2. Cf. Rousseau’s (1762) taking men as they are and laws as that might be, Rawls (1971) making men self-interested but envy free.
3. Later I deal with the objection that we don’t need to know the ultimate destination to know where we should go next. The point here is only that we need at least a proximate destination to move at all.
4. Anderson (2010, 3).
5. Anderson (2010, 5).
6. This is more specific than Parfit’s (2011, 95) defense of idealization as revealing of information.
7. In As if: Idealizations and Ideals (2017), Kwame Anthony Appiah offers a similar justification of theoretical idealizations. However, there are three ways in which Appiah’s defense of idealizing differs from mine that are worth noting. Firstly, following Hans Vaihinger, Appiah describes idealizing as treating falsehoods as true. I think that is a misleading and unnecessary characterization. Instead, I think of idealizing, especially in moral and political theory, as treating possibilities as actual. This may seem to amount to the same thing because it is false that the possible is actual. But insofar as moral and political idealization is a species of practical reasoning, that is, figuring out what is to be done, it is future oriented. From our epistemic standpoint, no future event is in fact actual; all events are only possibilities. The decision to treat some current actualities as enduring and others as changeable is not a matter of recognizing some truths and ignoring others. Rather it is a matter of accepting (resigning yourself to?) the inevitable realization of some possibilities (treating them as if they will become actual) and then exploring which other possibilities are compatible with the inevitable ones. Ideal moral and political theory takes the possibilities whose realization appear dependent on voluntary, contingent human action, evaluates them, and commends, ceteris paribus, the best contingent possibilities’ realization. This way of describing idealization removes the connotation that idealizing is irrational because it traffics in falsehoods.
Second, Appiah’s embrace of pragmatism is more hesitant than mine, leaving the justification of idealizing more lightly anchored than it need be. Appiah emphasizes, quite rightly in my view, that idealizing’s justification requires that it be useful (2017, 156). But he offers no general account of utility, relying mostly on a gut pluralism (2017, 111) that claims we know utilities when we see (or imagine) them only in specified circumstances. This approach disallows more comprehensive idealizations because we cannot say what they are good for.
This second difference leads to a third: Appiah is reluctant to say what is good, and as I argue above, however tentative and undogmatic such account is, it is needed to provide an account of the better. While the best may be an enemy of the better, neither is recognizable without goodness. The robust epistemological pragmatism that this book adopts gives a general answer to the question what idealizations are good for—discovering ethical truth—and thereby secures them a central role in normative theory. Ethical truth itself, like all truth, receives its justification pragmatically. What a pragmatic justification of truth amounts to is discussed in chapters 3, 4, and the appendix.
1. The Self
Much of traditional Western religious thought contends that selves are simple unified soul substances. The Cartesian mind is a philosophical variant of this tradition. Separable from its body, or any particular perception, thought, or emotion, the self is the thing that senses, thinks, feels, and has a body. Traditional Eastern thought often holds that there are no selves. Here selves are either mythical beings with no reality at all, or illusory beings, all appearance, shimmering inconsequentially on the surface of reality.1 It is not my purpose to argue against either of these traditional ideas of the self, rather I acknowledge these views, and dismiss them. Instead of rebutting opposing views of the self, I will simply roughly describe the conception of the self I accept.
The self is a complex, ever-changing entity, extended in time, which performs a set of functions we label “mental.” Prominent among these mental functions, using crude, broad, but familiar categories, we find believing, perceiving, and acting. The intimate and unique causal relations these functions have with each other, especially relations of memory, and the ongoing awareness of these relations, constitutes a particular self. As best we can tell, such relational complexes are most fully realized in human brain tissue. You, and I, do not have logical, emotional, moral, and aesthetic capacities, we do not have beliefs, feelings, dispositions, perceptions, aches, pains, loves, hates, memories, principles, fears, motives, and thousands of other mental properties—we are networked clusters of those capacities and properties. Although some of those features play more enduring, central, and influential roles in the grouping, no small subset of properties is definitive of the group. Empirically, your brain may be essential, but conceptually no one aspect is necessary or sufficient to you being you. But want of a strict definition does not make you a mythical creature or an illusion. It makes you vague. We all have loose boundaries. Our beginnings, ends and synchronous catalog of constituents all elude precision. But if the real were restricted to the precise, and responsible philosophical talk restricted to the real, at best we might be able to speak of subatomic particles, and that would make for a dull sermon. So there you are. More or less.2
Selves, and the goodness and rationality, of which they are capable, develop from humans’ peculiar social nature. Moreover, they can only be manifested in society. Society is the stone out of which selves are carved and only in relation to other selves can selves maintain their form. The autonomy of the self, the self-sovereignty which is the fulfillment and measure of the self’s reason and goodness, rather than being independent from others, is achieved and exercised with and through others. Later, I will say more about the social production and sustenance of the self.
2. Our Freedom
This conception of the self is the setting of a coherent notion of “free will.” Indeed, to a large extent, selves are conceived and formed to explain freedom. The potpourri of variously related elements that cause human actions are theoretically welded into an entity of which we can predicate character, responsibility, and agency. Selves are the things that are free.3
The ancient debate on free will has concerned itself with the question of whether the will can be free in a determined world, that is, a world whose entire condition, down to the last detail, is a function of its fully specified condition in the previous instant. In the history of a determined world, each and every event ensues from the constellation of earlier ones. Given the initial constellation, the events of this world admit of no alternatives.
My acts are of this world, and if they are determined by the state of the world from the first syllable of recorded time, or first fluctuation of unrecorded first being, well before I am at all, then surely I have not determined my acts. And if I do not determine my acts, I am unfree. Or so say the free will deniers.
I take no position on metaphysical determinism, and think it irrelevant to an adequate conception of free will, which needs only that there be sufficient determinism, that is, that we live in a world where we can truly say that some things are caused, among them our acts. A free act of will is simply an act that is caused by certain processes of the self. “Free” is the name we give acts with a favored pedigree. Although no act has untainted ancestry, and there is no perfect freedom, to the extent that an act is the result of careful deliberation, considered values, enduring and cherished desires, clear logic, true beliefs, realistic hopes, reasonable fears, and a recursive reflective awareness of these processes, all of which are possible constituents of a self, the self has acted freely. It matters not a whit how the self came to include these elements. An uncreated God-like self that had these elements eternally and necessarily, and because of them chooses to sacrifice his only begotten son so that others may