Understanding Political Theory: Scope, Relationships, and Analysis of Concepts, Study notes of Political Theory

Download Understanding Political Theory: Scope, Relationships, and Analysis of Concepts and more Study notes Political Theory in PDF only on Docsity! 1 The Methodology of Political Theory Christian List and Laura Valentini* (forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology) Abstract: This article examines the methodology of a core branch of contemporary political theory or philosophy: “analytic” political theory. After distinguishing political theory from related fields, such as political science, moral philosophy, and legal theory, the article discusses the analysis of political concepts. It then turns to the notions of principles and theories, as distinct from concepts, and reviews the methods of assessing such principles and theories (e.g., the reflective-equilibrium method), for the purpose of justifying or criticizing them. Finally, it looks at a recent debate on how abstract and idealized political theory should be, and assesses the significance of disagreement in political theory. The discussion is carried out from an angle inspired by the philosophy of science. Political theory, sometimes also called “normative political theory”, is a subfield of philosophy and political science that addresses conceptual, normative, and evaluative questions concerning politics and society, broadly construed. Examples are: When is a society just? What does it mean for its members to be free? When is one distribution of goods socially preferable to another? What makes a political authority legitimate? How should we make collective decisions? What goals should our policies promote? How should we trade off different values, such as liberty, prosperity, and security, against one another? What do we owe, not just to our fellow citizens, but to people in the world at large? Is it permissible to buy natural resources from authoritarian governments? Can war ever be just? Political theory is a long-established field. Its questions have animated thinkers since Classical Antiquity. Consequently, the methods of theorizing and substantive conclusions are diverse. In this article, we review the methodology of a core branch of contemporary political theory: the one commonly described as “analytic” political theory. Given space constraints, we are not able to cover the history of political thought, the study of ideologies, the comparative study of political thought across cultures, and “continental” political theory, including “hermeneutic”, “post-structuralist”, and “post-modernist” approaches (for a more comprehensive discussion, see Leopold and Stears 2008). Nonetheless, the label “analytic” should not be interpreted narrowly. It is meant to refer to an argument-based and issue-oriented, rather than thinker-based and exegetical, approach that emphasizes logical rigour, terminological precision, and clear exposition. The term “analytic” is not intended to refer only to the logical and linguistic traditions of philosophy associated with the Vienna Circle and philosophers in Oxford and Cambridge in the first half of the 20th century. Contemporary analytic political theory goes well beyond conceptual analysis. At least since the publication of * We are most grateful to Kimberley Brownlee, Emanuela Ceva, Johannes Himmelreich, Mathias Koenig-Archibugi, Joseph Mazor, Florian Ostmann, Mike Otsuka, Miriam Ronzoni, and Kai Spiekermann for extensive and helpful written comments. 2 John Rawls’s Theory of Justice (1971/1999), the development of normative theories has been one of the field’s central concerns. This review is structured as follows. In Section 1, we briefly demarcate the scope of political theory. In Section 2, we comment on the analysis of political concepts. In Section 3, we introduce the notions of principles and theories, as distinct from concepts. In Section 4, we discuss the methods of assessing such principles and theories, for the purpose of justifying or criticizing them. In Section 5, we review a recent debate on how abstract and idealized political theory should be. In Section 6, finally, we discuss the significance of disagreement in political theory. One clarification about the nature of this review is needed. Although we cover established ground, we do so from an angle that will be somewhat unfamiliar to at least some political theorists – namely an angle inspired by the philosophy of science. We have chosen this angle with a view to systematizing the activity of analytic political theorizing so as to make its connections with other fields of philosophy and positive science more transparent. This seems appropriate in the context of a handbook on philosophical methodology. 1. The scope of political theory To demarcate the scope of political theory, it is helpful to distinguish it from its most closely related neighbouring fields: political science, moral philosophy, legal theory, normative economics, and social ontology. We also offer some comments on the use of the label “political theory”, as opposed to “political philosophy”. 1.1 Political theory and political science Political theory can easily be distinguished from (positive) political science. Political science addresses empirical and positive questions concerning politics and society (for an overview, see Goodin 2009). It seeks to describe and explain actual political phenomena, such as elections and electoral systems, voter behaviour, political- opinion formation, legislative and governmental behaviour, the interaction between the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of the state, and the stability or instability of different forms of government. Political theory, by contrast, addresses conceptual, normative, and evaluative questions, such as what a democracy is, how we ought to organize our political systems, and how to evaluate the desirability of policies. Political theory and political science can complement each other. Normative recommendations and evaluations of policies or institutional arrangements often rest on empirical premises. It is hard to arrive at a