Whence and Whither
Political Normativity?
––Thesis ––
Master of Science
Political Science (Political Theory)
University of Amsterdam
Adrian P. Kreutz
Supervisor: Enzo Rossi
Words: 23.110
June 2020
Abstract
This thesis is an attempt at assessing the current standing of realism in political theory. My key argument, which I shall develop throughout the following chapters, is that the value of realism qua meta-normative position must be questioned, and all sparring with the moralist that springs from it discontinued. From that follows the need for a recalibration of political realism: First, realism shouldn't be understood as committed to a sui generis source of political normativity but to a rejection of moral normativity as an appropriate guide for politics. Hence, the realist's slogan 'autonomy of the political' must not be understood as referring to autonomy tout court but to the autonomy of politics (or political reasoning, or political theory, for that matter) from a moral source of normativity. Second, realism must focus on the 'political' side of political realism. Third, radical realism, which emphasizes the 'political' in political realism, ought to be the way forward. However, as I shall disclose, it is, as it stands, not as radical as advocates of radical realism take it to be.
Part One of this thesis serves as a (biased) introduction to political realism. I will first lay out a conceptual analysis of realism defined as adhering to a genuine political source of normativity (cf. inter alia, Rossi & Sleat, 2014). I will then discuss realism's relation to (liberal) moralist political theory. A presentation of Williams' (2005) and Geuss' (inter alia, 2010) realist machineries will bring the introduction to a close. Part Two is concerned with exposing the attacks leveled at the realist agenda by Leader-Maynard & Worsnip (2018) as unfounded. This discussion will motivate a reformulation of the realist position, one that dares to depart from meta-normative quibbles. I will then look at clinical research on the Moral Foundations Theory (cf. Hatemi, Crabtree & Smith 2019), which I take not only to bolster but even to strengthen the realist position. I will conclude Part Two with a substantial recalibration of the realist case. Part Three is about moving from 'whence?' to 'whither?': First, I will review charges of status-quo bias (cf., inter alia, Prinz, 2016; Finlayson, 2017) and how radical realists respond to it (cf. inter alia, Prinz & Rossi, 2017; Rossi, 2019; Rossi & Argenton, 2020). Second, I will take a Marxian stance on radicalism and evaluate forms of critique (immanent critique and genealogical critique, to be precise) along those lines. Radical realism qua genealogical ideology-critique, I shall argue, lacks radical purchase. Third, I will formulate an argument for why one might want to be reticent about the value of genealogy in ideology-critique in general. And fourth, I will conclude with a proposal for how the radical realist might, in the end, be able to square rekindling genealogy with the pursuit of (proper) radicalism.
Content
Abstract 2
Part One
§1 Sources of Normativity 5
§2 The 'Ultimate Point-of-View Gun' 12
§3 Power and Order 17
§4 Facts and Feasibility 23
Part Two
§5 On Moralist Whataboutism 27
§6 Upside-Down Moral Foundations 35
Part Three
§7 How Radical is Radical Realism? 42
Part One
"I fantasize, I call it quits I swim with the economists
And I get to the bottom of it for good By the time reality hits
The chimes of freedom fell to bits The shining city on the fritz" –– Alex Turner
§1 Sources of Normativity
Is everything permitted in a world without God? "Wrong!", one might interpret Hugo Grotius as saying (cf. Tuck, 1979: 58-81). Human beings have obligation "even if we should concede that which cannot be concede without the utmost wickedness, that there is no God, or that the affairs of men are of no concern to him", Grotius said (1962:92 [1625]). His comment is undeniably drenched in an excess of pious loyalty, but isn't it still the case that everything was permitted in a godless world if only we could do away with pious hypocrisy? On some readings, this might be considered Hobbes' programme (cf. Johnson Bagby, 2007; Cromartie, 2008). However, jumping to that conclusion is perhaps a wee bit hasty. After all, moral conduct, Hobbes said, might as well be expedient for social stability––within families, nations, or wherever else––but moral conduct is not really obligatory in and of itself unless there is a Leviathan, an authority with coercive powers that lays down moral codes as the law to which the people must abide. Morality, this illustrious notion, what is it then? In the end, maybe little more than a politician's fantasy that has proven useful in keeping calm the cattle? Besides Hobbesians and Grotians, there are those more radically inclined. Those like Ivan Karamazov, Dostoyevsky's rebel-with-a-cause, for whom it is not God's existence (or the Leviathan's, for that matter) that is unacceptable, but who still, moved by the mundane atrocities and precarities, "most respectfully returns him [God] the ticket". The urge to do away with morality, once and for all, is indeed a viable one. But if morality doesn't write the guidebooks to the social world, what else might do?
The Specter of Normativity
It is widely acknowledged that God, the Leviathan, or indeed we ourselves make claims on, command, oblige, regulate and guide us and our conduct. When the Leviathan, for instance, tells you that something is right, or good, or true, or prudential, or just, or virtuous, or beautiful, the Leviathan is saying that you ought to do what is right, ought to adhere to the good, ought to know what is true, ought to believe what is expedient, ought to act according to what is just, or even ought to be aesthetically pleasing1 (cf. Darwal, 2000).
What is arguably in the Leviathan's authority is to make normative judgments, in other words, 'verdicts'. Some of those verdicts are ethical verdicts, especially (or perhaps exclusively) those that involve the notions of 'goodness', or 'the good life'. Hence, there is something like ethical normativity. Some other verdicts appeal to the aesthetic value of things. Hence, there is aesthetic normativity. Others, again, appeal to 'truth' and hence to knowledge, or to 'prudence', and hence to knowledge's little sister, 'belief', which opens the categories of epistemic and prudential normativity. The normative valence of some of those verdicts may not be perfectly epistemically transparent (a term I will define in Part
1 If that’s the corresponding ought-statement to aesthetic normativity, about which I am not sure––as if
Three). This is the situation in which we find Dostoyevsky's Ivan. On those grounds, as we will see in Part Three, verdicts can be challenged.
All the above are 'kinds of normativity' for they contain different kinds of 'ought-statements'. Instead of kinds of normativity we can also say that ought-statements are different with respect to their underlying 'sources of normativity', i.e. that where normativity comes from, where it is, crudely put, generated. Moral sources of normativity are typically centered around the concept of 'rightness', at least according to Anscombe (cf. Teichmann, 2008) who seems to have a Kantian idea of morality working in the background. Of course, her broadly Kantian deontological commitments make Anscombe's discussion biased––in any case, 'goodness' could be the center of moral sources of normativity instead. I prefer Anscombe for no reason. I think Anscombe's is a widely acknowledge way of drawing the line between morality and ethics. The former being concerned with 'rightness', the latter with 'goodness' (cf. Foot, 2001).
Moralists (for the technical use of the term, see Estlund, 2017) think that verdicts about rightness (and justice) are, odds-on, moral verdicts and that those moral verdicts of rightness govern politics. In other words, moralists––these are the Kantians, Neo-Benthamites, Neo-Mooreans, Neo-Confucians, and Neo-Lockeans, to name but a few– –believe that the normative foundations of politics can be found in some external, non-political system of morality (cf. Hall & Sleat, 2017:280).
