Reconstructing Public Reason 9780674274938

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RECONSTRUCTING PUBLIC REASON

ERIC MACGILVRAY

Reconstructing Public Reason

HAR VARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England 2004

Copyright © 2004 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data MacGilvray, Eric, 1971– Reconstructing public reason / Eric MacGilvray. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-674-01542-8 (alk. paper) 1. Liberalism. 2. Pragmatism. 3. Political science. I. Title. JC574.M27 2004 320.51’3—dc22 2004052276

to Daniel Frank MacGilvray and Patricia Dale MacGilvray in loving memory

Contents

Acknowledgments

xi

Abbreviations

xv

Introduction: The Task before Us

1

1. The Present Dilemma 1 2. What Pragmatism Is (and Is Not) 6 3. Overview 13 I . TO WA R D A P R A G MA T I C T H E O R Y O F PO L I T I C A L J U S T I F I C A T I O N 1

The Tyranny of Minimalism 1. Does Justification Matter? 21 2. The Limits of Proceduralism 25 3. The Limits of Agonism 31 4. Pragmatic Justification 37 5. Beyond Minimalism 41

21

2

Prospectivism and “The Will to Believe” 1. Scope of the Problem 46 2. Belief and Will 52 3. Belief and Evidence 56 4. Belief and Context 63 5. Pragmatism and the Will to Believe 67

46

viii • Contents

3

Narrative and Moral Reasoning 1. Narrative and Moral Experience 72 2. Narrative and Moral Ontology 76 3. Narrative and Evidence 81 4. Narrative and Doubt 85 5. Narrative and Public Discourse 90

72

I I P R A G M A T I S M A N D D E MO C R A C Y 4

Against a Second Pragmatic Acquiescence 1. Acquiescent Pragmatism 97 2. The Problem of Context 102 3. Experience as Experiment 106 4. Science and Democracy 112 5. Pragmatism and Egalitarianism 116

97

5

Against Deweyan Democracy 1. The Deweyan Revival 121 2. The Hegelian Deposit 126 3. Individuality and Community 131 4. The Problem with the Public 137 5. Dewey’s Enduring Contribution 144

121

I I I PO L I T I C A L L I B E R A L I S M 6

Political Liberalism and the Limits of the Political 1. Desiderata 153 2. Public Justifiability 157 3. Right and Reasonable 163 4. Right and Good 167 5. Public Reason and Reasonable Disagreement 172 6. Two Difficulties 176

153

7

Public Reason and Public Institutions 1. Embodying Public Reason 181 2. Disagreement, Consensus, and Respect 185 3. The Judicial Model 190 4. Insincerity Examined 194

181

Contents • ix

5. The Federal Model 198 6. Is Injustice Justifiable? 203 8

The Fact of Reasonable Pluralism 1. The Pluralist Narrative 208 2. Is Pluralism Necessary? 213 3. Is Pluralism Permanent? 217 4. The Fallibilist Narrative 221 5. Fallibilism without Skepticism 225 6. Legitimacy without Neutrality 230

208

Conclusion: Liberalism after Minimalism

235

Index

243

Acknowledgments

One of the great pleasures of finishing a project like this is having the opportunity to publicly thank the many people and institutions who have had a hand in its creation. I am completing the book at the end of a ten-year association with the University of Chicago, first as a graduate student and then as a lecturer in the College. I am indebted not only to numerous friends, colleagues, teachers, and students there—only some of whom I will be able to single out by name below—but, more broadly, to the uniquely fertile intellectual culture of this remarkable university. I would like to mention in particular the interdisciplinary Political Theory Workshop, which was in many respects my first intellectual home and to which much of what follows was presented in one form or another. The book began its life as a doctoral thesis under the supervision of Charles Larmore, Marion Smiley, and Jean Bethke Elshtain. My intellectual debt to Larmore will, I think, be obvious, especially in the later chapters. Harder to convey is the deeper role that he played as the exceptionally conscientious chair of the dissertation committee. He will find much to disagree with in what follows, but I hope that he is also able to recognize the profound influence that he has had not only on my thoughts but on my way of thinking. Marion Smiley took me on as a student when she had no institutional obligation to do so, and has been unfailingly generous with her advice and encouragement. My intellectual debt to her, especially in Part II of the book, will also be

xii Acknowledgments

apparent to anyone who is familiar with her work. Jean Elshtain provided support and incisive criticism at a time when I was very much in need of both, and her skepticism about pragmatism has helped to deepen my own thinking about what I find valuable (and problematic) in this tradition of thought. In singling out the specific contributions of a number of other individuals I inevitably abstract from the larger context of friendship and intellectual community in which the book was written and in which their contributions were made. Michael Neblo offered innumerable stimulating conversations on topics related and unrelated, provided detailed written comments on the entire manuscript, and had the patience to respond at length to a number of rejoinders. Chad Flanders and I kept up a running exchange on various incarnations of the arguments in Part III over a period of several months, which helped enormously to bring them into sharper focus. I would also like to thank Marc Blitz, Bill Caspary, Chad Cyrenne, Kirk Greer, Gary Herrigel, Jeff Isaac, Jim Johnson, Jack Knight, Jacob Levy, Susan Liebell, David Mandell, Peter Manicas, Bernard Manin, Patchen Markell, Steve Monte, Don Moon, Viren Murthy, Andrew Rehfeld, Frank Sposito, Tracy Strong, Stephen White, Masashi Yazawa, Iris Young, Catherine Zuckert, and a number of anonymous reviewers for their comments on portions of the manuscript. I am, of course, solely responsible for the errors that remain despite their efforts. Versions of several chapters were presented at various annual meetings of the Midwest, Southwest, and American Political Science Associations and before audiences at Johns Hopkins University, Middlebury College, the University of Notre Dame, Princeton University, and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. I would like to thank the audiences on those occasions, for their stimulating comments, and my hosts at the latter institutions in particular, for helping to make my visits run smoothly. An early version of Chapter 4 appeared in Political Theory 28, No. 4 (August 2000) under the title “Five Myths about Pragmatism, or, Against a Second Pragmatic Acquiescence.” I would like to thank Michael Aronson and his colleagues at Harvard University Press for their enthusiasm and their patience, and especially for their confidence in giving me the latitude to reshape the argument by my own lights.