blueprint for a just society, for example, without understanding how society actually works, since normative recommendations may have to respect feasibility constraints (e.g., Gilabert and Lawford-Smith 2012). Thus political theory requires political science and the social sciences more generally. Similarly, when political scientists investigate, for instance, whether democracy promotes economic development or whether free societies are more politically stable and less corrupt than unfree ones, they need to know what counts as a democracy or how to define freedom. These questions require the conceptual input of political theorists. Finally, among the large number of empirical questions that political 5 justice is influenced by G. A. Cohen’s (1995) work in political theory; and the work on variable-population social choice by Charles Blackorby, Walter Bossert, and David Donaldson (2005) is influenced by Derek Parfit’s (1984) work on population ethics. Arguably, the main difference between political theory and social choice and welfare theory is not a substantive one (although the former is broader than the latter), but a methodological one. Mainstream political theory is a non-formal discipline, making at most limited use of formal methods from mathematics, logic, and economics, while social choice and welfare theory is predominantly formal. 1.5 Political theory and social ontology A less well-known but growing field in the neighbourhood of political theory is social ontology. Social ontology investigates the nature of phenomena such as joint intentions, collective actions, social norms and conventions, group agency, and institutions (e.g., Gilbert 1989; Pettit 1993; Searle 1995; Bratman 1999; Tollefsen 2002; Tuomela 2007; List and Pettit 2011). Its central question, roughly speaking, is: What are the building blocks of the social world, and how are they related to one another, to the individuals involved, and to the physical world? The substantive questions in social ontology are distinct from those in political theory and in some respects prior to them. Social ontology is primarily a positive and explanatory field rather than a normative or evaluative one. Its relevance to political theory lies in the fact that political theory cannot get off the ground unless we are clear about what entities and properties exist in the social world. For example, before we can answer questions about rights, obligations, and responsibilities, we need to know what entities can be the bearers of rights, obligations, and responsibilities. Are these restricted to individuals, or do they also include certain collectives? Should we regard the state as an agent, as a mere collection of individuals, or as some kind of special fiction? Similarly, before we can answer the question of what is or is not socially desirable, we need to know what the possible objects of value might be. It is difficult to determine, for instance, whether there should be any cultural rights or state subsidies for cultural activities unless we can give at least a partial answer to the question of what we mean by “culture”. Since different social-ontological theories give us different accounts of what entities and properties there are in the social world, they can, in turn, impose constraints on what the possible objects of analysis in political theory might be. 1.6 Political theory and political philosophy Although some scholars distinguish between political theory and political philosophy, this is mainly a conventional distinction. It refers, roughly, to the different styles of political theory conducted in political science and philosophy departments, respectively, especially in North America. (In the UK, much of what is conventionally called “political philosophy” is traditionally conducted in political science departments.) Arguably, “political theory” is the slightly more inclusive and interdisciplinary label, referring not only to philosophical work but also to a variety of 6 other approaches. As mentioned, here we focus specifically on the analytic branch of political theory. 2. Concepts in political theory A long-standing concern in political theory is the analysis of political concepts: freedom, equality, justice, authority, legitimacy, democracy, welfare, and so on. Each of these has been interpreted and defined in numerous ways, and political theory can help us clarify the advantages and disadvantages of different interpretations and definitions. The bulk of political theory in the decades prior to the publication of Rawls’s A Theory of Justice was conceptual analysis.2 The analysis of political concepts is relevant not only to normative theory building (e.g., any theory of liberalism must employ some concept of liberty) but also, as already noted, to positive work in political science. Thus conceptual analysis is, in some sense, the least normative or evaluative part of political theory. Of course, when we analyze concepts such as freedom and democracy, we are usually interested in the kinds of freedom and democracy that we find valuable or normatively required. Hence the ultimate motivation for our analysis may well be a normative or evaluative one: we may wish to clarify these concepts in order to express normative or evaluative principles in terms of them. Logically, however, the question of how to understand freedom and democracy is distinct from the question of whether freedom and democracy so understood are valuable. Indeed, political scientists may sometimes be interested primarily in whether freedom or democracy can serve as independent variables in explanations of political phenomena (e.g., when they investigate whether freedom promotes prosperity or whether democracies are less prone to fighting wars against one another), irrespective of any considerations of value.3 In this section, we introduce some key ideas relevant to the analysis of political concepts. 2.1 What is a concept? We use concepts to categorize or classify objects.4 The concept democracy, for example, may help us distinguish between those forms of government that are democratic and those that are not. The concept legitimacy, in relation to acts of state coercion, may help us distinguish between those acts of state coercion that are legitimate and those that are not. 2 For a classic work on political concepts, see Oppenheim (1981). 