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The Tyranny of the Ideal: Justice in a Diverse Society

af Gerald Gaus

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332727,058 (4.5)Ingen
In his provocative new book, The Tyranny of the Ideal, Gerald Gaus lays out a vision for how we should theorize about justice in a diverse society. Gaus shows how free and equal people, faced with intractable struggles and irreconcilable conflicts, might share a common moral life shaped by a just framework. He argues that if we are to take diversity seriously and if moral inquiry is sincere about shaping the world, then the pursuit of idealized and perfect theories of justice--essentially, the entire production of theories of justice that has dominated political philosophy for the past forty years--needs to change. Drawing on recent work in social science and philosophy, Gaus points to an important paradox: only those in a heterogeneous society--with its various religious, moral, and political perspectives--have a reasonable hope of understanding what an ideally just society would be like. However, due to its very nature, this world could never be collectively devoted to any single ideal. Gaus defends the moral constitution of this pluralistic, open society, where the very clash and disagreement of ideals spurs all to better understand what their personal ideals of justice happen to be. Presenting an original framework for how we should think about morality, The Tyranny of the Ideal rigorously analyzes a theory of ideal justice more suitable for contemporary times.… (mere)
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This book belabors some points and zooms by others, but I give it 5/5 for being delightfully thought provoking. Gaus explores two big ideas: whether or not we should orient our quest for greater justice in terms of realizing an ideal (rather than always choosing a local improvement in justice) and how we can build a shared moral contract in a world that is diverse. To some degree, these two ideas are separable. Even if one believes that orienting the quest for justice toward an ideal is the best way to improve the world, one might accept that, pragmatically, developing a shared moral contract that a diverse set of perspectives can accept is the best way to proceed. Thus, the second idea, on how to think about justice in a diverse world, is strongest when people deeply believe that they have something to learn from perspectives other than their own rather than believing their own ideals is near perfect.

A long-but-short summary of the argument follows.

An ideal theory orients the quest for justice by prioritizing moves toward the ideal state even if they may decrease overall justice in the short term. This requires two things: that we can evaluate the states of the world with respect to their justice and that we can tell whether we are moving closer to or further from the world that represents the ideal. Note that both of these are necessary. If moving toward the ideal was always identical to increasing justice, then we could just always make the move to increase justice. (These conditions are formalized via the idea of a perspective. A perspective consists of evaluative standards by which words are compared, features of the world which describe the justice relevant properties, a mapping function which applies the evaluative standards, a similarity ordering which compares worlds relative to their features, and a distance metric which determines how far any two words are from each other.)

Ideal theory is useful when the justice landscape is moderately rugged. If it is too rugged, then moving toward the ideal is unlikely to move toward justice since only meeting the ideal exactly will realize high justice. If it is too smooth, the ideal is unnecessary because choosing to move in the local direction of greater justice will also move in the direction of the ideal. Moderately rugged landscapes are characterized by neighborhoods: areas where small changes in world features are correlated with small changes in justice. This high correlation between world features and justice means that we can be more confident in predictions we make about worlds within our neighborhood than worlds outside of our neighborhood. Within our neighborhood, we can be relatively certain about how changes to the world increase or decrease overall justice. Moving outside our neighborhood -- toward the ideal -- has the potential for even greater justice, but because we are making predictions about worlds outside our neighborhood, our certainty about those predictions decreases.

One way to confront this problem is to increase the set of worlds in our neighborhood. This can be accomplished by sharing the insights gleaned by diverse perspectives. Diversity improves outcomes. Under certain conditions, diversity can guarantee ideal outcomes when no single perspective could do the same. (This works, essentially, by a baton passing mechanism. When one perspective gets stuck at a local maxima, it conceptually passes the baton to another perspective for which the current world is not a local maxima.) However, in practice, different perspectives will have a hard time learning from each other. They will disagree not only on how to get from the current world to the ideal. They will also agree on what the ideal even is. This is because the different elements of a perspective -- how to evaluate justice, similarity of worlds, what features are justice relevant, etc., are themselves interconnected.

