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Political Ideals and Political Practice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Extract

The pursuit of high ideals in politics is often scorned as unrealistic and, therefore, undesirable. This article considers two new ways in which this might be true. One allegation is that ideals might be so highly idealized as to be inaccessible to ordinary agents and hence incapable of guiding their actions. The other notes that the full and simultaneous implementation of all of our ideals is typically unrealistic, and that first-best ideal desiderata may well be imperfect guides to choice among second-best worlds.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

1 Wildavsky, Aaron, Speaking Truth to Power (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, 1979), p. 216Google Scholar; Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan (London: Andrew Crooke, 1651), chap. 6Google Scholar. Cf. Goodin, Robert E., Political Theory and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), chap. 7Google Scholar, and ‘The Political Realism of Free Movement’, in Barry, Brian and Goodin, Robert E., eds. Free Movement (London: Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1992), pp. 248–64.Google Scholar

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3 Calabresi, Guido and Bobbit, Philip, Tragic Choices (New York: Norton, 1978).Google Scholar

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5 Critiques of ‘universal human rights’ as varied as Burke's and Marx's are couched similarly in terms of objections to such ‘abstractions’; see Waldron, Jeremy, ed., Nonsense Upon Stilts (London: Methuen, 1987)Google Scholar. Among contemporaries, such themes are echoed by writers as diverse as Oakeshott, Michael, Rationalism in Politics (London: Methuen, 1962)Google Scholar, and Rorty, Richard, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 See O'Neill, Onora, Faces of Hunger (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986), esp. chap. 3Google Scholar; ‘Ethical Reasoning and Ideological Pluralism’, Ethics, 98 (1988), 705–22Google Scholar; ‘Presidential Address: Constructivisms in Ethics’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 89 (19881989), 117Google Scholar; and Constructions of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), esp. chap. 11.Google Scholar

7 There are of course schemes for by-passing people's intentions altogether, guiding their behaviour from behind their backs. For example, it might be better that people should generally follow slavishly some commonsense morality, which is itself broadly utilitarian in its form and function, than that they internalize utilitarianism, which, when misapplied, would yield less utilitarian results; see Smart, J. J. C., ‘An Outline of a Utilitarian System of Ethics’, Utilitarianism, For and Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 175 at pp. 4257CrossRefGoogle Scholar. But that is just to say that the underlying moral discourse need not be accessible to everyone in the community, though it none the less has to be accessible to someone (rulers, at least) if it is to be used even in this behind-the-back mode of rule.

8 Reprinted in Lewis, Jane, ed., Before the Vote Was Won: Arguments For and Against Women's Suffrage (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), pp. 2146 at p. 30Google Scholar. See more generally Goodin, Robert E., Motivating Political Morality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), chap. 5.Google Scholar

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15 One reason is that rules often are, and often must be, framed around statistical artefacts rather, than real people. The statistically ‘average’ family may have 2.7 children, for example, but-certain child custody arrangements apart – that hardly describes the actual circumstance of many real families.

16 For some of the problems with equality measures, see Sen, Amartya, On Economic Inequality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chap. 2, and Cowell, Frank A., Measuring Inequality (New York: Wiley, 1977).Google Scholar

17 Or at least that the ideal has several dimensions, often at variance in any particular application. See, more generally, Rae, Douglas W., Equalities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981).Google Scholar

18 Goodin, Robert E. and Le Grand, Julian et al. , Not Only the Poor (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987), esp. chap. 10.Google Scholar

19 It does not much matter whether these goals are contingently or necessarily in conflict. Precisely the same problems would arise in precisely the same form if the ideals were merely contingently jointly unattainable, just so long as those contingencies are relatively ineradicable in the short to medium term.

20 Goodin, Robert E., ‘The Development-Rights Tradeoff: Some Unwarranted Economic and Political Assumptions’, Human Rights Quarterly, 1 (1979), 3142Google Scholar; Frohock, Fred M. and Sylvan, David J., ‘Liberty, Economics and Evidence’, Political Studies, 31 (1983), 541–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 For synoptic summaries of the broad alternatives, see Stokey, Edith and Zeckhauser, Richard, A Primer for Policy Analysis (New York: Norton, 1978), chap. 13Google Scholar; Barry, Brian and Rae, Douglas, ‘Political Evaluation’, in Greenstein, Fred I. and Polsby, Nelson W., eds, Handbook of Political Science (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1975), vol. 1, pp. 337401Google Scholar; and Keeney, Ralph L. and Raiffa, Howard, Decisions with Multiple Objectives: Preferences and Value Tradeoffs (New York: Wiley, 1976).Google Scholar

22 Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971)Google Scholar, sees. 8, 39 and 82. I shall follow Rawls in calling this form of priority ‘lexical’, for short.

