Williams for and Against. Politics as a Constitutively Normative Practice

Abstract

The main goal of this paper is to show that politics constitutes a normative domain of its own. To this, a concept of political value that explains why the politically good provides reasons for actions is indispensable. I shape this concept by adopting the framework of political minimalism and developing one of its central tenets, namely, that politics, as a constitutively normative practice, specifies objective standards for evaluating political phenomena. I characterize the notion of political value in these terms to offer a non-moralist foundation for political normativity. In this endeavor, the work of Bernard Williams plays two opposing roles: while his metapolitical ideas exemplify the shortcomings of substantialist accounts of political normativity, his criticism of the morality system and his conception of practical rationality as all-things-considered practical deliberation are fundamental, to the point that the conception of political normativity endorsed here can be seen as an extension of Williams’ ideas on normativity in general. Finally, I draw some consequences from this account of political minimalism to show that this conception of political normativity can hardly be considered a variety of political realism.

1 Introduction: Political Axiology and Political Deontology

There are two ways to approach the study of political normativity. From a deontic¹ perspective, the question is whether we can have reasons and obligations specific to the political sphere. If we anticipate that this is so, the challenge becomes to explain why these reasons and obligations cannot be derived from other types of reasons or obligations -such as moral ones. Alternatively, from an axiological perspective, the question is whether politics can establish its own standards of “goodness” or “correctness”, and if the answer is yes, then the challenge becomes justifying specific criteria for what makes political decisions, norms, regimes, ideologies, etc. good or bad, correct or incorrect, from a strictly political point of view.

In principle, a robust account of political normativity should integrate these two perspectives, articulating its answers to both types of questions. In particular, it should explain how adequately responding to our political reasons leads to the politically good, and why what is politically good determines what we should do. Such articulation should be available whether we answer the above questions positively (thereof assuming that politics constitutes a normative domain of its own) or negatively.

Although the axiological and the deontic perspectives appear intertwined in early metapolitical reflections,² from Kant onwards the philosophical debate adopted mainly a deontic perspective, focusing on the nature and foundation of political obligations—specifically, the obligations of rulers and, especially, of the ruled.

As Bernard Williams (2005) represented this debate in the political philosophy of his time, the alternatives were either an enactment model that assumes that political obligation is a form of moral obligation, or a structural model that accounts for political normativity in terms of the moral constraints to which political action would be subject. For its part, political realism challenged such moralist theses, seeking to show either that the political is orthogonal to the moral, as radical realists like Geuss (2008) hold, or that moral normativity underdetermines political normativity, as Williams himself argued, among others.

In either case, political philosophers have not taken on the task of integrating deontic and axiological perspectives. In principle, moralists would be in a good position to carry out this task. After all, moral value seems to be the only type of value capable of establishing obligations by itself: that φ is the only politically good option does not seem to imply that we must φ. Even if φ is the only rational option, it might make sense to question whether we must φ (Kolodny 2005; Raz 2005). In contrast, the agreement within the morality system (Williams 1985, Chap. 10) is that if φ is the only morally good option, then we must φ regardless of any other consideration. Thus, the political moralist could argue that the politically good determines what to do because, in the last resort, it brings with it the morally good.

However, despite this advantage, moralist philosophers have not tackled the integration of the axiological and the deontic aspects of political normativity. As a matter of fact, they have paid scant attention to political axiology and the task of justifying their proposed criteria to define political value. This is not surprising. After all, from a moralist standpoint, the politically good is either identical to the morally good (enactment model) or aligned with it (structural model); thus, the supposed self-evidence of the value of the morally good would render justifications for these criteria unnecessary–for example, there would be no need to demonstrate that political decisions must be just for them to be good, but only to explain what makes a political decision just indeed.

Contrastingly, the idea that we must justify our criteria to distinguish good from bad politics has been one of the warhorses of realism against moralism (Jubb and Rossi 2015, p. 457). Realists strive to characterize a notion of political value that avoids relying on normative intuitions, moral or else. In the case of Bernard Williams, the task revolves around the definition of legitimacy. However, as I will argue (Sect. 2), realism faces its central challenge in trying to explain how political value translates into reasons for action.

The main goal of this paper is to provide a framework to integrate the axiological and deontic perspectives of political normativity under the assumption that politics constitutes a normative domain of its own. Specifically, I seek to explain why what is politically good determines what we should do and why fulfilling our political obligations leads to politically valuable outcomes. To this, an alternative to both political moralism and realism is needed. In a series of articles on varied issues in political philosophy (Rodríguez-Alcázar 2017; Rodríguez-Alcázar et al. 2021; Bermejo-Luque and Rodríguez-Alcázar 2023), this alternative has been named political minimalism. I will adopt this account of political normativity and define one of its key notions, i.e., that of a constitutively normative practice, to carry out this task (Sect. 3).

