In some ways I am sympathetic, but wouldn’t this critique apply straightforwardly to any discipline that employs significant idealizations? Wouldn’t it show that idealized models, in, say, economics ought to be discarded? Or that the discipline ought to shift significantly because they’re in effect playing chmess? Or is the difference that political philosophy is a normative discipline in a way that economics is not?
Took the words right out of my mouth. I don't think Rawlsian ideal theory is actually defensible via the same arguments used for defending frictionless planes and expected utility maximizers--Appiah has a very nice discussion to this effect in his book on idealization--but I think the argument here is overbroad, in that it doesn't really let us distinguish good idealizations from bad ones.
As the author says near the end: 'Ideal theory of the kind practiced by Rawls and others does not involve simplifying assumptions; it involves counterfactual assumptions that mean it is theorising something altogether different.' As someone said 'All models are wrong. Some models are useful.' Judging whether a model contains usefully and acceptably simplifying assumptions or invalidating counterfactual assumptions is a critical aspect of assessing its utility.
But you could use that exact argument against all kinds of perfectly reasonable simplifying assumptions! Assume this spring were made of continuous matter (Hooke’s Law). Assume people were all self-interested (much of evolutionary game theory). Etc.
The missing idea in this article, IMO, is that we might be making simplifying assumptions in order to illustrate fundamental properties of a system that we all know is, in reality, more complicated. The point is to assume away some real features in order to isolate certain others. This isn’t always a good move, but you can’t always dismiss it as chmess.
An easier target than Rawls would be those political philosophers whose *policy proposals* only make sense in an ideal dream world—a world that ignores, tradeoffs, transaction costs, or what have you. Rawls is at least committed to caring about incentives etc. since these constrain the set of possible basic structures for society.
EDIT: but let me add that I loved the connection to Dennett on chmess. I’d forgotten about that passage!
i'm not 'always' dismissing 'it' as chess. Just ideal theories of politics, specifically.
Rawls thinks that real world political decisions (the realm of "nonideal theory") should be regulated by and made in reference to (his) ideal theory. So I'm afraid you can't get them off the hook that easy.
And yes, he cares a bit about incentives, so he's doing better than e.g. GA Cohen. But he doesn't care about them enough, because he doesn't have a realistic enough moral psychology.
I grant you that it would be chmess if Rawls were basing policy recommendations *entirely* on his theory. But isn't he pretty circumspect about doing so?
[Edit: Removed a false sentence -- Paul S is right. Rawls is not "circumspect" about welfare-state capitalism in sec. 42!]
To put it another way, I don't yet see your objection to the following kind of approach: we use a partly idealized theory to get our ideals and then use grubby empirical facts to figure out how to translate those ideals into policies. (Maybe your point is that idealizing can go too far even when trying to find ideals for a society?)
TJ says welfare state capitalism is ruled out, and we probably need to go for "property owning democracy", which is effectively a form of socialism, although he is very unspoken on the economics, which leaves him vulnerable on that point.
I don't have an objection to the kind of approach that you describe (so long as the idealisation does not lose touch with the basic building blocks of what politics necessarily has to be for creatures like us). My point is: Rawls (and such) are nowhere close to accurately being described as doing that.
What you describe is a lot more like what Dave Schmidtz advocate for in the first three chapters of his book Living Together. I like what Dave suggests.
Came here to glibly say, "now do econ", lol. But yeah, I think morally there is in fact a massive difference given that pol phil is (presumptively) normative and econ is (presumptively) descriptive. And that's not to say one should be able to get away with dubious assumptions more than the other. In general, houses of cards do not practically great mathematical frameworks make. And I don't think it's necessarily "better" that one can or should be able to quantify how off the idealization is from (what is for all practical purposes) reality. Yet IDK, maybe it's just my being a geek, but somehow it makes me less uncomfortable to say, "yeah this mathematical model might be garbage IRL but it's still kinda cute" than to say that moral intuitions about how to govern and live were fleshed out in a way that turned out to be...spurious. Ya feel me?
