In this project, I try to make sense of the distinction between ideal and non-ideal theory in political philosophy, and to explore whether the former can inform the latter in the way John Rawls and others think it can. According to the popular ‘ideal guidance’ view of ideal theory, ideal theory formulates principles of justice intended to guide how we do non-ideal theory, which specifies how we ought to design and operate institutions in the real world.
In a paper published in Social Theory and Practice, I defend the controversial full compliance assumption in ideal theory. Critics of ideal theory commonly point out that Rawls makes this assumption to avoid the difficult issue of how to design incentives that will actually make people compliant. By clarifying the role of full compliance in the ideal-theory model of fairness, I show how this criticism is misguided. However, I also demonstrate how principal-agent problems impose restrictions on the role this model can serve in non-ideal theory. I show why it cannot be the target to steer towards in non-ideal theory that Rawls and other ideal guidance theorists take it to be.
I further develop ideal theory’s ‘fairness role’ in a paper in Journal of Value Inquiry. Under ideal conditions of full compliance, everyone enjoys a just distribution of primary goods. Under non-ideal conditions, there is partial compliance and this ideal distribution is not realised. But the ideal model can be used as a constraints on attempts to improve the situation. In particular, it is unfair to require someone with no greater share of primary goods than would have under ideal conditions to sacrifice some of their primary goods for the benefit of others. In the paper, I also consider problems for a fairness constraint and how much weight it should carry.
The ideal theory project is in part developed in collaboration with Keith Dowding. With Keith, I explore more in depth the problems of the idea that ideal theory can guide non-ideal theorising. In ideal theory, we take a highly abstract view of social institutions that hides from view the micro-level of social institutions at which we see how act on their personal motivations. While we can introduce rules to guide the behaviour of these individuals, we cannot see how they respond to, and how they ‘game’, these rules.
This micro-level information, we argue, is crucial for guiding institutions. And since this information is not available in ideal theory, ideal theory cannot serve the guidance role many expect it to serve.
Principles that can actually guide the development of social institutions can therefore not be formulated in ideal theory. Such principles must instead be formed in continuous interaction with what social science tells us about how people respond to the incentives we introduce for the sake of improving our institutions.
What we can do without this input from social science is to formulate fact-insensitive principles that tell us about the nature of some value, such as justice, without telling us how to achieve it. We see the value in such principles in what we call ‘axiomatic-deductive theory’, which differs from ‘ideal theory’ in that it does not tell us how we ought to organize our society, all things considered. However, specifying the states of affairs in which principles are, or are not, co-satisfiable helps us consider whether, or to what extent, they should inform our non-ideal theorising.
G. A. Cohen proposes an axiomatic-deductive theory when he shows how equality, Pareto efficiency, and freedom of occupational choice are compatible when individuals are motivated by egalitarian values. This is an example of how ideal principles can be fitted together to criticise people’s preferences. In Cohen’s case, their non-egalitarian preferences. If we add preference-neutrality to the mix, we get a set of values that cannot be co-satisfied. This is what Sam Bowles does in his work on the moral economy to show why we must reject preference-neutrality and consider how we can make people adopt more social preferences in order to work towards a more egalitarian and efficient society.
These are my published papers on ideal and non-ideal theory so far:
2022. How Do You Like Your Justice, Bent or Unbent? Moral Philosophy and Politics (special issue on Estlund’s Utopophobia). Published online.
2022. Ideal Theory and Its Fairness Role. Journal of Value Inquiry. Published online.
2022. Making Sense of Full Compliance. Social Theory and Practice 48(2): 285–308.
2022. Three Roles of Ideal Theory. Ethics, Politics & Society 5(2): 96–108 (invited for special issue on Rawls).