© Copyright 2012 by Social Theory and Practice, Vol. 38, No. 1 (January 2012)

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Rawls and Realism Realist political philosophers argue that the abstract character of Rawl-sian political philosophy has left it floating free of any connection with “real politics.” Bernard Williams’s political realism is premised on the rejection of political moralism, which Williams understands as the idea that the moral is prior to the political and that political philosophy is applied morality.1 Raymond Geuss concurs, directing his critique of moralism at Rawls in particular and specifically at Rawls’s Kantian conception of ideal theory. Geuss concludes that the putative failure of ideal theory to provide guidance for how to negotiate “real politics” is “not a criticism of some individual aspect of Rawls’s theory, but a ba-sic repudiation of his whole way of approaching the subject of political philosophy.”2 Of course criticism of the abstract and idealistic character of Rawls’s political philosophy is not new; it featured prominently in communitarian critiques of Rawls. But when such criticism has been acknowledged as having force, it has often been taken to imply that theories of justice should be contextualist rather than universalist, not as challenging the fundamental aspirations of normative theorizing.3 The realist critique cuts deeper because it calls into question the relev-ance, and thereby the coherence, of the project of normative political theorizing in whatever form. It is important because it prompts political philosophers to consider reflexively the relationship between theory and practice. Underlying Williams’s critique of political moralism is the broader contention that analytical philosophy has been “notably ill-equipped among philosophies ... for reflexively raising questions of its own relations to social reality.”4 A fundamental theme in the work of

1Bernard Williams, “Realism and Moralism in Political Theory,” in In the Begin-ning was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument, ed. Geoffrey Haw-thorn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), chap. 1. 2Raymond Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). 3See, e.g., David Miller, “Two Ways to Think About Justice,” Politics, Philosophy & Economics 1 (2002): 5-28. 4Bernard Williams, “Political Philosophy and the Analytical Tradition,” in Phi-

56 James Gledhill Williams and Geuss, and of John Dunn, is that a political theory cannot achieve the same kind of objectivity as a scientific theory.5 Since poli-tics is not, and cannot be, a neutral vehicle for putting moral judgments into practice, political judgment cannot be a matter of subsuming indi-vidual cases under moral principles, but is rather a matter of the actions of real political actors within real institutional contexts. My concern in this article is with whether and how those who are sympathetic to Rawlsian political philosophy can respond effectively to the realist critique. This will involve making sense of Rawls’s claim in Justice as Fairness: A Restatement that, in its focus on ideal theory, justice as fairness is realistically utopian and probes the limits of the realistically practicable. Furthermore, it will involve examining Rawls’s emphasis on the fact that, as a political conception, justice as fairness is concerned with the special case of the basic structure of a modern dem-ocratic society. It aspires to provide nothing more or less than a politi-cal (albeit still moral) framework that can guide the judgments of polit-ical practitioners. Realist political philosophers are united in their op-position to the idea that political philosophy is applied moral philoso-phy, but on the basis of these two points, Rawls argues that justice as fairness is not applied moral philosophy.6 I will defend a Kantian con-ception of theory according to which it is precisely by offering general principles that are abstracted from immediate realities that theory is fit to guide practice through providing a framework for practical judg-ment. Since I wish to defend the capacity of such theorizing to provide guidance for negotiating political reality, I focus on the idea of realistic utopianism associated with Rawls’s later work. I will go on to argue, however, that there is no basic incompatibility between this idea of rea-listic utopianism and Rawls’s earlier conception of ideal theory. While many realist concerns will not be addressed, I will contend that the realist characterization of Rawls’s approach to political philosophy as an exercise in applied morality that is irrelevant to “real politics” can-not be sustained. While not a conclusive refutation of the realist case, rebutting this fundamental claim is an essential step in clarifying the terms of debate between realists and their opponents. I begin by elaborating the key points that can be extracted from the

losophy as a Humanistic Discipline, ed. A.W. Moore (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), chap. 14, p. 159. 5See Richard Bourke and Raymond Geuss (eds.), Political Judgement: Essays for John Dunn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), esp. the editors’ introduc-tion, Geuss, “What is Political Judgement?” and Bourke, “Theory and Practice: The Revolution in Political Judgement.” 6John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, ed. Erin Kelly (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 12-14, 182.

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realist critiques of Williams and Geuss. On this basis, I proceed to cla-rify Rawls’s conception of ideal theory by distinguishing it from the enactment and structural models of political moralism that Williams criticizes. In so doing, I demonstrate how justice as fairness is intended to provide a moral framework for the basic structure of society that can guide the judgments of political practitioners. I will argue that seen in this way, Rawls’s realistically utopian conception of ideal theory is not only consistent with the hermeneutical model of political philosophy that Williams endorses, but not fundamentally at odds with Geuss’s emphasis on the importance of political judgment. However, this un-derstanding of ideal theory raises a puzzle about what Rawls means by referring to nonideal theory. On the basis of a survey of Rawls’s dis-cussions of problems of nonideal theory, I will show how on Rawls’s view problems of nonideal theory do not require an ancillary philoso-phy theory, but rather demand the exercise of political judgment. I con-clude that while Rawls’s ideal theory approach can be defended against the charge that it sees political philosophy as applied moral philosophy, legitimate questions remain about its capacity to guide political judg-ment under changing political circumstances. Those sympathetic to the Rawlsian project should not, however, look to a shift towards nonideal theory, but pursue more, and better, ideal theory. 1. Realism Against Moralism The realist critique of political moralism—or the idea that political phi-losophy is applied moral philosophy—may be unpacked into three key propositions.7 First, realists argue that ideal moral theorizing is blind to the essential and ineliminable characteristics of politics. Political mo-ralism imposes upon politics a moral framework of categories of jus-tice, equality, and rights rather than beginning from the categories of power, interests, and legitimacy that are inherent to politics. Second, ideal theory goes wrong in advocating a deductive model of the appli-cation of moral principles to politics modeled on the technical applica-tion of scientific theories. There are, realists argue, no algorithms that can determine the application of moral principles. What is required is an act of practical judgment, and such judgment is a matter not of ideal 7In addition to the works of Williams and Geuss cited above, see, inter alia, Wil-liams, “In the Beginning was the Deed” (chap. 2) and “The Liberalism of Fear” (chap. 5) in In the Beginning was the Deed; Geuss, “Liberalism and Its Discontents” (chap. 1) and “Neither History nor Praxis” (chap. 2) in Outside Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); and Geuss, “Moralism and Realpolitik” (chap. 3) and “On the Very Idea of a Metaphysics of Right” (chap. 4) in Politics and the Imagination (Prince-ton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

58 James Gledhill prescription but of action, not of words but of deeds. Third, practical judgment must be political judgment, that is, the activity of judgment must be understood in a manner that is sensitive to the circumstances of politics.8 While political practitioners do in some minimal sense “ap-ply” normative ideas in acting, such ideas must “make sense” within particular social, institutional, and historical contexts. If political phi-losophy is to be sensitive to the requirements of political judgment it must therefore be reflexive, reflecting on both its capacity to guide the actions of political practitioners and the normative authority it claims in seeking to do so. Before considering whether Rawls’s ideal theory ap-proach is vulnerable to these criticisms, in the following two sections I will first differentiate Rawls’s view from the enactment and structural models of political moralism that Williams criticizes. 2. The Enactment Model According to the enactment model of the relationship of morality to politics, political philosophy “formulates principles, concepts, ideals and values; and politics (so far as it does what the theory wants) seeks to express these in political action, through persuasion, the use of pow-er and so forth.”9 As Williams describes it, the enactment model typi-cally involves a division of labor between philosophers and politicians and an intermediate activity in which the concerns of philosophy and politics meet. This intermediate activity involves tailoring moral prin-ciples to existing political realities as part of devising programs for practical improvement. This is a three-level model of the relationship of morality to politics, and Geuss’s understanding of political moralism may also be understood in these terms, the idea being that “‘Pure’ eth-ics as an ideal theory comes first, then applied ethics, and politics is a kind of applied ethics.”10 A clear elucidation and defense of the enactment model is offered by Adam Swift and Stuart White in their analysis of the division of la-bor between political theory, social science, and real politics.11 Accord-

8I borrow the term “circumstances of politics” from Jeremy Waldron, Law and Disagreement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 9Williams, “Realism and Moralism in Political Theory,” p. 1. 10Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics, p. 9. 11Adam Swift and Stuart White, “Political Theory, Social Science, and Real Poli-tics,” in David Leopold and Marc Stears (eds.), Political Theory: Methods and Ap-proaches (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), chap. 3. See also Adam Swift, “The Value of Philosophy in Nonideal Circumstances,” Social Theory and Practice 34 (2008): 363-87; Zofia Stemplowska, “What’s Ideal About Ideal Theory?” Social The-ory and Practice 34 (2008): 319-40.