3 Of course, political scientists may also consider freedom or democracy as dependent variables, such as when they ask which social and economic conditions promote each. Think, for instance, of the literature on the transition to, and consolidation of, democracy (e.g., Linz and Stepan 1996). In such studies, considerations of value may plausibly affect our choice of interpretation of the relevant concepts. 4 We here cannot discuss the ontological status of concepts, on which there are several rival views in philosophy. Instead, we rely on a relatively simple characterization of concepts, emphasizing the fact that we use concepts to categorize or classify objects and that they serve as ingredients in the activity of political theorizing. For a broader discussion of concepts as the constituents of thoughts, see Margolis and Laurence (2012). For a cognitive-science treatment of concepts as locations or regions within “conceptual spaces”, see Gärdenfors (2000). 7 For the purposes of this article, we assume that any concept has a domain of application. This is the set of objects of which it is meaningful to ask whether they fall under the given concept or not. We might say, for example, that the domain of the concept democracy is the set of all systems of government or decision-making. For any object in that set – i.e., any system of government or decision-making – we can meaningfully ask whether it is democratic or not. By contrast, for objects outside that domain, it is not meaningful to ask whether they are democratic or not. It makes no sense to ask, for instance, whether an equilateral triangle or a mountain is democratic or not (cf. Dworkin 1986, 75). Note that the domain of the concept democracy – or justice, or freedom, and so on – can be variously specified; we return to that point below. Further, any “classically well-behaved” concept has defining conditions. These determine, for any object in the concept’s domain, whether that object falls under the concept (“satisfies it”) or not. In our example, the question of whether a particular system of government or decision-making, say the political system of Iceland, is democratic or not depends on a variety of features of that system: how decisions are made, who participates in those decisions, how the participants provide their input, how the decisions are implemented and by whom, and so on. Philosophers are divided over the extent to which concepts in general have defining conditions (for a review, see, e.g., Margolis and Laurence 2012). Many of our common-sense concepts arguably lack such conditions. We may be able to pick out some paradigm instances (or “prototypes”) of redness or beauty, but may be unable to arrive at clear-cut necessary and sufficient conditions that an object must satisfy to be red or beautiful (for a related discussion, see Dworkin 1986, chap. 2). By contrast, in theoretical work, it is usually desirable to look for concepts with defining conditions. Occasionally, however, some theoretical concepts may be regarded as undefined “primitives” or as characterizable only through “prototypes”. Finally, a concept’s extension is the subset of the domain consisting of precisely those objects that fall under the concept (“that satisfy it”). If the concept has defining conditions, these determine the extension. The extension of the concept democracy is the set of all those systems of government or decision-making that, according to the concept, count as democratic. More generally, there can be “non-binary” concepts, which do not subdivide objects into those falling under the concept and those not falling under it, but which instead classify objects on one or several dimensions that may each admit of degrees. For example, equality and welfare are non-binary concepts. The level of equality or inequality in a particular distribution of goods is a matter of degree, and different interpretations of equality give us different accounts of when one distribution counts as more equal than another (see, e.g., Sen 1980). Similarly, a person’s welfare is a matter of degree and, on some accounts, even given by a vector of multiple attributes, representing different dimensions or aspects of welfare. Sen (1987) has argued for the “constitutive plurality” of the concept standard of living; there are multiple dimensions on which a person’s standard of living can be categorized. For practically any salient concept in political theory, there are debates about what the domain of application is, what the defining conditions, if any, are, and which objects belong to the concept’s extension and which do not. Just think of the many different 10 the actual world but also their continued absence in a range of nearby possible worlds. Political theorists are divided over which, if any, concepts should be modally demanding (see, e.g., Pettit 2011; Southwood 2013). Having defining conditions that are epistemically accessible: Depending on the intended use of a concept, we may require its defining conditions to be such that it is possible, at least in principle, for us to know whether an object meets them. For example, a concept of welfare whose defining conditions refer to certain kinds of mental states that are inaccessible to any observer would be of little practical use. Similarly, the defining conditions of justice under Robert Nozick’s account, which refer to the entire history of transactions leading to the current distribution of entitlements, fail to meet this desideratum and thus render Nozick’s account somewhat practically inert (Nozick 1974). Of course, the context and intended use may determine what counts as epistemically accessible. 