What is the best way to make sustained societal progress over time? Non-ideal theory done on its own faces the problem of second best, but ideal theory seems unable to cope with disagreement about how to make progress. If ideal theory gives up its claims to completeness, then we can use the method of incompletely theorized agreements to make progress over time.
AbstractThis article examines how the exemplars of ideal theory have addressed what I term 'the problem of preservation'. The 'problem' in question is not so much that a political community must make provisions for its self-preservation, but rather that its provisions must correspond to the intentions and capabilities of its neighbours. This constraint implies that the ability of a political community to pursue ideals rather than power depends heavily on who its neighbours happen to be. This article shows how Aristotle, Rousseau, Kant, and Rawls address this problem by recommending measures such as defensive fortification, collective security, and democratic peace, which, they claim, will dampen the anarchic nature of the international system. It argues that the implausibility of these measures renders the ability of political communities to heed the moral guidance offered by ideal theory contingent at best and impractical at worst. If proponents of ideal theory wish to resist this conclusion, then they must offer a more persuasive answer to the problem of preservation.
Many of the recent methodological debates within political theory have focused on the ideal/non-ideal theory distinction. While ideal theorists recognise the need to develop an account of the transition between the two levels of theorising, no general proposal has been advanced thus far. In this article, I aim to bridge this conceptual gap. Towards this end, I first reconstruct the ideal/non-ideal theory distinction within a simplified two-dimensional framework, which captures the primary meanings usually attributed to it. Subsequently, I use this framework to provide an algorithm for the bidirectional transition between ideal and non-ideal theory, based on the incremental derivation of normative models. The approach outlined illuminates the various ways in which principles derived under highly idealised assumptions might be distorted by the circumstances of our current world and illustrates the various paths which we can pursue in moving from our current state of the world to an ideal one.
The distinction between ideal and non-ideal theory is a tool that can help us understand how to make moral and political progress. Ideal theory provides a goal for us to reach, and non-ideal theory tells us what to do in our current, non-ideal state. Throughout my dissertation, I argue that we need both of these kinds of theory in order to make progress. I also argue that we need to apply these tools to particular problems in order to get a better understanding of the theoretical questions at stake. To that end, I investigate three particular problems. Chapter One is devoted to showing that we need ideal theory to make sustained societal progress over time. But because we are unable to agree on a complete ideal, we should work together to create incomplete ideal theory, which can then guide our progress. Chapter Two shows how we can use the ideal/non-ideal distinction to resolve two longstanding tensions in moral and political philosophy. We disagree about how much our moral theories should yield to our flaws, and we also disagree about how to interpret the voluntarist constraint: what it means for "ought" to imply "can." I show that we need ideal theory of morality, which uses a thinner version of the voluntarist constraint and does not yield to our flaws, to provide an ultimate standard. But we also need non-ideal theory, which uses a thicker version, to guide our actions. Chapter Three tackles beneficence. Does our duty to the very poor increase when others inevitably fail to comply with that duty? It may be that we only have to do our fair share—that even in the non-ideal world, we only have to do what we would have had to do in the ideal. I show that this view is plagued by counterexamples. Many consequentialists hold the alternative view, that we must pick up others' slack, but their interpretation of this view is extremely demanding. I argue that we should look to an alternative moral theory. Two versions of deontology, intuitionism and Kantianism, require us to do more when others are doing less without also making extreme demands.
The recent prominence of the ideal/non-ideal debate is largely due to the fact that it offers a vocabulary in which to diagnose what many see as a key problem of political theory: its relative unwillingness to provide solutions to urgent problems facing people here and now; or for people as they are rather than as they should be. The primary aim of this article is to offer an improved understanding of the territory that the ideal/non-ideal debate relates to.
This paper has three aims. First, it argues that the present use of 'ideal theory' is unhelpful, and that an earlier and apparently more natural use focusing on perfection would be preferable. Second, it has tried to show that revision of the use of the term would better expose two distinctive normative issues, and illustrated that claim by showing how some contributors to debates about ideal theory have gone wrong partly through not distinguishing them. Third, in exposing those two distinct normative issues, it has revealed a particular way in which ideal theory even under the more specific, revisionary definition will often be central to working out what to do in non-ideal circumstances. By clarifying the terms on which debates over ideal and non-ideal theory should take place, and highlighting the particular problems each deals with, it tries to clear the ground for turning to the actual problem, which is what to do in our non-ideal and often tragic circumstances.
In this article I argue that theorizing about justice at the level of ideal theory is inherently flawed and thus has impoverished liberal egalitarianism. Ideal theorists (falsely) assume that a political philosopher can easily determine (or has privileged access to) what constitutes the 'best foreseeable conditions'. Furthermore, by assuming full compliance, ideal theorists violate the constraints of a realistic utopia. More specifically I argue that liberal egalitarians who function at the level of ideal theory adopt a cost-blind approach to rights and a narrow view of possible human misfortune. The former issue leads liberal egalitarians to give priority to a serially ordered principle of equal basic liberties or to treat rights as 'trumps'; and the latter to a stringent prioritarian principle (Rawls' difference principle) or luck egalitarianism. Taken together, the cost-blind approach to rights, coupled with the narrow view of human misfortune, mean the liberal egalitarian theories of justice cannot address the issue of trade-offs that inevitably arises in real non-ideal societies that face the fact of scarcity. This makes liberal egalitarianism an ineffective theory of social justice.