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ing to this model, fact-independent ideal theory of the sort advocated by G.A. Cohen seeks the truth about values such as justice. In nonideal theory, social scientific knowledge is introduced in order to translate these fundamental principles into a policy program. Facts become rele-vant in devising, in Cohen’s sense, applied principles of justice, or, more broadly, optimal rules of regulation for the promotion of funda-mental fact-independent principles.12 Finally, in a third step, a demo-cratic politician may seek to put such rules of regulation into practice. Such a model assumes a deductive relationship between moral prin-ciples and their application to particular political issues. As Cohen puts it, facts “belong to minor premises the truth of which it is not my busi-ness to evaluate.”13 Political philosophy, then, is tasked with establish-ing the normative major premise. Nonideal theory introduces social scientific facts as minor premises that help to establish what conclu-sions follow from normative principles in particular circumstances. It is then the job of the politician to put these conclusions into practice. As Williams points out, utilitarianism is the paradigmatic example of a moral theory that implies an enactment model of the relationship between morality and politics. Indeed, one can presume that in describ-ing the enactment model, Williams has in mind Henry Sidgwick’s analysis of the relationship between ethics and politics in general and Sidgwick’s particular analysis of the utilitarian method of ethics. Wil-liams famously characterizes Sidgwick’s outlook as “Government House utilitarianism,” a morality for colonial administrators who are the workaday successors to Plato’s philosopher kings. While Williams criticizes the antidemocratic implications of this outlook, the fact that it is “indifferent to the values of social transparency,” his fundamental point against the enactment model per se is that an institutional divide is a consequence of a gap or dislocation between theory and practice. Sidgwick simply follows to its logical conclusion the question of whether “there is anywhere in the mind or in society that a theory of this kind can be coherently or acceptably located?”14 Since fact-independent principles transcend facts about persons and society, they cannot provide a public, social basis of justification. Considering further Sidgwick’s approach will help to clarify the na-

12G.A. Cohen, Rescuing Justice and Equality (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-sity Press, 2008), pp. 263-68, 274-92, 323-27. 13G.A. Cohen, “Equality as Fact and as Norm: Reflections on the (Partial) Demise of Marxism,” Theoria 83/84 (1994): 1-11, p. 1. 14Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana, 1985), pp. 109, 107-8. See also Williams, “The Point of View of the Universe: Sidgwick and the Ambitions of Ethics,” in Making Sense of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1995), chap. 13.

60 James Gledhill ture of the enactment model; furthermore, I will argue that Rawls’s conception of ideal theory can be seen as a defense of a Kantian ap-proach that Sidgwick rejects. Sidgwick defines politics as concerned with what the purposes of government ought to be and ethics as aiming to determine what ought to be done by individuals.15 Distinguishing between positive law and ideal law, the role of political theory accord-ing to Sidgwick is to lay down principles for ideal law, or law as it ought to be. There remains the question of how citizens are to behave in relation to existing positive laws. Here a subset of ethics will be de-voted to political questions. These concern both citizens’ political obli-gations to obey positive law and other commands of government, and the more general political duties that can be expected of good citizens. When considering the relationship between ethics and politics from the perspective of utilitarianism, Sidgwick’s description clearly conforms to Williams’s characterization of the enactment model: “Utilitarian Eth-ics naturally seems independent of Politics, and naturally prior to it; we first consider what conduct is right for private individuals, and then to how much of this they can advantageously be compelled by legal pe-nalties.”16 In Sidgwick’s terms both political theory and ethics are ideal in being concerned with what ought to be rather than with what is. Po-litical philosophy is most fundamentally concerned with the desirable; asking what is feasible is a separate and subsequent question. Cohen’s defense of the desirability of socialist equality, which ex-tends to ethical questions and not just questions of political theory in Sidgwick’s sense, is a particularly striking example of the enactment model, and provides a basis for comparing alternative conceptions of ideal theory.17 For Cohen, what remains living in the Marxian tradition is a set of socialist values and a set of economic designs for realizing those values.18 As with the utopian socialism from which Marxism once sought to distinguish itself, “theory is developed independently of the world, and practice is the attempt ... to make the world conform to the

15Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), pp. 15-22. 16Ibid., p. 457. 17Philip Pettit is an example of a political theorist who confines his focus to politi-cal theory in Sidgwick’s sense, concerned with the purposes of government and with “how society should be organised in an ideal world.” Pettit, Judging Justice: An Intro-duction to Contemporary Political Philosophy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), p. xii. Pettit argues for a shift away from ideal theory and towards an increased concern with the feasibility of desirable ideals in Geoffrey Brennan and Philip Pettit, “The Feasibility Issue,” in Frank Jackson and Michael Smith (eds.), The Oxford Hand-book of Contemporary Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), chap. 10. 18G.A. Cohen, If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 103.

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demands of theory.”19 Cohen addresses the question of whether social-ism is desirable by employing a thought experiment in which social cooperation takes place in a world that is ideal in the sense of being removed from the factual circumstances of modern capitalist econo-mies.20 This involves considering the norms of equality and reciprocity that it would naturally seem desirable to adopt on a camping trip. The point of the camping trip thought experiment is not to provide an ideal model that can be approximated in the real world, but to serve as a heu-ristic for identifying ideal principles of equality and community. Al-though they may inspire action, these principles are not themselves di-rectly action-guiding.21 The nonideal theory of socialist economists is required in order to design the social technology that can translate de-sirable socialist values into feasible policies. My purpose in setting out the structure of the enactment model is not so much to mount a critique as to establish a model of “political moralism” against which Rawls’s ideal theory approach may be com-pared. However, it will aid the latter task to consider briefly in what sense the enactment model is vulnerable to realist criticisms. In seeing the role of nonideal theory as being to translate fundamental principles into practical policy prescriptions, there are grounds for seeing the enactment model as understanding rules in the algorithmic sense that realists reject. At the very least, practical judgment plays the purely instrumental role of putting into practice policy prescriptions that pro-mote desirable values. That being said, proponents of the enactment model have a ready response to the charge that the moralistic categories of ideal theory fail to make contact with “real politics.” Indeed, Swift and White admit that the pendulum may have swung too far towards ideal theory and argue that the balance needs to be redressed through a greater concern with nonideal, or applied, political theory. This re-sponse is unlikely to satisfy realist critics, however. Ambiguities persist about whether the enactment model represents a stable understanding of the relationship between ethics and politics, theory and practice. Fol-lowing the realist diagnosis, these ambiguities may be traced to the enactment model’s assumption of a Platonic methodological framework and consequent ambivalence about the relationship of philosophy to politics.22 The enactment model remains torn between the desire for

19Ibid., p. 74. 20G.A. Cohen, Why Not Socialism? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). 21Cohen notes that Rawlsians “are in one way more Utopian than I,” for as con-structivists they “believe it is possible to achieve justice,” whereas for Cohen “justice is an unachievable (although a nevertheless governing) ideal.” Cohen, Rescuing Justice and Equality, p. 254. 22See Bourke and Geuss, “Introduction,” in Political Judgement, pp. 8-12. Lea Ypi