2.4 What concepts are not Concepts should not be confused with principles or theories – the topic of Sections 3 and 4. In particular, principles and theories have propositional content and may be true or false, while concepts, by themselves, cannot be true or false. They only categorize objects and, in doing so, can be more or less useful, more or less plausible, and more or less in line with established use or with our considered judgments.6 To give a simple illustration from outside political theory, the concepts red, green, or triangular are neither true nor false. Only statements in which they occur can have truth-values, such as “tomatoes are red” (true), “snow is green” (false), and “rectangles are triangular” (false). Even if we have a full account of when a political system is democratic or what it means for someone to be free, this still leaves open the question of whether democracy or freedom are desirable and whether we ought to promote each of them. We need principles or theories – making statements such as “we ought to respect freedom” or “we ought to make decisions democratically” – to address the latter questions. Such principles or theories are then capable of being true or false. Simply put, concepts can serve as building blocks of principles, which can serve as building blocks of theories. Still, people sometimes say things such as “freedom as non-interference is the true conception of freedom”. Assertions of this kind are best interpreted as abbreviations for claims such as “freedom as non-interference is the conception of freedom that is, in some relevant sense, most appropriate”, which, in turn, could mean that it best captures our established use of freedom or alternatively our considered judgments about what counts as free. Literally, however, the claim that one concept of freedom is the true one is not meaningful, since only things with propositional content can have truth-values. Concepts do not have propositional content: the extension of a 6 Recall that the defining conditions of any concept simply specify when an object falls under the concept, not whether the concept is true or false. 11 concept is not a set of possible worlds (which is what the extension of a proposition is), but a set of objects.7 Even on the above-mentioned charitable interpretation in terms of appropriateness, the assertion “freedom as non-interference is the true conception of freedom” is ambiguous. As noted, it would have to be understood as implying that, among the many different interpretations of freedom, one stands out as “most appropriate”. But, unless we specify a criterion of appropriateness, there is no unique such interpretation. For example, one interpretation may be most in line with our common- sense use of the word “freedom”, another most in line with our considered judgments about what counts as free, a third most suitable for playing a particular role in a theory of justice. Different criteria of appropriateness may diverge, and there is no application-independent criterion. Thus expressions such as “the true conception of freedom” are, at best, shorthand for more elaborate expressions involving criteria of appropriateness. To avoid ambiguity, it is best to spell those out explicitly. 3. Principles and theories in political theory While analytic political theory until the early 1970s was primarily concerned with the analysis of concepts, John Rawls’s Theory of Justice (1971/1999) invigorated the quest for theories and the principles underlying them. Rawls formulated some principles of justice, which are the basis of his theory of how we should organize the “basic structure of society”, namely its main political, legal, and economic institutions. In this section, we discuss the notions of principles and theories. Although these are widely used in political theory, they are seldom carefully defined. We hope, therefore, that our discussion will be clarifying. 3.1 What is a principle? A principle is a statement – a proposition expressed in language – that applies, at least potentially, to more than one case. Usually, this is marked by the occurrence of expressions with appropriate quantifiers, such as “for all X, subject to certain conditions, Y is the case”. A principle is evaluative if it has evaluative content; for instance, it includes evaluative predicates or concepts such as good or bad, better or worse, desirable or undesirable. A principle is normative if it has normative content; for instance, it includes deontic operators such as ought, may, permissible, obligatory, right, or wrong. A principle without any evaluative or normative content is positive. Such principles are common in the sciences; think of the principle of conservation of energy in physics. Classic examples of normative principles are the Ten Commandments from the Bible, the Golden Rule (“You should treat other people in the way in which you would like them to treat you”), Bentham’s principle of utility (“An action is right if it maximizes total utility”), and more recently Rawls’s principles of justice. Roughly speaking, these state that each person is entitled to the most extensive system of individual 7 Note that the extension of a statement or proposition is the set of those possible worlds in which the statement or proposition is true. 12 liberties, compatible with a similar system for everyone else (the “equal-liberty principle”); and socio-economic inequalities are permissible if and only if they are compatible with a system of fair equal opportunities (the “fair equality of opportunity principle”) and benefit the least well-off members of society (the “difference principle”) (Rawls 1971/1999). The propositional content of a principle is the set of all its implications. Sometimes this propositional content may depend on auxiliary assumptions. As already noted, their having propositional content sets principles apart from concepts, which merely offer categorizations. 