Acknowledgments

xiii

Finally, I would like to thank Nathan Tarcov and John Lucy at the University of Chicago for helping to arrange a teaching leave in the fall of 2001, during which the penultimate draft of the manuscript was completed. The final version was completed at the beginning of a sabbatical year as Sesquicentenary Fellow in the Discipline of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney, Australia, and I am grateful to my colleagues there for making my stay such an exceptionally pleasant and productive one. Thanks are also due to the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, for granting me the leave year. My greatest debts are to my wife, Karen, and my daughter, Ellie, for sustaining me in a very literal sense through a very long process. Karen was unfailingly patient in dealing with a writer’s mood swings, and her encouragement and sense of humor were essential to maintaining my sense of perspective during the times when the book threatened to become an all-consuming task. Ellie contributed her unique and infectious brand of good spirits. Both of them have taught me, each in her own way, something incalculable about the human capacity for love. I still have much to learn. The book is dedicated to my parents, my sine qua non in every respect.

Abbreviations

Collected Papers

Early Works

Middle Works

Later Works

Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur W. Burks (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931–1958), 8 vols. John Dewey, The Early Works, 1882–1898, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967–1972), 5 vols. John Dewey, The Middle Works, 1899–1924, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976–1983), 13 vols. John Dewey, The Later Works, 1925–1953, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981–1991), 17 vols.

RECONSTRUCTING PUBLIC REASON

INTRODUCTION

The Task before Us

1. The Present Dilemma We live, as we are often told, in an increasingly complex and interdependent world, one in which political and economic systems of enormous scope and power shape our opportunities—and thus, inevitably, our aspirations—to an unprecedented degree. It is nothing new to point out that cherished beliefs and values are being distorted and even destroyed by the imperatives of production and trade. What many of us lack today is an assurance that there is some course of action open to us—some coherent program of reform or revolution—that might help us to recover a sense of self-mastery in the face of these larger forces. Any candid observer must acknowledge the decline of the orthodoxies that governed premodern societies; nevertheless, we have reason to fear that the dissemination of commercial institutions and practices over time will bring with it an orthodoxy of an even more rigid and pervasive kind. This narrowing of our moral horizons is, for better or worse, the distinguishing feature of our time. We must ask ourselves in response not only whether these developments are conducive to our well-being (as well founded as our doubts on that point may be), but also whether we can answer this question with any confidence, given the difficulties involved in pursuing, or even conceiving of, substantial alternatives. This challenge—the challenge of articulating and pursuing alternatives to prevailing social practices—is, I believe, the most urgent task that lies before us as citizens of the modern world. 1

2 • Introduction

As with any widespread set of practices, the authority of the present order rests in part upon a particular set of beliefs about the nature and conditions of human flourishing—beliefs that command a broad, if often only tacit, allegiance. One obvious way to respond to our state of evaluative uncertainty, then, would be to examine the adequacy of these beliefs when compared to the available alternatives. Of course, to approach the problem from this angle is to oversimplify matters to some extent. Important historical, sociological, political, and economic factors are often obscured when we look at the world through the lens of beliefs and ideals, and these factors, taken in themselves, can often help us to understand, and thus gain a certain measure of control over, the social world. Still, the effort to understand our practices in terms of the beliefs and ideals that underlie them allows us to pose a series of questions that are often obscured or given short shrift by scholars of a more narrowly empirical bent: How did these particular beliefs come to be so influential? Are they the best ones available to us, and what credentials can they present to support this claim? To the extent that we have reason to doubt that they are, how might they be challenged and revised? These questions place us firmly on the terrain of normative inquiry, and though it is hard to respond conclusively to those who doubt that moral and ethical beliefs play an important role in shaping social and political outcomes, the fruitfulness of a normative approach can best be measured by the range of theoretical and practical insights that we gain by wrestling with questions like these. As the reader can perhaps guess by gauging the heft of this volume, I will not address all of these questions here; in fact, I will focus almost exclusively on the third one. This is a book about how we decide, or ought to decide, which ends to pursue as a political community; that is to say, it is a book about the nature and prospects of political justification. My aim is to show that the prevailing approach to justification is ill suited for meeting the challenge of articulating and pursuing alternatives to the emerging social and political order, and to defend an approach, based upon a pragmatic reconstruction of political liberalism, that is more adequate to this task. This may seem a rather narrow way of responding to the very broad concerns that I have raised, but surely the first step in critical inquiry must be to structure normative discourse in such a way that alternatives can be investigated in a fair and intelligent manner. After all, the question “Are our current beliefs and practices the best ones available

Introduction • 3

to us?” presupposes an answer to the prior question: “How could we know whether they are or not?” The latter question is, properly speaking one of justification. Moreover, by narrowing the scope of the argument in this way I hope to find common cause, not only with those who view the present state of affairs with alarm, but also with those who are able to accept it with relative equanimity. Whatever our views on this matter, I hope we can agree that a world in which alternatives to the emerging order cannot be articulated and, when appropriate, pursued is one in which, to paraphrase John Stuart Mill, even those who are in the right do not fully grasp their own position.1 This is a book written mainly for and about political theorists, a group that is perhaps uniquely sensitive to the dangers of ideological hegemony. Thus, even if my concerns are timely, my audience may seem to be poorly chosen indeed. Ironically, however, it is this very sensitivity, at least when expressed in a certain way, that lies at the root of the problem that I want to address. Political theorists today are intensely and appropriately preoccupied with the question of how we might best show respect for the many kinds of diversity that we find in modern societies. This concern to accommodate diverse points of view is not, of course, without precedent; indeed, it has its roots in one of the defining ideals of the liberal tradition: the belief that the exercise of political power should rest upon the consent of those who are subject to it. What is relatively new is the claim that a commitment to this ideal requires that public ends be justified in a “neutral” or “impartial” way or, in other words, in terms that all citizens can accept.2 This 1. “Their conclusion may be true, but it might be false for anything they know: they have never thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently from them, and considered what such persons may have to say; and consequently they do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrine which they themselves profess”: John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, in idem, On Liberty and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989 [1859]), p. 39. 2. This claim is most closely associated with John Rawls’s Political Liberalism, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996 [1993]). For related views see Ronald Dworkin, “Liberalism,” in idem, A Matter of Principle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 181–204; Bruce Ackerman, “What Is Neutral about Neutrality?” Ethics 93 (1983):372–390; Thomas Nagel, “Moral Conflict and Political Legitimacy,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 16 (1987):215–240; Jeremy Waldron, “Theoretical Foundations of Liberalism,” Philosophical Quarterly 37 (1987):127–150; Charles Larmore, “Political Liberalism,” in idem, The Morals of Modernity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 121–151.

