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Real Politics and Metaethical Baggage

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Abstract

So-called 'realists' have argued that political philosophers should engage with real politics, but that mainstream 'non-realist' political philosophers fail to do so. Perhaps surprisingly, many of the discussions between realists and their critics have not drawn much on debates in metaethics. In this paper, I argue that this is an oversight. There are important connections between the realism/non-realism debate and certain controversies in metaethics. Both realism and non-realism come with metaethical baggage. By considering several arguments that could be made for and against both positions, each of which rests on contested views about the metaphysics and epistemology of value, I outline exactly which metaethical claims realists and nonrealists must defend in order to make their position tenable.

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Notes

  1. See, for instance: Williams 2005; Geuss 2005, 2008, 2010; Sen 2009; Gray 2007.

  2. See, for instance: Bell 2009; Scheuerman 2009; Baderin 2014.

  3. See, for instance: Bavister-Gould 2011; Galston 2010; North 2010; Rossi 2010; Sleat 2010.

  4. For discussions of this type of realist critique, see: Galston 2010; Sleat 2010.

  5. For a very useful overview of some of these differing strands of realism, see Sangiovanni 2009.

  6. This assumes what some realists question; that political philosophers should attempt to justify values and principles in the first place (see, for instance, Geuss 2008, pp15-16). However, for simplicity, I shall take the realist claim to be that if (rightly or wrongly) justifying values and principles is taken to be an important task for political philosophers, then philosophers should engage with real politics when undertaking this task.

  7. See, for instance: Geuss 2008; Williams 2005; Mills 2005; Sen 2009.

  8. This position is partly motivated in Galston 2010.

  9. If the reader does not agree with this assumption, then I invite them to view the following discussion as devoted to one strand of realism – namely, the strand which argues that political philosophy should engage with real politics – rather than realism per se.

  10. I take metaethical enquiry to refer to attempts to understand the semantic, metaphysical, epistemological and psychological significance and nature of our ethical thought and practice. For more discussion, see Darwall et al. 1992.

  11. See, for instance: McDermott 2010; Swift 2008; O’Brien 1999, p77; Geuss 2008 pp16–17.

  12. In Darwall et al. 1992, the authors distinguish between ‘old’ analytic metaethics and ‘new’ metaethics. The former, which dominated until the 1950s, focused mainly on the nature of moral language and the facts/value distinction (see Darwall et al. 1992 p121). The latter has a much wider focus. It encompasses a number of issues relating to the philosophy of language, metaphysics, ontology, epistemology and moral psychology, together with the connections between these issues (see Darwall et al. 1992 p121). It seems that much of the existing work on the metaethical dimension of the debate between realist and non-realist political philosophers has concerned the issues associated with old metaethics. Its focus, therefore, is unfortunately narrow. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for drawing my attention to this point.

  13. See Cohen 2003, p234. This is not to suggest that Cohen resists committing himself to controversial metaethical views elsewhere (see, for instance, Cohen 2008, especially pp274–372). However, he certainly sees the neutrality of the argument presented in this article to be a virtue of the argument.

  14. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for this suggestion.

  15. See Geuss 2008, pp1–18 and pp59–101.

  16. See Williams 2005.

  17. I do not wish to claim that realists who deny that political philosophy is applied ethics necessarily will make this claim. As I have already mentioned, Geuss briefly discusses some metaethical issues associated with realism (see Geuss 2008 pp16–17).

  18. It might be argued that the slogan ‘political philosophy is not applied ethics’ is most charitably interpreted as an attempt to contrast political philosophy with particular traditions of ethical thought, or particular way of understanding ‘ethics’, rather than ethics per se (see Baderin 2014 pp144–145). If this is correct, then realists might be well advised to abandon this slogan as misleading. If they do, then this might remove the temptation to resist discussing metaethics in relation to political realism.

  19. For a discussion of some of the issues that arise for realists who wish to distinguish political philosophy from ethics, see Frazer 2010 pp497–499.

  20. To avoid confusion, it is worth emphasizing that ‘realism’ and ‘non-realism’ in the methodological literature on political philosophy are entirely different positions from ‘realism’ and ‘anti-realism’ in the metaethics literature, the similar labels notwithstanding. Moral realists claim, very roughly, that there are mind-independent moral properties in virtue of which moral judgements are true or false, and moral anti-realists deny this claim. So understood, it is plausible to claim that political non-realists can be moral realists and political realists can be moral anti-realists.

  21. See: Swift and White 2010; McDermott 2010.

  22. See: Geuss 2002, 2008; Williams 2002.

  23. See: Geuss 2008, pp67–70; Miller 1984, pp48–50.

  24. See: Nietzsche 1990; Nietzsche 2007.

  25. This line of argument is similar to, but also importantly different from, the much discussed argument G. A. Cohen offers in Cohen 2003. Cohen argues that fact-sensitive principles – roughly, principles that are partly grounded in facts – must presuppose more basic fact-insensitive principles. Much of the criticism of this argument has focused on the notion of ‘grounding’. (David Miller, for instance, argues that for Cohen, grounding seems to amount to logical entailment, which is too indefensibly narrow (see Miller 2013 pp21–28).) It is worth noting, however, that in making this argument Cohen’s concern is not, first and foremost, how we should justify political principles, but rather what those who affirm such fact-sensitive principles are committed to endorsing. That is, his argument concerns what endorsing a fact-sensitive principle presupposes. This, I take it, is why Cohen sums up his thesis by saying: ‘Most people think, as I indeed do, that facts do ground principles, and my thesis claims that they are thereby committed to acknowledging the existence of fact-insensitive principle’ (Cohen 2003 p228). Given that Cohen’s focus is on the presuppositions or commitments of those who endorse fact-sensitive principles, rather than directly on appropriate ways to justify those principles, his argument differs from the one I am currently considering.

