Abstract
Political realists complain that much contemporary political philosophy is insufficiently attentive to various facts about politics yet some political philosophers insist that any critique of normative claims on grounds of unrealism is misplaced. In this paper I focus on the methodological position G.A. Cohen champions in order assess the extent to which this retort succeeds in nullifying the realist critique of contemporary political philosophy. I argue that Cohen’s work does not succeed in doing so because the political principles that we are prepared to endorse are hostage to various fact-sensitive judgements about how they apply to the political domain. I then argue that this discredits various philosophical approaches to political theorising which begin by utilising non-political thought-experiments, such as Cohen’s own Why Not Socialism?
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Notes
Other notable contributions to the realist countermovement include Honig (1993), Mouffe (1993), Philp (2007) and Newey (2001). For more general discussions of the realism/moralism dispute see Stears (2007), Philp (forthcoming), as well as the essays collected in edited collection by Floyd and Stears (2011), and the edition of the European Journal of Political Theory dedicated to ‘realism’ (2010).
I should head-off the suggestion that this argument fails on the grounds that if one claims principle p should be rejected because its practical application in politics is unattractive, this judgement must rest on an implicit commitment to another principle that may, as Cohen claims, be insensitive to matters of fact. This seems true enough, but I do not think this frees the Cohenite from the realist critique because if this is all that Cohen proves he must accept that we are only prepared to endorse various political principles that various facts about their implementation do not lead us to reject, and that seems to make political philosophy importantly fact-sensitive.
Barry (1975) is perhaps the best example of this response. This focus on externalities does not suggest a consequentialist bias but merely points to a justificatory methodology like Rawls’s reflective equilibrium. I thank Sune Lægaard for this point.
Thus Jubb argues that ‘whether we have reason to believe a principle depends on its plausibility—on whether it is epistemically grounded—and that depends on what, as a matter of fact, it demands that we do, making judgments about it fact-sensitive’ (2009, p. 344). With this sort of claim in mind I am in broad agreement with much of the criticism that Cohen’s metaethical position has already received both in regards to its practical importance and as a critique of Rawls in particular. See on this Jubb (2009), Kurtumulas (2009), Pogge (2008) and Ronzoni and Valentini (2008).
I do not mean to imply that human nature is necessarily like this, the point is to consider what to think about socialism, at the level of principle, if it is.
The Cohenite might point out that in making this claim I endorse another fundamental, fact-insensitive, principle, namely: ‘people should not be repressed’. I am perfectly happy to accept this but, as I have already said, this shows the severe limitations of using his metaethical claim to rebut the realist challenge because reflection on various political facts is still of central importance to justification and therefore thinking about which political principles we should ultimately endorse.
As Gilabert recognises, this is where Cohen’s split between the normative and the prescriptive falls down because, contra Cohen, political philosophy does not just ask us what we should think, it asks us what we should think about what we must do (Gilabert 2011, p. 58).
Moreover, the indirect pursuit of such an ideal encounters the well-known second best problem. See (Goodin 1995) for an interesting discussion of this problem.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank audiences at the 2011 Nordic Network on Political Ethics conference and the LSE Political Theory seminar, and especially Paul Kelly, Pietro Maffetone, Catriona McKinnon, Yonathan Reshef, Luke Ulas and the referees and editors of Res Publica for their comments. I would also like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding the doctorate during which this paper was written.
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Hall, E. Political Realism and Fact-Sensitivity. Res Publica 19, 173–181 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-012-9199-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-012-9199-x