3.2 What is a theory? The word “theory” is commonly used in two distinct senses. First, it can refer to an entire academic field or area of enquiry, such as when we speak of “political theory” or “economic theory” as general areas to which curricula or scholarly journals are devoted. Second, the word can refer to a specific theory within such an area, such as Rawls’s theory of justice, the theory of the firm in economics, or Newton’s theory of physics. Our focus here is on theories in this second, specific sense. Surprisingly, there exists no canonical definition of a theory in that sense in political theory. To provide a starting point, we propose a simple definition inspired by the philosophy of science but adapted to the present context.8 We define a theory as a set of statements – propositions expressed in language – which is a candidate for playing some theoretical or practical role and which is, ideally, representable as the set of all implications of some underlying principles. The set of principles from which the theory can be derived – if there is such a set – is called the theory formulation. Although loose and abstract, this definition has some merits. First, it allows us to view positive theories (in the sciences) and normative or evaluative theories (in moral philosophy or political theory) as instances of the same general category. Second, it makes transparent the differences between them. For example, the roles played by theories can range from descriptive, explanatory, and predictive (in the case of positive theories) to evaluative and prescriptive (in the case of evaluative or normative theories). Third, the definition allows us to identify the special challenges that arise when we construct and assess normative or evaluative theories. Paradigmatic examples of theories according to our definition are Newton’s theory of physics and Rawls’s theory of justice. Each can be viewed as a set of statements, entailed by some underlying principles, which can play a descriptive, explanatory, or prescriptive role. Newton’s theory is the set of all statements entailed by Newton’s principles of physics, perhaps together with some empirical premises about the solar system or other physical systems of interest. It can be used, for instance, to explain and predict the trajectory of the planets around the sun and to guide such engineering 8 We here follow broadly what is often called the syntactic approach to defining theories (where a theory is defined as a set of sentences/propositions with certain properties); it is arguably the most conventional approach. For a classic exposition, see Quine (1975). It is also worth exploring the rival semantic approach (where a theory is defined as a set of models with certain properties), but given space constraints, we set this aside here (see van Fraassen 1980). For an introduction to the philosophy of science, see Okasha (2002). 15 both “p” and “not p”, is of little use, whether for explanatory, predictive, evaluative, or prescriptive purposes. By entailing everything, it is too indiscriminate.9 Deductive closure: We require a good theory to be deductively closed. This means that any statement that is logically entailed by the theory also belongs to the theory.10 The idea underlying deductive closure is that we want to be able to identify a theory with everything to which the theory is logically committed. If the theory asserts “p” and “if p then q”, for example, then it should also assert “q”. We would consider a theory defective if it were committed to the first two statements, but not to the third. The way we characterized Newton’s and Rawls’s theories had deductive closure built into it, since we characterized each as the set of all statements that are logically entailed by the relevant principles. Deductive closure is easy to achieve even when a theory is initially given in a form that violates it: we can re-define the theory as the set of all statements entailed by the original, non-deductively-closed formulation.11 Axiomatizability: This requirement is implicit in the final clause of our definition of a theory, which says that a theory should ideally be representable as the set of all implications of some underlying principles. Formally, a theory is axiomatizable if there exists a finite set of principles such that the entire theory can be expressed as their body of implications.12 It should be evident from our earlier discussion that Newton’s and Rawls’s theories are usually presented in axiomatized form, as the bodies of implications of Newton’s and Rawls’s principles, respectively, perhaps together with some auxiliary assumptions. An axiomatizable theory can be presented in an informative manner, simply by specifying the set of principles from which it can be derived. If the theory could only be presented by brute enumeration of all its implications – typically infinitely many – there would be no succinct way of summarizing its content. A good theory illuminates its subject matter by giving us a manageable set of principles – a manageable theory formulation – that encodes the theory’s entire propositional content. Parsimony: We require a good theory to avoid any unnecessary complexity, and to be as simple as possible, in an appropriate sense of simplicity (on simplicity, see, e.g., Baker 2013).13 Scientists commonly care about parsimony, often under the label “Occam’s razor”, and Rawls, for instance, also emphasizes simplicity as a virtue of a normative theory.14 What counts as “simple” may be different from context to context 9 Sometimes we may be prepared to lower the bar of consistency, by admitting some “contained” or “local” inconsistencies, as in so-called “paraconsistent” logics. Even then, we usually impose some weakened variant of a consistency requirement, to rule out those inconsistencies that are too global to preserve a theory’s usefulness. 10 A set of statements is deductively closed if it contains all its implications. 11 The deductive-closure requirement also highlights, once more, why consistency matters. Since an inconsistent set of statements entails everything, deductive closure would force such a theory to consist of everything that can be expressed in the relevant language, which would amount to a completely uninformative theory. Again, if we were to use a paraconsistent logic, we might weaken the requirement of deductive closure but still retain some less demanding requirement in a similar spirit. 12 See also Quine (1975). Note that any axiomatizable theory is deductively closed. Note, further, that logicians sometimes replace the “finiteness” requirement with a weaker “formal decidability” requirement; we set these technicalities aside. 