23 Dworkin, Ronald M., Taking Rights Seriously (London: Butterworth, 1977)Google Scholar, although Dworkin does not always stick strictly to the implications of this metaphor (see, for example, pp. 191–2).

24 The notion is introduced in Raz, Joseph, Practical Reason and Norms (London: Hutchinson, 1975)Google Scholar and illustrated with reference to national defence policy in Goodin, , Political Theory and Public Policy, pp. 226–31.Google Scholar

25 Harsanyi, John C., ‘Can the Maximin Principle Serve as a Basis for Morality?American Political Science Review, 69 (1975), 594–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26 Luce, R. D. and Raiffa, Howard, Games and Decisions (New York: Wiley, 1957), chap. 13Google Scholar. These rules were originally designed for special problems of making choices under uncertainty, but they can and often have been thought to apply to choice situations quite generally; see Goodin, , Political Theory and Public Policy, chap. 9.Google Scholar

27 Rawls's (secs. 12, 13 and 26) so-called ‘difference principle’, telling us to maximize the position of the worst-off representative individual, is the most familiar variant. To perform this exercise with the precision that that formulation demands, we would need to establish comparable measures of ‘goal-fulfilment’ across all our various goals.

28 The model here is the Arrow-Hurwicz rule; see Luce, and Raiffa, , Games and Decisions, pp. 282–4Google Scholar and Goodin, , Political Theory and Public Policy, pp. 177–9Google Scholar. How this ratio is determined is left as an open question; the most natural ways of fixing it cause this class of decision rules to start shading over into the third (‘weighting’) class.

29 Suppose our goals are ‘liberty’, ‘equality’ and ‘fraternity’. Suppose we have but two alternative courses of action, A and B. And suppose that the impact of each course of action upon each goal (where 100 represents perfect fulfilment of the goal and 0 complete non-fulfilment of it) would be as follows:

‘Maximin’, for example, would lead us to opt for action A: the least fully realized goal (‘equality’) gets a higher score performing action A than does the least fully realized (‘fraternity’) performing action B. But surely in such a case we would think that the vastly greater fulfilment of the other goals under action B more than compensates for this marginally worse performance on the least fully realized goal.

30 To perform the arithmetic exercise, we would need once again to establish comparable measures of goal-fulfilment across all goals, in addition to cardinal weightings. Either alone might be asking too much – both together might be asking much too much.

31 Compare Okun, Arthur M., Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1975).Google Scholar

32 Rawls, , A Theory of Justice (p. 542)Google Scholar backs off demanding lexical priority of liberty over material well-being for precisely this reason, thus compromising his case for a lexicographical priority rule more than he seems to have realized; see Barry, Brian, The Liberal Theory of Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), chap. 7.Google Scholar

33 Barry, Brian, Political Argument (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965)Google Scholar, chap. 1. See also Barry, and Rae, , ‘Political Evaluation’.Google Scholar

34 ‘In combining … single-attribute utility functions into a multiattribute utility function, there is almost always an attempt to utilize independence assumptions …[Indeed,] any violation of independence suggests … additional objectives, and thus attributes’, in the gloss provided on this literature by Keeney, Ralph L., ‘Value-focused Thinking and the Study of Values’, in Bell, David E., Raiffa, Howard and Tversky, Amos, eds, Decision Making (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 465–94, at p. 471CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See, similarly, Edwards, Wade, ‘Use of Multiattribute Utility Measurement for Social Decision-making’, in Bell, David E., Keeney, Ralph L. and Raiffa, Howard, eds, Conflicting Objectives in Decisions (New York: Wiley, 1977), pp. 247–76, at pp. 255–6Google Scholar; Keeney, and Raiffa, , Decisions with Multiple Objectives, chap. 3Google Scholar; Raiffa, Howard, Decision Analysis (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1968), chap. 9Google Scholar; and Fishburn, Peter C., ‘Independence in Utility Theory with Whole Product Sets’, Operations Research, 13 (1965), 2845.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

35 Indeed, that is the very definition of a ‘good’ within the economics tradition that inspires all these trade-off models.