62 James Gledhill revolutionary change and pragmatic criticism of the status quo. Thus on the one hand there is Cohen’s portentous Platonic idea of retreating to “justice in its purity to figure out how to institute as much justice as possible inside the cave,” while on the other hand Swift and White seek to rebut the charge that philosophers who seek to do so are aspiring to the status of philosopher kings.23 The job of instituting as much justice as possible in the cave belongs to the democratic politician who will have to “dilute” the truth when the feasibility set of “grubby” electoral politics demands it.24 Can political philosophers coherently combine an understanding of themselves as both democratic underlaborers and as tasked with ensur-ing that “the truth” does not slip out of sight, as Swift and White pro-pose? I will not explore this point any further, since when one turns to Rawls’s most extensive remarks on the nature of political philosophy one finds him criticizing the enactment model in terms strikingly simi-lar to those of Williams. Rawls rejects a Platonic model where “politi-cal philosophy’s knowledge of the truth authorizes it to shape, even to control, the outcome of politics, by persuasion and force if neces-sary.”25 What Rawls takes issue with is not simply the inference that Swift and White seek to forestall, that such a model legitimizes Plato’s philosopher kings or Lenin’s revolutionary vanguard, but, like Wil-liams, its very methodological structure. It is the assumption that there is an independent question about the truth of justice separate from the question of whether a conception of justice could be freely understood and accepted that Rawls rejects. Rawls adopts instead a democratic view of political philosophy that appeals not to the authority of philo-sophical truth but rather to the authority of shared human reason. Polit-ical philosophy takes its place within the background culture of a dem-ocratic society, its authority resting upon the collective judgment of citizens. Rawls’s contrasting view of the relationship between theory and practice can be clarified by interpreting it as an attempt to vindicate a Kantian account of the relationship between morality and politics in opposition to Sidgwick’s enactment model. Sidgwick considers, only to reject, the idea that moral theory should be “doubly ideal.” On this traces the origins of ideal theory, understood in terms of the enactment model’s divi-sion of labor between the desirable and the feasible, to Plato’s Republic. See “On the Confusion between Ideal and Non-Ideal in Recent Debates on Global Justice,” Politi-cal Studies 58 (2010): 536-55. 23Cohen, Rescuing Justice and Equality, p. 291. 24Swift and White, “Political Theory, Social Science, and Real Politics,” p. 67. 25John Rawls, “Remarks on Political Philosophy,” in Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 3.

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view, moral theory “not only prescribes what ought to be done as dis-tinct from what is, but what ought to be done in a society that itself is not, but only ought to be.”26 However, according to Sidgwick, it is too paradoxical to say that the whole duty of man is summed up in the effort to attain an ideal state of social relations; and unless we say this, we must determine our duties to existing men in view of existing circumstances ... The inquiry into the morali-ty of an ideal society can therefore be at best but a preliminary investigation, after which the step from the ideal to the actual, in accordance with reason, remains to be taken.27 This idea of a duty to act in accordance with the morality of an ideal society brings to mind Kant’s conception of the kingdom of ends, the point of view of which Rawls’s original position seeks to interpret in a manner fit for a democratic society.28 Contrary to the enactment model, the Kantian argument is “not the consequentialist one that we should take whatever means will most likely bring about the ideal moral world, or best approximate it,” but “that we should live now as if we were in an ideal moral community, ignoring the fact (for purposes of moral decision at least) that not everyone is conscientious.”29 Proponents of the enactment model tend to read Rawls’s ideal theory assumption of strict compliance with principles of justice as li-censing a search for fact-independent principles.30 But Rawls’s assump-tion of strict compliance takes its character from a second assumption that characterizes Rawls’s ideal theory approach. Rawls’s principles of justice define a perfectly just society—which for Rawls is a society well-ordered by the principles of justice as fairness—given favorable conditions. These are conditions that allow for the priority of liberty, that is, for the lexical priority of the principle of equal basic liberties over the second principle of justice.31 Such favorable conditions make

26Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, p. 18. 27Ibid., pp. 19-20. 28Sidgwick’s immediate target is Herbert Spencer’s view of an “absolute ethics” for a utopian ideal society as opposed to a “relative ethics” for the present imperfect social conditions (ibid., pp. 177-78 n.1). I leave it open whether the clear inspiration that Rawls takes from Sidgwick extends to inspiring Rawls’s alternative conception of ideal theory. See, further, Marcus G. Singer, “The Methods of Justice: Reflections on Rawls,” Journal of Value Inquiry 10 (1976): 286-316. 29Thomas E. Hill, Jr., “Moral Purity and the Lesser Evil,” in Autonomy and Self-Respect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), chap. 6, p. 73. 30As Ingrid Robeyns notes, however, the assumption of strict compliance does not of itself imply anything about the relationship between a conception of justice and the status quo. See “Ideal Theory in Theory and Practice,” Social Theory and Practice 34 (2008): 341-62, pp. 344-45. 31John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, revised ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-sity Press, 1999), pp. 214-20.

64 James Gledhill possible a democratic practice of social cooperation founded on a pub-lic political conception of justice that citizens can endorse on the basis of their sense of justice. The priority of liberty excludes appeal to truths about moral values considered as independent of what can be endorsed by free and equal citizens. Theories of the rejected kind are indifferent to the value of publicity. They cannot conceivably be seen as a reflec-tion of citizens’ sense of justice and therefore cannot conceivably find a social location as the focus of a well-ordered practice of social coopera-tion. Reasonably favorable circumstances are, according to Rawls, de-termined by “a society’s culture, its traditions and acquired skills in running institutions, and its level of economic advance (which need not be especially high).”32 Some limitations of political liberties may have been justifiable in what are today liberal societies in order to facilitate their development into liberal societies, and it may be necessary to forgo some political liberties if nonliberal societies are to develop into societies in which all the basic liberties can be fully enjoyed.33 But Rawls goes on to argue that in the United States, and we may presume many other societies, conditions favorable to the priority of liberty do obtain, even if the po-litical will to achieve a well-ordered society does not. It is these rea-sonably favorable conditions that license working in strict compliance theory and mean that it can reasonably be presumed that the parties in the original position are capable of a sense of justice and that this fact is public knowledge among them. Reasonably favorable conditions are ones in which it is not unreasonable to expect all citizens to act in ac-cordance with their sense of justice. The role of political philosophy is to fashion the will to achieve the well-ordered society that reasonably favorable conditions make possible. Rawls can therefore be understood as arguing against Sidgwick that political philosophy should be concerned with the duty to achieve an ideal state of social relations. It remains to be seen whether Rawls can respond adequately to Sidgwick’s argument that this can only be a pre-liminary investigation that must be supplemented by nonideal theory’s consideration of how the morality of an ideal society may be applied to our nonideal world. I will begin to examine this issue in the next sec-tion as part of assessing the second species of political moralism that Williams criticizes.

32John Rawls, Political Liberalism, expanded ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 297. 33Rawls, A Theory of Justice, pp. 217-18.