13 Although axiomatizability of a theory in terms of some easily expressible principles is one of the marks of parsimony, axiomatizability is not a sufficient condition for parsimony. 14 In his discussion of why his principles of justice are preferable to utilitarian principles, Rawls says that “reasonable risk aversion may be so great, once the enormous hazards of the decision in the 16 and may also depend on what the theory is about. We usually want to find the simplest theory able to account for its subject matter. To be illuminating, the theory ought to be simpler, for example, than the target phenomenon it seeks to account for, as well as simpler than its rival theories. A scientific theory, for instance, should be simpler and more succinct than an enumeration of all the empirical facts it seeks to explain; otherwise it cannot play any explanatory role. Likewise, a good normative theory should be simpler than an enumeration of all case-specific normative judgments. The relevant bar of simplicity may be adjusted depending on the theory’s subject matter. The present list of criteria for the internal assessment of theories is only illustrative, not exhaustive, but given space constraints, we now move on to external criteria. 4.2 External criteria We defined a theory as a set of statements that is a candidate for playing some theoretical or practical role. Implicit in this definition is the idea that there is something the theory is about: any theory is intended to represent, summarize, or capture something “outside the theory”. It may capture this correctly, in which case the theory is true, correct, or externally valid, or it may fail to do so, in which case it is false, incorrect, or externally invalid. What exactly a given theory is intended to represent needs to be spelt out further. In the case of a physical theory, the answer is relatively straightforward, especially if we accept “scientific realism”: it is intended to represent certain physical facts about the world, such as facts about how physical objects behave in response to each other (see, e.g., Chakravartty 2013). In the case of a normative or evaluative theory, the picture is more complicated. If we are realists about normative or evaluative matters, we may say that the theory is intended to represent some theory-independent moral facts. If we are not realists about normative or evaluative matters, it is harder to specify what a normative or evaluative theory is intended to represent (on moral realism and anti- realism see, respectively, Sayre-McCord 2011; Joyce 2009). Yet the very idea of a theory breaks down unless we assume that there is something potentially representable by it, however observer-dependent or socially constructed it might be.15 If we were nihilists, to take an extreme example of the denial of any normative or evaluative facts, we would not be able to engage in normative or evaluative theorizing in earnest. Thus, in this section, we assume that normative or evaluative theories are truth-apt: it makes sense to ask whether they are true – or, some might prefer to say: correct or externally valid. We thus accept a form of “cognitivism” about such theories. This original position are fully appreciated, that the utilitarian weighting may be, for practical purposes, so close to the difference principle as to make the simplicity of the latter ... decisive in its favour” (Rawls 1999, 144 emphasis added). 15 A constructivist might take a theory to represent certain constructed facts. This is consistent even with the view that the theory itself is the “vehicle” by which those facts are being constructed. To develop that view further, one might draw, for instance, on parallels with Searle’s analysis of declarative speech acts (which – roughly – bring certain facts into existence by representing them). See Searle (1995). 17 assumption is still compatible with a variety of views about the “meta-ethical” status of normative or evaluative judgments. We return to some of these issues in Section 6. Granting, then, that there is some standard of correctness by which we can assess normative or evaluative theories (an ontological assumption), we still need to know how to do this assessment (an epistemological question). We now review several methods of testing a theory for external validity. Taking intuitive judgments as strict evidence: According to this method, the test for a normative or evaluative theory is whether it fits our intuitive judgments about the relevant normative or evaluative matters. On this approach, our intuitive judgments have the same status as empirical observations in science. In science, a theory is empirically adequate if it entails the correct observation statements (see, e.g., Quine 1975; van Fraassen 1980). Similarly, in moral and political theory, we might call a theory normatively or evaluatively adequate if it entails the correct normative or evaluative statements. According to the strict-evidence method, these are precisely the normative or evaluative statements supported by our intuitive judgments (cf. the discussion in Dworkin 1975). Although simple and analogous to familiar scientific methods, this method has some problems. First, while we may be confident in some of our normative or evaluative judgments, other judgments may be more tentative, and in some cases – especially when the issue is less familiar – we may not have any firm intuitions at all. Second, our intuitive judgments may be subject to biases and framing effects, which may cast further doubt on their reliability. Third, our normative or evaluative judgments may not be consistent with one another, or they may entail other judgments that we reject on reflection; in such cases, the strict- evidence method provides no guidance at all. Reflective equilibrium: A more refined method of theory testing is the reflective- equilibrium method. It does not treat our intuitions as independent evidence, prior to the theory in question, but requires us to reach a “mutual fit” between the theory and our