According to (a strong-ish version of) political realism, political concerns derive their normativity from a genuine political, this is, non-moral source of normativity. Above all ostensibly genuine political concerns, most realists will say, is legitimacy (cf. inter alia, Horton, 2010; 2012; Mason, 2010; Mouffe, 2005; Newey, 2010; Philp, 2012; Sleat, 2012; Rossi, 2010b; 2012; Waldron, 1999; Williams, 2005). "This means", says Cross (2020:1), "that the fact that an institution is or isn’t legitimate gives people some kind of reason to do or not do something". But whether there really is such a thing as a genuine political source of normativity, and what it means to be genuine in the first place, are contentious questions.
The Slugfest
This essay is a slugfest between the moralist and realist. I aim to advocate the realist position and yet to make overt its weaknesses. The substantive issue of the moral vs. political normativity debate, I will argue, hinges on whether politics as a human endeavor is best guided by a moral source of normativity (in the form of an overarching moral principle, perhaps) as opposed to any other source of normativity. A strong realist position promotes a sui generis source of political normativity. This meta-normative version of political realism, I shall argue, is unreasonably strong2. In fact, as I shall argue towards
2 I am using the term 'meta-normativity' in a distinct sense here: Quine (1976) held that the central question
of metaphysics is 'What is there?', to be answered by looking at what it is we find inside the scope of our existential quantifiers. When we assume that there are both political and moral sources of normativity, and we are asking ourselves whether they are distinct or otherwise connected by a relation of priority or fundamentality, we go beyond the mere 'On what there is' to a question of how those metaphysical entities
the end of this thesis, it has been ill-advised to advocate a meta-normative definition of political realism to begin with.
Sphere of Normativity
For us to argue about, or else ideally to understand the chasm between political normativity and moral normativity I think it might help to first have a robust conceptual framework. Admittedly, what I have on offer its little more than a scaffolding, it is by far not exhaustive. Nonetheless, here is what I wish to propose:
Normative concepts cluster in spheres: The moral sphere, the political sphere, the aesthetic sphere, among others. These are spheres that evolve around thin(-ish) concepts such as 'good', 'right', 'just' and 'beautiful', or thick-ish concepts such as 'tactful', 'kind', 'cruel', 'elegant' and 'edgy' (for the concepts of thinness and thickness, see Williams, 1985; Annas, 2016; Bonzon, 2009). How those spheres emerge in the first place is difficult to say. It could be that normative concepts cluster in spheres because of a shared subject matter, because they can all be reduced to the same base, or because of some other form of family resemblance. The details shall not matter here. We can think about thick spheres of normativity as constituents of thin spheres of normativity; 'edgy' and 'elegant', for instance, are thick normative aesthetic concepts which can be subsumed under the thin(-ish) concept of 'beauty', hence they are constitutive of the sphere of aesthetic normativity––a position known in the literature as Thick Centralism. Its converse, Thin Centralism, the view on which thin spheres have priority and thick spheres are its members, is every bit as conceivable (cf. Väyrynen, 2019).3
What makes certain concepts (virtues, values and prescriptions) aesthetic as opposed to moral or political (if there is such a thing) is hard to say. Prima facie, intuition seems to be a better guide than reason when it comes to delineating, for instance, what is aesthetic from what is moral. The intuitionist view is indeed widespread, albeit rarely
(sources of normativity) interact with each other. Hence, to a meta-metaphysical level. It is imperative to mention that I am not using the term 'meta-metaphysics' to refer to a study of the methodological
foundations of metaphysics itself (whether it is a priori or a posteriori discipline, for instance), as Chalmers,
Manley & Wasserman (2009) do in their celebrated introduction to meta-metaphysics. I acknowledge that mine is a somewhat arbitrary terminology, but so is everybody else's. There is no solid reason for why a prefixed 'meta' should indicate the study of a discipline's methodological foundations instead of simply a higher-level discourse on lower level entities. Instead of meta-metaphysics, we might as well talk about meta-normativity (as I did above), which, correspondingly, I don't take to be an inquiry into the nature of normative reasoning––as in 'what are normative verdicts anyway?'––but into the ways sources of normativity interact.
3A different, perhaps philosophically more sophisticated but eventually similar approach to spheres of
normativity is Skorupski's (2010), where the spheres of normativity (in his words, 'domains of reason') center around, what he calls 'reason relations' which are 'irreal objects of true and false thought'. Skorupski's is a reductionist move: All normativity is ultimately about reason. Reasons, for Skorupski, are of three different kinds: Epistemic, practical and evaluative. I capture the idea of 'kinds of reason' with the concept of a normative core (below). I in fact eschew the reductionism to 'reason' in my approach, which, contra Skorupski, I think is neither primitive, nor pervasive, nor constitutive of thought itself. For a discussion of a wide concept of a sphere of normativity, encompassing norms, requirements, oughts, reasons, reasoning, rationality, justification, and value, see also Robertson (2009).
carefully examined. In the Tractatus (§6.421), for instance, Wittgenstein (1999) says that "aesthetics and ethics are one and the same". He is using 'moral' and 'ethical' interchangeably, so we can turn it into a judgment about the sameness of morality and aesthetics. His judgement on sameness, let's assume, goes beyond the mere recognition of both being in some sense about values.
On the other hand, there are also intuitive differences between morality and aesthetics: Morality is everywhere, situation in which moral judgement is required "spring up around us like partridges out of the grass", in Sartre's (1993:62) jargon, in a way that situations which require aesthetic judgment don’t. We also hold people responsible for ethical harms in a much more serious manner than we would do for aesthetic harms (given that aesthetic harms exist, apart from the obvious case; Hundertwasser houses). But those are neither arguments for the sameness of ethics and aesthetics, nor for the latter being reducible to the former.
There is a whole debate about whether inquiry into (sources of) normativity can at all be rational, as Aristotelians and Kantians like to think, or whether it is based on (non-rational) emotions and intuitions, as non-cognitivists tend assert (cf. Foot, 1972; Broome, 1999). A problem for the non-cognitivist view is that some spheres of normativity apply to attitudes, intuitions or emotions. Epistemic normativity for instance applies to beliefs and prescribes certain attitudes to truth. An explanation for why epistemic normativity guides attitudes which refers to attitudes runs at the risk of circularity. So, let's just take for granted that inquiry into sources of normativity can be rendered rationally accessible, even if the how to is far from clear.
How, then, shall we go about delineating what is moral from what is political if rational inquiry into the relation between normative spheres has proven to be an arduous enterprise? This really is the bed of nails on which the whole meta-normative moral vs. political normativity slugfest rests. Since moral evaluations are so pervasive (or perhaps self-important) that they permeate nearly everything, as the Sartre quote suggests, it is easy for the moralist to claim fundamentality or priority over all other spheres of normativity: Morality as the overarching institution; morality the default mode. The realist, on the other hand, seems to carry the heavy burden of proof. We will return to this in Part Two.