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3. The Structural Model The structural model of the relationship between morality and politics, which Williams associates with the Kantian approaches of Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, is one where “theory lays down moral conditions of co-existence under power, conditions in which power can be justly ex-ercised.”34 Rawls does indeed describe the role of a realistic utopia as setting limits to the reasonable exercise of power.35 However, it is far from self-evident that Rawls foresees the exercise of power being li-mited by moral conditions laid down, or legislated, in the manner of a Kantian sovereign. As I have described it, Rawls’s “doubly ideal” Kan-tian alternative to Sidgwick’s enactment model of ideal theory takes its inspiration from Kant’s moral philosophy rather than Kant’s political philosophy. It involves both the idea of an ideal morally perfect world and the duty of persons to act as if they were self-legislating free and equal citizens of such a world. This second idea differentiates Rawls’s view of how a theory is realized in practice from other Kantian ap-proaches like Dworkin’s with which it is often associated. Dworkin employs a three-level model, analogous to the enactment model, to explain how principles of equality of resources for an ideal world can be translated into a form where they can be approximated in the real world. In terms of Onora O’Neill’s distinction between abstrac-tion (bracketing known truths) and idealization (denying known truths), I take it that both Rawls and Dworkin offer abstract rather than idea-lized accounts of practical agency.36 The next question is whether the structural framework within which practical agency is seen as being exercised in ideal theory is understood in an idealized sense.37 Here I will argue that while for Dworkin ideal principles are fit to guide action only in an ideal world, Rawls denies this. Rawls seeks to overcome a Kantian dualism of the ideal and real worlds in order to render more realistic Kant’s view of the relationship between ideal moral theory and practice, in which theory directly guides practical judgment. Therefore, as I will show in section 4, unlike O’Neill, Rawls does not abstract away from the circumstances of our social world, constructing prin-ciples that are fit to guide political judgment. It is through such a re-vised Kantian two-level model of the relationship between theory and 34Williams, “In the Beginning was the Deed,” p. 1. 35John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 6 n.8. 36Onora O’Neill, Towards Justice and Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 39-44. 37Here my concerns are similar to those of Laura Valentini, “On the Apparent Paradox of Ideal Theory,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 17 (2009): 332-55. How-ever, I work with a different understanding of how normative theory guides action.

66 James Gledhill practice that Rawls can hope to respond to Sidgwick’s skepticism about the self-sufficiency of ideal theory. In sum, while Dworkin’s departure from the enactment model is limited to adopting a Kantian view of theory as practical, Rawls makes both this move and the further Kan-tian move of understanding practical judgment as the key to realizing a theory in practice. Contrasting with the enactment model’s concern with desirable val-ues, then, for Kant, and for Rawls and Dworkin, a moral theory is by definition a set of practical or action-guiding rules. Such rules of theory are general in nature and abstract away from empirical circumstances, circumstances that nonetheless become relevant again in the practical application of these rules. Practice (praxis), on the other hand, for Kant (and, I will argue, for Rawls) consists in action in accordance with pro-cedural principles. This requires practical judgment, for Kant takes it to be obvious that between theory and practice there is required, besides, a middle term connecting them and providing a transition from one to the other, no matter how complete a theory may be; for, to a concept of the understanding, which contains a rule, must be added an act of judgment by which a practitioner distinguishes whether or not something is a case of the rule; and since judgment cannot always be given yet another rule by which to direct its subsumption (for this would go on to infinity), there can be theoreticians who can never in their lives become practical because they are lacking in judgment.38 The key point to note is that Kant rejects the idea that practical rules can aspire to the same algorithmic status as natural scientific rules. This is because whereas natural scientific theories are intended to fit the world, moral theories are intended to guide practice, thereby fitting the world to the theory. Putting a moral theory into practice involves not the application of ideal principles to particular problems, but rather practicing, enacting, or instantiating ideal principles under existing cir-cumstances.39 In Rawls’s terms, while theoretical reason is concerned with knowledge of given objects, practical reason is concerned with the production or perfection of objects in accordance with a conception of those objects.40 An example of this is political action in accordance with the conception of a well-ordered society represented by the proce-dural principles that could be agreed to in an original position of free-dom and equality. 38Immanuel Kant, “On the Common Saying: That May Be Correct in Theory, But It Is of No Use in Practice,” in Practical Philosophy, ed. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 279. 39See Onora O’Neill, “Experts, Practitioners, and Practical Judgement,” Journal of Moral Philosophy 4 (2007): 154-66, and “Normativity and Practical Judgment,” Jour-nal of Moral Philosophy 4 (2007): 393-405. 40Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 93.

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Ideal theory has been described as establishing an ideal world in the form of a mythical “Paradise Island,” and indeed Dworkin’s theory of equality of resources imagines a hypothetical resource auction between shipwreck survivors on a desert island in the “ideal ideal world of fan-tasy.”41 Unlike Cohen’s camping trip, Dworkin’s thought experiment is intended to guide action, not simply identify desirable values, by estab-lishing a framework of principles that can guide the establishment of an ideal institutional framework. But Dworkin’s ideal principles cannot guide action directly. The hypothetical resource auction for an “ideal ideal world” forms the basis for a theory of egalitarian improvement in the “ideal real world,” which involves a hypothetical insurance scheme. In turn, the insurance scheme can be used to judge performance in the “real real world,” with legislators seeking to approximate its anticipated outcomes through redistributive taxation. Dworkin’s ideal resource auction might be seen as an unobjectionable, and useful, exercise of abstraction, for it might be thought to function like the idea of a fric-tionless plane in physics: it abstracts from real-world facts, which have to be brought back in as the theory is applied, but the more closely the “real real world” resembles the “ideal ideal world,” the more closely it will approximate the auction ideal of equality of resources. However, there are reasons to question this analogy. Joseph Heath concludes that the relationship between equality and efficiency that the auction realizes “obtains only at the level of ideal theory. The thought experiment can-not be used to derive any conclusions about how actual markets work in the world or how actual resource-egalitarian allocations can be achieved.”42 It is not simply that at the level of redistributive taxation we are concerned with “second-best compromises of our ideal in the real world,” but that the general theory of the second best undermines the analogy between the auction mechanism, with its assumption of perfect competition, and a frictionless plane. The step from the ideal to the actual requires a mediating nonideal theory since the ideal prin-ciples are for an “ideal ideal world” and cannot be directly enacted un-der the structural constraints of the real world.43

41Robeyns, “Ideal Theory in Theory and Practice,” pp. 344-45; Ronald Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000). 42Joseph Heath, “Dworkin’s Auction,” Politics, Philosophy & Economics 3 (2004): 313-35, p. 331. 43Thomas Pogge’s interpretation of Rawls adopts a similar approach to which a similar point applies. For Pogge, Rawls’s theory could be used to “design a blueprint of ideal institutions that would be perfectly just,” but “[o]ur responsibility ... in no way depends on whether such a fully just scheme is practicable or realistically attainable ... much more important for now is its role in the comparative assessment of alternative feasible institutional schemes.” Justice as fairness must be “brought down to earth,” the

68 James Gledhill In contrast to Dworkin’s three-level model, interpreting Rawls as seeking to overcome the Kantian dualism of the ideal world and the real world, in order to vindicate the Kantian idea that ideal procedural principles can provide a framework for practical judgment, suggests an alternative view of the relationship between theory and practice. The point of view of the original position should not be understood in uto-pian terms as the standpoint of an “ideal ideal world.” Rawls detaches Kant’s conception of autonomy from Kant’s two-world metaphysics by applying it to the choice of principles for giving an ideal form to the basic structure of a democratic society. The original position provides an ideal standpoint for viewing the basic structure of our social world, not for choosing principles of justice for a perfect world. Indeed, Rawls’s focus on the basic structure is integral to his conception of ideal theory: A conception of justice must specify the requisite structural principles and point to the overall direction of political action. Thus ideal theory, which defines a perfectly just basic structure, is a necessary complement to nonideal theory without which the desire for change lacks an aim.44 Dworkin pursues a more “retail level” approach designed to be of more concrete practical use to legislators and judges.45 Rawls’s aspirations, on the other hand, are confined to proposing a framework for guiding the judgments of political practitioners. And while Rawls suggests this might be of assistance to judges, justice as fairness is “addressed not so much to constitutional jurists as to citizens in a constitutional regime” who seek guidance on fundamental political questions.46 The original position, then, provides a reasonable moral framework for choosing a conception of justice that in turn provides a reasonable moral framework for guiding reform of the basic structure of society. But what does it mean to realize Rawls’s principles of justice? Thomas Pogge argues that “Rawls does not merely seek to construct the ideal of a perfectly just well-ordered society and then have us use intuition and instrumental rationality for muddling through toward this ideal.”47 However, I think this is almost exactly what Rawls does, and should, intend when he describes a theory of justice as a guiding framework. It will not, though, be quite what Rawls intends if one understands Rawls’s key to this being an intermediate philosophical theory that tailors ideal principles to existing realities. Thomas Pogge, Realizing Rawls (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 12, 9, 136. 44Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 285. 45 Herlinde Pauer-Studer (ed.), “Ronald Dworkin: Law, Morality, and Equality,” in Constructions of Practical Reason: Interviews on Moral and Political Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 128-47, at p. 139. 46Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 369. 47Pogge, Realizing Rawls, p. 136.

