This criticism points out ideal theory’s incompleteness as a blueprint for reaching the good, but it does not establish ideal theory’s irrelevance, let alone its baneful effects. And while ideal theories typically offer no complete transition program, nothing about them dismisses this work. Doing ideal theory does not imply that we can ignore formulating educational programs and political strategies rooted in our best social theories and most informed historical understanding. Idealizing may be only one of the theoretical tasks contributing to moral and social betterment, but it is a useful one. Like the more specialized or narrowly focused theoretical work, ideal theory can help us understand how to achieve a more perfect world. Ideal theory’s vision sets a direction for the next concrete step. There can be no transition program without knowing what we are transitioning to.3 That ideal theory provides no detailed instructions for the journey only shows that it is not the only theoretical work needed for moral progress. But who said it was?
As to the claim that ideal theorizing is insensitive to our moral intuitions and pressing moral concerns, I’d claim that rather than blind us to actual injustice, ideal theory illuminates them. We judge an ideal theory by how well felt injustices are explained and unfelt ones revealed. If the felt injustices aren’t accounted for it is a deficiency of the ideal theory under consideration, not of ideal theorizing as such. If we are not sensitized to previously unfelt wrongs, the theory is of little help in making moral progress, but other ideal theories might helpfully uncover many and deep real injustices unnoted by contemporary moral consciousness.
Does ideal theorizing commit us to a stultifying vision? I do not dispute that our conception of the good changes, but ideal theory need not deny this. Justifying an ideal does not disallow future justifications of modifications of that ideal. An ideal theory need not claim its ideals are the last word in ideals, and it can even incorporate openness to new values and norms into its idealization. Ideal theory gives direction to our first steps. It strategically informs what is to be done now. But setting a direction does not lay rail tracks onto an unbending utopia parkway.
Related, but subtler criticisms of ideal theories are provided by Elizabeth Anderson. She argues, although she doesn’t put it quite this way, that idealizing leads to inadequate or positively harmful transition programs, or rather, that thinking of moral progress as implementing a transition program is misconceived. She claims that even tentatively held ideas of “the best,” are unnecessary and may misdirect us away from what is actually better; knowledge of the “best” is not needed for knowledge of the better, and what’s worse, may prevent improvement.4
It is quite true that we need not know what is best to know what is better, but we must know what is good to know what is better, and trying to understand what is best is a way of getting clear on what is good. Nothing is justifiably believed better than anything else without a conception(s) of the good and reasons to think that the “better” condition has more of the good(s) than the “not as good.” However tentatively held, an idea of goodness is required to believe things could be better. But how, asks the critic, does inquiry into what is best clarify what is good? Might it not instead defame or obscure the goods that are at hand, and ignore or acquit present evils?
Granted, idealizing can, as Anderson fears, distort evaluation and moral judgment; it can be dismissive of perspectives that would not ideally exist (e.g., the perspectives of members of an unjustly despised group),5 but do exist and need to be heeded. It can ignore a good that is only good in the nonideal context (affirmative action?), or endorse one that is only good in the ideal context (open borders?). But nothing essential to ideal theory entails such mistakes. Ever conscious of the context of constraints it works within, well done idealizing will be highly alert to the morally relevant changes wrought by further constraints. In a world without homophobia, perhaps it is just to refuse on a whim to sell a couple a wedding cake. It might be useful to know that given the delight humans take in indulging their whims, an ideal society would allow the whimsical refusal to sell wedding cakes. However, knowing that does not prevent us from knowing justice must weigh different considerations in a world burdened by homophobia. The idealizing might even highlight the injustice of refusing to sell same sex couples wedding cakes by making explicit the conditions that justly permit giving wide latitude for whimsical desires and how the absence of those conditions forbid whimsical discrimination.
Ideal theory’s relation to nonideal theories is similar to nonideal theories’ relation to reality, and serves a similar function—it describes what is better.6 Insofar as any distinction can be made between nonideal and ideal theorizing, the latter simply takes on only the constraints the theorist believes will always be inescapable for rational beings, or slightly less idealized, human beings, while the former takes on constraints the theorist believes early twenty-first century humans are stuck with for the time being.
The utility of doing ideal theory is made more perspicuous if we conceive of it not as attempt at constructing the “best”—that of which there can be no better—but instead as an of unending striving to imagine the “still better.” The transitive nature of “the better” relationship enables ideal theory to shed light on the comparative worth of more immediate options. So, for example, if two reforms promise equal, but different advances to a more just society, but only one of them offers a feature, which although of no value now, would be a virtue in an ideal society, that gives us some reason to pursue the reform that includes the potentially virtuous feature. Suppose we could increase satisfying, productive employment through investment in dedicated vocational programs or in vocational tracks embedded in liberal arts schools, and had little evidence that one would be more effective than the other. If a liberally educated general population is part of our ideal, then we have a reason to prefer integrating vocational training into a liberal educational context.
To be sure, we must be alert to a virtue in ideal conditions being a vice in our actual conditions, or allowing a large virtue in an imagined future prevent the pursuit a slighter but more immediately available good. Perhaps in current conditions mixing a liberal and vocational education would engender student resentment and thwart the training effort, or would diminish its results; the speculative good of a liberal education to the individual or society would seldom justify forgoing an immediately and more certain beneficial policy. Ideals can mislead. But the misuse of idealizing hardly demonstrates its uselessness, and the dangers its abuse poses don’t erase the benefits its circumspect engagement promises.
Finally, Anderson argues that ideal theory cannot learn from experience because it is not judged by experience. Ideal theory, she claims, sets the standards by which experience is evaluated, so our judgments of experience are forced to adjust to our theory rather than our theory adjusting to judgments formed by experience.
I believe this picture misrepresents ideal theory, depicting philosophical method as dogmatic theology. Ideal theory does not, at least not typically, present its findings as revealed truth, or matters of faith, irrefutable by logical or empirical evidence. Ideal theory demands no commitment to evaluate experience on the theory’s terms regardless of the intuitive appeal or consequences of those evaluations. Our moral intuitions are formed by personal, social, and cultural experiences of every type, and those same historically formed moral intuitions have the most prominent jury seats when pronouncing on the plausibility of an ideal theory. To speak of the norms provided by ideal theory as standards external to experience is to describe the formal role they have been nominated for, not the reasons for their election. And even once elected, the norms of ideal theory are liable to impeachment if experience demonstrates they perform poorly in office.
Idealizing, like nonideal theorizing, creates a normative structure and pronounces it good. But unlike God’s pronouncement at the end of each creative day, the ideal theorist declaration of goodness comes with reasons. Our intuitions and ongoing experience not only continually assess those reasons, they assess the practices those reasons have realized.7
NOTES
1.