An example for the 'morality is everywhere' attitude we find in a footnote to Political Liberalism where Rawls seems to use "moral" in the loosest way possible covering everything that can ostensibly be the carrier of normativity ("ideals, principles and standards") while explaining that “…in saying that a conception is moral, I mean, among other things, that its content is given by certain ideals, principles and standards; and that these norms articulate certain values, in this case political values.” (Rawls, 1996:11). With this extremely broad understanding of 'morality', moralism becomes trivial. It does not show that moralism is true in a philosophically interesting sense. What we want to avoid at all cost is a purely verbal, non-substantive debate (I shall return to this point in §5 when discussing moralist attacks on realism). The debate is rendered substantive, we might say, once spheres of normativity can be differentiated without semantic confusion or the discourse defect that comes with translating one position, without remainder, into the
other. This, I will not even try. How to render the meta-normative debate substantive, I simply don't know––and, I assume, neither does anyone else involved in the meta-normative discussion about political realism. Evidence for why this discussion is futile will be picked up in Part Two. This will motivate a recalibration of political realism.
Sources of Normativity
To understand the "classical" realist position a little better I nevertheless wish to spell out the meta-normative realist position as clearly as possible, just to get an impression of where it is the realist comes from, argumentatively speaking. The conceptual scaffolding is rarely made explicit in the realist literature, so maybe it will help to get a clearer picture of their venture.
The interesting question is where spheres of normativity get their normativity from in the first place. This is where the sources of normativity enter the stage. In a celebrated lecture series, Christine Korsgaard (1992) describes, albeit exclusively in the ethical case, different sources of normativity––a term she also coined. A source of normativity is where normativity comes from, metaphysically speaking. Pertinent examples may be: From moral sentiments (see Part Two), from ideology-critique or from utopian dreaming (see Part Three). On that I agree with Korsgaard. But Korsgaard seems to entangle two concepts which should better be kept apart: sources of normativity and justifications of normativity.
The quarrel above, between Grotius, Ivan, and Hobbes is put in terms of moral conduct and can, according to Korsgaard, be an attempt at finding the justification of ethical normativity. A justification seeks, that’s etymologically unsurprising, to justify a verdict, usually the verdict of some authority. The verdict "You shall have no other gods before me!" (Exodus 20:3), if uttered by God, the authority in all matter's moral (let's pretend), is a somewhat circular way of justifying the moral conduct of monotheism for God seems to be both source and justification of this moral normativity. But maybe it makes clearer the distinction. The quarrel between Grotius, Ivan, and Hobbes is about more than issues of justification. It is also about a quest for sources of normativity in the metaphysical sense, as in that what generates as opposed to merely justifies normativity. Korsgaard misses out on that distinction between sources and justifications.
Normative Authority
This justificatory aspect is what I wish to capture with the notion of a normative authority. A normative authority functions like a culvert through which normativity flows and through which normative statements acquire their justification. Monotheism is justified because God, the authority on theistic issues, told us so. Authorities don't usually generate normativity––that’s what sources of normativity do––but the normativity of ought-statements is "mediated" through them. In the case of God, the point I am trying to make may be less obvious, for God is usually associated with a whole host supranatural capabilities, so why not the capability to generate ought statements. In that sense (and
that’s perhaps what makes theistic commandments generally problematic), God is both source and authority of normativity. In the case of Donald Trump, who most people (although maybe not he himself) behold as incapable of supranatural forces, it should be obvious that he doesn't bring about normativity pace his political position, but that in the best case an already normative statement derives its justification from Trump's political authority. For example, when Trump say's "People of America, inject yourselves disinfectant!" that verdict lacks normative valence regardless of Trump's authority–– perhaps for prudential reasons. If justification and normative valence go apart systematically, that may be a reason for deep concerns, either about the justification of a normative statement, or about its normative underbelly.
Normative Core
The notion of a normative core is thought to express the fact that sources and spheres do not have to converge. In other words, just because the sphere is broadly epistemic, this does not mean that the source from which the sphere derives its normativity must be epistemic, too. This is an important point with regards to the meta-normative moralism vs. realism debate. A political sphere might derive its normativity from an epistemic source (this is the view I am going to push in Part Three), or any other non-moral source of normativity. This is already to depart from the "classical" meta-normative realist position which would say that there is a sui generis political normative core. This is unnecessarily strong. That and why it is unnecessarily strong is being discussed in chapter §5. On a less idealistic reading, to say that there is genuine political normativity is to say that politics is guided by everything but moral normativity. An already recalibrated definition of political realism thus comes down to that: The theory of politics is normatively guided by a source of normativity with a non-moral normative core (whatever this may be). The conceptual scaffolding that I was trying to establish looks something like this:
Normative Authority: |Divine| |Leviathan| |Self| |None| etc. Spheres of Normativity: |Moral | |Political| |Aesthetic| etc.
Sources of Normativity: |Moral Sentiments| |Ideology-Critique| |Utopianism| etc. Normative Core: |Moral| |Epistemic| |Modal| etc.
Alternative Definitions
A pertinent example of this unnecessarily strong "classical" realist position is Rossi & Sleat's (2014:1) definition which accentuates the meta-normative aspect of realism. Political realism, they say, is defined "on the basis of its attempt to give varying degrees of autonomy to politics as a sphere of human activity, in large part through its exploration
of the sources of normativity appropriate for the political." On a strong reading of this, there is absolute discontinuity between moral and political sources of normativity––they take Geuss (2008) to be an advocate of that.
I admit, Rossi & Sleat's is sufficiently vague to escape the strong reading. What they mean by 'autonomy', they might say, is not autonomy tout court but autonomy in this favourable weak sense. On a weak reading, "morality may have a role to play in providing a source of political normativity, yet it remains important to appreciate the manner in which politics remains a distinct sphere of human activity"(ibid.) (See also, Philp 2007, 2012; Newey 2013; Sleat 2014; Sleat 2013; Waldron 1999). The realist on the weak reading, they say, merely seeks to give "greater autonomy to distinctive political thought" (Williams, 2005:3). Throughout this thesis I will present reasons for why the strong reading is uncharitable.
Rossi & Sleat's rendering of the realist case is certainly not without alternatives. Political realism is not one monolithic thing. Some even dub its advocates are a ragtag band (cf. Galston, 2010:385). Philp (2012:636) for instance conceives of realism, or what he calls 'realism without illusions' as "a code of honour". For him, realists should not be occupied with meta-theoretical games, severing a genuine political source of normativity form morality broadly construed, but should better see a “pragmatic account of realism” which “looks more like a code of honour with respect to arguments about political possibilities in given contexts”. I agree with the former observation that realists should drop the meta-normative debate, but I am not sympathetic towards the "code of honour". Philp's definition creates a rather narrow concept of politics qua code of virtues of personal agency as pointed out in Finlayson (2017) and moves realism too close towards non-ideal theory. Swift & White (2008) think of realism as a purely methodological position, in contrast to a full-fledged theory of the political and a vision for the practice of real politics. This entails that realism is nothing but an amendment of the methodological shortcomings of the current moralist ways of doing political theory. Anti-moralism is a significant characteristic of the realist position (see the next chapter), but to equate it with realism is wrong. First, realism is supposed to be an alternative to prevalent political theorizing (it's not just (liberal-)moralist reformism). Second, I take realism to carry some (if only a marginal) political vision.
