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WHAT IS A POLITICAL VALUE? POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY AND FIDELITY TO REALITY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 December 2016

Matt Sleat
Matt Sleat*
Affiliation:
Political Theory, University of Sheffield
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Abstract:

This essay seeks to defend the claim that political philosophy ought to be appropriately guided by the phenomenon of politics that it seeks to both offer a theory of and, especially in its normative guise, offer a theory for. It does this primarily through the question of political values. It begins by arguing that for any value to qualify as a value for the political domain, it must be intelligible in relation to the constitutive features of politics as a human activity. It then examines the extent to which the preconditions for the realization of values in practice ought to figure in our considerations as to whether they are values that fit or belong to our social world. We can understand these parts of the essay as responding to two related questions, respectively: (i) Is this a political value at all? — which is to ask, is it a value that is appropriate for the political realm?; and then (ii) Is this a political value for us? The final section responds to the often-made complaint that political philosophy ought not to make any concessions to the actual world of politics as it really is, arguing that attending to the realities of politics, and in particular the constitutive conditions of political activity, gives meaning to the enterprise as the theorization of politics (and not something else). Furthermore those same conditions provide the limits of intelligibility beyond which ideals and values can no longer be, in any meaningful sense, ideals and values for the political sphere.

Keywords

ideal theorymoralismpolitical valuesrealismutopianism
Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 33 , Issue 1-2 , Fall 2016 , pp. 252 - 272
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2016 

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References

1 For an interesting overview of (and attempt to synthesize) several definitions of politics by theorists throughout the twentieth century see: Alexander, James, “Notes Towards a Definition of Politics,” Philosophy 89, no. 2 (2014): 273–300.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 The concern that contemporary political philosophy, especially in its ideal form, is insufficiently action guiding is central to the nonideal critique that will be discussed in the final section.

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4 This thought has often been put in terms of the “autonomy of the political.” This is not necessarily helpful, not least because it implies — or has been taken to imply — that politics is a fully autonomous sphere with its own internal logic that necessarily excludes values or concerns from other domains such as morality or economics. To think that politics is a completely independent realm of human activity would be deeply unrealistic. The claim is therefore better understood as one of irreducibility: politics is related to these other spheres but its ends, values, limits, means, and so on, are sufficiently distinct such that it cannot be reduced to them. For an interesting discussion of this, and how such claims to politics’ autonomy was viewed in classical realist thought, see Alison McQueen, “The Case for Kinship: Classical Realism and Political Realism,” https://www.academia.edu/14160494/The_Case_for_Kinship_Classical_Realism_and_Political_Realism (accessed 29/03/2016).

5 None of what follows should be taken to imply that the general conditions of the political that I focus on here exhaust all that might fall into that category. Certainly any complete account would need to say much more, where there is indeed more to be said.

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12 Mason’s response to this is to claim that ideal theory ought to “concede that it is non-political in an important way” but that this is not problematic if it is then supplemented with nonideal questions such as “How should we respond to those who, we believe, unreasonably reject those procedures?” For reasons I discuss in the third section, I do not think such a defense is plausible.

13 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. C. Betts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 54–55 (emphasis added).

14 Here I have been benefited greatly from Bernard Williams’s “From Freedom to Liberty: The Construction of a Political Value” (in Williams, In the Beginning Was the Deed). I have not followed him in distinguishing between the “proto-political” value of freedom and the political value of liberty, but I take what has been said here to be consistent with that way of thinking about how to construct political values.

15 Williams, Bernard, Making Sense of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 139.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 Ibid., 136.

17 Ibid., 140.

18 Williams, In the Beginning Was the Deed, 92.

19 For an excellent discussion of these questions see William Galston’s contribution to this issue.

20 For a good account of the various claims and positions that are included under the labels ideal and nonideal theory see Valentini, Laura, “Ideal vs. Non-Ideal Theory: A Conceptual Map,” Philosophy Compass 7, no. 9 (2012): 654–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 Estlund, David, “Utopophobia,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 42, no. 2 (2014): 113–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22 Ibid., 115.

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24 David Estlund, “What Good Is It? Unrealistic Political Theory and the Value of Intellectual Work,” Analyse & Kritik 33, no. 2 (2011): 395-416. Adam Swift makes a similar point: “It seems plausible that we have an interest in knowing or understanding truths about justice that is distinct from our interest in achieving it, or guiding action towards it, and I see no reason to deny that those seeking such truths are engaging in political philosophy” (“The Value of Philosophy in Nonideal Circumstances,” Social Theory and Practice 34, no. 3 [2008]: 363-87, at 366). As does Alan Hamlin and Zofia Stemplowska: “It matters . . . to our understanding of justice whether some requirement is not a requirement of justice merely because satisfying it is not feasible, or because it would not be required by justice anyway. For example, it may well be feasible for all parents to give up their children happily. But we do not understand parental justice fully unless we ask whether justice would require this of parents if it became feasible” (“Theory, Ideal Theory and the Theory of Ideals,” Political Studies Review 10 [2012]: 48-62, at 55).

25 The difference between nonideal and realist concerns has been explored in detail in Sleat, Matt, “Realism, Liberalism and Non-Ideal Theory: Are There Two Ways to Do Realistic Political Theory?” Political Studies 64, no. 1 (2016): 27–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The distinctiveness of nonideal and realist concerns regarding how reality ought to impinge on our theorizing of politics means that it is perfectly possible for a theory to be susceptible to one charge but not the other. So one possibility that I shall return to at the end, for instance, is that a theory might be realistic (in the sense of being political, properly speaking) yet may lack any reasonable chance of being realized. A theory might therefore seem ideal from the perspective of nonideal theory without being so from that of realism, and vice versa.

26 Estlund, “Utopophobia,” 130–31.

27 Ibid., 131 (emphasis added).

28 Similar arguments could be made of other practices also: For instance, we might reasonably think that a theory of business that did not take into account the profit motive, or of sport that ignored the fact that athletes compete to win, cannot be an appropriate theory for either, by virtue of not being about either.

29 Dunn, John, The Cunning of Unreason (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 8.Google Scholar

30 Ibid., 7.

31 Williams, Bernard, Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline, ed. Moore, A. W. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 155.Google Scholar

32 This is a point made by Ed Hall in his contribution to this collection also.

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34 Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).Google Scholar