4 • Introduction

understanding of the meaning of consent has given rise to a theoretical discourse in which we have largely stopped talking about which public ends we ought to pursue, to talk instead about what it might mean for an end to be justified in this way.3 Even nominally antiliberal thinkers, who officially reject this approach to justification, will often appeal to it for polemical purposes—the standard argument being that a particular claim to impartiality has been used to smuggle in a controversial and therefore exclusionary point of view. Thus the critique of liberalism is now more than ever an immanent critique.4 I do not intend to reject or soften the commitment to accommodating diversity that characterizes liberal and, increasingly, antiliberal political thought today. I do think, however, that we need to find a more fruitful way of honoring this commitment. The problem lies not in the aspiration to maximal inclusiveness but rather in the fact that this aspiration has been tied to a theory of justification that is, I believe, deeply flawed and ultimately unworkable. This theory proceeds from the normative claim that public ends should be justified in the most inclusive possible terms to the empirical claim that currently controversial moral and ethical beliefs could not win the consent of a society as diverse as ours, and thus to the methodological claim that we should seek political principles that accommodate instead of challenging our existing beliefs on these matters. This pessimism about the tractability of our disagreements then becomes something of a self-reinforcing premise, one that generates a reluctance to conduct the kind of inquiry into the possibilities of human association that will be needed if we are 3. Perhaps the most commented-upon example of this trend is the evolution of a relatively concrete debate about competing ideals of distributive justice in the 1970s and early 1980s into a more abstract debate about methods of justification in the later 1980s and 1990s. This shift is reflected in, and was in part driven by, the work of Rawls, the most widely discussed political philosopher of this period. Compare his recent Political Liberalism with the seminal A Theory of Justice, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999 [1971]). 4. That is, contemporary antiliberals, rather than reject the liberal ideals of toleration and inclusion as false or pernicious (as did the antiliberal ideologues of the past), are preoccupied instead with showing that liberals have themselves failed to live up to those ideals. Consider, for example, Sheldon S. Wolin’s hostile review of Rawls’s Political Liberalism, in which he argues that Rawls’s principles of impartiality “are, to a significant extent, essentially principles of exclusion”: “The Liberal/Democratic Divide: On Rawls’s Political Liberalism,” Political Theory 24 (1996):112.

Introduction • 5

to respond critically and intelligently to the emerging social and political order. Clearly, if we are going to respond adequately to the moral and ethical challenges posed by globalization or, indeed, to any significant moral or ethical challenge, we will have to go about articulating and testing some controversial beliefs. Whatever its motivations, the reticence in the face of disagreement that we currently find among many political theorists leaves the status quo, with all of its exclusions and blindnesses, largely in place. In short, political theorists who are concerned about issues of justification face two equally pressing and potentially contradictory tasks. The first is to show how a society made up of people holding a wide variety of beliefs might come to agree upon public ends in a way that all could accept as legitimate. The second is to show how the complex and powerful institutions of late modernity might be rendered subject to intelligent control. Although it is true that we live in a world marked by a diversity of moral and ethical commitments, we also live in a world in which one particular set of commitments is becoming increasingly dominant. We must therefore be concerned to ensure that in our efforts to accommodate diversity we do not make it more difficult to respond to the challenges posed by globalization and its attendant phenomena. The central aim of this book is to rethink the terms of political justification in such a way that this kind of dilemma does not arise. I seek to defend a theory of political justification that would allow us to admit controversial social and political ideals as going concerns within a liberal polity without undermining the norms of fairness and respect for persons that define such a polity. It may seem odd that a book with these aims should proceed under the standard of pragmatism, a school of thought often associated today with a kind of light-minded contextualism that is theoretically modest even to the point of moral irresponsibility.5 Thus, before I defend my own “pragmatic” model of justification, I must first turn to the more fundamental problem of agreeing on terms. 5. This brand of pragmatic thought is most closely associated with Richard Rorty; see, for example, his Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). On the charge of light-mindedness see, for example, Richard J. Bernstein, “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: Richard Rorty on Liberal Democracy and Philosophy,” Political Theory 15 (1987):538–563.

6 • Introduction

2. What Pragmatism Is (and Is Not) One of the central insights of the pragmatic tradition is the observation that there is no account of human experience that is fully objective; no way to describe the universe in its own terms or to view it sub specie aeternitatis. On the contrary, all such accounts must be evaluated in terms of the contexts in which, and the purposes for which, they are put forth. This is a double-edged claim. On the one hand, such a view requires that we admit the provisional and situated character of our beliefs and devalue those accounts of justification that claim analytic, axiomatic, or transcendental authority. On the other hand, the pragmatic theory of inquiry obliges us to take account of the essential purposiveness of human intelligence, and so pragmatists are unwilling to equate the acknowledgment of uncertainty with a celebration of willfulness or rhetorical play. While we cannot entirely escape the contingency of our judgments, neither can we escape the need to arrive at habits of action that reliably engage the reality within which our aims are to be pursued. As John Dewey puts it, “[t]he function of intelligence is . . . not that of copying the objects of the environment, but rather of taking account of the way in which more effective and more profitable relations with these objects may be established in the future.”6 Thus, although pragmatism does indeed entail a rejection of apriorism in its various forms, it is not, despite William James’s famously infelicitous phrase, a doctrine according to which beliefs are simply willed into existence and projected upon an inert and indefinitely malleable world. This conception of the nature of human intelligence may seem ideally suited to play a mediating role between the dominant schools in contemporary moral and political thought; “to trace a path,” as one scholar has put it, “between the Scylla of rationalism and the Charybdis of relativism.”7 However, while the desire for a philosophical via media is understandable given the often fractious state of current theoretical discourse, this is not a suitable lens through which to assess the significance of pragmatic thought. Indeed, taken on its own terms, pragmatism must be considered a failure if its role is defined in this way. The 6. John Dewey, “The Development of American Pragmatism” (1925), Later Works, vol. 2, p. 17. 7. Matthew Festenstein, Pragmatism and Political Theory: From Dewey to Rorty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 9.