As it will become apparent, the work of Bernard Williams will play two opposing roles in this endeavor: while his metapolitical ideas exemplify the shortcomings of substantialist accounts of political normativity (Sect. 2), his criticism of the morality system and his conception of practical rationality as all-things-considered practical deliberation are fundamental, to the point that the conception of political normativity endorsed here can be seen as an extension of Williams’ ideas on normativity in general (Sect. 4). Yet, I will draw some consequences from this account of political minimalism to show that it cannot be considered a variety of political realism. Specifically, I will examine the notion of legitimacy (Sect. 5) and the roles of conflict and utopia within politics (Sect. 6) to make this difference apparent.

2 Political Value from a Realist Point of View

In his posthumous work, In the Beginning was the Deed, Williams (2005) employs what I have termed an axiological approach to political normativity. Particularly, he aims at specifying a standard to determine political value, which he defines in terms of legitimacy. Williams derives this standard from what he identifies as the First Political Question (FPQ): "the securing of order, protection, safety, trust, and the conditions of cooperation" (Williams 2005, p. 3).

Yet, Williams adds, to be legitimate, politics must respond to this question in the right way, that is, by complying with a Basic Legitimation Demand (BLD), which requires addressing the FPQ in a way that makes sense to the citizens, and by attending to the Critical Theory Principle (CTP), which prescribes that the acquiescence of the citizens will not be obtained spuriously. These conditions have an obvious motivation: there are ways of guaranteeing order, protection, security, etc. that are not politically acceptable—such as a methodical dictatorship (for the BLD), or a regime retorting on brainwashing (for the CTP). Williams admits that the foundation for the BLD and the CTP could ultimately be moral, but this would not lead him to a moralist view, for he contends that this foundation "does not represent a morality which is prior to politics" Williams (2005, p. 5). Thus, in Williams’ account, legitimacy is a value that stems from politics, not from morality, because the BLD and CTP can only be articulated as constraints as long as we are subject to the normative reality that political practice brings about.

However, even if we accept that Williams’ notion of political value cannot be reduced to morality, it remains unclear that he can avoid moralism when explaining how political value, so understood, generates reasons for action. For the question arises: how does the legitimacy or illegitimacy of something give us reasons to act one way instead of another?

One might presume that the notion of legitimacy involves the type of imperative that is also characteristic of the notion of moral value. This way, ‘legitimate’ would be to politics what ‘just’ is to morality: that a norm or decision is just/legitimate would provide a moral/political reason to comply with it simply because that is what moral/political value amounts to. But this response assumes that the type of link between value and reasons advocated by the morality system–which Williams himself criticized in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985)—is correct, and this is far from obvious. Even if it were, why should we think that it is also the type of link between value and reason that political normativity provides (Cross, 2024)? In the morality system, the notion of moral value is particularly tuned to imply such a link because it is meant to be irreducible to anything else: the morally good is basically what we have most reason to pursue. But Williams’ aim is precisely to offer a definition–i.e., a standard—of political value, and this leaves his account exposed to a version of Moore's open question argument: for it seems to make perfect sense to question whether the fact that a proposal is legitimate (in the sense of fulfilling the FPQ, the BLD and the CT) is a reason to accept it or promote it.

Realist thinkers have offered diverse solutions to this kind of difficulty, drawing on various strands of realism. For example, Cross (2022) tried to defend an instrumental conception of political value by suggesting a different foundation for both the BLD and the CTP. As Cross observes, these requirements are instrumental to adequately respond to the FPQ in the long term: not fulfilling these conditions is a threat to political stability. From this point of view, political value (i.e., legitimacy), understood as a means of guaranteeing a response to the FPQ in the long term, would provide instrumental reasons for action because the type of outcome that accompanies good politics (i.e., stability) is something that we usually long for.

However, instrumentalism provides a weak foundation for political normativity, for it makes reasons to pursue the politically good dependent on reasons to pursue the things that the politically good delivers. This ultimately undermines the idea of politics being normative of its own.

Burelli (2022) echoes this difficulty and develops a functionalist conception of political value that is meant to avoid instrumentalism. To it, he relies on an etiological notion of function, defined in terms of that feature or behavior which 1) objects of a class tend to have or display, and 2) is causally determinant for their existence. Thus, the etiological functions of hearts or microwaves would be, respectively, to pump blood and heat food since 1) this is what hearts and microwaves typically do and 2) is causally relevant to their existence. Thus, although hearts also make a characteristic sound, this would not be their function because that sound is not causally determinant for their existence. According to Burelli's etiological account, the function of politics would be to "secure binding collective decisions" (Burelli 2022, p. 629) and this would provide us with a standard–at least, a partial one (Burelli 2023)–for evaluating certain phenomena from a political point of view.

In principle, it seems difficult to make sense of this etiological notion of function as normative. For example, we humans tend to search for food, and this is causally relevant for our existence, but it seems weird to say that our function is searching for food. Yet, Burelli might reply that even though etiological functions can be worthless per se, the notion can be used to provide objective standards to assess members of functional classes. However, it is also difficult to see how an account of value in these terms could imply consequences for action. The fact that we can tell good members of a functional class from bad ones does not explain why we have reasons to promote the good ones, or the whole class for that matter. As Erman and Möller (2023) have pointed out, if we define political value in terms of the minimal political function that Burelli proposes, it is not clear that political value provides political reasons: why should we submit to the norms of a group or contribute to promoting binding collective decisions? The truth is that there are groups of all kinds, and some of them are very undesirable, even from a strictly political point of view.