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conception of our intuitive capacities as not restricted to the instrumen-tal pursuit of pre-defined ends but as encompassing a Kantian capacity for practical judgment. For Rawls, what is required in practice by the ideal of a perfectly just well-ordered society is ultimately “a matter of political judgment guided by theory, good sense, and plain hunch.”48 But while the “measure of departures from the ideal is left importantly to intuition,” our judgment is guided by the priority of the principle of equal basic liberties.49 I return to this point in section 5, but we may conclude that: We must not ask too much of a philosophical view. A conception of justice fulfills its social role provided that persons equally conscientious and sharing roughly the same beliefs find that, by affirming the framework of deliberation set up by it, they are nor-mally led to a sufficient convergence of judgment necessary to achieve effective and fair social cooperation.50 The Rawlsian understanding of ideal theory that I have been arguing for is one in which ideal theory is concerned with constitutive rules of social cooperation, or ideal practice rules, for the basic structure of so-ciety. The role of such rules or principles is to “construct actions-as-realizations-of-ideals rather than to identify preexisting actions that serve as means of promoting goals.”51 I have therefore contrasted two-level views of the relationship between theory and practice, where ac-tion in accordance with ideal practice rules realizes the ideal of a per-fectly just well-ordered society, with three-level views in which non-ideal theory is required to identify feasible means for promoting or ap-proximating desirable goals. The role of a conception of justice in con-structing actions-as-realizations-of-ideals is evident in the role of pub-lic reason in providing a framework for guiding the political judgments of judges, legislators, and, most importantly, citizens. The idea of pub-lic reason includes the idea of a political conception of justice for the basic structure of society. When voting, a reasonable citizen will seek to frame the reasons on the basis of which they vote for a candidate for public office, and the policies the candidate supports, within the terms of public reason. In doing so, “ideally citizens are to think of them-selves as if they were legislators,” considering whether policies and supporting reasons meet a criterion of reciprocity.52 When citizens act 48Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 246. 49Ibid., p. 216. 50Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 368. 51Tamar Schapiro, “Kantian Rigorism and Mitigating Circumstances,” Ethics 117 (2006): 32-57, p. 57. 52Rawls, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” reprinted in Political Liberalism, pp. 435-90, at p. 445. Rawls notes in this context a resemblance between the criterion of reciprocity in public reason and Kant’s principle of the original contract.

70 James Gledhill in accordance with procedural principles of public reason, principles represented through the original position, their actions are constructed as the realization of the ideal of public reason, an ideal of democratic reciprocity that characterizes a well-ordered society. 4. The Hermeneutical Model and Realistic Utopianism Williams recognizes that justice as fairness is a political conception of justice whose subject is the basic structure of society. As Rawls puts it, political values “arise in virtue of certain special features of the politi-cal relationship, as distinct from other relationships.”53 But such politi-cal values remain a subset of moral values, and Williams therefore maintains his view that Rawls takes the moral to be prior to the politi-cal and sees a political conception of justice as the application of a moral conception to a particular subject matter. If Rawls may see the role of a conception of justice as being to provide a moral framework for the basic structure that can guide practical judgment, it has not yet been shown that this framework takes account of the circumstances of politics and is able to provide a framework for political judgment. In order to address this question, it is necessary to consider the polit-ical realism that Williams contrasts with Rawls’s supposed political moralism. In Williams’s succinct formulation, liberalism should be re-garded as the conjunction of the requirements of legitimacy (LEG) and the circumstances of modernity: LEG + Modernity = Liberalism. In order to be legitimate, a society must provide an acceptable solution to a Basic Legitimation Demand. It must answer in a way that is accepta-ble to “us” the “first” political question posed most clearly by Hobbes, concerned with the “securing of order, protection, safety, trust, and the conditions of cooperation.” While this may be a moral idea, it is a mo-rality that is not prior to politics but rather “inherent in there being such a thing as politics.”54 An acceptable solution to the Basic Legitimation Demand, such as to render a state legitimate, will be a structure of au-thority that “makes sense” to those it claims to govern as an authorita-tive structure. The idea of what makes sense is for Williams a quasi-technical category: a category of historical understanding, or a herme-neutical category. What we take to be a justification of political au-thority for our own practices will be grounded in reasons internal to those practices and Williams takes this to vitiate political moralism’s attempt to “apply” external moral principles to politics. The distance between the apparently contrasting methodological 53Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 182. 54Williams, “Realism and Moralism in Political Theory,” pp. 3, 5.

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approaches of Rawls and Williams would be closed if Rawls’s political conception of justice for the basic structure of society could be seen as also relying upon just such a hermeneutical justification. A hermeneuti-cal political theory understands its relationship to practice in a different way to a political theory that follows the structure of natural science: while natural science theory also transforms practice, the practice it transforms is not what the theory is about. It is in this sense external to the theory. We think of it as an “application” of the theory. But in politics, the practice is the object of theory. Theory in this domain transforms its own object.55 On such a hermeneutical view, practices of social cooperation are consti-tuted by citizens’ normative self-understandings. The impetus towards political philosophy arises from a sense of the inadequacy of these con-stitutive self-understandings, and in turn a political theory is validated by its capacity to provide more adequate guidance. Rawls can be seen as following just such a model. Rather than withdrawing from society and the world to construct principles for an ideal world that then have to be brought down to earth, political philosophy’s “work of abstraction is set in motion by deep political conflicts.”56 Political philosophy is concerned with ideal social practice rules that through guiding practitioners’ politi-cal judgments can reconstruct existing social practices.57 A clearer understanding of how Rawls follows such a hermeneutical model can be gained by considering the place of ideal theory within the realistically utopian role Rawls allots to political philosophy. That ideal theory should be understood in relation to realistic utopianism is sug-gested by Rawls when he says that discussion of the nature and content of principles of justice for the basic structure of a well-ordered society is referred to in justice as fairness as ideal, or strict compliance, theory. Strict com-pliance means that (nearly) everyone strictly complies with, and so abides by, the prin-ciples of justice. We ask in effect what a perfectly just, or nearly just, constitutional regime might be like, and whether it may come about and be made stable under the circumstances of justice ... and so under realistic, though reasonably favorable, condi-tions. In this way, justice as fairness is realistically utopian: it probes the limits of the realistically practicable, that is, how far in our world (given its laws and tendencies) a democratic regime can attain complete realization of its appropriate political values—democratic perfection, if you like.58 55Charles Taylor, “Political Theory and Practice,” in Christopher Lloyd (ed.), So-cial Theory and Political Practice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), p. 74. 56Rawls, Political Liberalism, pp. 44-45. 57This idea of hermeneutical circularity is implicit in Frank Michelman’s analysis in “On Regulating Practices with Theories Drawn from Them: A Case of Justice as Fairness,” in Ian Shapiro and Judith Wagner DeCew (eds.), Theory and Practice (NOMOS XXXVII) (New York: New York University Press, 1995), chap. 11. 58Rawls, Justice as Fairness, p. 13. Justice as Fairness: A Restatement derives from lectures given in the 1980s, suggesting a clear continuity between Rawls’s con-

