Politics, politics

Let's say I wanted to argue against Elizabeth Anderson's version of deontic sufficientarianism called "democratic equality". How would I do this? Well, one obvious starting point might be to take the theory and point out implications that might seem particularly absurd, i.e., Anderson's theory says x, but in the following scenario, x is absurd, therefore we ought to revise the theory in light of the new findings for this particular scenario.

But this line of argument is particularly tricky. It's likely that a retort would come back as follows: "you think that in your scenario x is absurd, but it isn't!" How does one respond to this? Or, consider the line of argument given my Larry Temkin against the Slogan (that a situation cannot be worse than another if there is no one for whom it is worse): we wouldn't accept the Slogan because don't we feel that the slogan is too restrictive in cases of, say proportional justice (namely: a situation is better if it's worse for sinners)? Answer from Slogan supporters: no! Proportional justice is absurd if it conflicts with the Slogan!

The frustrating thing about these debates in political philosophy, in part, is that political philosophy was supposed to be somehow more tractable than, say, debates in normative and applied ethics--James Raches v. Judy Thomson, for example. After all, it seems as though there is some mechanism for resolving such disputes, i.e., the original position, or some other sort of state of nature argument. But it looks as though that conjecture isn't holding up. Intuition-pumping arguments have seemed to creep up in political philosophy just as much, and it's become just as frustrating to try to navigate these disagreements. (I'm not the only one who's noticed this phenomenon; Charlie Kurth gets big-ups.)

The abandonment of rigorous theoretical commitments in favor of intuition-pumping arguments is, I think, detrimental, but it is not clear at all that the idea that political philosophy was somehow more tractable wasn't just an illusion after all. I mean, Rawls himself suggests that we need to tinker with the original position to get it to match our considered judgments. With a few refinements, that procedure is referred to as reflective equilibrium. And it's not clear that social contract theory relies any less heavily on these sort of mechanisms, such as the Slogan that are seemingly only argued for by pointing at intuitions and scenarios.

So how do we overcome this problem and engage people who disagree with each other on a level that is more than table-pounding? I think the answer is not to look for some new method, but rather to return to the old method, the one that Rawls so proudly proclaimed, though he acknowledges its existence in the works of Nelson Goodman, especially the famous deductive logic passage from Fact, Fiction, and Forecast. What needs to be done, and what hasn't been done, is to articulate whole theories and judge them at each level of generality. It is not enough simply to point to the levelling-down case to argue against egalitarianism. It is not enough simply to point to proportional justice to argue against the Slogan. Rather, we have to produce whole theories and judge the theories themselves along with the implications in given cases. The levelling down case is damaging, but perhaps it could be accepted if the theory itself is plausible enough. Proportional justice is something most people agree with, but perhaps it could be rejected if Slogan-heavy theories are otherwise plausible. We have to return to holistic justification. We cannot simply let our first-order intuitions (intuitions about individual cases) do our dirty work for us. Intuitions in moral argument are here to stay. But we have to be able to organize our thoughts in coherent patterns, and testing must occur not only at the first-order, but also at the second-order, third, etc.