Alternatively, we could propose a more clearly valuable function as a criterion for distinguishing good from bad politics. After all, microwaves not only tend to heat food, but also to do so faster than stoves, to have reasonable energy consumption, to be small, compact, easy to install, easy to use, relatively inexpensive, and so forth. These features are also causally effective for their existence; therefore, we could say that they constitute the function of microwaves and the standard for evaluating them. However, if we define the value of microwaves in this way, it becomes less obvious that we are articulating a notion of microwave goodness rather than simply listing things we usually value in a microwave. In the case of artifacts like politics, their ability to achieve things we generally desire (e.g., certain moral or material ends) might give us reason to pursue “good” politics instead of bad politics. But this response just reintroduces the challenges associated with instrumentalism.

Other realist approaches, of an institutionalist nature, such as those of Sangiovanni (2008) or Jubb (2015), try to account for the relationship between political value and political reasons by inverting the order of explanation.

Social and political institutions fundamentally alter the relations in which people stand, and hence the first principles of justice that are appropriate for them. (Sangiovanni 2008, p. 138)

Basically, the institutionalist holds that political value (understood either as justice or as legitimacy³) exists only because we have the political obligations that our current institutions and political practices consist of. Political correctness or goodness would be the property that arises from meeting such obligations. From this point of view, politics would be normative in the same way that, for example, communication is normative for some pragmatists, that is, as a result of the deontic reality that the corresponding institutions and practices create.

However, the difficulty for institutionalism arises when trying to specify what kind of reasons we can have to justify our specific political institutions and practices and the norms that constitute them. For if we say that these reasons are political, we are begging the question; and if we say that they are not political, then we are placing political normativity outside politics (Rossi 2012, p. 159). Unfortunately, the institutionalist cannot attempt a Rortyan response to this difficulty and contend that there is no need to justify our political practices because, to paraphrase Brandom (1994, pp. 625–626), they are "normative all the way down." The reason is that, unlike what happens with communication and the conditions of communicative success, we are much too capable of imagining alternative political institutions and practices, and we need political reasons to discard some of them and promote others if we aspire to offer a truly normative account of politics.

3 How to Give up Substantialism: The Notion of a Constitutively Normative Practice

As this brief survey is meant to illustrate, for the realist, the task of explaining political reasons or obligations in terms of the politically good evinces that their notion of political value is normatively weak. In turn, a realist explanation of political value in terms of political reasons or obligations seems vacuous: we can adopt a pragmatist perspective and say that politics is essentially normative; however, this can serve to define the political, but not to justify a recognizably normative model for politics.

In view of these difficulties, one may think that, for the realist, political deontology and political axiology must be considered as irreducible aspects of political normativity. Some realists seem to endorse this view, at least partially, when they assume that we can meaningfully assess political phenomena qua political, regardless of whether the politically good effectively provides reasons for action, let alone obligations (McQueen 2017; Sleat 2022). Yet, this view would turn criteria to determine political value into a mere standard for politics. As we have seen, the problem with this is that, in general, satisfying a standard does not imply being valuable: standards may be futile, like the standard for wearing a bow tie, or even malicious, like mafia’s standard for threatening competitors. That something is normatively good or valuable is a prima facie reason to opt for it; in contrast, that something meets a certain standard is not a prima facie reason to opt for it: it is only a reason if we have additional reasons to meet the standard (Enoch and Brady 2011).

Thus, as Bernard Williams’ critique of the enactment model suggests, we should assume that, unless a non-moralist notion of political value is able to explain why the politically good provides reasons for action, political moralism will be unescapable. To claim that politics is normative in its own terms, we must show both, that there is a kind of value that is intrinsically political and that some reasons for action are political reasons because they instantiate or bring about the politically good. Basically, the idea is that we have to characterize the notion of political value in order to specify the domain of politics, and we have to explain how political value constitutes political reasons for action in order to show that this domain is effectively normative.

In this and the next sections, I seek to show that a non-moralist account of political value can indeed explain why the politically good provides reasons for action. Yet, to this, it is essential to abandon the substantialism of realist (and moralist) proposals. Metapolitical substantialism is the view that the political value of a decision, policy, ideology, regime, etc. depends on its ability to achieve some desirable end, that is, something that deserves to be desired, either for moral reasons or because it is (predicatively) good in other sense.⁴ The problem with substantialism is that, if we take that such ability determines the identity of a phenomenon as political–for example, if we consider that only by responding to the FPQ while complying with the BLD and the CTP we are dealing with a political phenomenon—then political value ceases to be a standard for evaluating politics: politics becomes the same as good politics and the fact that something lacks political value can mean both that it is politically flawed and that it is not political at all. In turn, if we take that having this capacity does not determine the identity of a phenomenon as political, then the notion of value that we are characterizing is not that of political value, but simply that of something that we value for some (non-political) reason: a knife that does not cut may still be considered a knife and may be good for spreading butter or simply to be displayed as a model of a knife that is otherwise useless; in the same way, political decisions that do not respond to the FPQ while complying with the BLD and the CTP may still be valued because, for example, they express the true feelings of some people, or because they are historically unique. Different achievements may be valuable from different points of view, and they may provide reasons to act one way or another if we have reasons to pursue them.