Introduction • 7

founding pragmatists were united in their conviction that the dominant philosophical schools of their day, far from shedding light on genuine problems, were a positive obstacle to the progress of inquiry. They did not intend to mediate existing disputes but to reconfigure them so that intelligence could be freed for the more pressing task of identifying fruitful norms of action. To seek in pragmatism a means of harmonizing contending positions is therefore to beg the prior question of why these positions should be taken to define the going alternatives. Far from blurring the lines between opposing views, the genuine pragmatist should seek to sharpen the distinctions between them so that their respective implications for practice can be discerned. This clarifying tendency, this effort to bring about what Dewey called “reconstruction,” and not a concern to arbitrate existing disputes, defines pragmatism’s proper role in the current intellectual climate no less than at the time of its founding. It would be wrong to conclude (as many have) that the pragmatic emphasis on practice entails a rejection of speculative or “metaphysical” thinking. Pragmatists are concerned with the exigencies of acting in an uncertain world, and to act in the world at all we have to make some basic assumptions about its character. To act in a social world we have to make assumptions about, among other things, the nature of human motivations and interests. These assumptions may take any number of forms, from the apparently mundane to the truly exotic, but I see no reason to stop using the term “metaphysical” to describe the general category to which they belong. Indeed, far from discouraging metaphysical thinking, pragmatic inquiry positively depends upon it. As Charles Sanders Peirce puts it, “[e]very man of us has a metaphysics, and has to have one; and it will influence his life greatly. Far better, then, that that metaphysics should be criticized and not be allowed to run loose.” James agrees that for the pragmatist “the whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants of our life, if this world-formula or that world-formula be the one which is true.”8 Although pragmatism provides little in the way of substantive guidance in choosing among 8. Charles Sanders Peirce, “Notes on Scientific Philosophy” (fragment, ca. 1905), Collected Papers, vol. 1, p. 52; William James, “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results” (1898), in idem, Collected Essays and Reviews (New York: Russell & Russell, 1920), pp. 413–414.

8 • Introduction

these “world-formulas,” it does provide an illuminating account of what we are doing when we make such choices—and (perhaps more importantly) of what we are not and cannot be doing. It is, to paraphrase Peirce, a way of making our ideas clear on such matters, and James defines metaphysics as “nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.”9 How, then, are we to achieve this kind of clarity? This question brings us to the founding principles of pragmatic thought: Peirce’s maxim that “there is no distinction of meaning so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice” and its corollary, that “different beliefs are distinguished by the different modes of action to which they give rise.”10 For Peirce, as for James and Dewey after him, pragmatism is above all a theory of meaning; it states that any meaningful belief, no matter how abstract or trivial it may seem, commits us to a particular set of expectations regarding the likely consequences of a given course of action. We may find that two apparently distinct beliefs have identical implications for practice, in which case they are pragmatically speaking the same belief, or that a particular belief has no conceivable practical implications, in which case it is pragmatically meaningless. It is only beliefs of the latter kind that pragmatists are concerned to dismiss, not because they are objectionably “deep,” but because Peirce’s maxim helps us to see how shallow they really are. If the meaning of a belief consists in the consequences that are expected to follow from acting upon it, then it follows that its validity depends upon whether or not those expectations are met in practice. To the extent that they are not, we are said to be in a state of doubt with respect to that belief. The challenge of justification for the pragmatist is 9. William James, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983 [1890]), p. 148. Peirce’s metaphysical views are most fully elaborated in his Collected Papers, vol. 6 (which the editors title Scientific Metaphysics); James’s in his A Pluralistic Universe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977 [1909]), and Dewey’s in his Experience and Nature (1925), Later Works, vol. 1. 10. Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (1878), Collected Papers, vol. 5, pp. 257, 255. James closely paraphrases Peirce’s maxim in “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,” pp. 411–412, and on p. 29 of his Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978 [1907]), where it becomes the focal point of discussion. Dewey’s analysis of Peirce’s maxim can be found in his review of James’s Pragmatism, “What Pragmatism Means by Practical” (1908), Middle Works, vol. 4, pp. 98–115.

Introduction • 9

not, then, to show how our beliefs can be said to be justified in general, but rather to determine how we should go about revising them once a particular doubt has arisen. When a belief that we hold has been thrown into doubt, the pragmatic theory of justification holds that we should revise it (if we choose to do so) by positing a new belief that can account for our doubts, identifying the consequences that would be expected to follow if that belief were correct, and then acting in such a way that we can see whether those consequences follow. The belief in question may be as concrete as a belief that nature behaves according to regular laws or as abstract as a belief in the Platonic forms. Whatever its content, it is adopted with the expectation that it will serve as a useful guide to conduct, and held so long as this expectation is borne out in practice. It is one of the signal contributions of pragmatic thought to have extended this experimental approach to inquiry—which, as Peirce notes, “[e]verybody uses . . . about a great many things, and only ceases to use . . . when he does not know how to apply it”11—to the resolution of doubts in everyday life. This point of contact between pragmatism and modern science has led even otherwise hostile critics to acknowledge that the pragmatic theory of justification is not entirely without merit. These critics tend to part company with pragmatism over the question of whether its appeal to consequences is drawn narrowly enough: Bertrand Russell, for example, concedes that “the scientific working may be regarded as a species of the pragmatic working,” but goes on to object that “[t]he essential novelty of pragmatism is that it admits, as a ground of belief, any kind of satisfaction to be derived from entertaining the belief, not merely the theoretic satisfaction which is sought by science.”12 It is true that pragmatists sometimes give justificatory force to “kinds of satisfaction” that would not be admissible in scientific inquiry. It is not the case, however, that for the pragmatist any kind of satisfaction suffices to justify any kind of belief whatsoever. Recall that according to the pragmatic maxim a belief is justified not because it leads to good consequences, but because it leads to the expected consequences when acted upon. It follows that the question of what kinds of satisfaction are 11. Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief” (1877), Collected Papers, vol. 5, p. 243. 12. Bertrand Russell, “Pragmatism,” in idem, Philosophical Essays (New York: George Allen & Unwin, 1966 [1910]), p. 96 (original emphasis).

10 • Introduction

relevant to justification depends entirely upon the motives for which a given belief was adopted. As Dewey puts it, “I have never identified any satisfaction with the truth of an idea, save that satisfaction which arises when the idea as working hypothesis or tentative method is applied to prior existences in such a way as to fulfill what it intends.” Peirce agrees that “to say that an action or the result of an action is Satisfactory is simply to say that it is congruous to the aim of that action.”13 The belief that a particular scientific theory is correct commits us to the expectation that certain physical operations—certain experiments—will lead to different outcomes than if some other theory was the correct one; this is the “theoretic satisfaction” to which Russell appeals. Personal satisfaction (the kind of satisfaction that Russell was concerned to exclude from scientific inquiry) becomes relevant to justification only when a belief is adopted with the expectation (or hope) that we will be happier, or better off, or whatever the case may be, if we act upon it. In other words, this kind of satisfaction comes into play only when we are seeking to justify moral and ethical beliefs. Thus we face a double uncertainty in the case of moral inquiry: we must determine not only whether the expected consequences follow from acting upon a given belief, but also whether those consequences, once realized, are ones that we find morally attractive or desirable. After all, it is not difficult to think of cases in which the expected consequences of a promising course of action, once they have been realized, cause us to reevaluate the beliefs that led us to pursue that course of action in the first place. This is what Dewey has in mind when he says that our ends should always be regarded as “ends-in-view”—ends that may or may not prove attractive or desirable once achieved.14 This unwillingness to appeal to fixed ends has led critics of pragmatism to argue that the pragmatic theory of justification is nugatory and even incoherent when applied to moral and ethical questions. According to the pragmatic account, when a particular belief that we hold has been rendered doubtful, we must try to identify some course of action that 13. Dewey, “What Pragmatism Means by Practical,” p. 109 (original emphasis); Peirce, “Truth” (fragment, ca. 1906), Collected Papers, vol. 5, p. 392. Dewey and Peirce are responding to an ambiguity in the theory of truth set forth in James’s Pragmatism; for James’s own efforts to resolve this ambiguity see his The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to Pragmatism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978 [1909]). 14. See especially his Theory of Valuation (1939), Later Works, vol. 13, pp. 189–251.