72 James Gledhill This important passage indicates ideal theory’s concern with ideal social practice rules in the idea that the strict compliance with which Rawls is concerned is compliance with the principles of justice as fairness that would achieve a realizable and stable well-ordered society. Ideal theory is for our world, not a perfect world, and its aspiration for democratic perfection involves seeking to completely realize the political values ap-propriate to social cooperation in a constitutional democratic regime. There are, though, three further elements here that require discussion. First, what is realistic about a realistically utopian conception of justice? Second, in what sense are realistic conditions also reasonably favorable conditions, conditions that allow a realistically utopian conception of justice to probe, rather than take as positivistically given, the limits of the realistically practicable? And third, why should we be concerned with whether a perfectly just well-ordered society can achieve a stable prac-tice of social cooperation? A realistically utopian conception of justice is realistic because it excludes no general facts about the circumstances of justice, or what Rawls calls more generally the circumstances of the social world. These include circumstances like the fact of reasonable pluralism that reflect the “historical conditions under which modern democratic socie-ties exist.”59 Principles of justice are constructed against the back-ground of what is feasible given the circumstances of the social world. Since the role of principles of justice is to reconstruct the constitutive understandings of our social practices, justice as fairness draws upon the fundamental constitutive ideas implicit in our democratic social practices, most fundamentally the central organizing idea of society as a fair system of social cooperation, which is cashed out with reference to the idea of citizens as free and equal persons and the idea of a well-ordered society. In what sense, though, are realistic conditions also reasonably fa-vorable? It is here that Rawls departs from the assumption that led Sidgwick to reject “doubly ideal” theory for a perfect society. Sidgwick argues that moral theory must “take the moral habits, impulses, and tastes of men as a material given us to work upon no less than the rest of their nature.” Given that change in these factors is both unlikely and unpredictable, if we want practical guidance for real politics it will, Sidgwick argues, be little use to set about “constructing an ideal mo-rality for men conceived to be in other respects as experience shows them to be, but with their actual morality abstracted.”60 Rawls’s realis- ception of ideal theory in A Theory of Justice and his later concern with realistic utopi-anism. 59Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. xxi; Rawls, Justice as Fairness, p. 84. 60Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, pp. 468-69.

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tic utopianism, by contrast, follows Rousseau’s maxim of “taking men as they are and laws as they might be.” It is important here that taking persons’ moral and psychological natures as they are involves under-standing human potentiality, or how persons’ natures might be within a framework of political and social institutions organized as they should, or ought, to be.61 As Rawls puts it, “the limits of the possible are not giv-en by the actual, for we can to a greater or lesser extent change political and social institutions and much else.”62 Rawls’s ideal conception of citi-zenship for a constitutional democratic regime, given by public reason, presents how things might be taking people as a just and well-ordered society would encourage them to be, providing a realistically utopian ideal to guide our political judgment under existing circumstances.63 Williams’s idea that tenable justifications of political authority must “make sense” on the basis of reasons that are internal to existing political practices parallels his neo-Humean commitment to motivational internal-ism in moral philosophy.64 But in objecting to Williams’s motivational internalism, Rawls asks: “How is one to fix limits on what people might be moved by in thought and deliberation and hence may act from?”65 In other words, how can we know in advance that citizens cannot and will not be moved by the conception-dependent desire to act in accordance with the procedural principles that could be agreed to in an original po-sition of freedom and equality? If conception-dependent desires are part of the public political culture, and are learned by persons from this cul-ture, thereby becoming part of their subjective motivational sets, then the supposed bright line between “Humean” internal reasons and “Kan-tian” external reasons becomes blurred. If philosophy for Rawls begins in mediis rebus, seeking to reform political practices on the basis of moral ideas implicit in those practices, then in what sense is the moral prior to the political, or the political prior to the moral?66 The problem is rather one of starting from where we are and asking what it would mean for our societies to more perfectly realize the publicly professed ideals upon which the legitimacy of political authority depends. Both Williams and Geuss emphasize the need for political philoso-phy to take up reflexively the question of its own relation to social real-ity. However, before turning to this issue we should consider the reflex- 61Rawls, The Law of Peoples, p. 7. 62Ibid., p. 12; Rawls, Justice as Fairness, p. 5. 63Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 213. 64Bernard Williams, “Internal and External Reasons,” in Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), chap. 8. 65Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 85. 66Burton Dreben, “On Rawls and Political Liberalism,” in Samuel Freeman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Rawls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), chap. 8, pp. 322-23.

74 James Gledhill ivity built into the practices that political philosophy takes as its object. In one sense this means nothing more than that citizens in liberal dem-ocratic societies take an interest in reflecting upon the terms of their political relationship. More fundamentally, though, it is essential to the very idea of modernity in which “social practices are constantly ex-amined and reformed in the light of incoming information about those very practices, thus constitutively altering their character.”67 Here it is Williams and Geuss who can be faulted for a lack of hermeneutical his-torical thinking. Putting it in Rawls’s terms, we could say that we only have access to the concept of Williams’s basic legitimation demand through a particular conception of that concept. For citizens of liberal democratic societies, the fusion of the basic legitimation demand and modernity is not optional. Neither is it fixed, but must be continually reconstituted. Indeed, we may suppose that in a democratic society it “makes sense” to citizens that what “makes sense” will change: Wil-liams himself accepts that it is part of our social practices to criticize, and therefore go beyond, our existing social practices.68 There is there-fore no moralistic veneer to be stripped away to reveal the nature of “real politics,” but rather an original modern problem of securing stable social cooperation that has become for us a normative problem of con-tinually re-elaborating the normative conceptions that have become constitutive of the democratic self-understandings of our societies. It might indeed be necessary to keep running to even stand still. Rawls’s view that a conception of justice may reasonably assume that citizens in modern democratic societies are prepared to revise their political commitments upon reflection, and in accordance with moral conceptions, is not implausible. But on the hermeneutical model, such a conception must still consider reflexively its capacity to guide citizens’ political judgments and the authority it claims in aspiring to do so. Rawls’s concern with the problem of stability in A Theory of Justice responds to the demand that a theory should present a description of an ideally just state of affairs, a conception of a well-ordered society such that the aspiration to realize this state of affairs, and to main-tain it in being, answers to our good and is continuous with our natural sentiments.69 Including the fact of reasonable pluralism among the feasibility con-straints of the circumstances of justice threatens the tenability of this stability argument. This prompts Rawls’s clarification that the norma-tive authority claimed by justice as fairness is that of a political concep- 67Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford Univer-sity Press, 1990), p. 38. 68Williams, “In the Beginning was the Deed,” pp. 24-25. 69Rawls, A Theory of Justice, pp. 417-18.

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tion of justice rather than a comprehensive doctrine. One aim of Politi-cal Liberalism is to show that reasonable pluralism is not a nonideal condition and that including it among the feasibility constraints of the circumstances of justice does not affect the possibility, or realizability, of a perfectly just well-ordered society. Indeed, reasonable comprehen-sive doctrines provide the basis on which reasonable persons can en-dorse a reasonable political conception of justice, as we see when we reflect on the fact that a reasonable pluralism of such doctrines is itself encouraged by such a conception.70 Fundamentally, then, where Rawls differs from Williams is not in his rejection of a hermeneutical model of the relationship between morality and politics; rather, it is in positing a “double hermeneutic” in which political philosophy reflexively takes as its object, and seeks to reconstruct, social practices that are them-selves reflexive and constantly being reconstructed.71 5. Nonideal Theory or Political Judgment? Political realism presents itself as the application of a requisite hard-headedness in the face of the philosophical temptation to build ideal castles in the air. But as Susan Neiman has argued, the demand to “get real” and decrease one’s moral expectations of politics cannot pretend to philosophical neutrality. There are different ways to view “reality,” and realism represents one such worldview, which in order to legiti-mate itself has to screen out the reality of the fact that persons are often moved to act in accordance with ideals.72 I will not pursue any further the deeper questions of epistemological realism versus idealism that this raises, nor the affinities between the latter and more naturalistic philosophical views according to which empirical content is organized by conceptual schemes. My aim in this final section is limited to ana-lyzing what Rawls says about problems of nonideal theory in order to call into question the view that Rawls’s distinction between ideal and nonideal theory supports a distinction between ideal theory for an ideal world and nonideal theory for our actual, real, nonideal world. 70For the distinction between feasibility and realizability, see James Bohman, “Critical Theory,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2010 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2010/entries/critical-theory/. 71On the idea of a double hermeneutic, see Anthony Giddens, New Rules of Socio-logical Method, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), and The Constitution of Soci-ety (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984). 72Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). There are clear parallels between Neiman’s Kantian idea of grown-up idealists and Rawls’s realistic utopianism. On the motivations behind Rawls’s realistic utopianism, see Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 310-14.