Faced with this dilemma, the question is: is it possible to establish standards for politics without resorting to achievements whose value is independent of their strictly political nature?

In a series of papers (Rodríguez-Alcázar 2017; Rodríguez-Alcázar et al. 2021; Bermejo-Luque and Rodríguez-Alcázar 2023), a constitutivist account of political normativity has been proposed as an alternative to both moralism and realism. This proposal is called “political minimalism” because, instead of assuming that political normativity depends on substantive values, ends or norms, it argues that the normative character of politics is the result of political practice itself.⁵ To develop this idea, politics is characterized as a constitutively normative practice (CNP). In Bermejo-Luque (2011, chap. 2) I introduced the concept of a CNP to characterize the notion of argumentative value, but without providing a formal definition. In this paper, I propose the following one:

A type of behavior or disposition Φ is a CNP if and only if:

• (1) Φ has a constitutive goal, in the sense that one counts as Φ-ing because one counts as intending that goal. That is, constitutive goals are not something that we typically intend when we Φ, but something that we count as intending because we count as Φ-ing. Accordingly, the constitutive goal of playing chess would not be to checkmate the opponent, but to move the pieces according to the rules of chess. This is because, even though checkmating the opponent is the typical goal that we pursue when playing chess, it makes sense to say that someone is playing chess even if they are trying to let the opponent win. Similarly, the constitutive goal of believing that p would not be to know that p, but to < uphold the truth of whether p given that p > . This is because it is possible to believe that p without intending to know that p, but it is not possible to believe that p without intending to uphold the truth of whether p given that p.

• (2) Φ-ing does not entail achieving the constitutive goal of Φ: For example, since the constitutive goal of biking is to ride a bike, biking is not a CNP because it is not possible to bike without completely achieving the goal of riding a bike. On the other hand, it is possible to play chess without moving the pieces according to the rules of chess completely; that is, it is possible to make mistakes when playing chess, because playing chess does not amount to following the rules of chess, but to displaying behavior that is typically conducive to having the chess pieces moved according to these rules.

• (3) The constitutive goal of Φ can only be achieved by Φ-ing: While believing, playing chess and biking satisfy this condition, purely instrumental activities such as polishing shoes, mowing the lawn or relaxing the back do not, because their constitutive goal (which is to have the shoes polished, the lawn mowed, or the back relaxed) can be achieved without exhibiting the corresponding behavior or having the corresponding disposition.

• (4) By Φ-ing, subjects profess to be fulfilling the constitutive goal of Φ: For example, playing chess would not be a CNP despite meeting conditions 1 to 3, because (admittedly, in very strange circumstances) it is possible to be playing chess by moving the pieces in a certain way without professing to be moving the pieces according to the rules of chess. On the other hand, believing that p would be a CNP because, in addition to fulfilling conditions 1–3, when believing that p, individuals profess to hold the truth about whether p given that p.

Unlike characteristic functions or goals, constitutive goals are not contingent as standards, and unlike constitutive aims or norms, failure to satisfy them does not exclude identity. Thus, if φ is a token of a constitutively normative practice Φ, then there is an objective standard for evaluating it qua Φ: this is a matter of whether or how far φ achieves its constitutive goal qua Φ.⁶ Regarding the characterization of politics as a CNP, political minimalism makes the following conjecture:

Political Minimalism Conjecture: all and only political phenomena can be described as attempts at providing good answers to the question "what shall we do?" as an exercise of means-ends deliberation whose subject is the political community.

According to this conjecture, politics would be a CNP whose constitutive goal is providing good answers to the question "what shall we do?" as an exercise of means-ends deliberation whose subject is the political community.

4 Politics as a Constitutively Normative Practice

Although a proper discussion of this conjecture and of the thesis that politics is a CNP are beyond the scope of this paper, in this section I shall at least briefly motivate this view.

To begin with, a political community can be roughly defined as a group of agents that interact as such agents and face the coordination problems that make the question "what shall we do?" relevant. This definition allows for communities of varying sizes and types, ranging from small groups like university departments to the entirety of humanity. They can be ad hoc initiatives like civic society movements defending public heritage or well-established collectives like sports leagues or royal academies. Some communities have clear boundaries, like the citizenry of a country, while others are more loosely defined, like the feminist or the human rights movements. They can be naturally formed groups like people living in a region, or crafted entities like nations. Finally, the agents who are members of the community may be individuals or communities themselves, such as international organizations.

Political deliberation is usually associated with individuals acting as members of a community and deliberating on its behalf. Besides, individuals entrusted with authority by the community, or holding power otherwise, can both deliberate and enact their decisions. Yet, the exercise of means-ends deliberation that politics amounts to does not necessitate explicitness or planned implementation: ordinary people, through their everyday actions, do also provide answers to the "what shall we do?" question for the entire community. Thus, as condition 3 for CNPs predicts, politics also happens when community members contribute answers through their decisions, the norms and conventions they manage to establish, the possibilities they create, and the expectations they set through their coordinations with each other. For certain matters, these answers can be politically better than planned ones. At any rate, it is always the entire community that ultimately implements responses to the "what shall we do?" question, although rarely through explicit public deliberation.

In view of this fact, it might be argued that politics is not a CNP after all, because it doesn’t meet condition 1 in our definition: community members do make politics without intentionally trying to respond to any political question. Moreover, dictators and corrupted politicians act politically even though what they intend with their policies is not to provide good answers to the “what shall we do?” question for their communities. However, it must be noticed that, in our definition of a CNP, goals are not psychological states, but constitutive features of the practice. Because practices are performed by agents, it makes sense to attribute to them the disposition of aiming at a certain CNP’s constitutive goal if they are to be interpreted as intentionally performing that CNP. Thus, when dictators or bad politicians present their decisions as political, they do so because they present them as allegedly good responses to the political question –even if, in the last resort, their psychological intentions are silencing the opposition, enriching their allies or relatives, etc. In fact, it is because individuals have to present themselves as professing this much to be regarded as political subjects (condition 4) that political subjects are accountable as political agents and not only as individuals. Much the same can be said of the community when we describe it as a political agent: such a description involves seeing its overall behavior as an active response to certain political questions, not merely as a passive effect of the political decisions of others.

Finally, politics clearly meets condition 2 in our definition, since engaging in politics, as dictators and bad politicians do, does not equate to actually providing good answers to "what shall we do?". But this leads us to the question of how to determine that an answer to "what shall we do?", as an exercise of means-ends deliberation, is a good one. Again, I cannot properly address this question here, but I shall briefly outline my proposed response to provide at least an overview of the whole framework.

In Bermejo-Luque (forthcoming), I suggest that means-ends deliberation is a CNP whose constitutive goal is moving forward the agent’s agenda. The rationale for this account stems from an analysis of the possible ways to criticize the outputs of means-ends deliberations. In this account, agents are entities whose behavior can be assessed in terms of means-ends rationality, ends are all the things that an agent wishes or aims at (either for their own sake or as a means to achieve something else), and agendas are the sets of ends of the agents, ordered according to their priority. Priorities are established in virtue of the following relationships between ends:

• Compatibility: Two ends are compatible to each other if and only if satisfying any of them does not preclude the satisfaction of the other.

• Necessity: An end x is necessary for another end y if and only if y can only be satisfied if x is satisfied.

• Equivalence: Two ends are equivalent if their satisfaction requires the same state of affairs and allows for the satisfaction of the same ends.

Roughly, the more compatible and necessary an end is in relation to the rest of the ends of an agenda, the higher its priority. When an agent deliberates on two ends that have the same priority but are incompatible to each other, it faces a practical dilemma.

In the realm of political deliberation, the agent is the community, and the agenda of the political community (APC) is the set of ends held by the members of the community, ordered by their priority relationships. On this account, ends such as order, security, and cooperation will normally have a high priority in most APCs, as they are not only compatible but also necessary for many other typical ends that individuals in political communities endorse. However, contrary to what some realists suggest, these are only typical top priorities in most APCs, but not necessarily the highest priorities for any political community in any circumstances.

A project, action, or decision advances an APC if it promotes a state of affairs that brings about some of the ends of the APC and does not prevent the satisfaction of ends that have a higher priority in that APC. Otherwise, the project, action, or decision is politically bad or inadequate. Finally, the more ends of an APC are satisfied, the more the APC is advanced and the better the project, action, or political decision is. Thus, in this account, political value presents itself in degrees, so that it makes sense to compare two political ideas, actions, or decisions to determine which is better from a political standpoint.

As I flesh out in the next section by reference to Williams’ account of practical rationality, political deliberation, so understood, happens to be a form of all-things-considered practical deliberation. Why is this so? Because, among the ends that a political community may have, we can find compliance with certain aesthetic, moral, economic, etc. … values, and the circumstances in which political agents wonder what to do may be, among others, the fact that certain norms (social, legal, moral, etc.) are in play.⁷ Accordingly, good political deliberation will involve all these types of considerations. Yet, it will do so not because these considerations are normative for politics, but because they appeal to ends endorsed by the community and to the means at its disposal. This is the way in which political minimalism departs from substantialism, both moralist and realist.⁸