Introduction • 11

would, if pursued, alleviate these doubts. But in the case of moral inquiry we are in doubt not only as to which course of action to pursue but also as to what outcome we are trying to achieve. If we could answer the latter question, then we would not be in a state of moral doubt; we would simply be in doubt about how best to realize our existing ends. In other words, although the need to engage in inquiry presupposes that we have ends to pursue, the need to conduct moral inquiry implies that these ends have been called into question. In light of this paradox it may seem doubtful that pragmatism could play a constructive role in the justification of moral norms. This is of course a very familiar—perhaps the single most familiar— objection to the pragmatic position, and it explains, I think, why pragmatists who write about politics have tended to rely upon norms derived from a particular social or cultural context.15 I agree that pragmatism taken in itself has little of substance to contribute to the resolution of moral and ethical dilemmas—though I do think that it has something to contribute, as I will argue in Part II. However, I reject the conclusion that it must therefore stand for some form of contextualism. Such a claim, in its rush to find a set of moral or ethical ends that can be endorsed on pragmatic grounds, overlooks the fact that pragmatism was only ever meant to provide a theory of meaning and justification, and not a substantive theory of the good. It is this theory of meaning and justification that the founding pragmatists (and their critics) were talking about when they were talking about pragmatism, and so we must be careful to define pragmatism in these terms rather than to associate it with the moral and ethical commitments of any particular time, place, or thinker.16 Even the most assiduous commentators have found it 15. Rorty often refers to the former tendency as pragmatism’s “ethnocentrism”: see, for example, his “Solidarity or Objectivity?” in idem, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 21–34. 16. Although the founding pragmatists sometimes disagreed about how pragmatism should be understood, the greater part of their disagreements arose from the various extra-pragmatic philosophical commitments that they held. As Peirce once remarked of James, “though we may differ on important questions of philosophy . . . I am inclined to think that the discrepancies reside in other than the pragmatistic ingredients of our thought”: “A Survey of Pragmaticism” (ca. 1906), Collected Papers, vol. 5, p. 318. For a detailed and useful discussion of both kinds of “discrepancies” see H. S. Thayer, Meaning and Action: A Critical History of Pragmatism, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981 [1968]), especially parts 2 and 4.

12 • Introduction

difficult to group the wide variety of views that self-described pragmatists have held under a single philosophical heading, and the reason is that such an approach misconstrues the very nature of pragmatic thought. If we insist upon defining pragmatism in terms of the various positions that individual pragmatists have held, we will be likely to draw the same conclusion that many critics have already drawn: that it means too many things to mean much of anything at all.17 What, then, does pragmatism, understood in this narrower sense, have to contribute to moral inquiry? A belief in the validity of a moral norm or principle, like any belief, is justified on pragmatic grounds if and to the extent that no further doubts arise from acting upon it. As Peirce puts it, “[i]f . . . the future development of man’s moral nature will only lead to a firmer satisfaction with the described ideal, the doctrine is true.” Thus the statements “free from actual doubt” and “justified” are pragmatically equivalent, at least from the agent’s point of view; again, in Peirce’s words, “[i]f the premises are not in fact doubted at all they cannot be more satisfactory than they are.”18 This criterion of justification is not as solipsistic as it may at first seem, because moral doubts arise above all through our interactions with others—through moral claims that we find ourselves unable to satisfy, experiences of suffering and loss for which we find ourselves unable to account, and so on. In the broadest sense, then, the goal of pragmatic moral inquiry is to identify norms of action that, if followed, would bring about a state of affairs in which this kind of doubt would no longer arise. Because we cannot know in advance whether a given rule of conduct will meet this test, it follows that moral doubt—like all doubt—can be resolved only (if at all) by acting upon some uncertain belief or set of beliefs. Thus, the claim that pragmatism fails to provide any transparently binding moral principles, while accurate, falls wide of its intended mark: The fact that

17. For the canonical statement of this view see Arthur O. Lovejoy, “The Thirteen Pragmatisms” (1908), in idem, The Thirteen Pragmatisms and Other Essays (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963), pp. 1–29. More recently see Garry M. Brodsky, “The Pragmatic Movement,” Review of Metaphysics 25 (1971):262–291, and W. V. Quine, “The Pragmatists’ Place in Empiricism,” in Robert J. Mulvaney and Philip M. Zeltner, eds., Pragmatism: Its Sources and Prospects (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1981), pp. 23–37. 18. Peirce, “Truth” (fragment, 1901), p. 395; “Fixation of Belief,” p. 233.

Introduction • 13

such principles are unavailable to us is itself one of the leading claims of pragmatic thought.19 This shift in emphasis away from what can be conclusively demonstrated in the present and toward what can be defended as a promising course of action going forward serves to broaden rather than narrow the range of moral conceptions to which the pragmatist can legitimately appeal. It is perfectly acceptable on pragmatic grounds to believe in entities as intangible as natural law, an autonomous and self-legislating reason, or a benevolent and omnipotent God, so long as we attend to the practical implications of these commitments and are willing to revise them when they no longer adequately account for our experiences of doubt. Thus, taken in itself, pragmatism does not provide a comprehensive set of moral commitments; it merely offers a particular way of orienting ourselves toward whatever commitments we do in fact adopt. In Peirce’s words, it “is not a Weltanschauung but is a method of reflexion having for its purpose to render ideas clear.”20 Far from limiting us to contextualist theories of the good, or to the pursuit of material ends, or even to “common-sense” ways of thinking about moral dilemmas, pragmatism leaves us free in principle to appeal to any conception of morality whatsoever, so long as some distinct set of consequences for conduct can be shown to follow from it and insofar as the realization of those consequences over time does not tend to perpetuate or exacerbate our feelings of doubt. The remainder of this book is devoted to applying this rather abstract theory of moral inquiry to those moral and ethical decisions that must be made in common—that is, to the task of political justification. 3. Overview We can now pose our original question in more pointed form: How can we combat the narrowing of our moral horizons that threatens to 19. Thus James’s famous claim that pragmatism stands for “[t]he attitude of looking away from first things, principles, ‘categories,’ supposed necessities; and of looking toward last things, fruits, consequences, facts”: Pragmatism, p. 32 (emphasis removed). Peirce puts the point even more succinctly: “The effect of pragmatism . . . is simply to open our minds to receiving any evidence, not to furnish evidence”: Letter to William James (March 7, 1904), Collected Papers, vol. 8, p. 190. 20. Peirce, “Preface” (fragment, ca. 1902) to Collected Papers, vol. 5, p. 9n.