Realism is a robust agenda for the study of the practice of politics and a revisionist methodological approach to matters of political theory. But it is not only a revisionist methodology (cf. Rossi, 2015). It is also a vision of politics, yet not a substantive political position like liberalism, conservativism, communitarianism, or socialism4. Among those
4 Realism is politically underdetermined––an unsaturated concept, in Fregean parlance. It can be partisan
when saturated by a substantive political position, such as socialism. As Rossi and Sleat (2014:9) rightly point out, "Socialism might be thought of as inherently more realistic insofar as it not only takes seriously conflicts of interests but views these in terms of a nexus of power relations between economic groups." There are, however, also problems with saturating realism with socialism. First, breaking everything down to class-conflict is a one-sided view of political conflict and therefore inherently unrealistic unless socialists can proof the fundamentality of class-conflict to all other forms of conflict, which is a vexed issue, especially in the context of intersectionality theory. Furthermore, as Freeden (2013) notes, socialism, especially as manifested in Cohen's camping trip, is likely to assume a too harmonious account of human nature for it to count as broadly realistic.
attempts to narrow down realism to a comprehensive agenda I prefer this recalibration of Rossi & Sleat's definition: The theory of politics is normatively guided by a source of normativity with a non-moral normative core. Or, to put it with Brecht (my translation): "First comes the grub, then comes morality" [German: "Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral].
Further Aspects of Political Realism
Political Realism encompasses more than just a distinctive stance on normativity. Yet, the commitment to the normative autonomy of a political source of normativity can absolutely be considered the middle of the realist vortex: "Insofar as realism is a normative theory […]", say Rossi and Sleat (ibid:2) "it can be distinguished on the basis of its choice of the relevant sources of political normativity." This alleged autonomy of a political source of normativity pertains on what Rossi & Sleat (ibid.) say are the four key-themes of political realism. According to my rendition, these are (1) an opposition to an applied ethics view of politics (i.e. moralism), (2) an opposition to ideological obfuscation of legitimation-stories, (3) an opposition to the priority of justice over legitimacy, and (4) an opposition to universality and context-independence. Those points are of course not perfectly isolated in practice.
A lot of realist critique pertains on more than one point. The first point permeates, in one sense or another, the entire thesis. The opposition to ideological obfuscation of legitimation-stories will be central to Part Three. A discussion of realist's opposition to the priority of justice over legitimacy is picked up in §3. Next, we will look a little more closely at the realist's opposition to universality and context-independence or as I shall call it, the mainstream political philosopher's Ultimate Point of View Gun.
§2 The 'Ultimate Point-of-View Gun'
In 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy', at least in its 2005 cinematographic rendition, Deep Though (the super-computer which determined '42' as life's ultimate meaning) creates am epistemically potent gun which lets its target see things from the perspective of the shooter: The Point-of-View Gun. Mainstream liberal political philosophy, says the realist––and by that she is usually referring to the 'nouvelle greats', Rawls, Dworkin, Nozick, Cohen and Habermas5––is the attempt to equip political philosophy with an
*Ultimate* Point-of-View Gun, one that works on a level upstream political reality––a meta-political level––and promises to make once and for all obsolete the need for
5 Some people debate whether Rawls can rightly be classified as a moralist. (cf. Gledhill, 2012; Jubb, 2014;
Thomas, 2017). One point of conflict is the following of Rawls' (2001:1) claims: the "practical role arise[s] from divisive political conflict and the need to settle the problem of order", which sound a lot like realist jargon. Based on that others contend that "Rawls is more realist than many realists realise" (Jubb, 2015:919). The difference is still that Rawls moralizes conflict through his 'reasonable pluralism' (while acknowledging order), which the realist doesn't.
individuals of a pluralistic society to make use of their own *Private* Point-of-View Guns to consolidate conflict.
The philosophical method of most anglophone political theory is in the spirit of the Ultimate Point of View Gun. It is, say Rossi & Argenton (2020:21), "characterised (inter alia) by reliance on ‘intuition pumps’ and other types of thought experiments, as well as other argumentative strategies designed to appeal to pre-theoretical, common sense judgments." (see also Brownlee & Stemplowska, 2017). The Ultimate Point-of-View Gun, fired by the political philosophy from her meta-political high seat, aimed for a sufficiently large society is conjectured to create an artificial situation (behind a 'veil of ignorance', for instance) in which the effects of every individual carrying around his or her own private Point-of-View Gun is already established by design––or, in the terminology of 'Political Liberalism', an 'overlapping consensus of reasonable comprehensive philosophical doctrines'. The Rawlsians, with their 'ideal-theory' project, and the Habermasians, with their 'ideal-speech' project (cf. Benhabib,1986:329) are pristine examples for political philosophy invoking the Ultimate Point-of-View Gun–– of philosophers mimicking Deep Thought.
One way to characterize the anti-liberal moralist stance of political realism then is as a rejection of this hubris. Instead of grand, universalist, context-independent theories which put forward universal principles for any possible political scenario realists adhere to contextualist normativity and sensitivity to the practice of real politics (cf. Bourke and Geuss 2009; Dunn 2000; Dunn 1990; Sabl 2012). The Ultimate Point-of-View Gun, on the other hand, usually comes in a moralized form: "[Rawls’] key idea", says Freyenhagen (2011:324), "is to formulate a conception of justice which is freestanding in a double sense: (1) it is freestanding from moral and ethical values beyond the political sphere (for example, it is agnostic about whether surfing or monastic devotion leads to the good life) and (2) it is also freestanding from philosophically controversial questions (such as the nature of truth or the sources of normativity)."Williams (2005:1) too has reservations about the liberal philosopher's Ultimate Point-of-View Gun. He dismisses the Rawlsian and the Habermassian project as "political moralism" which seeks to derive alleged political verdicts from pre-political ethical ideas and specifies "the limits of political conduct through pre-political moral commitments such as a Kantian notion of autonomy or some conception of moral rights" (Rossi & Sleat, 2014:3). Geuss (2008:9) shares this diagnosis but calls it the "ethics-first approach".