36 And insistently so. As Keeney, , ‘Value-focused Thinking’, p. 471Google Scholar, writes, if there is ‘any violation of independence [then that] suggests that additional objectives’ are in play: interactions between goals are analytically ruled out of court; any interaction effect is to be treated, within these models, as yet another (composite or synergistic) goal.

37 Allais, Maurice and Hagen, Ole, eds, Expected Utility Hypotheses and the Allais Paradox (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Machina, Mark, ‘Expected Utility Analysis Without the Independence Axiom’, Econometrica, 50 (1982), 277323.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

38 It is striking to note the extent to which the most subtle of these decision-analytic techniques strive to force the multiattribute utility function into an additive form simply summing across values derived from all component attributes. See, e.g., Fishburn, , ‘Independence in Utility Theory’Google Scholar; Edwards, , ‘Use of Multiattribute Utility Measurement’, pp. 255–6Google Scholar; Keeney, and Raiffa, , Decisions with Multiple Objectives, chap. 3Google Scholar; and Keeney, ‘Value-focused Thinking’ p. 471.Google Scholar

39 MacCrimmon, Kenneth and Wehrung, Donald A., ‘Trade-off Analysis: The Indifference and the Preferred Portions Approaches’Google Scholar, in Bell, , Keeney, and Raiffa, , eds, Conflicting Objectives in Decisions, pp. 148–71.Google Scholar

40 More generally, these models specifically assume monotonicity within each value, as well as independence across values; see Edwards, , ‘Use of Multiattribute Utility Measurement’ pp. 255–6.Google Scholar

41 Little, I. M. D., A Critique of Welfare Economics, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), chap. 2.Google Scholar

42 Lipsey, R. G. and Lancaster, K. J., ‘The General Theory of Second Best’, Review of Economic Studies, 24 (1956), 1133CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For another political application, see Coram, Bruce, ‘Second Best Theories and the Implications for Institutional Design’, in Goodin, Robert and Brennan, Geoffrey, eds, The Theory of Institutional Design (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).Google Scholar

43 Such appearances deceive, however. The proper application of those principles is in terms of the extent to which our goals themselves are attained, whereas the ‘conditions’ here in view are operational means for attaining those goals.

44 Lipsey, and Lancaster, , ‘The General Theory of Second Best’, p. 11.Google Scholar

45 Problems of second best arise particularly when descriptions are couched in terms of surface attributes rather than more directly in terms of the underlying sources of those values. But that is just the way political ideals are typically cast (e.g., we want a liberal democracy with a market economy, welfare safety net and open borders). Without the requisite independence among underlying value attributes (of the sort described in the previous section), second-best problems will of course arise even if descriptions are cast directly in terms of bedrock underlying values.

46 Or so would be suggested by the ‘Wilt Chamberlain example’ in Nozick, Robert's Anarchy State and Utopia (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), chap. 7Google Scholar; I cite his argument without in any way endorsing its conclusions.

47 Such is the lesson Roy Pateman draws from his experiences with the Eritrean People's Liberation Front. He tells of how freedom fighters travelled so lightly as not even to pack a change of clothes, knowing that they could count upon sympathizers in the next village swapping clean clothes for their soiled ones; but as he comments, villagers could only be expected to be happy to let others raid their wardrobes in that way so long as those wardrobes were not very extensive in the first place. See his ‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité: Aspects of the Eritrean Revolution’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 28 (1990), 457–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

48 Rawls, , A Theory of Justice, sec. 82.Google Scholar

49 Goodin, , ‘Development-Rights Tradeoff.’Google Scholar

50 Rae, Douglas W., ‘Decision-rules and Individual Values in Constitutional Choice’, American Political Science Review, 63 (1969), 4056CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Taylor, Michael J., ‘Proof of a Theorem on Majority Rule’, Behavioral Science, 14 (1969), 228–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar