Abstract
In recent years a number of political theorists, dissatisfied with what they see as a dominant but wrongheaded approach to political philosophy exemplified in what they call “liberal moralism,” have endorsed a modus vivendi approach as a framework for evaluating political institutions around the globe. In this paper I discuss this approach in the face of a serious challenge that can be raised against it. The challenge is to show that as an approach to global political morality modus vivendi is both (1) essentially different from the liberal moralism it rejects and (2) normatively and conceptually compelling as a way of answering fundamental questions of political morality. To satisfy the first, global modus vivendi must avoid appealing to the parochial notions of universal norms, human nature, and human interests that are often said to mar liberal moralism. To satisfy the second, it must posit some universal moral standards of minimally decent treatment (most often, and most usefully, cashed out in the idea of human rights). In this chapter I pursue these challenges to determine whether modus vivendi is best seen as a genuine alternative to liberal moralism or instead simply as a more chastened and sensible version of that approach.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
I sometimes want to say on behalf of liberal moralism what Rawls said on behalf of deontological approaches to ethics: “All ethical doctrines worth our attention take consequences into account in judging rightness. One which did not would simply be irrational, crazy” (Rawls 1971: 30). So too for a liberal moralism fanatically insistent on establishing liberal rights regardless of potentially terrible costs.
- 3.
Williams might contest the obviousness of this claim. He builds into his very conception of political arrangements the idea that they are free of a kind of disqualifying level of coercion, which might make it conceptually impossible for there to be genuinely political arrangements that systematically violate substantial human rights through massive coercion. But this strikes me as an unnecessary detour from what we really want to say, viz., that the preservation of social order by political institutions is compatible with a level of moral odiousness that marks a regime as illegitimate. Do we want to say that in the antebellum United States there were no political institutions, or that there were vis à vis free citizens, but not vis à vis slaves? I don’t see what this gains us.
- 4.
For helpful discussion exploring the issues in the preceding two paragraphs, see Wendt (2016: Chaps. 6–9).
- 5.
The general idea of a normative supplement (though not the inelegant phrase) I owe to my reading of Matthew Sleat’s paper in this volume.
- 6.
The locus classicus of this last idea is Shue (1980).
- 7.
I suspect that such a position is in the end unsustainable, since whatever considerations lead one to endorse democracy also commit one to the conditions under which it can function, and these I take to include the range of protected freedoms that mark liberal democracy.
- 8.
Manon Westphal has suggested to me a possibility I have overlooked: that certain evils can, over time, grow from being merely contextual evils to being genuine universal evils. This idea does seem to me something that might be welcomed by Gray’s account, which makes reference to the changing character of universal evils, but I confess that I am not entirely clear how to think about this tantalizing suggestion.
- 9.
This example, and the complications it points to in thinking about the universality of important evils, I owe to discussion with John Horton.
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McCabe, D. (2019). Modus Vivendi as a Global Political Morality. In: Horton, J., Westphal, M., Willems, U. (eds) The Political Theory of Modus Vivendi. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-79078-7_9
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