14 • Introduction

become a defining feature of modern societies and at the same time honor the diversity of moral commitments that we find in those societies? In particular, how can we do this in the current theoretical climate, in which the effort to defend a substantive social or political ideal can be blocked, at least prima facie, by the mere observation that some people are deeply committed to another view? According to the pragmatic theory of justification that I have sketched, the resolution of moral doubt requires that we act in such a way that uncertain moral beliefs can be tested in practice. By this measure the current state of theoretical discourse brings to mind James’s observation that “a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule.”21 This book is an attempt to articulate a theory of political justification that avoids this kind of irrationality, a theory that would allow us to pursue substantive (and therefore controversial) social and political ideals without jeopardizing our underlying commitment to accommodating diverse points of view. I am guided throughout by the conviction that, unless we actively investigate the possibilities of human association, our moral horizons will be increasingly defined by forces that are poorly understood and largely beyond our control. If I can defend a model of justification that allows us to admit genuine alternatives to the emerging order into public discourse without prejudice or favor, then I will have achieved my aims. Part I is devoted to elaborating the pragmatic theory of justification, especially as it applies to cases of political disagreement. In Chapter 1 I describe the current impasse in political theory between, on the one hand, those who hold that justification should be guided by procedural norms that can claim antecedent authority and, on the other, those who believe that it is precisely in the absence of such fixed points that true freedom and equality become possible. I argue that each of these views draws its force from an uncertain appeal to the attractiveness of a possible future state of affairs, and that in order for either to be justified we would have to act in such a way that their merits could be tested in practice. Because this prospective approach to justification bears a certain resemblance to, and raises certain difficulties associated with, 21. James, “The Will to Believe,” in idem, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979 [1897]), pp. 31–32 (emphasis removed).

Introduction • 15

James’s doctrine of the “will to believe,” Chapter 2 is devoted to an examination of that doctrine and, in particular, to a defense of the claim that it can be rational to act upon attractive beliefs even when the balance of the existing evidence is not in their favor. In Chapter 3 I argue that such beliefs acquire motivational force only when they are incorporated into narratives that articulate a relationship between a proposed course of action, our past experiences, and our present self-understandings. An appreciation of the central role that narratives have to play in moral inquiry allows us to distinguish two separate challenges of political justification: first, that of identifying a set of narrative commitments that can bind us together as a political community, and second, that of identifying a set of moral commitments that would make it possible for us to pursue controversial public ends in a way that respects the diversity of beliefs that we hold. In Part II, I pursue the first of these tasks by examining the relationship between pragmatism (understood as a theory of inquiry) and democracy (understood as a political ideal). I begin in Chapter 4 by arguing that the pragmatic theory of inquiry carries as a corollary the claim that the experimental intelligence of each citizen should, all other things being equal, be developed and expressed, and that to be engaged as a pragmatist in normative political inquiry is therefore to be concerned with the problem of extending the exercise of this faculty in public life whenever possible. This is the common orientation toward political discourse that we are seeking. However, because this orientation taken in itself is compatible with a wide range of political arrangements, it must be supplemented with more substantial beliefs and commitments if it is to serve as an adequate guide to conduct. In Chapter 5 I illustrate this point by pointing out that Dewey’s political thought, which has often been identified with pragmatic political thought more generally speaking, draws its democratic character not from his pragmatism but rather from his neoHegelian expectation that the apparently conflicting interests that we find in modern societies might someday be harmonized. Once this presupposition is called into question, we are thrown back upon the challenge of investigating the boundaries of political community without any guarantees as to how “democratic” the outcome of this investigation will turn out to be. Thus the pragmatic theory of inquiry requires as its complement a moral commitment to explore the possibilities of human association in a way that respects the experimental intelligence of each citizen.

16 • Introduction

In Part III, I argue that the political liberal conception of legitimacy, once it has been reconstructed along pragmatic lines, best expresses this moral commitment. This pragmatic reconstruction requires, however, that we modify some of the key assumptions of the political liberal position as it is currently defended. I begin this task in Chapter 6 by arguing that the effort among political liberals to define the boundaries of legitimate state action in advance of inquiry, and to restrict the scope of application of political liberal principles to a narrow set of “constitutional” questions, tends to distract from and even undermine the moral commitments upon which their position rests. I argue instead that a public end is publicly justified insofar as all can accept it as a reasonable candidate for experimental inquiry, and that political liberalism so understood need not and should not place prior limits upon the scope or content of legitimate public action. Because this position leaves a great deal of room for disagreement about matters of justification, I turn in Chapter 7 to the problem of determining when a political decision has met this standard. This obliges us to confront in particular the possibility of manipulation and deception in the use of public reasons and to examine some institutional mechanisms for managing this threat. In Chapter 8 I consider the question of how political liberals might best account for the fundamental disagreements that divide modern societies. I recommend replacing the currently prevailing assumptions about the irreducible nature of our disagreements with a kind of Millian fallibilism, which is in my view more consistent with an open-ended commitment to collective inquiry. Taken together, these insights into the dynamic and uncertain character of public justification define the distinctive territory that my pragmatic reconstruction of political liberalism seeks to occupy. This brief synopsis is sure to raise more questions than it answers, but for the time being I hope to have established three general principles that will guide the more detailed discussion that follows. First, the significance of pragmatism does not lie in its ability to mediate or dissolve existing philosophical disputes but rather in its ability to reorient or “reconstruct” those disputes so that they center around possible differences in practice. Indeed, pragmatism should serve to sharpen, not blur, our appreciation of such differences. Second, inquiry will ultimately reach a point at which a course of action must be chosen while the evaluative basis for choice remains in doubt. Such dilemmas lie at the center of moral

Introduction • 17

and ethical inquiry and, thus, at the center of normative political thought, which is concerned with those moral and ethical decisions that must be made in common. Third, our doubts cannot be resolved, even provisionally, until our beliefs have been clarified in such a way that the courses of action that they imply can be articulated and carried out. A pragmatic theory of political justification must therefore be able to show how fundamental beliefs about the human condition can be brought to bear upon political practice, and to consider whether the mobilization of such beliefs can be made consistent with a respect for the fundamental beliefs of each citizen. Only then can we have some assurance that our practical needs and our moral commitments are not at odds with one another.