This reminds me of a joke: a farmer, whose chickens have been dying, employs the services of a biologist, a chemist, and a physicist. After dispatching with the theories of the biologist and the chemist (mites and toxic chemicals, respectively) the farmer asks the physicist what she thinks. The physicist, who has been busily scribbling on a note pad while the various investigations were taking place, says, “I believe I have the answer—but it only works for a spherical chicken in a vacuum.”
I'm a physicist and came here exactly to use the same joke, but with the opposite meaning.
I also studied *theoretical* physics and always found the joke utterly dumb (meaning also this whole post is actually wrong).
Of course in reality friction exists, so Newton's first principle (actually Galileo's) that an object mantain its status of linear motion if there is no force, seems unwarrented.
You know who started his physical thinking by what actually seem to happen? Aristotle. He got almost everything wrong. It took Galileo and Newton's "idealization" to build a theory that works.
So no, I'm sorry, your argument is unfounded and wrong.
In short, it's the claim that you shouldn't simplify a situation because that's unrealistic.
But in practice you should, at least as a start, because otherwise the problem is untractable.
Thank you!! My name is Nathan Woodard and I approve of your message!! I feel like the golden age of physics in the early 20th century created a lot of confusion in philosophy and social sciences--it became fashionable for theorists in other disciplines to steer towards the methods of the hard sciences (not hard as in difficult--hard in the sense of "hard determinism"). It seems to me that a lot of disciplines (like economics?) are still suffering a certain amount of brain damage that accrued during that period.
We physicists are expert wielders of idealized assumptions — a priori false but useful tools of thought. In social studies and many nascent sciences, however, such assumptions often ossify into dogma and become ideological cudgels that can persist for generations. Even in physics, whole subfields have at times gone astray — ether theory, caloric, steady-state cosmology, possibly even string theory today — but our field has generally managed these detours within one or two generations, thanks to the corrective pull of experiment and prediction.
This is among the best essays I have encountered in Substack. Thanks! It seems like you are entering into territory that clicks very neatly into some of the biggest debates of the centuries:
1) Social constructivism vs biological determinism.
2) Tragic vision vs, constrained vision. (Sowell)
3) Positive vs. Negative Liberty (Isaiah Berlin)
4) Reason vs. Tradition (Burke vs. Rationalist reformers)
5) Empiricism vs. Rationalism in the human sciences
I’m willing to bet my prepper stash (dried beans, seaweed, an FM radio, and a giardia filter) that you had all five of these debates—and more—at the back of your mind as you wrote this. (Kidding about the stash, and apologies if I missed something you did cover.) If I’m wrong, I’d be thrilled for you to unpack that. If I’m right, did you consciously steer clear of these topics to keep things morally and politically neutral? Either way, I’d love to see follow-up essays that frame these debates within the scaffolding you’ve built here. Those essays would be legendary—a real gift to posterity.
Well, that stuff is in the background for me, because I've spent about 20 years immersed in moral and political theory - and crucially, their histories - and that is just the water I swim in. I didn't make any of it explicit, because I don't think Dan would've allowed me to run a 3,000,000 word guest post!
As Max Stirner would say, you can argue about rights all you want but at the end of the day who owns the means of production is whoever seizes them.
One factor that certainly contributes to Chmess is the incentive to regularly publish novel results. Chmess is much safer, after all you're just doing speculative theory so if you're wrong, there are no brutal regimes' blood on your hands. The h-index can march up risk-free.
Which is fairly endemic as far as the Symbolic Capital Bubble goes.
The game of chmess seems to be a minor variant of chess, in such a way that studying it would offer very little insight into the game of chess. It would be roughly equivalent to a Rubik’s Cube with one square on each side with the wrong color. Let’s call this RubNik’s Cube. Yes, RubNik’s Cube would be challenging (for humans who use their color perception to solve it), but it’s not mathematically interesting. To a computer that begins with a definition of the cube that includes the original position of each square, it would be mathematically identical to a simple Rubik’s Cube. Chmess is hardly more interesting; in fact, it is far less interesting than Chess 960 (Fisher Random), a variant (to be exact, a group of 960 variants) that top players in the world do in fact play.