Another succinct reason for why realist should be critical of political liberalism is that its concept of legitimacy is self-grounding. To see this, we may borrow some terminology from Rawls, and some from Rahel Jaeggi. In his Political Liberalism (1996:137), Rawls defines liberal legitimacy thus: "Our exercise of political power is fully proper only when it is exercised in accordance with a constitution the essentials of which all citizens as free and equal may reasonably be expected to endorse in the light of principles and ideas acceptable to their common human reason. This is the liberal principle of legitimacy." According to Rawls' definition, a liberal political actor would fail to adhere to the standards of liberal legitimacy if it interfered with the free choice of one's, as Jaeggi (2014) puts it, form of life. A form of life is a rather lax and broad concept. We
may break it down as a set of cultural artefacts of human coexistence, including practices and moral and ethical beliefs. The nuclear family, for instance, is a form of life centered around a particular mode of coexistence, a particular set of moral and ethical beliefs and certain routinized practices. The standards of liberal legitimacy entail ethical neutrality towards and non-interference with forms of life––one may choose to live in a nuclear heteronormative family, or one may not––perhaps, one may call this progressive liberalism. The 'pursuit-of-happiness slogan' of the American constitution is a way of expressing the idea that a liberal political actor has no right to interfere with anyone's pursuit of 'the good life', i.e. anyone's form of life. This position of ethical neutrality, however, is a form of life itself. It is a way of pursuing the good life. The ethical neutrality of the liberal form of life, however, has the tendency not to thematize the plurality of forms of life at all, given that criticizing or questioning a form of life from an ethical perspective is impermissible. The impermissibility of questioning or criticizing forms of life of course extends to liberalism qua form of life. In other words, liberalism renders itself impermissible to be thematized let alone criticized or questioned. It is thus inherently status-quo affirming and self-grounding.
There are then two problems with ethically neutral liberalism: First, it renders alternative forms of life––this is, alternatives to the liberal form of life––invisible by making critical assessment impermissible (cf. Adorno, 2003; see also Freynhagen, 2011; Jaeggi, 2014; and many more). This lack of alternatives to the liberal form of life indirectly strengthens the legitimacy of ethically neutral liberal political actors. It sets in motion a process of 'naturalization': A lack of alternatives to liberalism may easily be turned into a 'This is how humans naturally and therefore ideally coexist'. Inside liberalism the way of naturalization conflicts with its anti-paternalist code and the point and purpose of ethical neutrality. It conceals the space of possible forms of life and so largely inhibits, by concealing the options, the free pursuit of happiness. Under scrutiny, liberalism is self-undermining. Second and connected, because the legitimacy of the liberal form of life derives its legitimacy from being liberal (which we saw it does by being illiberal, i.e. by concealing alternatives), it is self-legitimizing––legitimacy runs in a loop, so to say (cf. Rossi, 2008).
The Wittgensteinian View of Politics
Refuting the moralisation of politics is usually a two-step process: First, realists point out that ethical values or principles (such as principles of justice, rights, freedom, and equality) are not appropriately sensitive to the real forces of politics and thus unfit at guiding the practice of politics. Second, realists point out that giving antecedent authority to moral values and principles (see above) improperly determines the limits and ends of real politics. The upshot: Moral ideals/values/principles are inappropriate resources when it comes to settling issues within the political realm. But what is politics in the first place? Tracing the realist ragtag band's self-professed lineage can enlighten us here.
Realists take themselves to be descendants of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Hume, maybe Nietzsche, maybe Weber and Schmitt, for the radicals Lenin and for the naturalists
Aristotle––remember, realism is unsaturated. The common denominator between those figures is perhaps a denial of consensus-based theories as the "desire to evade, displace, or escape from politics" (Gaslston, 2009:111). Realists usually think that ineluctable disagreement––perpetuum bellum at worst, modus vivendi at best (cf. Horton, 2010; McCabe, 2010)––is the hallmark of politics. To observe politics is to observe a never-ending conflict. A conflict that cannot be stopped without making politics obsolete or stepping violently outside the realms of politics. Underlying this thought is a distinction between bona fide politics and mere domination or brute rule by violent force. With that in mind, it becomes overt why realists think the mainstream political philosopher's Ultimate Point-of-View Gun is a case of unjustified optimism.
If politics is perpetual conflict, what is it to do politics? Doing politics must be more than observing a continuous battle. It is the intention to bring this conflict to an end, to establish order, cohesion, stability and peace. Doing politics is like climbing Wittgenstein's ladder into a safe and stable treehouse: Once you have reached the top the ladder becomes nonsensical (unsinnig), you must throw it away, for climbing down would mean a return into a situation of disorder and instability. The politician "must transcend these propositions [the political propositions of perpetual conflict] and then he will see the world aright", Wittgenstein might say (cf. Tractatus §6.54). By "aright" we really mean aright, as a world without politics would be a world without conflict, one in which finally and once and for all everything was, well… aright. That this treehouse of perfect peace, stability and harmony is utopian in the pejorative sense come with a basic realist attitude. Nevertheless, the treehouse is what politics is striving towards. Ideally, there would be no need for politics. Politics has lived up to its own expectations (it meets its own definition) if and only if it has become superfluous––politics proper is politics own cure. This is the epitome of the Wittgensteinian view of politics which describes my rendition of the realist picture.
This, I admit, may sound like some kind of anarchist view. Godwin (2015 [1793]) or perhaps Chomsky (2005) come to mind. Both think that politics is a necessary evil, but one that ought to be overcome. A certain anarchist vision––one without political coercion, but not necessarily without coercion tout court (for such a view, see Raekstad, 2016)––certainly stands at one end of the Wittgensteinian view of politics6. That this
anarchist vision is perhaps unrealistic––a utopia in the pejorative sense––many realists (and critics) take for granted (cf. Finlayson, 2017), as I shall discuss at length in Part Three. But it need not be, as Rossi (2019) sets out to explain: Acephalus societies were predominant throughout human history, still those societies were not non-coercive (cf. Widerquist & McCall, 2017). The Wittgensteinian view of politics shall be able to incorporate all that.There are several ways of filling in the details of the Wittgensteinian view, several ways of making the view more robust. I shall address the predominant two in chapter three below. One is associated with Raymond Geuss, the other with Bernard
6This is not to say that Wittgenstein himself would have endorsed this––I know too little about
Williams. Before diving into that, I wish to discuss the relation between the Wittgensteinian view of realism and Political Naturalism.
Naturalizing Realism?
One might worry that the Wittgensteinian view conflicts with a tendency for naturalization recently witnessed in realist scholarship (cf. Rossi, 2010a; Newey, 2013; Rossi & Argenton, 2020; Burelli, 2020; for a critical note, propounding that naturalism fails, see Cross, 2017). Rossi and Sleat (2014:8) say: [T]he first question isn’t whether we should establish coercive political institutions, but rather how we should structure them." This they take to establish a connection between realism and naturalism––the Aristotelian view that politics is essential to human life and the formation of a polis is inevitable. If a naturalized realism says that politics is necessary, but a Wittgensteinian realists says that the goal of politics is to overcome (i.e. cure) itself, then at least will a naturalized Wittgensteinian realism have to give up on the hope of ever reaching that treehouse of harmony, peace and stability. The telos of politics, which is to overcome itself, would be a futile ambition, to say the least. There is however reason to think that the recent (Aristotelian) attempts to naturalize realism rest on a wrong interpretation of Aristotle's Politics. On a hitherto heterodox reading of Aristotle, naturalism and Wittgensteinian realism are compatible.