PA R T I

Toward a Pragmatic Theory of Political Justification Knowledge is partial and incomplete, any and all knowledge, till we have placed it in the context of a future which cannot be known but only speculated about and resolved upon.

—John Dewey, “Philosophy and Democracy” (1919)

CHAPTER ONE

The Tyranny of Minimalism

1. Does Justification Matter? Contemporary political theorists face the challenge of defending principles of social and political organization at a time when traditional sources of obligation can no longer claim transparently binding authority (if indeed they ever could), even as political and economic systems of unprecedented scope and power make the need for robust norms more pressing than ever.1 What obligations does a political community have toward its less fortunate members, and how should macroeconomic policies and social welfare programs be designed to meet those obligations? What responsibilities come with the possession of great economic and military power, and under what circumstances is a state that has such power justified in imposing its will upon other states and peoples? What balance should be struck between the need to ensure that citizens are educated to use their democratic liberties responsibly and the desire of parents to pass their beliefs and values on to their children? Modern societies are characterized by deep and persistent disagreement on these and many other questions, and in the face of these disagreements it is often difficult to see how it might be possible to 1. Although this way of framing the issue is closely associated with the postwar tradition of critical theory, it is already present in Dewey’s political writings; see especially The Public and Its Problems (1927), Later Works, vol. 2, pp. 235–372. For an elaborate statement within the tradition of critical theory, see Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy, 2 vols. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984, 1987 [1981]). 21

22 • TOWARD A PRAGMATIC THEORY

identify any coherent set of public ends that all of the citizens of such a society could accept as legitimate. This is the central problem of political justification, and it provides a common point of orientation for political theorists who otherwise have little in common. Liberals and communitarians, Kantians and Nietzscheans, deliberative and agonistic democrats, perfectionist and political liberals—all of these groups have wrestled with this problem in one form or another. Although justification is a familiar topic of concern in contemporary political thought, it may seem an unlikely one to address from a pragmatic perspective. After all, if, as pragmatists maintain, justification ultimately depends not on theoretical speculation but on practical activity, then what could be less pragmatic than an effort to articulate a theory of justification? There is a kernel of truth to this objection: pragmatism does indeed hold that our practical doubts cannot be resolved through the exercise of our theoretical faculties alone. It would be wrong, however, to conclude that the pragmatist must therefore devalue theoretical inquiry, including inquiry into the nature and aims of justification itself. As we have seen, one of the fundamental tenets of pragmatic philosophy is the claim that belief and action should be viewed as elements of a larger process of inquiry, to which each has an essential contribution to make and apart from which neither can be properly understood. In ordinary circumstances our beliefs correspond to established habits of action whose efficacy we not only do not but cannot sincerely doubt. This is because for the pragmatist, doubt is not a verbal matter but a state of practical uncertainty that arises whenever we find that the consequences of our actions no longer correspond to our expectations. As Peirce observes, this kind of doubt “can only be due to some novel experience, whether external or internal.”2 When such an experience is disruptive enough, we are driven to reexamine our practices, and the beliefs and expectations upon which they rest, in order to arrive at more accurate beliefs and (thus) more fruitful habits of action. Of course, in any significant sphere of conduct the gap between our expectations and the consequences of our actions is likely to be persistent if not ineradicable. Indeed, the single best measure of the significance of a practical question is its recalcitrance to doubt. After all, a belief will 2. Charles Sanders Peirce, “Consequences of Critical Common-Sensism” (ca. 1905), Collected Papers, vol. 5, p. 367; see also “The Fixation of Belief” (1877), ibid., p. 232, and “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities” (1868), ibid., pp. 156–157.

The Tyranny of Minimalism • 23

become the subject of inquiry only if it bears upon some uncertain matter of conduct, and once this uncertainty has been removed, the motivation to conduct further inquiry—and the salience of the belief—will fade. Thus, for example, the question of why we should not indiscriminately kill or torment other people is not a pressing matter for inquiry, because our convictions on the matter are settled. Our energies can be directed instead toward more uncertain and (therefore) more practically significant questions, such as the legitimacy of capital punishment, the justice of warfare, and so on. This is not to deny that inquiry into specific matters of practice will often refer us back to beliefs of an abstract or “metaphysical” character; as I have already noted, pragmatism, far from devaluing such modes of reflection, positively depends upon them. After all, if doubt arises from a lack of fit between our expectations and our experiences, then the removal of doubt will require not only that our practices be revised but that our beliefs be clarified, perhaps at a very high level of generality. Moreover, while it is true that a doubtful belief cannot be justified until it has been acted upon, it is also true that we will not be able to choose among the various courses of action that present themselves unless we have some criteria for discriminating among them. Thus a pragmatic theory of justification is needed. The pragmatic account of the relationship between belief and action is not without political implications, because, like all of our practices, our political practices rest upon normative and empirical premises whose validity we may come to doubt. To ignore or dismiss the challenges involved in resolving these doubts is to abdicate the practical responsibility that falls to normative political thought. For example, when we are trying to determine why (or to what extent) we should grant one another an equal voice in political affairs and an equal chance to influence political outcomes, we must first determine why (or in what sense) we should regard one another as equals in the first place. All of us, at least some of the time and in certain circumstances, have genuine doubts on these matters, doubts that arise at least in part from our own participation in and observation of political processes. We are therefore likely to disagree about when it is appropriate to invoke differences in experience, capacity, or inclination as a way of justifying inequalities in political access or outcomes. The particular approach that we take toward resolving these disagreements will in large part determine our response to such first-order questions as how political institutions