considered judgments. This works as follows. We begin with some initial theory, perhaps inspired by our initial intuitive judgments or given by some prima facie principles, then consider the implications of the theory and ask whether they are also in line with our judgments. If those implications fit our judgments, the process stops. It is more likely, however, that only some of the theory’s implications fit our judgments, while others do not. We then reassess both the theory and our judgments. In some cases, we may decide, on reflection, to revise the theory by changing some of the constituent principles, so as to bring the theory in line with the judgments we are unwilling to give up. In other cases, we may decide to overrule our judgments and embrace the theory’s implications as our new considered judgments. A reflective equilibrium is reached when the implications of our possibly revised theory are in line with our possibly revised judgments. At least since Rawls’s Theory of Justice, reflective equilibrium has been one of the most widely used methods in political theory (Rawls 1999, 15–18, 40–46; Daniels 2013). Its details can be spelt out in a variety of ways. For example, we may choose the units of assessment more narrowly or more broadly. We can either search for a reflective equilibrium involving a narrowly specified theory, constituted by a small number of principles together with very few auxiliary assumptions, or we can search for a reflective equilibrium involving a more broadly specified theory, constituted by a larger number of principles and further additional assumptions – which in turn may be interpreted as a conjunction of multiple theories, covering a wider domain of issues. Political theorists 20 of statements – if it entails some (simplifying or limiting) falsehood about that issue; formally, it has a false implication for some of the given statements, implying one or more false statements among them or the negations of one or more true statements. A simple Newtonian theory of mechanics, for instance, may be idealized with respect to friction, entailing the absence of friction in the physical systems it represents, although friction is present in the real world. Since theories are meant to simplify the world, most political theorists agree that abstraction is virtually unavoidable in theory construction, and an innocuous intellectual exercise (O’Neill 1996, chap. 2; see also the discussion in Stemplowska 2008). Idealization, unlike abstraction, is looked at with greater suspicion in political theory and is considered potentially problematic (O’Neill 1996, chap. 2). 5.2 The worry about idealization The “danger of idealization” in political theory has been discussed primarily in the debate on “ideal versus non-ideal theory” (for an overview, see Valentini 2012). The debate is largely animated by the worry that resort to simplifying assumptions and idealized thought experiments or intuition pumps – which are common in contemporary political theory – will adversely affect the validity of the ensuing theories (see, e.g., O’Neill 1996, chap. 2; Farrelly 2007; Mills 2005). For instance, John Rawls develops his theory of justice assuming full compliance with the resulting principles. This makes critics wonder whether we can trust Rawls’s principles to deliver correct and action-guiding prescriptions for the real world, where many people fail to abide by the demands of justice. In assessing this worry, two points are worth making. First, like abstraction, some degree of idealization in our theories – in the form of simplifying assumptions – may play an important, and justified, heuristic role. Again, Newton’s theory of physics does not appear to be significantly undermined by its assuming friction away, especially to the extent that information about friction can potentially be re-introduced in refinements or applications of the theory. This suggests that, rather than reject idealizations as problematic from the outset, we must ask whether a theory contains the “right” idealizations, given its purpose (Robeyns 2008; Valentini 2009). Second, to answer the question of which idealizations are “right” and which are not, we need to distinguish between three possible loci – or levels – at which idealizations can occur: (1) the theory itself, (2) the conditions of application of the theory’s prescriptions (where those prescriptions are of the form “if such-and-such conditions hold, then such-and-such follows”), (3) the justification of the theory. Crucially, idealization at any one of these levels need not entail idealization at any of the others. 5.3 Rawls’s theory as an example Rawls’s theory of justice, as described earlier, consists of the “equal liberty” (X), “fair equality of opportunity” (Y), and “difference” (Z) principles and their implications. The theory itself would be idealized – a level (1) idealization – if and only if these principles entailed false statements about their subject matter – for instance, if the statement “we ought to re-arrange the tax system so as to benefit the worst off as much as possible” were false. Note, however, that the often-criticized “idealized” 21 assumption of full compliance is not made within the theory itself, but occurs as part of the justification that Rawls offers for the theory. It is one of the assumptions made by the parties in the original-position thought experiment. So, it is an idealization at level (3). Rawls’s principles, which generate his theory, do not imply any false claims about full compliance; hence we have no idealization at level (1) here. Nor do the prescriptions following from these principles presuppose full compliance for their applicability; hence we have no idealization at level (2) either (see Simmons 2010, 9– 10 for discussion). Similarly, consider Rawls’s assumption that society exists under favourable historical and social conditions. Relative to existing war-torn, or desperately poor countries, this assumption is clearly false: it is an idealization. Rawls says explicitly that his principles of justice may not apply to societies in which the relevant favourable conditions are absent (Rawls 1999, 216). Does this make Rawls’s theory idealized – an idealization at level (1) – and problematically so? Arguably, it does not, because the favourable-conditions idealization operates at the level of the conditions of application of the theory’s prescriptions, i.e., at level (2). The prescription that is entailed by the theory (under a careful formulation) – namely “if favourable conditions hold, justice demands X, Y, and Z” – is still true. Although the conditional nature of this prescription limits the scope of application of the theory, it does not make the theory itself idealized, by generating false prescriptions. 