76 James Gledhill

Ideal theory (Strict compliance theory)

First part Second part

TJ

Principles of justice chosen in the original position

Stability (on the basis of a comprehensive doctrine)

PL

A political conception of justice represented through the original position

Stability (overlapping consensus of reasonable comprehensive doctrines)

LP

The Law of Peoples for a Society of Liberal Peoples

Realization through extension to decent hierarchical peoples

Nonideal theory

Partial compliance Unfavorable conditions

Tolerable Intolerable Changeable Permanent

TJ

1. Civil disobedience 2. Conscientious refusal

1. Theory of punishment 2. Compensatory justice 3. Weighing of institu- tional injustices 4. Doctrine of just war 5. Curbing liberties of in- tolerant and rival sects

Historical limitations

Natural limitations and historical contin-gencies, e.g. regula-tion of liberties for public order and limitation of scope of majority rule

PL

Reasonable comprehensive doctrines within the wide view of public political culture

Unreasonable doctrines

Reasonable comprehen-sive doctrines under nonideal conditions, e.g. slavery in antebellum South and 1960s civil rights movement

Natural limitations and historical contin-gencies

LP

Toleration of decent non-liberal peoples

Just war against outlaw states

Duty of assistance to burdened societies

Natural limitations and historical contin- gencies

Table 1. Rawls’s distinction between ideal and nonideal theory

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In the previous section we saw that Rawls understands ideal theory to have two parts: first, the construction of a conception of justice and second, reflection on its motivational stability and its realizability.73 For there to be a reasonable duty for practitioners to conform their judgments to a conception of justice, such a conception must be realistically utopian or realizable. An analogous two-part structure, concerned first with con-struction and then realizability, is evident in the two parts of ideal theory in The Law of Peoples. The specific details of these two parts of ideal theory in Rawls’s three major works are summarized in the upper part of Table 1. Rawls therefore implicitly rejects Sidgwick’s claim that after inquiring into the morality of an ideal society we need a new, mediating nonideal theory to make the transition from the ideal to the actual. But if this is the case, how are we to understand Rawls’s references to nonideal theory? It is to this puzzle that I now turn. The account of ideal theory that I have given follows A. John Sim-mons in viewing Rawls’s conception of ideal theory from the perspec-tive of the perennial problem of the relationship between philosophical theory and political practice, and as tasked with providing an integrated structural end that we can strive to realize.74 But I depart from Sim-mons in my understanding of nonideal theory. For Simmons, “ideal theory dictates the objective, nonideal theory dictates the route to that objective (starting from whatever imperfectly just conditions a society happens to occupy).”75 On this view, nonideal theory provides the tran-sitional principles of justice for individuals that are required to move towards a goal, drawing on both philosophical and social scientific judgments.76 But as Rawls defines it, ideal theory “develops the con-ception of a perfectly just basic structure and the corresponding duties and obligations of persons under the fixed constraints of human life.”77 Nonideal theory then takes up problems of partial compliance and un-favorable conditions. The idea of transitional principles of justice is vulnerable to the problem of infinite regress to which Kant’s discussion 73As I interpret it, Rawls does not offer an ideal theory of justice; rather, principles of justice are constructed in ideal theory. For the contrary view, see Michael Phillips, “Re-flections on the Transition from Ideal to Non-Ideal Theory,” Noûs 19 (1985): 551-70, esp. p. 568 n.4. 74A. John Simmons, “Ideal and Nonideal Theory,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 38 (2010): 5-36. 75Ibid., p. 12. 76Simmons understands Rawls’s idea of local justice as a subpart of principles for individuals. However, Rawls’s reference to Jon Elster’s work in this context suggests a view according to which social science does not contribute to working out how the goals of ideal theory can be pursued, but rather offers explanatory theories set within a normative framework. See Rawls, Justice as Fairness, p. 11; Jon Elster, Local Justice (New York: Russell Sage, 1992), esp. pp. 14-16. 77Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 216 (emphasis added).

78 James Gledhill of theory and practice draws attention: where the anticipated, and to that extent ideal, conditions envisaged by the nonideal transitional theory do not hold, we will need a nonideal nonideal transitional theory to get us to the point where the nonideal transitional theory can be ap-plied, and so on. As Kant argues, for a theory with practical intent to actually be put into practice it must be practiced, and this requires judgment on the part of practitioners. Rawls’s discussions of nonideal theory, summarized in the remainder of Table 1, support this interpretation. In section 2, I outlined Rawls’s view of how existing conditions are favorable to the priority of liberty, allowing a practice of well-ordered social cooperation supported by citizens’ sense of justice. Historical limitations that applied to liberal societies in the past or apply to nonliberal societies today and that ne-cessitate unequal liberty must be clearly distinguished from natural limitations, such as the regulation of liberty for public order, that ne-cessitate less extensive liberty. Such natural limitations are one of the problems with which nonideal theory is concerned, and they obtain in even the most favorable historical conditions.78 The other concern of nonideal theory is partial compliance. Here a distinction needs to be drawn between tolerable, because potentially justifiable, noncom-pliance and intolerable, or unjustifiable, noncompliance. The examples of noncompliance that Rawls discusses in most detail, civil disobe-dience and conscientious refusal, need to be understood in relation to the idea that the stability of social cooperation is not fixed but devel-opmental. A conception of justice must be able to guide judgments about how political practices should change. Noncompliance may suc-ceed in showing that laws do not comply with principles of justice, meaning that a “general disposition to engage in justified civil disobe-dience introduces stability into a well-ordered society, or one that is nearly just.”79 The wide view of public political culture in political libe-ralism, which allows the introduction of comprehensive doctrines into public reason provided that in due course political reasons can be intro-duced, responds to an equivalent problem. It is an expansion of the in-clusive view of public reason under which the introduction of compre-hensive doctrines by the abolitionists and the civil rights movement was seen by Rawls as justified as a response to the unfavorable non-ideal conditions of slavery and institutionalized discrimination. Like civil disobedience, the inclusive view “may strengthen the forces work-ing for stability.”80 A similar developmental rationale can be seen as implicit in Rawls’s argument in The Law of Peoples for the toleration 78Ibid., p. 215. 79Ibid., p. 336. 80Rawls, Justice as Fairness, p. 90.