Now consider Rubik’s cubes of 4, 5, 6,….n layers. To study these objects, the original Rubik’s cube with 3 layers would be a valuable first step. It’s a simple case, a good place to start for the study of n-layer cubes. Of course, the simple application of the rules and techniques of solving a 3-layer cube would be inadequate for solving, say, a 10-layer cube, but it's difficult to imagine solving a 10-layer cube without solving the 3-layer cube first.
It seems that the assumption, in much political and economic theory, that humans are rational actors is such a first step. Such theories assume that human behavior can be modelled as an optimization function. The first approximation of that theory—that humans rationally pursue rational self-interest, is an extreme oversimplification of human behavior, but it’s not necessarily a bad place to start.
An optimization function that could actually model (and therefore explain) human political and economic behavior would have to possess many dimensions, starting with many of the factors that Dan Williams talks about all the time: confirmation bias, sense of self-worth, social approval, in-group loyalty vs out-group hostility, etc.
Even for one (such as I am) who is completely removed from the halls of academe, and particularly their philosophy departments, I found this essay a witty, enjoyable read. Also, the links toward the end to books examining more “chess like” approaches look fascinating, such as Robert Jubb’s “Unjust Authority” and Judith Shklar’s “The Faces of Injustice.”
I am also reminded, in reading this essay, of A.E. Housman’s “Introductory Lecture of 1892” (from which I took the quote I use for my Substack profile: “The house of delusions is cheap to build but drafty to live in, and ready at any instant to fall”).
I know nothing of Rawls, but, as described, his theorizing seems to show an advanced case of deductive reasoning disease of the type Housman dissects in his lecture. As Housman writes at the outset, “This method, conclusion first, reasons afterwards, has always been in high favour with the human race: you write down at the outset the answer to the sum; then you proceed to fabricate, not for use but for exhibition to the public, the ciphering by which you can pretend to have arrived at it. The method has one obvious advantage,—that you are thus quite sure of reaching the conclusion you want to reach.”
I look forward to following on (as best I can) where this exploration of political philosophy and its discontents may go.
I like the term ‘sober political realism’ and look forward to learning more about it. As a layperson I have occasionally wondered if philosophy in general should try harder to constrain itself to language, concepts and thought experiments that are realistic and can be widely understood. I have heard of ordinary language philosophy but I’m not sure if that captures what I’m saying here.
This sounds to me like yet another of the constant demands from the "left-wing" and the "right-wing" (which are really siblings, not opposites) that we should give up on liberal democracy and just have a civil war. It also sounds like the constant left-wing attacks on economics by using the term "homo economicus" to make fun of all economic theory and claim that we should just throw out models and rely on dialectic (which never works, for anything, because it's just very sloppy medieval scholasticism).
"Not only is it manifestly the case that politics is exemplified by agents not exhibiting “strict compliance” regarding justice, but more fundamentally, the very reason that we have politics is precisely because human beings don’t exhibit strict compliance regarding things like justice." -- This is also left-wing/right-wing rhetoric. It dismisses the opposition as evil haters of justice. Whereas in reality, the reason we have politics is more because humans DO exhibit strict compliance with e.g. justice, but have widely varying beliefs about what "justice" is, AND insist on calling everyone who disagrees with them "evil" instead of admitting that they, too, want justice, but have different ideas about what is just.
I experienced some cognitive dissonance while reading this essay. I big fan of Williams' due to his work on misinformation and his critique of naive political realism. But, at the same time, I have become increasingly partial to Rawls. When I was getting my phd in history, I barely knew who Rawls was. I guess you would say that we were studying chess instead of chmess.
But I started reading him about 8 years ago when I began to the increasing left authoritarianism surrounding me in academia. His ideal of pluralism in Political Liberalism seemed to offer an alternative to being forced into intolerant tribalism of the left or the right. Yeah, it's abstract and dense, but his basic idea seems pretty simple to me: "Hey we should be able to agree to some rules about how to live together fairly even if we don't agree about who God is or what He wants us to do with our lives." To me, that seems similar to the conclusions that I draw from Williams' critique of naive political realism: "Like, maybe we should chill out before we censor and punish those who disagree with us because maybe we're wrong and maybe they're not as evil as we think they are."