5.4 The worry reassessed We suspect that, although worries about idealization in political theory are frequently expressed as complaints about “theories being idealized”, they actually tend to target idealizations at levels (2) and (3), rather than (1) – i.e., at the levels of the theories’ conditions of application and the justifications offered for those theories, not at the level of the theories themselves. Of course, idealizations at levels (2) and (3) often make the target-theories somewhat irrelevant to the real world, by rendering them insufficiently action-guiding in real- world circumstances. While this lack of guidance may be a genuine shortcoming, it is not accurately captured by the claim that the theories themselves are idealized. Rather, in the case of a level (2) idealization, the theories entail true prescriptions of an “if-then” sort, whose antecedent conditions – the “if” clauses – do not hold in real- world circumstances. And in the case of a level (3) idealization, the theories may be insufficiently justified, in that the justifications offered for them – such as highly contrived thought experiments – are too idealized to allow inferences for the real world. Our discussion highlights the importance of clarity about the role that idealizations play in the defence and formulation of one’s theory. Consider a theory of justice prescribing “p”, defended on the assumption that there is no reasonable disagreement about justice within society, and yet formulated in universal terms: “justice always demands that p”. This theory does indeed run the risk of being problematically idealized, if it turns out that the presence of reasonable disagreement makes a morally relevant difference to what justice demands. The theory, in that case, would have false implications in a number of situations, namely those involving reasonable 22 disagreement. A true principle, by contrast, would only say: “if there is no reasonable disagreement, justice demands that p”. 6. The significance of disagreement in political theory We noted earlier that, while political theory is sometimes viewed as a subfield of moral philosophy, another view is that political theory is distinct from moral philosophy in that the conditions of theorizing are different (see, e.g., Williams 2005; Larmore 2013). On this view, political theory, unlike – or much more than – moral philosophy, is conducted against the background of (reasonable) pluralism in society. Disagreement about normative and evaluative matters, it is said, has a different status in political theory than in (mainstream) moral philosophy. The nature of disagreement in society constrains what normative or evaluative principles can be defended in political theory. In this section, we explore this view and discuss its methodological implications. 6.1 Disagreement: “constitutive of assertability conditions” rather than “epistemic” While moral philosophers seek to answer questions such as “what ought we to do in a given situation”, political theorists are faced with questions such as “what ought we do, given that we do not agree about what we ought to do” (see, e.g., Waldron 1999; Larmore 2013). At first sight, we might be perplexed by this alleged difference between political theory and moral philosophy. Are there not equally big disagreements in moral philosophy? Practically every well-known moral dilemma has the property that different people take different views on how it should be resolved, and the question of what one should do in such cases of disagreement arises also in the moral realm. Yet, the difference between moral philosophy and political theory may be said to be the following. In moral philosophy, we commonly (though not universally) make the assumption that, among the many different rival normative or evaluative theories, one is the independently correct or true theory. The task for the moral philosopher is to identify that theory. If we conduct moral philosophy on this assumption, disagreement is of a “merely” epistemic kind. There is a fact about what the right answer to any normative or evaluative question is; we may just have different beliefs about that fact. It is less clear – so the argument goes – whether the same assumption can be made in political theory. On this picture, disagreement in political theory may be viewed, not merely as “epistemic”, reflecting different beliefs about the same truth, but as partly “constitutive” of the correctness conditions – or warranted assertability conditions – of normative claims themselves. On this view, whether a normative or evaluative theory in political theory is correct (or assertable) depends, in part, on the society in which the theory is to be applied, and specifically on the level of reasonable disagreement in that society; we define the notion of reasonableness below. A key desideratum here is that our theories be, at least in principle, acceptable to individuals holding reasonable but conflicting moral views within pluralistic societies. What counts as a correct normative or evaluative principle in a society with little reasonable disagreement need not always count as correct in a highly pluralistic society, where the range of reasonable disagreement is greater. In light of this, some 25 from different such perspectives could not hope to gain sufficient support and to offer a stable basis for social organization in pluralistic liberal democracies (Rawls 1996, Lecture 4). 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