  26. See also: Swift 2008; O’Brien 1999, p77.

  27. For classic discussions of this position see: Mackie 1977; Ayer 1952; Blackburn 1993.

  28. See Putnam 2002 pp7–66. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for suggesting this clarification.

  29. The position bears comparison with the Stephen Toulmin’s discussion of the connection between the justification of moral and empirical claims. See Toulmin 1950.

  30. See, for instance: Ayer 1952, pp104–126.

  31. This view has an obvious connection to the idea that moral claims are justified a priori. Historical advocates of this view include W. D. Ross, G. E. Moore and Henry Sigwick. See: Ross 1930; Moore 1903; Sidgwick 1981. For a more recent account, see Audi 2004.

  32. See, for instance: Wolff 1976, p6.

  33. For further elaboration on the method of reflective equilibrium, see: Daniels 1996.

  34. See, for instance, Geuss 2008 pp15–16.

  35. See, for instance, Putnam’s criticisms of Carnap and other logical positivists in Putnam 2002, pp7–270.

  36. See, for instance: Dewey 1938.

  37. See: Davidson 2004.

  38. Other advocates of this argument include Iris Murdoch (1970) and John McDowell (1998).

  39. For a related discussion see: Geuss 2008, pp16–17.

  40. Mills 2005 p175.

  41. Ibid p175.

  42. See, for instance, Swift and White 2010 p60.

  43. The descriptive and evaluative meanings are held to be inseparable in the sense that it is impossible to offer a reductive analysis of thick moral concepts that can fully separate the descriptive and evaluative components. For a discussion of this claim, see: Elstein and Hurka 2009.

  44. See, for instance: Blackburn 1984, p184.

  45. See, for instance: Kripke 1980.

  46. Quine’s claim that all justified beliefs could be defeated by further experience is sometimes used to argue that there could be no genuine a priori knowledge. See: Quine 1980; Cassam 2007, pp207–209.

  47. For defences of this view of moral epistemology, see: Boyd 1998; Brink 1989; Sturgeon 1985.

  48. See, for instance: Williams 2005; Geuss 2008, pp1–18.

  49. See: Geuss 2008, especially pp1–18, pp37–55 and pp95–101. See also Geuss 2009.

  50. Geuss claims, for instance, that ‘understanding politics means seeing that such statements [e.g., it is correct that people in general try to keep themselves alive and that all humans have to eat to survive] do not wear their meanings on their sleeves; in fact understanding politics means seeing that such statements have clear meaning at all only relative to their specific context, and this context is one of historically structured forms of action’ (Geuss 2008, p14).

  51. Political action, Geuss argues, ‘requires the deployment of skills and forms of judgement that cannot easily be imparted by simple speech, that cannot reliably be codified or routinised, and that do not automatically come with the mastery of certain theorises. A skill is an ability to act in a flexible way that is responsive to features of the given environment’ (Geuss 2008, p15).

  52. See: Williams 2005, p3.

  53. See: ibid pp4–8.

  54. It might be argued that if there are evaluative presuppositions in the justification of ‘basic’ political values and principles, then those values and principles are not really basic after all. In one sense, this is correct. However, I have been using ‘basic’ in a different sense; to say that a political principle is basic implies that other political claims are applications of it. In this sense, there is no tension between the claim that a political principle is basic and that further evaluative claims are presupposed in its justification.

  55. See Geuss 2008 pp16–17.

  56. Miller, for instance, defends the claim that basic political principles of justice are ‘fact-dependent’; that is ‘their validity depends on the truth of some general empirical propositions about human beings and human societies, such that if these propositions were shown to be false, the concepts and principles in question would have to be modified or abandoned’ (Miller 2013 p18). This realist claim seems perfectly compatible with a reductive analysis of arguments into evaluative and factual components.

  57. See, for instance, Geuss 2008, pp23–30.

  58. See, for instance: Gray 2007; Mouffe 2005.

  59. See, for instance: Elkin 2006.

  60. See Miller’s discussion of more and less radical versions of the claim that political principles should be fact-insensitive in Miller p20 and p28.

  61. This model, of course, is not too far from ideas developed by the earlier and later work of Rawls and that of Habermas. See: Rawls 1971, pp102–170; Rawls 1993, pp11–46; Habermas 1996.

  62. See, for instance: Waldron 1999, pp147–208.

  63. See: Dancy 2004.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Hallvard Lillehammer, Lorna Finlayson, Raymond Geuss, Andrea Sangiovanni and Laura Tisdall for their extremely helpful comments on various drafts of this paper.

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    Sebastian Nye

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Nye, S. Real Politics and Metaethical Baggage. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 18, 1083–1100 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-015-9590-8

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