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Against the conventional widsom, I propose that clinical theorists should adopt an institutional failure analysis approach, which takes its primary design task to be obviating or averting social failures. The main innovation of this approach is to ground our evaluation of institutional arrangements on a detailed understanding of the causal processes that generate actual problematic outcomes. So conceived, failure analysis enables clinical theorists to prescribe more effective solutions to injustice because it focuses on understanding the injustice, rather than on specifying an ideal of justice. In so doing, failure analysis better fulfills the objective of clinical theory, namely, to think about how, in the midst of current injustice, we might bring about social conditions that are more just than our current conditions. Adapted from the source document.

The growth of non-ideal theory and of political realism has had a profound influence on methodological inquiry in political philosophy. It is now the norm for authors defending ideal theory to take special care to show that it can relate to the real world in the right sort of way. Two recent books—David Estlund's Utopophobia: On the Limits (If Any) of Political Philosophy ( 2020 ), and Ben Laurence's Agents of Change: Political Philosophy in Practice ( 2021 )—fit this mold. Both authors argue that ideal theory can be practical, and Estlund additionally argues that it can be valuable even if it lacks practical value. In this commentary, I argue that something important is missing from these defenses of ideal theory: they both fail to be realistic in a "second-order" way. I suggest that other recent work comes closer to meeting this standard.

This article characterizes the aims of a practice-based method of justification and explains why its form of "ideal theory" need to only assume that a group of agents "ideationally" endorse an aim or end. Our interpretation of a practice, according to its aims or ends, can thus be quite realistic about the selfish or corrupt motives of any particular agent. This helps to answer "selectorate theory" cynics that view rules (in trade, etc.) as equilibrium solutions among elites optimizing for their personal "political survival." Even when that is so, reason can still have an audience in politics in the "ideational" recognition of values (e.g. as upheld in the classical theory of free trade).

In this review piece I assess the theoretical approach employed by Elizabeth Anderson in her book The Imperative of Integration. Anderson advocates a non-ideal theoretical approach to questions of normative political theory. She uses non-ideal arguments to offer a compelling justification of racial integration as a social policy. I unpack her argument to identify some of the important strengths of non-ideal theory. In doing so, I argue that non-ideal approaches provide insights that are necessary for the development of persuasive answers to normative questions, but that are not achievable with ideal theoretical alternatives.

Abstract:When a constitutional court faces opposition from other branches of government or significant segments of the public, should it always hold fast to what it considers constitutionally right, even where this would potentially harm its status and perceived legitimacy? Or are constitutional compromises sometimes justified? Such 'institutionally hard' cases – those characterised by a sharp tension between constitutional principle and institutional prudence – pose a true dilemma for constitutionalism. This article advances a realistic, yet principled, liberal-constitutional approach to this dilemma, put forth in the vein of Rawlsian non-ideal theory. It addresses a troubling gap between, on the one hand, the idealising discourse of constitutional theory – which overlooks or downplays the actual social and political pressures that courts must confront – and, on the other, a growing political science literature which, in the name of 'realism', views judges solely as strategic actors, leaving no role for principled reasoning. What has stepped into the gap in normative theory is a vague notion of 'judicial statesmanship', which praises or criticises judges post hoc, on an intuitive basis, without any tangible prescriptive bite. Developing evaluative and prescriptive guidelines for institutionally-hard cases, a non-ideal theory of constitutional adjudication should construct principles that both reinforce the commitment to ideal constitutional principle, and properly situate constitutional courts within the real – contingent and often very non-ideal – social and political contexts in which they operate.