Maybe Rawls ideal game never did and never can exist, but I think that we were closer to playing it in the 20th century US than we are now. And I'd rather play open-minded tolerant liberalism than what we are playing at now even if the latter is more consistent with human nature.
But you do have a sense of how ships ought to be -- an idealization -- and part of that idealization is that they shouldn't be leaky. If you didn't have that, you'd have no more reason to fix the leak than to enlarge it.
1) yes, but an idealisation isn't the same thing as an ideal. I'm mean, just think about it. I can have an idealisation of a boat that has stopped leaking.... but I'm not thereby idealising an ideal boat. So you'll have to do better than that!
2) here is a good reason to fix the leak, not requiring idealisation about boats: I don't want to drown
EDIT: the point being, the boat is supposed to do something for me. The boat does not just simply exist as an entity that can have bigger and smaller holes.
yes, and the idealisations need to be carefully calibrated to the specific thing we are trying to understand (and that could change a lot within different bits of politics, let alone other human activities)
Great article! In general, I think the critique is fair but, at the risk of sounding like an apologist, I think Rawls deserves more credit here. Certainly the first two parts of TJ can be abstract and chmess-like. However, Part 3 constructs this powerful vision of how a sense of justice can really take root in people and it was based on the best work in moral psychology, social psychology, economics etc. That being said though, as a person who works a lot in this space, sometimes it does feel like the work I read has lost the proverbial plot.
I should confess that partly this was motivated after spending much of the summer with *Political Liberalism*...which effectively renounces part three of TJ and grafts off an utterly implausible moral psychology! So the later Rawls works against you I'm afraid :)
In some ways I am sympathetic, but wouldn’t this critique apply straightforwardly to any discipline that employs significant idealizations? Wouldn’t it show that idealized models, in, say, economics ought to be discarded? Or that the discipline ought to shift significantly because they’re in effect playing chmess? Or is the difference that political philosophy is a normative discipline in a way that economics is not?
Yes, one might even think that the displacement of political economy by economics was a big wrong turn...
Took the words right out of my mouth. I don't think Rawlsian ideal theory is actually defensible via the same arguments used for defending frictionless planes and expected utility maximizers--Appiah has a very nice discussion to this effect in his book on idealization--but I think the argument here is overbroad, in that it doesn't really let us distinguish good idealizations from bad ones.
As the author says near the end: 'Ideal theory of the kind practiced by Rawls and others does not involve simplifying assumptions; it involves counterfactual assumptions that mean it is theorising something altogether different.' As someone said 'All models are wrong. Some models are useful.' Judging whether a model contains usefully and acceptably simplifying assumptions or invalidating counterfactual assumptions is a critical aspect of assessing its utility.
What Alaistar said. More generally, see that Dave Schmidtz discussion about theories as maps linked to in the original
But you could use that exact argument against all kinds of perfectly reasonable simplifying assumptions! Assume this spring were made of continuous matter (Hooke’s Law). Assume people were all self-interested (much of evolutionary game theory). Etc.
The missing idea in this article, IMO, is that we might be making simplifying assumptions in order to illustrate fundamental properties of a system that we all know is, in reality, more complicated. The point is to assume away some real features in order to isolate certain others. This isn’t always a good move, but you can’t always dismiss it as chmess.
An easier target than Rawls would be those political philosophers whose *policy proposals* only make sense in an ideal dream world—a world that ignores, tradeoffs, transaction costs, or what have you. Rawls is at least committed to caring about incentives etc. since these constrain the set of possible basic structures for society.
EDIT: but let me add that I loved the connection to Dennett on chmess. I’d forgotten about that passage!
i'm not 'always' dismissing 'it' as chess. Just ideal theories of politics, specifically.
Rawls thinks that real world political decisions (the realm of "nonideal theory") should be regulated by and made in reference to (his) ideal theory. So I'm afraid you can't get them off the hook that easy.
And yes, he cares a bit about incentives, so he's doing better than e.g. GA Cohen. But he doesn't care about them enough, because he doesn't have a realistic enough moral psychology.
Thus Chmess it remains!
I grant you that it would be chmess if Rawls were basing policy recommendations *entirely* on his theory. But isn't he pretty circumspect about doing so?
[Edit: Removed a false sentence -- Paul S is right. Rawls is not "circumspect" about welfare-state capitalism in sec. 42!]
To put it another way, I don't yet see your objection to the following kind of approach: we use a partly idealized theory to get our ideals and then use grubby empirical facts to figure out how to translate those ideals into policies. (Maybe your point is that idealizing can go too far even when trying to find ideals for a society?)
TJ says welfare state capitalism is ruled out, and we probably need to go for "property owning democracy", which is effectively a form of socialism, although he is very unspoken on the economics, which leaves him vulnerable on that point.
I don't have an objection to the kind of approach that you describe (so long as the idealisation does not lose touch with the basic building blocks of what politics necessarily has to be for creatures like us). My point is: Rawls (and such) are nowhere close to accurately being described as doing that.
What you describe is a lot more like what Dave Schmidtz advocate for in the first three chapters of his book Living Together. I like what Dave suggests.
Great point -- thanks for the correction, Paul! (I've edited my earlier comment.)
Came here to glibly say, "now do econ", lol. But yeah, I think morally there is in fact a massive difference given that pol phil is (presumptively) normative and econ is (presumptively) descriptive. And that's not to say one should be able to get away with dubious assumptions more than the other. In general, houses of cards do not practically great mathematical frameworks make. And I don't think it's necessarily "better" that one can or should be able to quantify how off the idealization is from (what is for all practical purposes) reality. Yet IDK, maybe it's just my being a geek, but somehow it makes me less uncomfortable to say, "yeah this mathematical model might be garbage IRL but it's still kinda cute" than to say that moral intuitions about how to govern and live were fleshed out in a way that turned out to be...spurious. Ya feel me?
I feel ya!
This reminds me of a joke: a farmer, whose chickens have been dying, employs the services of a biologist, a chemist, and a physicist. After dispatching with the theories of the biologist and the chemist (mites and toxic chemicals, respectively) the farmer asks the physicist what she thinks. The physicist, who has been busily scribbling on a note pad while the various investigations were taking place, says, “I believe I have the answer—but it only works for a spherical chicken in a vacuum.”
I'm a physicist and came here exactly to use the same joke, but with the opposite meaning.
I also studied *theoretical* physics and always found the joke utterly dumb (meaning also this whole post is actually wrong).
Of course in reality friction exists, so Newton's first principle (actually Galileo's) that an object mantain its status of linear motion if there is no force, seems unwarrented.
You know who started his physical thinking by what actually seem to happen? Aristotle. He got almost everything wrong. It took Galileo and Newton's "idealization" to build a theory that works.
So no, I'm sorry, your argument is unfounded and wrong.
In short, it's the claim that you shouldn't simplify a situation because that's unrealistic.
But in practice you should, at least as a start, because otherwise the problem is untractable.
Nice joke though
All I would say here is: this is just yet more proof that political philosophy is fundamentally a different thing to physics :)
(in fact, I think it is true generally that philosophy is fundamentally a different thing to science… but that’s for another day)
Thank you!! My name is Nathan Woodard and I approve of your message!! I feel like the golden age of physics in the early 20th century created a lot of confusion in philosophy and social sciences--it became fashionable for theorists in other disciplines to steer towards the methods of the hard sciences (not hard as in difficult--hard in the sense of "hard determinism"). It seems to me that a lot of disciplines (like economics?) are still suffering a certain amount of brain damage that accrued during that period.
I'm also a physicist. As such, I am very envious of your name. :) :) :) :)
We physicists are expert wielders of idealized assumptions — a priori false but useful tools of thought. In social studies and many nascent sciences, however, such assumptions often ossify into dogma and become ideological cudgels that can persist for generations. Even in physics, whole subfields have at times gone astray — ether theory, caloric, steady-state cosmology, possibly even string theory today — but our field has generally managed these detours within one or two generations, thanks to the corrective pull of experiment and prediction.
Physics envy -- scourge of many a comparatively insecure discipline.
This is among the best essays I have encountered in Substack. Thanks! It seems like you are entering into territory that clicks very neatly into some of the biggest debates of the centuries:
1) Social constructivism vs biological determinism.
2) Tragic vision vs, constrained vision. (Sowell)
3) Positive vs. Negative Liberty (Isaiah Berlin)
4) Reason vs. Tradition (Burke vs. Rationalist reformers)
5) Empiricism vs. Rationalism in the human sciences
I’m willing to bet my prepper stash (dried beans, seaweed, an FM radio, and a giardia filter) that you had all five of these debates—and more—at the back of your mind as you wrote this. (Kidding about the stash, and apologies if I missed something you did cover.) If I’m wrong, I’d be thrilled for you to unpack that. If I’m right, did you consciously steer clear of these topics to keep things morally and politically neutral? Either way, I’d love to see follow-up essays that frame these debates within the scaffolding you’ve built here. Those essays would be legendary—a real gift to posterity.
Well, that stuff is in the background for me, because I've spent about 20 years immersed in moral and political theory - and crucially, their histories - and that is just the water I swim in. I didn't make any of it explicit, because I don't think Dan would've allowed me to run a 3,000,000 word guest post!
That makes perfect sense. :) Thanks again for the brilliant essay! I just ordered all your books. :)
i’m afraid they are a lot more boring! Although I suppose they do retain a certain willingness to pick fights…
As Max Stirner would say, you can argue about rights all you want but at the end of the day who owns the means of production is whoever seizes them.
One factor that certainly contributes to Chmess is the incentive to regularly publish novel results. Chmess is much safer, after all you're just doing speculative theory so if you're wrong, there are no brutal regimes' blood on your hands. The h-index can march up risk-free.
Which is fairly endemic as far as the Symbolic Capital Bubble goes.
Oooh yes i like that. Seems like it could be a very good supplement to Joseph Heath's case regarding why all the Marxists became Rawlsians...
The game of chmess seems to be a minor variant of chess, in such a way that studying it would offer very little insight into the game of chess. It would be roughly equivalent to a Rubik’s Cube with one square on each side with the wrong color. Let’s call this RubNik’s Cube. Yes, RubNik’s Cube would be challenging (for humans who use their color perception to solve it), but it’s not mathematically interesting. To a computer that begins with a definition of the cube that includes the original position of each square, it would be mathematically identical to a simple Rubik’s Cube. Chmess is hardly more interesting; in fact, it is far less interesting than Chess 960 (Fisher Random), a variant (to be exact, a group of 960 variants) that top players in the world do in fact play.
Now consider Rubik’s cubes of 4, 5, 6,….n layers. To study these objects, the original Rubik’s cube with 3 layers would be a valuable first step. It’s a simple case, a good place to start for the study of n-layer cubes. Of course, the simple application of the rules and techniques of solving a 3-layer cube would be inadequate for solving, say, a 10-layer cube, but it's difficult to imagine solving a 10-layer cube without solving the 3-layer cube first.
It seems that the assumption, in much political and economic theory, that humans are rational actors is such a first step. Such theories assume that human behavior can be modelled as an optimization function. The first approximation of that theory—that humans rationally pursue rational self-interest, is an extreme oversimplification of human behavior, but it’s not necessarily a bad place to start.
An optimization function that could actually model (and therefore explain) human political and economic behavior would have to possess many dimensions, starting with many of the factors that Dan Williams talks about all the time: confirmation bias, sense of self-worth, social approval, in-group loyalty vs out-group hostility, etc.
Even for one (such as I am) who is completely removed from the halls of academe, and particularly their philosophy departments, I found this essay a witty, enjoyable read. Also, the links toward the end to books examining more “chess like” approaches look fascinating, such as Robert Jubb’s “Unjust Authority” and Judith Shklar’s “The Faces of Injustice.”
I am also reminded, in reading this essay, of A.E. Housman’s “Introductory Lecture of 1892” (from which I took the quote I use for my Substack profile: “The house of delusions is cheap to build but drafty to live in, and ready at any instant to fall”).
I know nothing of Rawls, but, as described, his theorizing seems to show an advanced case of deductive reasoning disease of the type Housman dissects in his lecture. As Housman writes at the outset, “This method, conclusion first, reasons afterwards, has always been in high favour with the human race: you write down at the outset the answer to the sum; then you proceed to fabricate, not for use but for exhibition to the public, the ciphering by which you can pretend to have arrived at it. The method has one obvious advantage,—that you are thus quite sure of reaching the conclusion you want to reach.”
I look forward to following on (as best I can) where this exploration of political philosophy and its discontents may go.
I like the term ‘sober political realism’ and look forward to learning more about it. As a layperson I have occasionally wondered if philosophy in general should try harder to constrain itself to language, concepts and thought experiments that are realistic and can be widely understood. I have heard of ordinary language philosophy but I’m not sure if that captures what I’m saying here.
This sounds to me like yet another of the constant demands from the "left-wing" and the "right-wing" (which are really siblings, not opposites) that we should give up on liberal democracy and just have a civil war. It also sounds like the constant left-wing attacks on economics by using the term "homo economicus" to make fun of all economic theory and claim that we should just throw out models and rely on dialectic (which never works, for anything, because it's just very sloppy medieval scholasticism).
"Not only is it manifestly the case that politics is exemplified by agents not exhibiting “strict compliance” regarding justice, but more fundamentally, the very reason that we have politics is precisely because human beings don’t exhibit strict compliance regarding things like justice." -- This is also left-wing/right-wing rhetoric. It dismisses the opposition as evil haters of justice. Whereas in reality, the reason we have politics is more because humans DO exhibit strict compliance with e.g. justice, but have widely varying beliefs about what "justice" is, AND insist on calling everyone who disagrees with them "evil" instead of admitting that they, too, want justice, but have different ideas about what is just.
I experienced some cognitive dissonance while reading this essay. I big fan of Williams' due to his work on misinformation and his critique of naive political realism. But, at the same time, I have become increasingly partial to Rawls. When I was getting my phd in history, I barely knew who Rawls was. I guess you would say that we were studying chess instead of chmess.
But I started reading him about 8 years ago when I began to the increasing left authoritarianism surrounding me in academia. His ideal of pluralism in Political Liberalism seemed to offer an alternative to being forced into intolerant tribalism of the left or the right. Yeah, it's abstract and dense, but his basic idea seems pretty simple to me: "Hey we should be able to agree to some rules about how to live together fairly even if we don't agree about who God is or what He wants us to do with our lives." To me, that seems similar to the conclusions that I draw from Williams' critique of naive political realism: "Like, maybe we should chill out before we censor and punish those who disagree with us because maybe we're wrong and maybe they're not as evil as we think they are."
Maybe Rawls ideal game never did and never can exist, but I think that we were closer to playing it in the 20th century US than we are now. And I'd rather play open-minded tolerant liberalism than what we are playing at now even if the latter is more consistent with human nature.
But you do have a sense of how ships ought to be -- an idealization -- and part of that idealization is that they shouldn't be leaky. If you didn't have that, you'd have no more reason to fix the leak than to enlarge it.
1) yes, but an idealisation isn't the same thing as an ideal. I'm mean, just think about it. I can have an idealisation of a boat that has stopped leaking.... but I'm not thereby idealising an ideal boat. So you'll have to do better than that!
2) here is a good reason to fix the leak, not requiring idealisation about boats: I don't want to drown
EDIT: the point being, the boat is supposed to do something for me. The boat does not just simply exist as an entity that can have bigger and smaller holes.
So your position is that you need idealizations but not ideal theory?
yes, and the idealisations need to be carefully calibrated to the specific thing we are trying to understand (and that could change a lot within different bits of politics, let alone other human activities)
Great article! In general, I think the critique is fair but, at the risk of sounding like an apologist, I think Rawls deserves more credit here. Certainly the first two parts of TJ can be abstract and chmess-like. However, Part 3 constructs this powerful vision of how a sense of justice can really take root in people and it was based on the best work in moral psychology, social psychology, economics etc. That being said though, as a person who works a lot in this space, sometimes it does feel like the work I read has lost the proverbial plot.
I should confess that partly this was motivated after spending much of the summer with *Political Liberalism*...which effectively renounces part three of TJ and grafts off an utterly implausible moral psychology! So the later Rawls works against you I'm afraid :)