In Book One of Aristotle's Politics we find frequent allures to human nature that are supposed to justify patriarchal relationships, the subordination of women, and the unavoidability of slave-master relations, as well as appeals to the polis as the natural and hence inevitable way of social coordination (cf. Chappell, 2009). Recent scholarship calls into question whether what Aristotle really meant to say was that a human being is a zoon politikon by necessity, and the polis its natural (and therefore inevitable) habitat. What Berryman (2019) suggests is that among all the numerous times in which Aristotle calls human beings politika only one can sensibly be taken to support a translation as 'political' rather than 'social'. A Wittgensteinian naturalist might say that as long as humans are political animals––which they are as long as there is conflict––there will be the need for politics. Or, vice versa, if there is the need for politics––which there is, if there is conflict– –humans are by nature political animals. In that sense, the Wittgensteinian view (and its anarchist bend) and naturalism are compatible. But neither does that mean that for as long as we are social animals there will be the need for politics, nor that just because we are by nature social animals perpetual conflict is a necessary given7. A social world without
politics is possible (an acephalus order is perhaps a good example for that); a political world (one that is conflict-laden and can only be appeased by means of politics) without politics however—tautology alert––is not possible.
Here is to entertain the sophists: While we have a phusei of sociality (i.e. society as a fact of nature (phusis)), politics as a response to conflict however is the product of our
7 This interpretation of Aristotleles naturalism (and therefore is compatibility with the Wittgensteinian
view) confirms Salkever's (1990) work on Aritotle's Politics which he thinks is a piece of broadly social philosophy rather than narrowly political philosophy.
nomos (i.e. socially constructed conventions). Phusis and nomos I understand as binary, exclusive, and exhaustive categories. That means that the polis is part of the nomos; a social construction, the product of human invention in response to blazing conflict, and contingent on it.8 "Against such a background", says Berryman (2019:94), "the claim that
the polis is natural may mean little more than that it is to be regarded as a legitimate institution based on human needs", which I take to be in line with the Wittgensteinian realist agenda.
§3 Power and Order
In International Relations Theory realism as a methodological approach had been well-established long before political theorists became aware of its potential for incentivising a somersault within recent scholarship (cf. Morgenthau, 1967). In IR theory, realism advocates a form of Realpolitik that takes seriously the role of 'power' qua commodity on the international playing field, i.e. the power to bring about the fulfilment of one's interests by any means necessary. Raymond Geuss (2005:96) too thinks that "modern politics is importantly about power, its acquisition, distribution." Jaeggi (2014:55-57) calls this, the 'agonistic position'. This stance on politics qua power-play also determines the character of Geuss' preferred style of political theory: "If you want to think about politics, think first about power." (ibid:97). Adding the notion of power is a way of making the Politics as Conflict view more robust (see also, Menke, 2010; Rossi, 2010a; Freynhagen & Schaub, 2010; Prinz, 2012).
Foucauldian Detoxification
Next on the Geussian agenda is the prospect of 'widening' the ordinary understanding of power, so to say, by a Foucauldian 'detoxification' which is thought to cleanse the concept of power from its connotation with evil villains aiming at world dominance. We get there by practicing a suspension of judgment, by making "the very distinction between good and bad, useful and useless, attractive and repulsive, blur or drop away completely" Geuss (ibid:100). When theorizing about politics we should try our best at running the idea of power through this epoché before we even begin to think more carefully about policy and how to practice politics. In that respect, the process of detoxifying power is also a process of de-moralising it, as in suspending the moral judgments associated with obtaining or lacking power.
This detoxified Foucauldian form of power only exists in its historical, socio-political context. What Geuss urges the socio-political theorist to do is hence to look at the manifest techniques and rationalities of power as they occur everywhere around us. As such, power is first and foremost neither good nor bad, legitimate nor illegitimate, but
8 We may even guess that the phusis of sociality supports a clan- and village-structure, not a polis in the
"potentially dangerous" (ibid.97). Hence, instead of only looking at power from a normative angle which begins with an inquiry into the legitimacy and rightful hold of this power (as in most of Western political philosophy), Geuss wants us to take of the meta-ethical straightjacket that keeps us firmly between 'is' and 'ought', between (merely) descriptive and (merely) normative political theory (the former being solely concerned with facts, the latter being solely concerned with moral principles). The is-ought gap is a distinction, Geuss reckons, that has no grip on reality and is the mere figment of human conceptual invention, or in other words, quoting from Marx' Grundrisse (MEW 42: 602, my translation), "invented organs of the human brain; the commodified power of knowledge"). [German. "geschaffene Organe des menschlichen Hirns; vergegenständlichte Wissenskraft"]
Dimensions of Power: Lenin, Nietzsche, Weber
The Geussian method is about exploring power in specific contexts and analysing its destructive and creative effects as power unfolds in reality. Invoking an ultimate context, such as the original position behind the veil of ignorance, he thinks is misguided. After all, "one person's disorder is sometimes another's freedom." (Geuss, ibid: 22). The concept of detoxified power requires a multi-dimensional analysis. To understand those dimensions of power as they manifest in any given context, and thus politics itself, we have to ask three questions:
The Lenin-Question: "Who Whom?"
The ingenuity of Lenin's formula 'Who Whom?' is that, spelled out completely and properly nourished, it can be both descriptive and normative. The descriptive version asks: "Who does (could do) what to whom (and for whose benefit)?". The normative version asks: "What should be done (allowed to do) by who to whom (and for what benefits)? Those questions concern concrete people doing concrete things to other concrete people; the policeman reprimanding the parking offender, the government creating jobs in the public sector, or the corona-committee prescribing social-isolation. Both questions have a modal character in that they ask about what is normatively and practically possible. By adding a clause concerning the benefits of what is (to be) done, the question also has a consequentialist character. The modal and consequentialist extensions make both questions sensitive not only to de facto and de jure power relations but also to perceived and yet concealed power relations––those that are either hidden or otherwise go beyond mere factual coercion and brute domination. These are forms of structural, ideological, impersonal domination. Lenin thinks that the "Who Whom?" perpetually reoccurs in political life but its importance, the form and vigor with which it arises, will vary from historical context to historical context.
The Nietzsche-Question: "What Shell We Do, and When?"
Politics is about making choices, opting for X rather than for Y on the cost of upsetting those in favour of Y. It is not about doing the good simpliciter, for what is good is usually too elusive anyways. What politics can be however is the pursuit of some historically and socially situated (political) good. For our understanding of politics this means the following: Politics is a temporally located decision-making process. To be successful at doing politics is to know what to do, and when to do it.
The Weber-Question: "How Shall We Act?"
Weber's take on the how-question is more nuanced than it might look like on the outset. For Weber, when agents ask how-questions concerning their own actions they typically ask for a 'legitimation' of their actions; a legitimation they will eventually have to give to themselves for not to fall into inertia or agnosticism (which is the worst state one can be in amidst perpetual conflict). Practicing politics is to ask that legitimation-question on the collective level: Deciding whether to build a school, go to war, abolish the patriarchy, these are collective actions that "include institutions, patters of distribution of access to resources, and other similar things." (ibid:35). The Weberian how-question is supposed to evoke a sensitivity to the limits of feasibility in real politics set by institutions, resources, patterns of decision-making etc., not to the limits of feasibility as they come with universal moral principles.