Importantly, this way of renouncing substantialism does not lead to an unacceptable form of relativism. Political minimalism endorses the view that a certain political decision can be good in one political context but bad in another. Such contextualist view seems plausible, and in any case, it does not pose a threat to political normativity. Contrastingly, the view that there are no objective criteria to distinguish good from bad politics is a nonstarter for political normativity. This form of relativism blurs the distinction between mere appearances of political goodness and genuine political value. Political minimalism posits that political value is a matter of providing objectively good answers to "what shall we do?". Certainly, the goodness of such answers is contingent on the specific ends that people pursue on each occasion, but also on the surrounding circumstances that determine the possibility of achieving them. As a consequence, we will be mistaken in thinking that x is politically good if x brings about ends that are incompatible to ends of higher priority in the APC. Thus, for example, even for an unreservedly xenophobic society, expelling foreigners might ultimately prove to be bad politics because such a decision could lead to undesirable consequences for a significant portion of its members, such as labor shortages, international sanctions, reputational damage on the global stage, or simply the violation of basic human rights. Good responses to “what shall we do?” are those that effectively take all the relevant considerations into account and lay down plans accordingly.⁹

Political minimalism defines political value in terms of the quality of this exercise of means-ends deliberation: essentially, good political ideas, programs, ideologies, institutions, decisions, policies, regimes, etc., are those that provide good answers to the question "what shall we do?" for the political community. Regarding the goal of showing that politics constitutes a normative domain of its own, the remaining question is: how does the politically good, so understood, determine how to act? Or, put differently, how is it that mere means-ends deliberation can be seen as deliberation tout court?

5 Williamsiam Practical Normativity. Political and Moral Reasons

As I hope to show in the next sections, political minimalism can hardly be considered a version of realism. Nonetheless, the articulation of the axiological and deontic perspectives that follows from this conception of political normativity and its account of the relationship between the political and the moral are especially akin to Williams’ views on practical rationality.

As is well known, the axis of Williams’ critique of what he calls “the morality system” challenges the notion of categorical obligation. Although, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, morality is constructed around the link between moral value and this type of obligation, Williams argues that deontic judgments are nothing but the conclusion of a practical deliberation all things considered.

One can, of course, ask, on a given occasion, “what should I do from an ethical point of view?” or “what should I do from a self-interested point of view?” These ask for the results of subdeliberations, and invite one to review a particular type of consideration among those that bear on the question and to think what the considerations of that type, taking by themselves, support. In the same way, I can ask what I should do taking only economic or political or family considerations into account. At the end of all that, there is the question “what should I do all things considered?” There is only one kind of question to be asked about what to do, of which Socrates’ is a very general example, and moral considerations are one kind of consideration that bear on answering it. (Williams 1985, p. 6)

In the opening pages of Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Williams also maintains that the question of "how should one live" is the same as a question about the good life (Williams 1985, p. 5). That is to say, for Williams, the outcome of an exercise of practical deliberation is not only an answer to what we should do but also an assessment of the value of our doings: the reasons that can justify what we do are those that show that what we do is good, in the sense of "adequate from the point of view of our practical deliberations."

Under this light, Williams’ conception of practical normativity would have only needed to contemplate the possibility of a collective subject, i.e., an "us" such as the political community, to give rise to the notion of political normativity defended here.

Such deliberative account of practical normativity would imply that practical deontology comprises only two realms: the realm of the prudential¹⁰ ought, i.e., the one that the question "what shall I do?" inaugurates, and the realm of the political ought, i.e., the one that the question "what shall we do?" inaugurates.

The standards constitutive of each type of deliberation bring about the corresponding notions of value, namely, the prudentially good and the politically good. In turn, appealing to prudential or political values amounts to adducing prudential or political reasons. Such reasons may be part of further individual or collective deliberations. Yet, prudential/political reasons can determine what to do by themselves. This happens when they justify a specific answer to the question “what shall I/we do?”. On the other hand, moral reasons would be those that appeal to moral values, and according to this deliberative conception of normativity, they could not determine what to do by themselves because, as Williams observes, these are only one kind of considerations that are relevant in practical deliberations.¹¹ In fact, following Williams’ internalism about reasons, the same would be true of other values that may shape the set of ends that an individual or a community endorses, such as aesthetic values, economic values, etc.: for such values to constitute reasons to act one way or another, they must promote ends endorsed by the agent that deliberates about what to do.¹²

Accordingly, if the term ‘obligation’ were less burdened with connotations from the morality system, we might suggest that only political communities can have political obligations, while individuals can only have obligations of a prudential character. For example, on this account, a Member of Parliament (MP) might have moral reasons to vote against a proposal (for example, because it would involve breaking their electoral promises and betraying their constituents, which is morally wrong) and political reasons to vote in favor (for example, because it effectively moves forward the PCA, which is politically good). To decide what to do, the MP will have to take into account these and other relevant considerations, and their decision will be deemed morally good if it is altruistic rather than selfish, and politically good if it is indeed a good answer to the question “what shall we do?”. This implies that individuals may have moral reasons to act in accordance with what is politically good, and that they may have political reasons to act in accordance with what is morally good –as well as moral reasons to act against what is politically good and political reasons to act against what is morally good.

Contrastingly, that a political proposal is indeed the best answer to the "what shall we do?" question given the circumstances is tantamount to say that the political community as a whole is rationally required to promote it. To meet this requirement, the community may need, for example, to promulgate laws and ensure compliance. This means that such laws stand for obligations for the community as a whole, but not for its members, as Bernard Williams, among others, would hold.

