The Truth in Conservatism

I disagree more than you do, because he’s excluding the people who do think about these things from philosophy. As I understand, in the pursuit of certainty, correct method, and universality philosophy has just abandoned the field in certain areas, and I don’t think that it should have.

Whoa! You mean there was about to be a battle royale between continental and analytic philosophy and I almost stepped in it?

In that case, there’s bound to be one person present who’s never seen this before:

Jerry [reading from card]: So, Todd, you’re here to tell your girlfriend something. What is it?

Ursula: Don’t listen to him! Logic is a male hysteria! Rationality equals oppression and the silencing of marginalized voices!
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I’ve never heard of Cohen before, much less read anything by him, but it seems to me he’s made some very helpful observations about the nature of value and its relation to envalued things (e.g., things can be valued for playing the role of carrying value).

Whether his analysis overall is cogent I cannot say (I had to read it quickly), but even presenting such claims must help navigate the world of value theory a little easier.

It does seem to me that he has brought to light a fundamental phenomenon (his small-c conservatism) and made a good deal of progress in exploring its structure.

Puts me in mind of Nietzsche’s “antiquarian history” from “On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life.”

Let me take Cohen’s cooking analogy further to express what I find problematic with his position. I will use the example of making a yummy pumpkin soup rather than baking a cake.

Recipe #1: Good pumpkin soup recipe, “all-things-considered”

3.5 lbs pumpkin, chopped
6 cups of vegetable stock
2 onions, chopped
2 cloves of garlic
½ tsp of nutmeg
dash of salt and pepper to taste
2 tbsp sour cream (optional)

1.Bring the vegetable stock to a boil in a medium pot.
2. Add the pumpkin, onions and garlic.
3. Simmer around 20 minutes or until soft.
4. Puree soup in a blender until smooth.
5. Return soup to the pot to reheat.
6. Season the soup with nutmeg, salt and pepper.
7. Pour the soup into bowls.
8. Swirl in some sour cream (optional).

Recipe #2: The “ideal” pumpkin soup

You simply must get the salt right! A dash of salt means exactly 1 table spoon (not more, not less). As for which kind of salt to use, there are two schools of thought here. I support the purist position which endorses using sea salt. Less sophisticated connoisseurs might endorse using table salt. Sure using table salt might be more convenient (e.g. it’s cheaper), but such facts should not influence our thoughts concerning the ideal soup.

Oh yeah, there are a bunch of other things as well (some pumpkins, water, etc.), you just stick them in a pot and boil it until it looks done. But anyways, back to the salt. I want to bring in some further distinctions here because I don’t think you appreciate how important the salt really is. So let me elaborate a bit further on the salt…

Which recipe would you prefer?

Cheers,
Colin

Cohen goes on after the passage quoted to draw a distinction between “political philosophers” and “political theorists,” the latter of whom, he suggests, are the ones who (professionally) worry about the practical and the here-and-now.

As I am neither a political philosopher nor a political theorists, but reading the paragraph in which Cohen draws this contrast left me wondering whether it sounded right to most political theorists and political philosophers.

Like Aaron_m, I too was puzzled by Harry’s claim that “Cohen is right that, qua philosophers, we are not concerned with what should be done in practice all things considered.”

Much of course depends on what one thinks constitutes being a “philosopher”. The Greek definition of philosophy means “love of wisdom”. So, at least for me, a political philosopher is one who aspires to achieve phronesis. And thus political philosophy is inherently practical.

I suspect this vision of the discipline runs counter to the spirit of how Harry and Cohen would characterise what a political philosopher does. I don’t doubt that many academic philosophers employed in philosophy depts are not concerned with what should be done in practice all things considered. But if that is indeed the case then, in my opinion, so much the worse for the discipline.

Cheers,
Colin

“What, actually, to do in the circumstacnes we find ourselves in—well, that requires, among other things, a nuanced understanding of the way the institutions we are embedded within work and responsible, empirically informed, predictions about the likely effects of various courses of action (including, most importantly, their likely effects with respect to the salient values). This last does not seem to be a philosophical task, to me.”

We cannot expect philosophers to do everything or even a lot, and division of labor is necessary. I do wish more political philosophers worked closer with the described empirical questions, in part just because they are I think uniquely positioned to do so (e.g. I think, against what is usually advertised, that economists tend to be worse at philosophy than political philosophers are at dealing with empirical issues.)

But more importantly reasons for identifying and even more so weighing values seems only to give rise to philosophical urgency given questions about what “to do in the circumstacnes we find ourselves in,” in the sense described above.