Getting to that point -- that the only way to really reach the ideal in the face of our inability to reliably predict the justice of worlds outside our neighborhood is to utilize diversity but that diverse perspectives will see the world in fundamentally different ways -- was the culmination of the first three sections of the book. The rest of the book discusses one way to deal with this tension.

The Open Society drops the constraint that perspectives must agree on the evaluation of justice or even on what world features are relevant to justice. Different communities can make up their own mind as to what is ideal and who they will learn from. In a world of diverse perspectives, is it possible to endorse a shared public moral constitution? Only if the participating perspectives give up on optimizing the world to best match their own conception of justice. People need to be willing to hold themselves and others to a set of rules which they do not deem optimal. This does not mean, however, that there is one normalized perspective on justice to which everyone must conform, even if they do not fully agree with it. Rather, what is important is that the public moral constitution has to be endorsable in the sense that all perspectives participating in the constitution need to consider it better than having no shared ruled at all.

Instead, progress is made in the Open Society by identifying the set of socially eligible rules. These are the rules that every participating perspective agrees are better than having no rule at all. (Note that "having no rule at all" is different than "doing nothing". This is critical but will also be key to my criticism.) Any rule from the socially eligible set is one that members of that society should be willing to endorse even if some (or all) of them think it is suboptimal. There is still a significant coordination problem here: all perspectives are incentivized to choose some rule from the eligible set but they generally would prefer different rules.

There is, however, one fundamental element of normalization required in the Open Society. All perspectives that participate in the shared moral constitution must be willing to give up the optimizing stance. They must be willing to say that if the shared moral constitution endorses some rule that they consider better than no rule at all, then they will abide by that rule. (Optimizing perspectives can exist in this society in so far as they can follow laws that they disagree with, but they do not participate in the creation of the constitution and they are often a source of tension.)

An Open Society must be stable; a stable set of rules is valuable because it reduces uncertainty which reduces the cost of coordination. However, it must also be open to change as new and changing perspectives participate in the generation of the shared moral contract. This semi-stability is the heart of the engine for moral change over time.

The upshot of this is that "The well-ordered society is a dangerous illusion. The very aim that the ideal theorist cherished, to know justice and just social states as well as possible, requires an open, diverse society, in which innumerable perspectives simultaneously cooperate and compete, share and conflict. In this society there will be a crisscrossing network of communities exploring and refining moral ideals and gaining insights into their own ideals by their interactions with others."

There is value in having a common moral framework; it allows us to have more predictable, lower friction interactions with others in society (whether they agree with us or not). However, instead of conceiving of the public moral framework as the reflection of a particular ideal (e.g., secular justice), we should think of it as a working agreement between many perspectives each with their own ideal. This is both more effective and less satisfying. More effective because it allows many different people to live together and, often, even learn from each other. But less satisfying because every perspective sees society as deviating from their (obvious, self-evident) ideal.

The negotiated shared moral constitution can, if it truly takes all perspectives willing to participate into account, also be a way to ensure that marginalized perspectives are not dominated by those perspectives with the most power. "If we look back on the incredible moral changes in the past century, we have seen the steady elimination of rules that marginalized perspectives never endorsed, but to which they were subjected by power—and very often the power of a dominant normalized perspective, insisting that it was the sole arbiter of justice."

In a world where diversity is inescapable, an understanding of how to build a shared moral constitution would be valuable even if one did believe that one's own ideal represented a true perspective on justice. However, the arguments in this book point to a broader change in perspective: justice is not some thing that is out there, for us to discover. It is not some ideal that, sadly, we humans are incapable of living up to. Rather, justice is how we live well together. If a standard of justice is one that real humans are unable to live up to, it is the standard that is wrong, not the humans. "Our ideals of justice are ideals about how our rather unusual species can live in ways that are good or beneficial to all".

That, in long, is a summary of the central argument. The argument against the ideal was not hard to convince me of. It did, however, crystalize many of the intuitions I had about why relentlessly pursuing one's ideal without listening to others is problematic. The description of how the Open Society can address the challenges of diverse perspectives was fascinating and largely new to me.

