Abstract
The paper argues that modern political life faces a seemingly irresolvable contradiction. On the one hand, a moral judgement in politics can refer only to the consequences of any policy. On the other hand, in modern society no consequences can be reasonably predicted at the moment a decision is taken. This renders political life unbearable from the moral point of view, because almost any political decision is likely subject to failure in the future. The solution to this dilemma is to understand modern politics as a contract of fallibility, according to which citizens agree to withhold their moral judgements, as long as others do not act as if they assume their own infallibility. The adoption of such a theory might remove the sense of inescapable failure from ethically inclined political actors and emancipate our political discourse from irrational moralistic absolutism. In addition, the contract of fallibility can serve as the most economical justification of modern representative democracy.
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Notes
Hannah Arendt (1998, pp. 243–247) may have come closest to what is suggested here, having emphasized the problem of unpredictability and the role of promise in mitigating the effects of such unpredictability. However, she does not suggest anything remotely reminiscent of the contract of fallibility.
There is a vast amount of literature on the subject of forgiveness. For an example, see Digeser (1998).
See Smith (1976, p. 67). A third position is sometimes suggested. It assigns the quality of the good neither to the motive nor to the outcome, but to the action itself. Some advocates of ‘absolutism’ tend to adopt this position (for example, Nagel, 1972, p. 130). Yet I am not persuaded by this position. One can always ask why the good action is good. And two possible answers to this question (presented separately or in combination) are: it is good because it springs from a good motive; or, it is good because it leads to a good situation. What the notion of the good action beyond these two possibilities means remain beyond my comprehension.
Or, if we interpret Kant's ethics as divorced from any consequential considerations, its foundations, again, can be found only in the idea of the primacy of an autonomous will. Any good, following to other persons from a good action, is incidental to the essence of the action, even if inevitable.
On the importance of character, see, for example, Dobel (1999).
‘[R]isk society is provoking an obscene gamble … I am held accountable for decisions which I was forced to make without proper knowledge of the situation’ (Beck, 1999, p. 78).
‘Human judgement tends to be tragic judgement. It continually confronts a reality that it can never fully master, but to which it must none the less reconcile itself’. (Beiner, 1983, p. 119)
For example, the guiding principle of the medical profession ‘not to harm’.
The unpredictability I refer to is not the unpredictability of technological risk, but that of human interaction. Unlike Ulrich Beck and other theorists of ‘risk society’ (for example, Beck, 1999, pp. 50–52; Lupton, 1999, pp. 3–4), I believe that the level of unpredictability was already very high long before the dawn of ‘late modernity’. The intensification of unpredictability was an outcome of the formation and strengthening of rival modern states and especially of the apparatus of policy implementation at the disposal of the rulers of those states.
For example, the theory of deliberative democracy can be seen as one of many possible conceptualizations of this continuous trial-and-error exercise in political life. On deliberative democracy, see Gutmann and Thompson (2004).
It is not only that ‘the overlapping consensus’ resting on ‘shared moral … reasons’ (Forst, 2001, p. 367) must exist in order for citizens to be deliberative citizens. It is also that one can hardly imagine how any society could function without presupposing at least some form of moral consensus, however loose that consensus might be.
This argument is named by Albert Hirschman (1991, pp. 11–35) ‘the perversity thesis’. Hirschman is right to suggest that the instances in which the perverse effect actually takes place are not as frequent as those who invoke it seem to believe (p. 38). Nevertheless, it is sufficient for my argument to establish that the perverse effect sometimes happens, and that we can never be sure in advance whether it is going to take place in our particular case.
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Podoksik, E. The contract of fallibility. Contemp Polit Theory 8, 394–414 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2009.5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2009.5