This does not mean that abstracting away from the real world in order to theorize is a problem. But the notion of idealized political philosophy somehow free from the constraints of the conditions we find ourselves (e.g. empirical facts about the kinds of motivations beings like us have) is I take it, from my limited knowledge of these debates, pretty contested. But I may still be missing the mark somewhat on what Harry is saying.

“But non-ideal political philosophising is not sufficient to guide us in deciding what we should do all things considered, and it seems odd, and overly-ambitious, to me to think that it could.”

This statement seems to me to correctly limit the category of ‘ideal political philosophy’ to something that still can contribute to guiding”us in deciding what we should do all things considered.”

The last paragraph was more alluding to this stuff about the status of ideal theory about practical reason that at the same time is admittedly not practicable, at least in this non-ideal world. What can such theorizing tell us, is it appropriate to call results ‘ideal’ at all? But this is a different issue and off the point of the post.

Just started reading Cohen’s paper. It is kind of funny at the start in the way he is being so careful about how far his thinking on the subject has developed, while before he gets into the main issue he rushes through a bunch of stuff on what philosophers are and are not interested in. These comments could just be cut out without any effect and sent to the save for later pile.

“Philosophers like me are not primarily, as philosophers, interested in what should be done in practice, all things considered. We are interested, instead, in what distinct things are worth considering. We care more about what ingredients should go into the cake than about the proportions in which they are to be combined.”

I think much depends on the scope of the italicized phrase; but I think Jerry’s simply saying he and people like him are concerned with working out the requirements of justice, and happy to leave the relative weight of justice as against other values to others (political philosophers, theorists and/or practitioners) depending on empirical context.

Paul,

I actually borrow the term “first-best conceptualism” from Adrian Vermeule (Judging Under Uncertainty) who uses it in the context of legal philosophy, though I think it captures a similar range of issues in political philosophy (indeed Gutmann and Thompson use the term “first-order theory” to capture the same thing in Why Deliberative Democacy). So basically the central concern with such normative theorizing is to win the philosophical debate concerning the primacy of one’s favored concept- be it equality, liberty, democracy, sufficiency, priority, etc. Whereas a second-order theory is more concerned with determining what would constitute a reasonable balance between the competing values that arise in the debates at the first-order level.

I suspect my use of these terms don’t map neatly onto your distinction between justice and legitimacy. But none-the-less, I think a second-order theory can address the concern you have regarding civil disobedience, etc. Indeed, it probably is better suited in this respect than a first-order theory. Rawls’s discussion of civil disobedience in A Theory of Justice is actually a great example. For Rawls presents civil disobedience as a middle position we can pursue when a conflict arises between the duty to obey the law (in a nearly just society) and the duty to protect one’s rights and liberties. And he tries to reconcile these two things by stipulating that the injustices in question must be substantial, that one first try normal political appeals, your actions must be public, etc. So Rawls’s discussion of these things is a great example of second-order analysis of these issues. His primary concern is to reconcile these competing demands of justice rather than give absolute priority to one or the other. I just wish the bulk of A Theory of Justice followed the example Rawls outlined in the chapter on civil disobedience.

Cheers,
Colin

i know cohen is a great guy and all, but it sure felt weird to read his paeans to all soul’s “autonomy” and “independence” and never see the words “surplus value” mentioned anywhere. i mean, he even considers in a footnote that all soul’s vaunted independence depends on its ‘portfolio’. i.e., it lives on rents.

oh well.

as for the rest of it, i’ll need to read the second half, but the first half looks a lot like the standard conservative dodge of saying “i cannot justify my preferences in any above-board, articulate manner, so i’m going to erect a theory that makes my underhanded, inarticulate inability into a new kind of justification–and claim that it’s a morally superior kind, to boot.”

i’m hoping it gets better.

Jerry’s conservatism paper is a great paper, so good job, Harry, for linking to it. Two thoughts.

In his brief methodological remarks, Jerry runs together two claims: that philosophers qua philosophers aren’t interested at all in how values weigh against each other, and that they aren’t interested in *exactly* how they weigh against each other. (For the latter see, e.g. the remark about the person who mentions decor in restaurants.)

The first claim seems to me, descriptively, inaccurate. I can show you lots of philosophical discussions of how, in general, equality weighs against utility or virtue against pleasure. But it may be true that philosophers don’t usually go beyond fairly abstract comparisons to attempt exact ones, and Jerry could be right in so far as he makes just that weaker claim.

Moreover, the claim about interest could be rephrased as one about ability, i.e. that philosophers qua philosophers are no better than anyone else at making exact comparative judgements. They may better at what Jerry’s paper does, i.e. looking at ongoing ethical discussions and extracting from them and making explicit a type of value-consideration that people are using without being fully aware of that fact. They may also be better at formulating abstract possibilities for how values compare with each other and maybe choosing between them. (So they can say that 99% sugar is out.) But they may be no better — they may even be worse! — at making exact comparisons. That may require a kind of context-sensitive judgement that they have no more capacity for than others. And what they’re no better at qua philosophers, they should be hesitant about doing qua philosophers.