It was, however, not quite convincing. One criticism of this approach is that it only takes one perspective thinking that no rule is better than any rule to reduce the size of the socially eligible set to zero. On a case-by-case basis this is acceptable -- not all problems need be solved by a rule. However, if a perspective nominally gives up an optimizing stance but takes as a key element of their perspective that no rule is (almost) always better than nothing, then the Open Society will not be able to have a shared moral contract. This is not a theoretical concern; many Libertarians in the US do believe that no rule is generally better than any rule.

Another concern goes back to the critical difference between having no rule vs doing nothing. In the world as it exists, we have rules. These existing rules sometimes reflect an element of today's socially eligible set. Sometimes they reflect something that was once an element of that set but no longer is. Often, however, these rules reflect the forcing of one perspective on others. Those who have achieved the instantiation of rules that reflect their ideal will not be incentivized to rescind those rules in favor of something from the socially eligible set. Technically, this is doing nothing rather than having no rule, but the idea of utilizing precedent makes the distinction between the two more blurry.

Neither of this criticisms makes me feel that the overall model is less useful. The Open Society certainly seems like a better place to start from than that of a broad normalized perspective. However, it is itself an ideal and moving toward the realization of it would teach us many things.

I suspect one of those things would be the importance of just decision procedures. The argument in the book discusses that having a socially eligible set does not solve the coordination problem of actually choosing a rule to endorse. The lack of an obvious way to choose a rule is, in the view of the author, an advantage since it provides an engine of moral change as different perspectives work over time to have their preferred option be the one endorsed. This is an advantage. However, just because there is no one best decision procedure, it does not follow that the decision procedure does not matter at all. (Note: Gaus doesn't say it is irrelevant. He just does not address what makes a good decision procedures.) Having settled on the idea that choosing from a set of socially eligible rules will yield the strongest social contract, there is another necessary step: we need to make sure that the choice is made in such a way that people continue to endorse the process of the Open Society itself. For example, a bad way of choosing from the socially eligible set would be "which ever of the socially eligible options group X prefers." While any element of the socially eligible set is technically better than nothing, systematic bias in that choice will make the system overall seem unfair over time.

Overall though, this was a good read and worthy of the time I spent thinking about it. It also generated at least a half dozen books to add to my reading list. ( )
  eri_kars | Jul 10, 2022 |
The alternative view to us not being up to justice is that justice is up to us. Justice is the way our species has found to live well together, to prosper, and to discover. When one thinks one has hit upon a standard of justice, and finds again and again that attempts to construct "rules of regulation" to implement it have repeatedly led to disaster, the proper response is not to shake one's head sadly that the children are not yet up to JUSTICE. Rather, the embarrassing fact for the philosopher is he is the one who has erred. He got justice wrong. Only a philosopher or a theologian would think it obvious that, if their ideals lead to ruin, the flaw is not theirs, but in the creatures for whom the ideals were set.

Gaus has laid out a compelling case against the pursuit of an ideal well-ordered society in which everyone is on board with the same principles of justice. Instead, he favors an Open Society in which there will be permanent, yet enriching, disagreement. Inevitable normative ambiguity between moral communities will ensure better choices for the rules governing society. Overall, Gaus's book is thought provoking and well put together, but it leaves one wondering how John Rawls might have responded if he were still alive. ( )
  drbrand | Jun 8, 2020 |
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In his provocative new book, The Tyranny of the Ideal, Gerald Gaus lays out a vision for how we should theorize about justice in a diverse society. Gaus shows how free and equal people, faced with intractable struggles and irreconcilable conflicts, might share a common moral life shaped by a just framework. He argues that if we are to take diversity seriously and if moral inquiry is sincere about shaping the world, then the pursuit of idealized and perfect theories of justice--essentially, the entire production of theories of justice that has dominated political philosophy for the past forty years--needs to change. Drawing on recent work in social science and philosophy, Gaus points to an important paradox: only those in a heterogeneous society--with its various religious, moral, and political perspectives--have a reasonable hope of understanding what an ideally just society would be like. However, due to its very nature, this world could never be collectively devoted to any single ideal. Gaus defends the moral constitution of this pluralistic, open society, where the very clash and disagreement of ideals spurs all to better understand what their personal ideals of justice happen to be. Presenting an original framework for how we should think about morality, The Tyranny of the Ideal rigorously analyzes a theory of ideal justice more suitable for contemporary times.

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