6 Political Value and Legitimacy

As we have seen, the main consequence of political minimalism is that it allows us to articulate the relationship between political deontology and axiology, which is fundamental to any attempt to show that political normativity is not reducible to moral normativity, as the realist maintains.

An additional consequence of this proposal, and in particular, of this notion of political value, is that it allows us to exploit the full potential of an axiological approach to political normativity. To illustrate this, it is useful to compare this notion of political value with the notion of legitimacy.

The concept of legitimacy has traditionally occupied center stage within the realist tradition. As I have tried to show, accounting for political normativity in terms of legitimacy poses a dilemma whose options are equally unsatisfactory. On the one hand, it invites us to think of the link between political axiology and deontology in the same terms as the morality system articulates the relationship between moral value and obligation: from this point of view, if a government or a law is legitimate, the ruled have at least reasons to submit to them, if not the obligation to do so, simply because that is what it means for something to be legitimate. As we have seen, to assume this, i.e., to assume that 'legitimate' is irreducible in this way, implies giving up on establishing criteria for evaluating political phenomena. On the other hand, trying to define legitimacy in order to have such criteria leads us to a version of Moore's open question argument: if what is legitimate is what meets certain conditions, then that something is legitimate is only a reason to act in its favor if we have reasons to pursue what is achieved by meeting those conditions. At this point, only moralism, within the framework of the morality system, could restore the normative character to the concept of legitimacy by positing that only that which meets certain moral conditions is legitimate—such as the condition of being just, as Rawls would say.

Political value, as proposed by political minimalism, is the property that the assessment of political decisions as answers to the question “what shall we do?” determines. This means, as pointed out in Sect. 4, that political decisions can be good or bad regardless of the community’s opinion about their political value. Accordingly, this notion of political value is extraneous to that of legitimacy, as characterized in the realist tradition, and it delivers a better lens to evaluate the actual adequacy of political solutions in tackling collective challenges.

Remarkably, by making political normativity pivot on this notion of political value instead of on the notion of legitimacy, we free ourselves to define legitimacy in non-normative terms. Thus, we may say that the legitimacy of a political phenomenon is a matter of its conformity to the norms, procedures, principles, etc. that a political community endorses. This is why, in modern times, the concept of legitimacy intertwines with notions like consent, democracy, rule of law, and human rights. Because we belong to this cultural framework, this is what legitimacy means for us–but, as Williams strives to explain, that legitimacy involves these criteria is a contingent matter.

On the other hand, for the political minimalist, that x is legitimate in this sense is a political prima facie reason in its favor, because the norms, procedures, principles, etc. that a community actually endorses are part of the circumstances that determine whether x is a good answer to the “what shall we do?” question. For example, once a political community endorses certain norms and procedures to elect rulers, the circumstances to elect a new ruler include, among other things, that these norms and procedures are in play. Depending on the case, however, this may be a reason to reform such norms and procedures (because they bring about unwanted outcomes), or just to proceed as they prescribe (because their outcomes are less problematic for the community than the process of setting new norms and procedures).

The other problem with characterizing political value in terms of legitimacy is that the comparability of political proposals, policies, programs, institutions, ideologies, etc. in terms of their political value is severely limited. Certainly, Williams contemplates the possibility that the considerations that support legitimacy “are scalar” (Williams 2005, p. 10), but he also says that, once a certain threshold of legitimacy has been reached, the choice between legitimate decisions is reduced to the fact that one of the rival proposals manages to win rather than lose (Williams 2005, p. 13). This means that making a rational choice between incompatible and equally legitimate proposals requires appealing to extra-political reasons, which is tantamount to say that the choice between such proposals cannot be justified from a merely political point of view.

Contrastingly, political minimalism makes sense not only of the idea that a political decision can be better than another, but also of the idea that a decision can be both legitimate and politically bad; or, in other words, that we can have specifically political reasons to oppose, even fight against, a legitimate political proposal. Basically, this happens when adherence to established norms and procedures, thereby securing legitimacy, does not guarantee a decision’s effectiveness in addressing the underlying coordination problem that triggers the question “what shall we do?”.

7 Political Minimalism and Political Realism: Conflict and Utopia

The distinction between realism and moralism is often presented as exhaustive. It is certainly possible to define realism as any metapolitical view that rejects the idea that any normativity in politics ultimately comes from morality. Under this light, political minimalism would be a form of realism indeed. However, it is also possible to think that this is a false dichotomy because, as pointed out before, both realism and moralism are substantialist views, and these are not the only options for an account of political normativity. Furthermore, several common elements exist across different versions of realism, elements that do not necessarily follow from the assumption that politics constitutes a normative domain of its own. Thus, I will conclude by showing that, if we define realism based on these shared elements, political minimalism can hardly be considered a form of realism.