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of decent nonliberal peoples. There remain questions about whether ideal theory can provide guidance for addressing cases of intolerable noncompliance and perma-nent natural limitations. The relationship that Rawls envisages here be-tween political philosophers and political practitioners comes out par-ticularly clearly in The Law of Peoples. The student of philosophy looks to the real interests of a well-ordered society, and, on this basis, first sets out a conception of justice and second considers its realizabili-ty. Turning to nonideal theory, the student of philosophy must say enough to show that the principles of ideal theory provide guidelines that can and should inform addressing problems of nonideal theory. But, Rawls argues, citing Kant’s Critique of Judgment, it is the task of the statesman, not the student of philosophy, to “discern these condi-tions and interests in practice” and to convince public opinion of the importance of following the nonideal theory duties of just war and as-sistance to burdened societies.81 Just war is also referred to as one of the problems of partial com-pliance theory in A Theory of Justice, although Rawls spends most time discussing the theory of punishment and religious intolerance. When it comes to the theory of punishment, on the one hand, given the normal conditions of human life, “ideal theory requires an account of penal sanctions as a stabilizing device.”82 But ideal theory seeks only to pro-vide guidelines for how the partial compliance theory problem of pun-ishment is to be addressed in practice. It is limited to consideration of principles that justify sanctions according to the principle of liberty and its priority. In like manner, with respect to restricting liberty when faced, for example, with rival religious sects, all arguments must pro-ceed from the ideal theory assumption of the priority of liberty, and to this degree the priority of liberty carries over to partial compliance theory.83 The priority of liberty also guides the regulation of liberties for public order and limitation of the scope of majority rule, understood as natural limitations that require not unequal but less extensive liberty. In Kantian terms, this is not to compromise the ideal of liberty in the face of real-world facts; rather, “liberty can be restricted only for the

81Rawls, The Law of Peoples, p. 97. 82Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 212 (emphasis added). This renders problematic Jon Mandle’s interpretation of the ideal/nonideal theory distinction as a distinction between distributive and retributive justice (Mandle, “Justice, Desert, and Ideal The-ory,” Social Theory and Practice 23 (1997): 399-425). It also makes clear that Rawls does not conceive of a perfect society in the terms in which Sidgwick dismisses the idea as involving “no such thing as punishment” (Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, p. 470). 83Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 213.

80 James Gledhill sake of liberty itself.”84 It is of course true, as Rawls says, that nonideal theory addresses the pressing and urgent problems we are faced with in everyday life.85 But on Rawls’s conception of political philosophy, that is where such prob-lems ought to be tackled: in everyday life. In consigning skeptical con-cerns about partial compliance to the domain of nonideal theory, Rawls asks his readers to suspend skepticism, evinced by Sidgwick, about the motivational potential of an ideal of social relations for a perfect socie-ty, splitting his inquiry into ideal theory and nonideal theory. However, when we reach the problems of nonideal theory we find that ideal prin-ciples remain relevant: what is required is political judgment in order to enact ideal principles in existing circumstances. Rawls has relocated problems of nonideal theory from the domain of a mediating philosoph-ical theory to the domain of the political judgment of political practi-tioners. As Rawls concludes, “while the principles of justice belong to the theory of an ideal state of affairs, they are generally relevant.”86 Indeed, on a Kantian conception, it is precisely in being abstract that political philosophy is able to guide practice. If we turn to political phi-losophy when the constitutive understandings of our political practices have become uncertain, then the turn towards abstraction is not a theo-retical escape form “real politics,” but a practical search for a more adequate framework for guiding political judgment.87 Conclusion Radically different interpretations of the significance of Rawls’s work can be given depending upon whether one emphasizes Rawls’s substan-tive principles of justice or the realistically utopian approach to politi-cal philosophy within which these principles are articulated. The for-mer interpretation might lead one to think that Rawls sought to pre-scribe a “timeless snapshot of an ideal world.”88 By contrast, I have emphasized the role of a realistically utopian political philosophy in orientating our political practice, the view that, in Samuel Freeman’s words, it is

84Ibid., p. 214. 85Ibid., p. 8. 86Ibid., p. 216. 87See, further, Carlos Thiebaut, “Rereading Rawls in Arendtian Light: Reflective Judgment and Historical Experience,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 34 (2008): 137-55. 88Mark Jensen, “The Limits of Practical Possibility,” The Journal of Political Phi-losophy 17 (2009): 168-84, p. 184.

Rawls and Realism 81

not so much the role of moral and political philosophy to tell us how to live our lives or arrange social and political institutions ... Rather its role is to provide new ways to understand longstanding moral and political traditions and principles, and new ways to argue for (or against) and justify these positions in terms that are amenable to contem-porary moral and political consciousness.89 What this means, however, is that being faithful to the methodological spirit of Rawls’s approach will require moving beyond the specific terms of Rawls’s theory. In this respect, Williams makes a fundamental criticism when he argues that even a theory that is maximally reflexive about its relationship to practice must acknowledge that it will not be able to render its relation to practice fully transparent. A theory “will seem to make sense, and will to some degree reorganize political thought and action, only by virtue of the historical situation in which it is presented, and its relation to that historical situation cannot fully be theorized or captured in reflection.”90 This raises questions that extend beyond a critique of political moralism to embrace the complex but fundamental issue of the relationship between philosophy and history. One implication of this criticism for the present discussion is that re-flection on the continuing capacity of Rawls’s theory to serve a guiding role must extend not only to considering the adequacy of Rawls’s un-derstanding of citizens’ conception-dependent desire to achieve an ideal form of social cooperation, but to Rawls’s understanding of the role of substantive philosophical conceptions in contributing to the fund of political ideals in the public political culture. However, follow-ing Kant’s fundamental lesson about the relationship between theory and practice, we should not conclude that justice as fairness works in theory but doesn’t work in practice, and that we need nonideal theory to bridge the gap, but that we need more, but better, ideal theory.91 The disagreement between realists on the one hand and realistic

89Samuel Freeman, Rawls (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 459. 90Williams, “In the Beginning was the Deed,” p. 25. 91Interestingly, Williams endorses Jürgen Habermas’s aspiration to locate political theory “between facts and norms.” See “Realism and Moralism in Political Theory,” pp. 9-10. In recent writings, Habermas has employed Rawls’s terminology of realistic utopianism and noted that his reconstructive approach could be said to “steer a course between ‘ideal’ and ‘nonideal’ theory,” where this is seen as a distinction between moralism and realism. See Jürgen Habermas, “The Concept of Human Dignity and the Realistic Utopia of Human Rights,” Metaphilosophy 41 (2010): 464-80, and “Reply to My Critics,” in James Gordon Finlayson and Fabian Freyenhagen (eds.), Habermas and Rawls: Disputing the Political (New York: Routledge, 2011), chap. 12, p. 291. I contrast the relationship between theory and practice in Rawls’s constructivism and Habermas’s method of rational reconstruction in James Gledhill, “Procedure in Sub-stance and Substance in Procedure: Reframing the Rawls-Habermas Debate,” also in Finlayson and Freyenhagen (eds.), Habermas and Rawls: Disputing the Political, chap. 7.

82 James Gledhill utopians on the other concerns not so much a profound methodological dispute between those who see political philosophy as applied moral philosophy and those who reject this model, but a substantive dispute about the nature of politics and the political relationship. Williams is at one with Rawls in arguing that we should give up the aspiration to reorder politics through the application of a comprehensive moral doc-trine. But if expecting too much of politics is likely to lead to cynicism and disappointment, there is just as much danger that expecting too lit-tle will do likewise. Here realistic utopianism takes forward Kant’s idea of the role of critical philosophy, seeking to curb the pretensions of theoretical reason—such as the realist claim that we need to “get real” about what we can expect from politics—in order to argue for the ne-cessity of using our practical reason, whose limits are not subject to empirical determination.92 The positive role of philosophy lies not so much in prescribing a substantive ideal of what ought to be, but in di-recting our attention towards the possibility of more fully realizing ideals that inform existing practices. The lesson to be drawn from Rawls’s conception of ideal theory for an ideal society is not that we live in a nonideal, imperfect world, but that what separates us from rea-lizing a more perfect society is forging the collective practical political will to do so.93

James Gledhill Department of Government

London School of Economics j.s.gledhill@lse.ac.uk

92Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (Basing-stoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 17-37 (Bvii-xliv). 93My thanks to Katrin Flikschuh and Elizabeth Frazer for both their comments and their encouragement over the years. Thanks also to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments, and to Edward Hall and Pietro Maffettone for helpful discussion. A precursor to this paper was presented at graduate conferences at the University of Manchester and the University of Pavia, and at the Manchester Workshops in Political Theory. I am grateful to the participants for comments and discussion, particularly Dimitris Efthimiou, Robert Jubb, and Federico Zuolo.