, in the latter part of the nineteenth century the [socialist] civilization of to-day, or anything like it, did not exist, although the elements which were to develop it were already in ferment.” Looking Backward, p. 3.
29 Page is certainly well aware of this. The Difference, p. 48.
30 See Locke, A Letter concerning Toleration, pp. 245–46. See also my “Locke’s Liberal Theory of Public Reason.”
31 Think here of our height example, §II.2.1.
32 “Laissez-faire” is a misnomer; as Rawls describes this system it includes a “rather low social minimum.” Rawls, Justice as Fairness, p. 137. His description suggests the classical system in political economy, which was most definitely not a laissez-faire system—laissez-faire was characteristic of the Manchester School and French Physiocrats. It is unfortunate that, despite the efforts of historians of political economy, this confusion is still common. See Robbins, The Theory of Economic Policy in English Classical Political Economy. See also my “Mill’s Normative Economics.”
33 What Wiles calls a “Soviet-type” system. Economic Institutions Compared, esp. chaps. 4, 11.
34 Rawls, Justice as Fairness, p. 136.
35 It is suggested by Chapman, “Justice, Freedom and Property.”
36 These features are: “Do citizens enjoy freedom of travel or choice of residence, employment, or institution of higher education? Do citizens have the right to own property and establish private businesses? Is private business activity unduly influenced by government officials, the security forces, political parties/organizations, or organized crime? Are there personal social freedoms, including gender equality, choice of marriage partners, and size of family? Is there equality of opportunity and the absence of economic exploitation?” Freedom House Freedom in the World Report, 2014.
37 It would not significantly alter what is said here if the perspectives agreed on the set of world features and then each picked one feature from that set as the sole basis of its similarity ordering.
38 See D’Agostino, “From the Organization to the Division of Cognitive Labor.”
39 Landemore and Page, “Deliberation and Disagreement,” p. 6. “The oracle assumption requires only that if alternative y is better than x, then each individual’s model must also rank alternative y above alternative x. Individuals need not know the exact values, they need only to be close enough.” Ibid., pp. 7–8.
40 Page, The Difference, pp. 172–73. I consider in more detail the sense in which we might still agree in §IV.1.3.1.
41 Page is aware of this. The Difference, p. 49.
42 Weber and Camerer, “Cultural Conflict and Merger Failure: An Experimental Approach.” For a model showing that meaningful propositions emerge from shared overall perspectives, see Hazelhurst and Hutchins, “The Emergence of Propositions from the Co-ordination of Talk and Action in a Shared World.”
43 Page observes this interaction as well: “We bias our interpretations [the categories employed by WF] towards what we believe most important [our evaluative standards.] If Tom cares about energy conservation, he may ask to see the heating bills before buying a house. If Bonnie cares about internal light, she may count the number of windows and their sizes. Because their preferences [ES] differ, so do their interpretations.” Page, The Difference, p. 292.
44 Even in Page’s analysis they are not fully independent: “sometimes one type of diversity creates another and … the contexts to which they apply overlap, and their effects intertwine.” Ibid., p. 285.
45 Ibid., p. 289.
46 Cf. Santos-Lang, “Our Responsibility to Manage Evaluative Diversity.”
47 D’Agostino, Naturalizing Epistemology, p. 1.
48 Recall: “This assumption can be equated with Habermas’ claim that the ‘unforced force of the better argument’ will triumph in an ideal speech situation (that is, the superiority of the ‘right answer’ will appear as such to all).” Landemore and Page, “Deliberation and Disagreement,” p. 6.
49 See Wiles, Economic Institutions Compared, pp. 85ff., chap. 6; Ward, The Ideal World of Economics, pp. 246–53.
50 D’Agostino, Naturalizing Epistemology, pp. 128–32.
51 The famous “Clause IV” of the Labour Party constitution, written by Sidney Webb, which called for “the common ownership of the means of production,” was dropped in 1995.
52 See Schneider, The Conservative Century, pp. 54–60.
53 Meyer, “Freedom, Tradition, and Conservatism,” p. 22.
54 Meyer, “In Defense of John Stuart Mill,” p. 168. Compare Kirk, The Conservative Mind, pp. 265–75.
55 Meyer, “Freedom, Tradition, and Conservatism,” pp. 26–27.
56 These words, of course, are from Barry Goldwater’s acceptance address at the 1964 Republican convention. “Extremism in the Defense of Liberty,” p. 245. In The Conscience of a Conservative (p. 13), Goldwater insists: “the Conservative’s first concern will always be: Are we maximizing freedom?” Meyer agrees: the principles of political right require “a state capable of maintaining order while at the same time guaranteeing to each person in its area of government the maximum liberty possible to him short of his interference with the liberty of other persons.” In Defense of Freedom, p. 98.
57 Hobhouse, Liberalism, p. 87.
58 Ibid., p. 54.
59 See Dewey, Individualism, Old and New, esp. chap. 6, “Capitalist or Public Socialism?” The fusion of liberalism and Marxism is an ongoing project; note how Cohen, whose early work was firmly in the Marxist tradition, entered mainstream liberal political philosophy by the end of his life, though the mix in this particular fusion is not clear. See his Rescuing Justice and Equality, esp. pp. 186ff.
60 This is an especially interesting case. It seems that libertarianism arose partly as a reaction to the fusion of liberal and socialist ideals in “the new liberalism”—bleeding heart libertarianism pretty explicitly seeks to fuse a classical liberal view with that earlier fusion. See Tomasi’s Free Market Fairness. The possibilities are endless.
61 Page, The Difference, p. 286.
62 Plato, The Republic, p. 178 [v. 473].
63 Rawls, The Law of Peoples, p. 128.
64 Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 1, p. 167. Emphasis in original.
65 Rawls, The Law of Peoples, p. 138.
66 Cf. Simmons, “Ideal and Nonideal Theory,” p. 24.
67 Well, perhaps they would think of it; recall Cohen’s remark that his “own inclinations are more liberal” (Rescuing Justice, p. 186), and so he rejects the Stalinist approach to assigning occupations; he wrestles with freedom v. Stalinism in Rescuing Justice and Equality, chap. 5.
68 Lenin, What Is to Be Done?, p. 269. Emphasis added.
69 Sen, The Idea of Justice, p. vii.
70 See Rawls, Justice as Fairness, p. 104. For an insightful and sympathetic treatment of Rawls’s political philosophy as a “naturalistic theodicy,” see Weithman, Why Political Liberalism?, chap. 1. See also chapter V of the present work.
71 Ward, The Ideal Worlds of Economics, p. 468.
72 D’Agostino, Naturalizing Epistemology, p. 138.
73 Ibid., pp. 138–41.
74 The classic analysis is Watts and Strogatz, “Collective Dynamics of ‘Small-World’ Networks.”
75 For some of these perplexities, see Mack and Gaus, “Classical Liberalism and Libertarianism.”
76 Muldoon, Borgida, and Cuffaro, “The Conditions of Tolerance.”
77 Passmore, The Perfectability of Man, p. 200.
78 Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, p. 23.
79 MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, p. 6.
80 Rawls, Political Liberalism, pp. xxvi, 4.