I certainly think some humility can be called for in philosophical discussions of concrete ethical issues. Past a point those issues require a kind of judgement that philosophical training need not give you more of and may even leave you with less of.

Colin writes:

So basically the central concern with such normative theorizing is to win the philosophical debate concerning the primacy of one’s favored concept- be it equality, liberty, democracy, sufficiency, priority, etc. Whereas a second-order theory is more concerned with determining what would constitute a reasonable balance between the competing values that arise in the debates at the first-order level.

I suspect my use of these terms don’t map neatly onto your distinction between justice and legitimacy.

I agree: these terms don’t map neatly onto the distinction between justice and legitimacy (as I set it out above). But I guess then I find the terms somewhat misleading. I suppose I would prefer something like “myopic” or “fetishistic” instead of your “first-order,” since it is quite possible to reject a single-minded concern with “distributive equality” or “freedom as non-interference” or “efficiency as optimal GDP” and still engage in a sort of “ideal” or “first-best” theorizing that, while useful for the purpose I identify in my last comment above, is not sufficient to guide action in our imperfect world. And even if it fails to hit its mark, I guess I see Rawls’s TJ as decidedly second-order (in your term) theorizing. It certainly makes no fetish out of any particular value in the way that many in the “Equality of What” debate have done when they say, at the outset, “I admit that my discussion touches on only one aspect of justice. It will certainly be necessary, even at the level of ideal theory, to balance distributive equality (of resources, welfare, opportunity for advantage, etc.) against other values, such as efficiency, non-interference, and the individual prerogatives of those whose grew up with an unfair bundle of resources.”

And I don’t think Rawls is as unique in this regard. Consider Dworkin, who in “Equality of Resources” says that his envy test may always fail, since we cannot realistically redress all deficits in “internal resources”. My guess is that you would count this as problematically first-order reasoning, since it simply explores the nature of an ideal of justice that is one amongst many, and indeed one that cannot be fully satisfied and must be weighed against those considerations that stand in the way its full realization. But then, in chs. 8 & 9 of Sovereign Virtue, Dworkin offers arguments for a different envy test, which can in fact be satisfied even when there remain deficits in internal resources. Yet instead of lamenting, as he did in ch. 2, that his ideal of equality of resources can never be realized, he offers the following diagnosis: the fact that it can never be realized in light of the costs it would impose is itself a reason to rethink equality of resources, as defended in ch. 2, as an ideal of justice. The demands of justice must be sensitive not only to the ideals of distributive equality, but also to the costs of implementing it, and an accurate account of what justice is will respond to both of these, rather than elevating one to an ideal consideration while counting the other as a mere practical constraint that impedes the realization of justice in this world.

While I’m not sure that Dworkin or Rawls gets it right in the end, I am hesitant to call either a first-order theorist. And since you suggest that much of TJ is first-order, I suppose you would count Dworkin as first-order too. But this seems to overlook sometimes subtle yet still central moves and themes in their work. And once we’re on the lookout for such themes in the work of others, I wonder just how much first-order theorizing there really is out there. From what I can tell, most political philosophy these days is decidedly second-order, in your sense.

The problem with Colin’s position is that it, in the terms of his analogy, can end up looking like it says ‘look, find a big orange vegetable; cook it somehow’. We want to be able to make distinctions between various normative ingredients of the all-things-considered prescription, so that we know what they are, and unless we think about those ingredients individually, it’s unlikely we can do that. That’s not to say that that’s what Colin ends up doing: but it can look like that’s what he’s advocating. There is a debate to be had about how abstract political philosophy should be, both in terms of how effective it’ll be in realising its ends – whatever those are – and in terms of how possible it is to be as abstract as someone like Cohen wants to be, but I think that just ruling out someone like Rawls, who is explicitly concerned with the possibility of implementing his schemes, on the same grounds as someone like Cohen is not obviously the way to go about having it.

Hey Loren, nice response. One last point and I’ll go away (I think my pumpkin soup is burning!)

I agree that there is a pretty good interpretive case that the later Rawls is up to much more than I have given him credit here. But I also think there is an equally good interpretive case that Rawls (and the Rawlsian project more generally) is guilty of the things I claim. But the real significance of the ideal/non-ideal distinction, at least for me, doesn’t concern figuring out what Rawls was up to (though that is an interesting question as well). It concerns how we go about constructing, and assessing, our normative theories. And so echoing Loren’s approval of Harry’s final point, I agree that we need a sense of both the ingredients and proportions.

Cheers,
Colin