The lexical priority given in contemporary theorising to respecting pluralism concerning ideas of the good life in contemporary societies rather than views about what ‘the good society’ would look like, and the belief that this priority implies that the needs/wants distinction has become obsolete, implies that the authors’ arguments reviewed in this paper will be seen as distinctively illiberal and that they are therefore at risk of being regarded as no longer of much use when thinking about distributive justice for contemporary societies. Since these historical arguments are based on specific theories of the good life, natural/divine law or equality being derived from a divine decree, contemporary political philosophers may be prone to thinking that those ideas are incompatible with a liberal pluralist society. We wonder if that conclusion is premature; instead, we think this is a question that warrants further analysis. An historical awareness of proto-limitarian arguments should prompt scholars developing limitarianism as a contemporary systematic view to question the dominance of theories that deny the legitimacy of making the distinction between needs and wants and giving this distinction a central role in the development of theories of distributive justice, including the limitarian view. Matthias Kramm & Ingrid Robeyns "Limits to wealth in the history of Western philosophy"
The passage just quoted is from a concluding section of fascinating survey article (forthcoming in The European Journal of Philosophy) about engagement with limitarian ideas in the history of western philosophy. The implied audience is fellow scholars who may wish to develop limitarianism as a contemporary systematic view. But I think their argument, and this passage in particular, is worth reflecting on for those of us who care for the health and emancipatory promise of a liberalism worth having.
For, it is not intrinsic to liberalism to find the needs/want distinction obsolete or to reject the very idea of a 'good society.' I suspect there are three worries lurking in the background here, and I address them in turn. First, one can be a genuine pluralist about fundamental ends and accept the needs/want distinction. Here's one way that would go: one may well think that human needs are objective features of the human condition even if the list of needs and the extent of their need-ness is in some sense culturally relative. (I think the previous sentence describes Adam Smith's and J.S. Mill's position just fine--they both had studied Aristotle carefully, of course.) To say this is not to deny that there will be cases of purported needs that give liberals pause or that the mixture of needs can generate serious tensions within various emancipatory projects. In fact, the fulfillment of needs are, in practice, the pre-conditions to emancipation or autonomous or happy or authentic lives (etc.); that is to say, rather than preventing pluralism the very possibility of a liberal pluralism may well require that needs are met (and so rely on some distinction between needs and wants). [Of course, Robeyns' own work on capabilities can be deployed here.] The old terminology between necessary goods and other less necessary (convenient/luxury, etc.) good captured this insight nicely. Of course, needs/wants distinction can be used for illiberal ends, but that's true for other excellent distinctions worth having.
Commitment to the good society is also compatible with a pluralist liberalism (recall this post on Lippmann and the references back to Grouchy and Smith). Yes, of course, there are versions of the good society that are neither pluralist nor liberal, but it is not intrinsic to the concept. It's true that a good society is incompatible with state neutrality. But neutrality is not required for liberalism. For, a state can be impartial in various desirable ways, without being, say, neutral about various liberal commitments and institutions (to due process, fair and equal elections, the rule of law, a free press, etc.) As the (agonistic) critics of liberalism never fail to say, these liberal commitments already presuppose non-trivial commitments and even an implied background consensus about what makes a life worth living (sometimes these commitments are inherited from religion or republicanism, so they all deserve scrutiny). I return to this point below.
Liberalism is not neutral about its own survival--if liberal procedures generate totalitarian societies, we think that a disaster. If liberal practices generate a dysfunctional public sphere, or pervasive criminality, or an epidemic of opiate or psychological problems, liberals recognize these as genuine problems not mere bugs. (Liberals pay more than mere lip-service to output legitimacy.) That is to say,the very idea of a 'public' (as in public opinion, public reason, and public sphere) presupposes something like a good society one that is flourishing in objective ways (public health, safety, life expectancy, etc.) Again, these will be characteristics that are presuppositions to liberal pluralism.
Second, what the previous three paragraphs suggest is that there is a considerable grey zone between embracing a particular version of the good life, and embracing a good society or the needs/want distinction. I don't mean to deny that some versions of the good life are incompatible with liberal society. But as the critics of liberalisms correctly note, some profoundly illiberal versions of the good life are not welcome in liberal society (or at least ought not be welcome). As it happens liberalism can accommodate many illiberal life plans, but it is possible (in a genuine sense, not just on Mars) that imperial dictatorships can accommodate more illiberal life plans and even some liberal ones. But this is not an objection to liberalism. The more important point is that in the evolving set of practices and doctrines that constitute liberalism, we always rule out some versions of the good life. And we rule in lives worthy of citizens' "devoted allegiance."
Third, one may object that the previous paragraph misses the real point, what drives the rejection of the needs/want distinction and the good society is not a concern over pluralism or ruling out of some illiberal versions of the good life, but misguided paternalism. This is a real risk, of course. Some libertarians may well worry about embracing needs/want distinction out of fear that it will invite paternalist policies. And these are often the very people who also worry that any concern with distributive justice is a slippery slope to Stalinism (or limitarianism)! But this position is not widely accepted; when Hayek or Milton Friedman argue for some minimal safety net they often do so while relying on a need/wants distinction.*
Of course, there is a sense in which the previous three paragraphs miss the worry, as Kramm and Robeyns imply, that modern post-Rawlsian liberalism has come to see that previous versions of liberalism illicitly smuggled rather substantive illiberal commitments into their justifications for the yery idea of a needs/wants distinction or a good society. That is, of course, possible in some circumstances and needs to be evaluated on a case by case basis. But while liberals reject veneration of antiquity or the tradition, in the great experiment of liberalism there is no requirement that those who come later are a fortiori more in the right than those who come before. To put the point I am hinting at polemically: if post-Rawlsian liberalism cannot embrace the good society,+ so much the worse for it.
*So, for example, Hayek recognizes that preventing starvation of the populace is a compelling state interest "in the Western world." (The provision of the need may be private, of course!)
+I think Rawls on justice actually presupposes a commitment to a good society (or, as he would put it, a comprehensive ideal). But this is not the place to offer a reading of the last chapter of The Theory of Justice.
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