Williams' First Political Question
For Williams as for Geuss, the starting point of inquiry is the Hobbesian insight that the social world is profoundly disordered, agonistic, its components in perpetual conflict and politics' task to create order. Whereas for Geuss politics evolves around 'power', Williams puts greater emphasis on what we may think is a normativized version of power, namely 'legitimacy' (cf. Williams, 2002, 2005:77)9. Around the concept of (roughly
acceptance-based voluntarist) legitimacy Williams builds an intricate machinery. Crudely put, its central lever is this: What a political actor (PA) has to do in order to obtain legitimacy is to solve the first political question ('first' in the sense of having an answer to it being a precondition for solving other political questions).
9 A side note: Some people think that a political actor is legitimate when it has certain Hohfeldian
liberty-rights, i.e. the right to enact and enforce laws, and has authority when, in addition to the liberty-right, it has a claim-right of the laws to be obeyed (for both sides of this, see Appelbaum, 2010, 2019). I will not make this distinction here. I consider a legitimate political actor automatically authoritative.
First Political Question: How can I (the political actor) secure "order, protection, safety, trust, and the conditions of cooperation?" (ibid.3)
If the PA knows how to solve this question, i.e. knows how to create order out of disorder, the PA thereby acquires a necessary yet not sufficient requirement for its legitimacy (LEG). For Hobbes, might is right: Solving the first political question would already be sufficient for a PA to be LEG, but not so for Williams. Saving people form brute terror is enough for a PA to answer the first political question, but saving people form brute terror is not enough for it to be LEG. After all, the rule of a PA could potentially be a different but perhaps even worse source of brute terror itself. Put differently, saving people from terror just to inflict another kind of terror upon them might be a way of solving the first question, but it doesn't make a PA LEG.
The Basic Legitimation Demand
Is there something together with which an answer to the first political question is jointly sufficient for LEG? Yes, there are three further components required for joint sufficiency. First, the answer to the first political question has to be an acceptable answer, subject to the Basic Legitimation Demand (BLD).
Basic Legitimation Demand: The way in which the PA solves the first political question, hence the way in which the PA brings order into chaos, has to be deemed acceptable by those affected. The BLD demands that the way in which the PA ends terror must be acceptable to those affected by it, otherwise the PA ≠ LEG. Every potential answer to the first political question is subject to the BLD. If it doesn't pass the BLD, this is, if it is not acceptable, the answer and the PA who proposed it is illegitimate (ILLEG). What counts as acceptable (to whom and under what circumstances) is of course debatable.
The intangibility of the concept of 'acceptability' is lao not efficaciously dealt with by referring to the equally slippery notion of 'making sense'. The thought is that a solution to the first political question is acceptable if and only if it makes sense (MS) to those affected by it (cf. Hall, 2015). The notion of MS, says Williams, is bound to a historical and contextual understanding considering our timely moral, political, and social concepts. What makes sense to X at t1 may not make sense to Y at t2, hence X cannot assess answers to the first question on behalf of Y. Williams himself expressed those ramifications of the BLD as follows: "If the power of one lot of people over another is to represent a solution to the first political question, and not itself be part of the problem, something has to be said to explain (…) what the difference is between the solution and the problem, and that cannot simply be an account of successful domination. It has to be a mode of justifying explanation or legitimation." (ibid. 5)
Legitimations-Stories and the Critical Theory Principle
Williams above is referring to legitimation-stories which will be of primary importance in Part Three. A legitimation-story is a 'justifying explanation' usually told by a PA in order to justify its own legitimacy. To say that dropping atomic bombs on Japan has been a necessary evil, since otherwise Japan wouldn't have surrendered and the ongoing war in the Pacific would have caused more casualties than the nuclear attacks did, is to invent a legitimation-story––a legitimation-story that, we may suspect, is drenched in a lot of ideological filth and should be countered with a lot of counter-ideological fury.
The example indicates that that legitimation-stories can be (i.e. are usually) shaped by ideologies or other forms of epistemic obfuscation. To make sense may thus still not be enough for a PA (or a political action) to be LEG. In order to guarantee epistemic transparency in the assessment of MS Williams (ibid.6) introduces yet another proviso to the BLD which he calls the Critical Theory Principle (CTP). It says that "…the acceptance of a justification does not count if the acceptance itself is produced by the coercive power which is supposedly being justified." In other words, epistemically flawed legitimation-stories nullify a PA's claim to LEG. The idea of 'reflective unacceptability' (Geuss, 1981:55-56) is usually consulted in the process of making sense of 'making sense'. It encourages individuals to counterfactually evaluate whether they would still adhere to the beliefs about legitimacy had they known about the (contingent and perhaps ideologically formed) origins of their beliefs.
Williams introduced the CTP to his machinery for realism not to collapse into Realpolitik, says Sleat (2014:330). The CTP is there to prevent the nuclear attack legitimation-story from confirming with the BLD and therefore from being LEG on the sole grounds of US-hegemony in effective storytelling. Geuss does something similar when he claims that "ethics is usually dead politics: the hand of a victor in some past conflict reaching out to try to extend its grip to the present and future." (2010:42). To summarize, the Williamsian formula is the following:
ORDER(PA) + BLD(ORDER) + MS(BLD) + CTP(MS) = LEG(PA)
If a PA creates order, the way of creating order confirms with the basic legitimation demand, the basic legitimation demand makes sense, and its making sense is epistemically transparent, then the PA is legitimate.
William's Machinery
What, according to Williams, does a PA capable of implementing a political arrangement that solves the first political question in a way that makes sense look like? Williams answer is that what a LEG PA is, or could be, depends on practice and/or context. Now and around here (that is, the Western capitalist part of the world in the early 20th/21st century),
the liberal state and its central normative commitments make sense to us who are subjected to it (cf. Williams, 2005:7). The liberal state may not have made sense in pre-industrial times, and it may not in post-post-industrial times. So, we see for Williams as for Geuss
the legitimation of power is a contextual question asking "who, whom, what, when, and how?". Williams' machinery is there to make sure that practicing politics in a situation of chaos isn't creating evermore disorder. Politics is therefore more than mere coercion, more than raw domination or crude subjugation (cf. Sleat, 2010). Politics is a craft, a Machiavellian virtù or Aristotelian technê (cf. Maloy, 2013). The PA who knows that craft acts in a way a raw dominator, a warlord, or Shogun does not––she acts politically. It also means that politics will always involve some claim to authority (cf. Philp, 2007). Authority, and thus legitimacy––the latter of which creates a vital umbilical cord that connects ruler and ruled––is therefore integral to politics. The point and purpose of the legitimacy relation in that context is indeed not to uphold any moral principles but to create a relation of interlegibility between those who exercise power and those over whom power is being exercised. This dialog can be free (i.e. epistemically transparent) or disrupted (i.e. epistemically obfuscated) by and in favour of those who exercise power (see Part Three).
