The second wave of liberalism (recall) has ended and liberalism may not survive. Some readers will say, good riddance, and to you I say, I hope you do better. This is the ninth post (recall here (I); here (II); here (III); here (IV); here (V); (VI); (VII); and (VIII) in an open-ended series (see also here, here, here, here; and here).
In the late nineteenth century or early twentieth, roughly between Sidgwick and Robbins, there was a split -- a cognitive and institutional division of labor within utilitarianism --, in which the economists (and also some psychologists) got the empirical (or ['positive'] side of the enterprise, and the philosophers obtained the normative side of the project (see here for scholarship). Of course, in practice bits of economics were certainly explicitly or implicitly normative (think of welfare economics, bayesian or rational decision theory, etc.), and naturally the normative, philosophical side of the enterprise drew on and, perhaps, sometimes even constituted empirical material (e.g., decision theory, formal epistemology, etc.). Utilitarianism is by no means that hegemonic anymore in philosophy, but the split has, despite (say) PPE scholarship largely persisted. In addition, not all utilitarianism is intrinsically liberal (I return to that below).
This division of labor has had an unintended effect on liberalism as a governing political ideology, or its art of government. For, it is characteristic of long stretches of liberalism, as a would be art of government, that it integrates normative and empirical stances in a particular way. In particular, that a receptivity toward non-zero-sum constitutional arrangements and policy strategies in which normative and (enlightened) self-interested or prudential arguments tend to reinforce and be mixed with each other. An enduring example of this kind of receptivity is the openness toward immigration and open borders, which are good for economic growth and the right thing to do for individuals (especially vulnerable ones).
What made such receptivity toward a non-zero-sum art of government so valuable is that it also allowed politicians and social movement leaders to cobble together potentially enduring coalitions and winning majorities in different local contexts. And because it is also a trans-national doctrine it provides a framework for international collaboration and win-win activities. And while perpetual peace is rather utopian, enduring alliances and friendships are worthy pay-offs.
Yes, I know some of you are fierce critics of liberalism, and you are eager to emphasize liberalism's fatal complicity in imperialism and racialized, settler colonialism, its permissiveness of oligarchic tendencies, its one-sided obsession with revolutionary movements which defend the have-nots, or (more recently) its fusionist embrace of religious nationalists (Stateside), and the carceral state (with law and order sliding into a for-profit prison industry complex). In each case your criticism is probably well taken. More subtly, these tactical, even strategic mistakes are the effect of the fact that liberalism intrinsically pursues a diversity of ends, and receptivity toward non-zero-sum strategies provide space for genuine policy/political mistakes. For, of course, liberalism's lapses in principle are nearly always the same side of the coin of pursuing non-zero-sum strategies, they are the roots of what gave liberal ideology its vitality within political and social life. And (looking ahead to my book on Foucault and neoliberalism) I am pretty confident that this is what attracted Foucault to neoliberalism warts and all at the end of his life.
But my interest today is not to persuade the critic of liberalism or to justify my political inclinations to her. (And so in this post I also ignore the objection that liberalism is intrinsically finished; that the material and sociological conditions that give rise to it have been completed.) Rather, I want to diagnose a problem for liberalism as a would be social movement and political ideal. For, with the split, philosophical liberalism has become increasingly normative in a moralistic, and relatively one-sided way such that theory tells us that [A] from the status quo baseline, movements toward a more just world or an environmentally sound world demand enormous changes and sacrifices from not the least liberalism's core political constituencies--trapping would be policy-makers and liberal political agents in zero-sum environments.* Turning political philosophy into applied ethics also has had the tendency to make it primarily a symbolic, oppositional project not fit for real governance.
And, yes, philosophical radicalism -- the specific English political branch of utilitarianism --, has been revived in recent times by Peter Singer with great vigor feeding into effective altruism and animal rights movements catching the imagination of educated citizens who want to make a difference. But in its contemporary manifestation this radicalism is self-consciously anti-liberal (see its special fondness for government house politics) and it often pursues its ends with seats at technocratic tables where the lives it wishes to reform or impact are not properly represented (e.g., emission trading schemes that disproportionally hurt the already poor), and where due to its lack of interest in how we got to the particular status quo, major social injustices go unrecognized (and uncompensated).
