For their patient support throughout the editorial process, from Lexington Books, I wish to thank Jana Hodges-Kluck, Trevor Crowell, Sydney Wedbush, Syed Zakaullah, Arun Rajakumar, Len Clapp, and especially Rob Stainton. Two anonymous readers for Lexington Books made suggestions that improved the book. I am grateful to them all.
Of course, none of the people mentioned above bear any responsibility for the resulting book.
Joel Marks, however, does. After decades of debating the relative merits of Kantianism and Utilitarianism with me, Joel dramatically and suddenly rejected all moral beliefs as false and pernicious. This “anti-epiphany,” as he called it, he partly attributed to my critique of modern liberal theism,9 and he challenged me to explain why that critique did not apply, mutatis mutandis, to morality. It was this spur which first moved me to think through the philosophical grounds for my belief that some actions are right and some are wrong.
However, although Joel Marks bears responsibility for its existence, he bears no blame for the book’s contents. His meticulous reading and generous, extensive commentary on a late draft was a heroic effort to save me from what he saw as blunders of logic, fact, or style. I have no doubt that the many recommendations of his I accepted made this a better book, but there were also many I rejected, so Joel is guiltless of all remaining infelicities. His interest in the project sustained it through a long gestation, and I am deeply appreciative of that, even if he thinks the baby ugly.
It surely is not always easy living with someone who spends much time staring into space thinking about truth and goodness when he might otherwise be doing truly good things, but Ora Gladstone tolerates it, and even helped proofread the index. I am grateful for her forbearance. Isaac and Hadass make the objectivity of moral goodness psychologically impossible for me to disbelieve.
NOTES
1. In each assertion, by “truth,” or “true” I mean what some feel the need to call “objective truth” or “objectively true.” In general, I feel no such need, and think the modifier redundant. Nonetheless, it is sometime convenient to refer to a belief as “subjectively true,” and so in certain contexts clarity requires using the expression “objectively true.”
2. Like many philosophical labels “moral objectivism” has been slapped on a host of differing doctrines. What I mean by it must await developing its elements, but for now I’ll simply say it asserts that there are true principles of action.
3. I recognize that some recent work in experimental philosophy (e.g., Pölzler 2018) casts some doubt on this claim, but hardly enough to shake me from this conviction. See chapter 5, section 4.
4. Cf. Misak (2000). Although not directly influenced by Misak’s work, this book explores many similar themes and arrives at many of the same positions she anticipated. For a comparison of her views and my Rationalist Pragmatism see chapter 4, section 10. Brandom (2011) who has also used the term “Rationalist Pragmatism,” to describe his views, is in some ways closer, in other ways less close, to the form of Rationalist Pragmatism I espouse than is Misak. See chapter 4, section 9 for a more extensive discussion of Brandom’s rationalist pragmatism.
5. See Kant (1785), Hutcheson (1723). Also Bentham (1789) and Mill’s (1861a) versions of the principle of utility.
6. Nozick (1993, 140).
7. Fukuyama (2011, xiv).
8. “Philosophy is the discipline that surveys all things that we think are true and tries to figure out how they can be true together.” Antony (2016).
9. Silver (2006).
Ideal and Nonideal Moral Theory
This book is an exercise in “ideal moral theory” insofar as it tries to lay out the fundamental structure of morality. Ideal theory, conceived of as describing a perfectly just polity or a complete set of fundamental moral principles, recently has been unfavorably contrasted with “nonideal” theory, which it is claimed, unlike ideal theory, attends to particular injustices and moral wrongs. The contrast and criticism are not new. Marx’s critique of “utopian” socialism and orthodox pragmatists’ reluctance to define “the good,” are motivated by many of the same concerns that inform contemporary arguments against ideal theory.1
There are three basic complaints about ideal theory. The first is that the proposed ideals are useless because they are impossible for us. They are castles in the air, populated with fully reasonable beings, which we are not, shaped by uncorrupted institutions, which we don’t have, and immaculately conceived outside of history, which nothing is. In a word, the ideal is unreal, and only the realistic is valuable.
The second complaint is that imagining the ideal makes one blind to actual injustices, or at least unresponsive to them. So, for example, because racism would not be part of any proposed ideal world, the construction of an ideal gives no guidance for a just response to racism. The ideal theorist, it is claimed, doesn’t begin with our experience of actual injustices, and therefore will tend to finish without addressing our strongly felt moral intuitions.
The third criticism leveled at ideal theorizing is that ideal theory envisions a perfected condition (that is what makes a theory ideal), but our norms are and ought to be conceived as evolving, constantly subject to reformation due to new experience and new knowledge. The good is never achieved, and it is a mistake to even imagine it achieved. Nonideal theorists, especially from the pragmatic tradition, argue that the fixity of the ideal in ideal theory misconstrues the source of value.
These criticisms are not without merit when directed against certain ideal theories, or when directed against certain misapplications of any ideal theory, but they fail as a general indictment of imaging and defending ideal moral institutions and practices.
To begin with, in an important sense, all normative theory “idealizes,” whether “ideal” or not. Unless the theory is of the “whatever is is right” variety, it moves beyond reality. Theories which merely describe the actual and explain how it came to be and operate are not normative theories. The normative evaluates the actual and compares it to some possibility, or compares some possibilities to each other. What is not the case, at least not yet the case, is always part of the normative theory mix. So the mere unreality of the ideals of ideal theories is no fault insofar as they are normative theories. Attempting to conceive of the best is simply the most extreme form of normative thought. Complaints that ideal theory departs from reality are complaints against doing any kind of normative theory.
If the charge is that the ideal trucks in impossibilities, then that is a different matter. Ideal theory should recommend the best possible world, but no better. Perfection in normative theory should be conceived of as good as it can get, not as as good as we might want. “Impossible!” is a grave accusation, and if warranted, a fatal offense. However, the charge of impossibility can only be sustained against a particular ideal theory combined with a theory of the possible. Possibility is always relative to a set of constraints delineating the possible. The logically possible may be physically impossible, the physically possible, biologically impossible. When a theorist claims some ideal normative construct is impossible, we need to ask which constraints she takes to be fixed. Just which unchangeable laws condemn Thomas More’s Utopia to remain nowhere? Since all normative theory strays from the actual, the realists must state the boundaries they set for wandering. Ideal theory usually is explicit in the constraints it accepts.2 Such methodological honesty sets a good example for nonideal theory’s less totalizing normative endeavors.
Constraints that critics are entitled to take as fixed in their critique of ideal theories are where we have been and where we are now. A possible good, which we cannot get to given our past journey and current location, might as well be nowhere. Without knowing how a condition might be achieved