Normativity and the BLD
Here is it where the spectre of normativity re-enters the stage. The assessment of the BLD is, for the one who is subjected to another's political power, a normative procedure. To assess what MS in each political predicament is to think normatively about the authority one is willing to accept in this situation. "The category of making sense is evaluative when applied to other contexts though it is normative when applied to our own", says Sleat (2010:488), and goes on say that "[t]his is because what makes sense, or makes most sense, to us as a political authority will be viewed as legitimate and guide how we react and respond to it (for example, not resisting or opposing it). Therefore, what counts as a sufficient reason for taking the political order to be legitimate will be dependent upon what makes sense as such to persons in their particular contexts."
We may have prudential reasons for accepting some authority in a given situation, "whether they arise, for example, from the stomach, or the imagination" (Marx, 1990:125 [1867]), but in the end it’s a normative judgement. The judgement is furthermore a contextual one: In the context of a civil war and massive state-prosecution the acceptability of the state as an answer to the first political question that MS will predictably be at a low point, whereas in times of prosperity and protection it is at a high. This relates back to Williams' judgement that around here and around now, the liberal state experiences a high in acceptability.
Whereas Geuss' theory is primarily destructive, Williams' has constructive elements and provides an alleged alternative to liberal normativity (the idea that political power is only then legitimate if its exercise is justifiable to all those subject to it––which creates a demand for universal consent and is a moral assessment). Williams thinks that his machinery is morality-free and his theory of legitimacy a form of political realism since the normativity of the BLD is generated within a genuine political source of normativity, rather than it springing from some external moral principle. The demands of legitimacy, so to say, are generated within the real practice of politics. While the provisos to the BLD
are context dependent the BLD itself is thought to reflect the idea that might ain't right, and is, as such, a universal but non-moral basic principle of legitimacy10.
§4 Facts and Feasibility
So far, we have touched upon most realist themes set out in the introduction. Central to the discussion has clearly been the rift between political and moral normativity. I now want to briefly highlight the other (intimately related) tenets of the realist position: 'Feasibility' and 'fact-sensitivity' (cf. inter alia, Hall, 2012, 2015; Jubb, 2015; Rossi, 2012; Erman & Möller, 2019). On a first look, feasibility and fact-sensitivity are distinct. The former a modal virtue of a normative theory's action-guiding prescriptions, the latter a purely theoretical virtue more widely known in the theory-choice literature as 'fit with the data' (cf. Quine, 1976). On a second look however feasibility issues and fact-sensitivity issues are interlinked, or so I will argue.
Gilabert & Lawford-Smith (2012:812) think that feasibility-claims involve a quadruple-place predicate of some agent A φ-ing to bring about a state-of-affairs S in a
given context C. How Gilabert & Lawford-Smith' concept of FEASIBILITY should be applied, as in what makes the φ-ing of A to bring about S in C feasible, is a contentious question and one that they don't answer. Here is an attempt to give an answer on their behalf: Think about A as a normative realist theory, φ as a normative verdict contained in that theory, S as the desired goal of politics (order, stability, social cohesion) and C as the contextualism spelled out in Williams and Geuss.
FEASIBILITY: It is feasible for A to φ to bring about S in C iif… [?]
To fill the gap [?] in the definition of FEASIBILITY we have to look at the other side of the coin where we will find the concept of SENSITIVITY––the definitions are interlinked. Sensitivity in the analytic epistemology literature is usually defined as a counterfactual which says that for A to know a proposition p requires and entails that if p were false A would no longer believe in it (cf. Williamson, 2002). This is fairly technical but I think we can retain the counterfactual analysis for the political realist case. Crudely, the idea is that a normative theory's ought-statements, OS, are sensitive to the facts of a given context C––in other words, sensitive to the practical externalities purchased with the realist's appeal to contextualism––iff, if C were no longer the case, the OS would no longer be the case either (i.e. if it would have lost its normative force). An OS can be defined as [A's φ-ing to bring about S].
10 For a sceptical argument, see Sleat (2010) who suggests that the BLD is premised on the pre-political
notion of equal moral worth. If legitimacy is what keeps up the distinction between politics and tyranny, we may suspect that the BLD is still, after all, in some sense inevitably prior to politics. This is, without a concept prior to that of legitimacy we would not know what legitimacy entails and hence we couldn't even tell apart politics from tyranny.
SENSITIVITY: A normative theory's OS [A's φ-ing to bring about S] in a given C is sensitive to the facts of C iif, if C were no longer the case the OS would lose its normative force.
Why is sensitivity to the facts of any importance to the realist cause? Wouldn't the excavation of a genuine political source of normativity be enough to get realism of the ground as a substantive position in the methodological deep forest of political theory? Sensitivity to the facts is to caution against technocratic and ideological hubris–– like the hubris of moral liberalist political philosophers mimicking Deep Though–– through attention to the complexities of real politics, paraphrasing Rossi (2019:644) here. In that respect, constraining one's realist theory to the practical externalities of a given context sits squarely with, or is perhaps even required by a firm anti-moralist stance. It is connected to or maybe even the natural ramification of the realist's aversion to high-flying moralism and to be contrasted with Cohen's (2008: 229) claim that principles are fact-insensitive. Different realist theories differ with respect to the kinds of facts they are sensitive to, largely depending on their incentives: The Williamsian programme, for instance, is sensitive to the workings of institutions on the scenes of order, stability and social cohesion. Geuss, on the other hand, primarily seeks sensitivity to overt (and ideally even concealed) power-relations.
We can now flip the coin once more and fill in the missing part, [?], of FEASIBILITY by reference to the definition of fact-sensitivity. The reason for why FEASIBILITY and SENSITIVITY are two sides of one coin, why sensitivity to the facts constrains the feasibility of a normative verdict should become evident through an example: Imagine you are a committed luck egalitarian, sensitive to the facts of a given context, but you are also sitting on the WHO's board for Covid19-Cure distribution. Now, your bourgeoise egalitarian gut-feeling magically tells you to distribute the cure equally, but, as matter of fact, there is not enough medicine for it to be effective if distributed equally among all those infected. Say, three agents are infected. You have one 1ml of cure and to successfully cure the average patient you need 0.5ml of medicine. Thus, if you distribute the cure equally––0.33ml for everyone––no one will be cured. If your theory (luck egalitarianism) were appropriately sensitive to the facts it would give those three agents a fact-laden account of the options available to them. Luck egalitarianism doesn't. The upshot is that, just like the collective psychological theory underlying Cohen's camping trip, luck egalitarian theory is not appropriately sensitive to the facts and hence not feasible. Building feasibility-constraints into your theory is thus showing "sensitivity to conditions of political possibility" (Hall & Sleat, 2017: 276-277).Provided the definition of SENSITIVITY I can now give this amended definition of what it means for a normative theory's ought-statement to be feasible in a given context:
FEASIBILITY*: A normative theory's OS in C is feasible iif it does not conflict with SENSITIVITY in C.
