Special issue on ideal and non-ideal theories of justice

#1 On one way of cutting the territory up, an ideal theory of justice is one for a world where people are committed to the principles the theory generates and willing and able to comply with what those principles demand. A non-ideal theory specifies what principles there should be in a world with a bunch of people, some of whom don’t agree with the principles, aren’t motivated to comply etc. By tweaking the details (how bad are the baddies and how many? how good are the goodies, ditto?) you can generate endless inbetweeny variants. And for some people (G.A.Cohen) for example, Rawlsian ideal theory (see above) is still a shoddy compromise with real-world limitations, and so not really ideal at all.

I’m not sure that putting in terms of fact sensitivity is the most helpful way of explaining the debate to a newcomer. After all, Rawls adheres to ideal theory as he defines it (i.e. full compliance), but he’s the guy Cohen’s criticizing for fact sensitivity.

Of course, you could say compliance levels are simply one fact (among others) for a theory to be sensitive to, but I don’t think it’s the most helpful way of introducing the matter. (Then again, often I’m not sure what is going on, since so many people seem to be making their own distinction).

Justice, I know it when it happens to me.

At the risk of simplifying a complex subject I would posit that justice is dependent upon your role. As a police officer, one might consider justice the solving of crime and the sentencing of the guilty , as a social worker, the equitable distribution of services to those in need thereof. To a citizen of a nation aware of the impact of that nation on the rest of the world or the role of her govt in dispensing such internally we get a more tenuous grasp of this question.

Perhaps we overcomplicate things too much. Maybe justice should be tied more firmly to fairness, to equitable dispensing of resources to those in need rather than to those in power. Perhaps I am failing to grasp the nuance at work here, ideal justice theory / non-ideal theory….I am a nuts and bolts sort of guy and think , when the word justice leaps up, that far too many are denied justice and far too many maniplualte the system to obtain a sort of justice that is not that at all.

Or something that hits those same places of notice, which isn’t always cuteness or blondeness, in everyone. Recognizing the unfair treatment of the unattractive, or even the repulsive, is an attribute of the larger heart.

It is easy to conflate two distinctions here. One is between ideal and nonideal theory. There the distinction is roughly between the specification of what we can reasonably hope and thus ought to practically work for under favorable conditions and the specification of what we ought to do under less than favorable or even very pressing conditions. Another concerns the way in which we specify what we can reasonably hope and thus ought to practically work for. Here the distinction is roughly between what we might call an institutionalist approach (one that takes historically given institutional forms as a starting point for a critical normative reconstruction) and a rationalist approach (one that aims to reason solely from universal truths about human nature, conceptual necessities, and so on, and without appeal to existing or given institutional relations, self-understandings, and so on). One reason why the debate over ‘ideal theory’ rages (there is more than one reason) is that readers of Rawls have run these two distinctions together in characterizations of his methodological commitments.
(Rawls emphasizes the need for and priority of ideal theory (it frames nonideal theory), but takes an institutionalist approach to doing ideal theory (which many readers miss, treating Rawls as a paradigmatic rationalist, in the sense set out above).

Maybe everything is subjective, I don’t know, but some things certainly are a lot more subjective than others. I mean, we have ‘beauty pageants’, but not ‘theories of beauty’, as far as I know.

am i the only one here who has no idea what dubin, abb1 and belmont are on about? get off the shrooms, boys.

What about approaching the definition of justice a little more inductively? As in: (nearly) all of us agree that A is unjust; let’s compare our reasons for thinking so. For example: I’m currently bilious about the fact that hundreds of millions of children sleep in houses without windows or screens, so a million or two of them die each year of malaria, while the Christmas bonuses handed out at a single Wall Street investment bank would easily cover the expense of insecticide-treated screens for all of them. Is this unjust?

Well, would it be unjust to let your child die for lack of a tiny expenditure if you had pots of money? Of course. Your sister’s child? Your neighbor’s child? A child across town? Across the country? Across the world? In each case, why? I know there are lots more steps to the rich world’s failure to provide those screens, but wouldn’t proceeding stepwise like this be useful? Or is this what moral philosophers commonly do?

This website used to be able to detect and reject a double-post; decay and fall everywhere.

And no, plenty of people would say that it’s unjust to take from (coerce) an investment bank and give to children, that’s the whole point.

What’s striking here is that the two groups holding these diametrically opposite views on ‘justice’ (must take a little from the bank – mustn’t take anything from the bank) are of the same general persuasion – liberals. Like I said before: minor doctrinal disagreements, yet their understandings of ‘justice’ are dramatically different. And now think about liberals vs. socialists (who would simply expropriate the bank) or nationalists (who don’t care about any children outside their country/race/ethnicity), or countless combinations of various degrees of these main doctrines.

Tom O’Roughley

‘Though logic-choppers rule the town,
And every man and maid and boy
Has marked a distant object down,
An aimless joy is a pure joy,’
Or so did Tom O’Roughley say
That saw the surges running by.
‘And wisdom is a butterfly
And not a gloomy bird of prey.

‘If little planned is little sinned
But little need the grave distress.
What’s dying but a second wind?
How but in zig-zag wantonness
Could trumpeter Michael be so brave?’
Or something of that sort he said,
‘And if my dearest friend were dead
I’d dance a measure on his grave.’

W.B Yeats

For the record, there are clearly two Daves getting at you, Roy. That wasn’t me.

Indeed, I should hate to have you think that I would make such a shallow judgment of a major literary figure.

Come on, why isn’t this journal open access? As someone who struggles to do research at a university that can’t afford resources I need, I can’t believe scholars keep giving up their work to journals to subsidize the rentiers who scoop up all the profits from the current system.

Of course, by the standards of philosophy journals, this is probably about as cheap as they get. I make a point of sending pdf attachments of journal articles to people who want them but don’t have access; the system is ridiculous and awful but those of us with access can make it better by being generous.

geo, that’s a pretty standard method for a lot of moral/political philosophers, but of course it only gets you so far. Sometimes it works better in the resverse direction, to demonstrate that principles that sound reasonable and compelling lead to bizarre moral judgments no one would accept. That doesn’t finish the job of refuting that view, of course, but it can help stimulate thought on what might be wrong with the proposed principle after all.