Although the definition of realism is a matter of controversy, there seems to be some consensus on its main characteristics:

“Among the hallmarks of this endeavor are a moral psychology that includes the passions and emotions; a robust conception of political possibility and rejection of utopian thinking; the belief that political conflict—of values as well as interests—is both fundamental and ineradicable; a focus on institutions as the arenas within which conflict is mediated and contained; and a conception of politics as a sphere of activity that is distinct, autonomous, and subject to norms that cannot be derived from individual morality. For political realists, a ‘well-ordered society’ is rarely attainable; a modus vivendi without agreement on first principles is often the only practical possibility” (Galston 2010, p. 385)

“Here I define political realism, provisionally, as a family of approaches to the study, practice, and normative evaluation of politics that (a) affirms the autonomy (or, more minimally, the distinctiveness) of politics; (b) takes disagreement, conflict, and power to be ineradicable and constitutive features of politics; (c) rejects as ‘utopian’ or ‘moralist’ those approaches, practices, and evaluations which seem to deny these facts; and (d) prioritizes political order and stability over justice (or, more minimally, rejects the absolute priority of justice over other political values)” (McQueen 2017, p. 297)

Political minimalism is in line with some of these views. For example, it does not start from an idealized conception of human nature. On the contrary, it predicts that the best answers to our political questions start from a deep understanding of the real circumstances in which these questions make sense.¹³ These circumstances include not only our authentic passions and emotions, but also the stark reality of what we truly fear and care for, and the limits of our capabilities. Besides, political minimalism posits that the quality of a political proposal hinges on its ability to utilize all the resources available for the community in an efficient and effective way (with the institutions that the community has already established playing a crucial role indeed), as well as its avoidance of unrealistic assumptions (such as overestimating the environment's capacity to restore natural resources or underestimating our enemies’ ability to fight back). On this view, politics demands not only the most accurate knowledge about the specific circumstances of each case, but also deep understanding of human and social psychology, history, and even scientific developments, technologies, and so forth.

In contrast, the minimalist does not share the idea that conflict and disagreement is fundamental for politics, nor that politics consists in the struggle for power. In the first half of the twentieth century, this conflictual conception of politics gained dominance due to its shared appeal across two opposing theoretical frameworks: those of Karl Marx, on the one hand, and Carl Schmidt, on the other. In more recent times, this conception has taken the postmodern form of an agonistic populist theory that renounces the possibility of rational mediation more explicitly (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). Although this renunciation may seem reasonable in certain cases such as the class struggle, or the struggle of the people against the elites, there are spaces in which, in addition to being unwarranted, it is extremely pernicious, for it hinders the possibility of developing tools and resources for fruitful political deliberation and action to take place.

Political minimalism defines politics, simply, as the sphere in which certain “we” ask themselves the question “what shall we do?”. The urge to answer this question can come from both inside the political community–because, in fact, there are conflicting interests that require being accommodated—and from outside–typically, because a novel circumstance demands the coordination of the members of the community to achieve some common ends. Certainly, internal coordination problems have been paramount in triggering political questions; yet, pursuing common ends in a collaborative way is also a frequent episode in our political lives. In fact, cooperation rather than conflict happens to be the origin of many political communities, and denying the political nature of these spaces unjustifiably restricts our understanding of the political and overlooks the presence of ideology, binding norms, regulations, etc. within them.

Of course, it is one thing to deny that conflict is the raison d'être of politics and another to suppose that the suitability of our specific answers to political questions will one day cease to be a matter of controversy. Yet, in a far-off world where agents were always willing to cooperate and to quit the pursuit of their particular interests for the sake of the common good, there would still be room for politics and for giving better or worse answers to the question "what shall we do?". Without going so far, a closer look at the diverse political reality of our days reveals that, fortunately, these communities of cooperation do come into being from time to time. Such kind of political practice is undoubtedly valuable, also from a political point of view.

On the other hand, although, as we have seen, political minimalism does not start from an idealized conception of politics or human nature, and avoids any appeal to an ideal theory to outline the framework of political normativity or of good political practice, it has no difficulty in recognizing the political function of utopian projects, ideals, principles, etc. In principle, this would be an advantage of minimalism, because a recurring criticism to realism is its tendency to privilege the status quo in an unjustified way (Finlayson 2017).

Certainly, “a ‘well-ordered society’ is rarely attainable” and, most of the times, we just manage to coexist without agreeing neither on first principles nor on ideals. However, it is difficult to dismiss the role that first principles, ideals and utopian thinking have played throughout history. From the perspective of minimalism, ideals and utopias serve political deliberation insofar as they encourage us to set ambitious ends, and first principles can be useful if they serve to avoid shortcuts whose consequences may be undesirable in the long run.

Although some authors have tried to defend the transformative potential of realism (e.g., Prinz and Rossi 2017; Rossi 2019), minimalism would allow us to go beyond what ideology critique and political genealogy allow, without falling into a sterile utopianism. Thus, beyond the mere denunciation of the contradictions of the status quo, political philosophy could be as idealistic and utopian as human creativity allows, provided that it effectively manages to offer good answers to the question "what shall we do?". In turn, being able to analyze the political function of ideals, principles, and utopias (both in cases where they have led to unquestionable social improvements, and in cases where they have led to bad, even nefarious scenarios), should serve to free us from naivety, but also from fear.