Of course, I am not the first to notice any of this. Marxists have discerned that liberal political philosophy is dominant in the academy, and provides financial and status rewards to its practitioners (including participation in NGOs, government advice councils, international organizations), but leaves everything pretty much untouched. (As I have noted this is the message of In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (2019) by Katrina Forrester.) So-called realist critics of this tendency of symbolic moralizing have tried to carve out a space, even one with lexical priority, in which certain kind of demands of political life can override the moralization of public life pursued by liberal political theory. But this project has little to offer programmatically.
Before I wrap up, I want to forestall an objection. Given the way the academy works, we should expect continued drift toward, and increasing significance of, applied ethics; and, so the objection goes, a lot of such applied ethics takes the stance of the government bureaucrat (who must, say, ration, or allocate benefits). And, while sometimes [see my paragraph on philosophical radicalism above] this slides into illiberalism, often such applied ethics is self-consciously liberal in all kinds of ways (with an embrace of autonomy, fairness, liberal egalitarianism, etc.). So, in this technocratic sense liberalism is not dead at all in applied ethics and the ways it infiltrates governance. (This objection also applies to my work I was intending to do on financial credit before I got long covid.)
But such technocratic projects are by definition elite; they do not form a sound basis for mass politics (try thinking about the political consequences of embracing a carbon tax). And while liberalism may not aspire to being a majoritarian stance, in its most flourishing periods it certainly had the capacity to mobilize pluralities.
It may be too late to recover a strictly philosophical flank for a liberal movement that is not focused, in one-sided fashion on, or privileges, ethics. Disciplines get entrenched and they find topics of study that are intrinsic and worthy to them, and the felt needs of its members. With working conditions in the academy become so mediocre for so many, it is no surprise that it is becoming a feeding ground among the young for more radical political ideologies than the sober non-zero-sum liberalism I advocate. That the academy becomes a bastion of countercultural thought may well be healthy for society (and perhaps the academy).
But I do not see these trends as a reason to despair for my ilk (although I am on the skeptical, non-dogmatic end of such non-zero-sum liberalism). Such liberalism promises individual emancipation, mutual enrichment, freedom, and sings the praises of prudence, and in many perhaps undiscovered combinations this remains a powerful drug on politicians and their followers; it gains it vitality from the daily experiments in living on the margins of society and in the daily conflicts of our multicultural societies. And, as I expect, once non-zero-sum liberalism is the minority in the academy certain lazy habits of thought will be challenged and this will improve it; and if the formation of liberal political ideology moves out of the academy and closer to social movements/interests and political parties that would be a blessing in disguise.
*There are ways of reading (say) Rawls' difference principle as win-win, but to get to circumstances where this is so requires massive social changes/redistribution. And so as a guide to transition (say to property owning democracy), it's a zero-sum philosophy.
Rawls connects his idealizations with the real world of politics in several ways, among these, the Four-Stage sequence. In section 31, there is a citation to Arrow. (There is also a deprecating footnote to Buchanan and Tullock in that section.) I think this is probably a response to Arrow's impossibility theorem, but I have not yet pursued this.
Another way Rawls connects his idealization with real-world politics is his theory of the moral justification of civil disobedience. This is Rawls's main example of non-ideal (or partial compliance) politics. Civil disobedience demands an unusually idealized view of politics, as compared with other forms of political activity, but it occurs in the real world with real consequences, not on paper.
Rawls discusses how a participant in civil disobedience has to assume that society is close enough to justice for her actions to make sense. He also discusses overlapping consensus there, among other things.
At the same time, the civilly disobedient person has the same real-world problems as any participant in any political activity. These raise questions of strategy, political aims, and the possibility that one's choices of aims require the sacrifice of other aims, so the problem you raise about zero-sum outcomes. Tradeoffs, however, occur in the third of the four stages of decision-making, whereas civil disobedience addresses citizens in at an earlier stage of this idealized process.
Forrester's book disappointed me on civil disobedience, despite all her archival work on it. Perhaps that is because she assumes that political theory has only certain kinds of real-world effects. (Also, it is hard to be a successful academic while also having done enough civil disobedience to reflect on its practice.)
Posted by: Aaron Lercher | 05/05/2022 at 08:48 PM