24 • TOWARD A PRAGMATIC THEORY

should be organized and governed, how the necessary limits on popular participation should be accommodated, and how inequalities in power should be distributed and compensated for. These are some of the practical implications that flow from an effort to defend equality in one way rather than another, and so this is one possible difference in practice that a theory of political justification can make. In this chapter I will examine two leading contemporary approaches to political justification, with an eye toward drawing some general conclusions about its nature and prospects under current circumstances. The first approach carries on the quest for transparently binding norms in a more limited way, by seeking to describe a procedure for resolving our disagreements that is rooted in widely shared moral commitments and that can therefore be expected to yield legitimate political outcomes. The second approach rejects even this modest attempt to constrain the terms of political discourse, holding instead that any effort to define a moral standpoint from which all other claims must be adjudicated should be resisted to that extent. I will refer to the former position, somewhat imprecisely, as the proceduralist approach to justification and to the latter, even more imprecisely, as the agonistic approach. Needless to say, neither of these approaches entirely avoids the need to appeal to controversial and nevertheless binding moral and ethical principles: we cannot specify a fair political procedure without appealing to a substantive conception of fairness, and the attractiveness of the political agon rests upon its claim to advance a particular ideal of human flourishing. Nevertheless, and despite the important differences between them, each of these approaches exemplifies in its own way the broader trend toward reticence in the face of disagreement that we identified in the Introduction. Indeed, precisely because they pursue the quest for an uncontroversial starting point for justification in such different ways, they help us to see more clearly both the ubiquity and the limitations of this approach. My broader aim, then, is to combat the tyranny of minimalism in contemporary political thought, a tyranny which has, in my view, tended to stifle creative thinking about the substantive challenges that we face. The more intractable our doubts are, the more fundamental the beliefs in need of clarification, and the practices in need of revision, are likely to be. It follows that, if we are to make progress in resolving our doubts about pressing matters of public concern, we will have to

The Tyranny of Minimalism • 25

appeal to beliefs and expectations that are very general in application and that are therefore likely to be very controversial indeed. Needless to say, these appeals will pose special difficulties, because in discourses of political justification we must take into account not only our own beliefs and doubts but also those of our fellow citizens. This is why it is appropriate to say that one of the leading challenges facing normative political theorists today is that of accommodating the diversity of fundamental beliefs that characterizes modern societies. Of course, to emphasize the salience of disagreement in this way may seem in itself to explain and even to justify the trend toward minimalism in political thought that I have identified. In order to show that this is not the case, I must first demonstrate that the theory of justification from which this trend draws its impetus is inadequate, whether it is pursued in its proceduralist or in its agonistic form (Sections 2–3). After sketching the main features of the pragmatic alternative (Section 4), we will be prepared to examine the particular difficulties to which this model gives rise (Section 5). These difficulties will occupy our attention in the following chapters. 2. The Limits of Proceduralism I will begin by examining what I have referred to as the proceduralist approach to political justification. Taken in itself, the term proceduralism is imprecise and potentially misleading. As I have pointed out, we would not be able to choose among the various procedures that suggest themselves unless we had some criteria of fairness or efficiency by which to assess them, and we cannot rank or even give substantive content to these criteria (which, of course, do not exhaust the range of possibilities) without appealing to moral principles of an even more abstract kind. Most so-called proceduralists recognize and take responsibility for these substantive commitments, and so it would be ungenerous to criticize them for trying to do something that they have never claimed to be doing.3 We can define proceduralism more precisely as the effort to refer the adjudication of controversial moral and ethical questions to fixed procedures that, because they rest on a minimal (but nevertheless 3. For a useful discussion see Joshua Cohen, “Pluralism and Proceduralism,” Chicago-Kent Law Review 69 (1994):589–618.

26 • TOWARD A PRAGMATIC THEORY

substantive) set of moral commitments, are more capable (but still not assured) of winning the allegiance of a wide (but not universal) range of people. Such an approach is “procedural” only in the sense that it can be usefully contrasted with theories of political justification that rest upon “thicker” conceptions of the moral and ethical commitments that are needed to structure public life. I wish to show that even when it is understood in these relatively modest terms, the effort to distinguish between procedure and substance will succeed only (if ever) when the stakes are relatively low—that is to say, when the challenges of justification are not especially pressing. I will use certain arguments advanced by “deliberative” democrats as a frame for this purpose, although I should emphasize that I do not intend the discussion that follows as a special indictment of deliberative democracy, which I consider to be one of the more fruitful developments in recent democratic theory. Indeed, deliberative democracy is a useful test case, not only because its leading principles are familiar to many contemporary political theorists but because it represents in many respects the most sophisticated and comprehensive attempt to work out a theory of justification along proceduralist lines. The shortcomings of this approach, insofar as they can be generalized, can be expected to apply a fortiori to other forms of proceduralism. The leading motivation behind the deliberative conception is a concern to move justification out of the realm of didactic philosophy and into the realm of practical activity and positive consent. On this view, the authority of moral and ethical principles cannot simply be posited—we are to assume that this is no longer possible under modern conditions—but depends instead upon the outcome of deliberative processes that can themselves be shown to embody widely endorsed norms of rationality and fairness. Deliberative democrats conclude, in the words of Jürgen Habermas, that “[o]nly those norms can claim to be valid that meet (or could meet) with the approval of all affected in their capacity as participants in a practical discourse.”4 This principle of justification points, of course, toward an inclusive deliberative forum as the appropriate vehicle for democratic will formation. 4. Habermas calls this the discourse principle (D): “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification,” in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990 [1983]), p. 93.

The Tyranny of Minimalism • 27

Of course, to insist that deliberation be conducted “fairly” and “rationally” only pushes the problem of justification back a step: deliberative democrats must somehow give content to these norms without forgoing the consensual properties that make their approach to justification attractive in the first place. The most straightforward way of doing this is to argue that, although certain norms must indeed structure the deliberative process, these norms can themselves become the object of discussion; to say, as Seyla Benhabib puts it, that “we can allow the conditions of the procedure to be thematized within the dialogue situation itself.”5 Recall, however, that for a deliberative democrat, norms can be validated only through the consent of all of the affected participants in a practical discourse. This is what it means for a decision to be fair and rational, so this is the norm that, by hypothesis, we intend to “thematize,” and thereby justify, in discourse. But once we have entered a deliberative setting governed by this norm, we are forbidden to revise or reject it (or any other norm) if any affected party—which is to say, at this level of abstraction, anyone—remains unpersuaded. As with all unanimity rules, the practical effect of this principle is to create an overwhelming bias toward the status quo—that is, toward the procedural norms by which the deliberative forum was constructed in the first place. If these constitutive norms remain unjustified from someone’s point of view even after discussion they must, by the principle of universal consent, nevertheless remain in place. Thus the discourse principle cannot claim to be justified, even hypothetically, by means of discourse alone. Deliberative theorists have accordingly sought deeper foundations for their commitment to deliberative equality. Most prominently, Habermas has argued that the norms of egalitarian discourse are among “the inescapable presuppositions of moral argumentation as such”; that in the very act of engaging in conversation we implicitly commit ourselves to the proposition that our assertions could be rationally endorsed by our interlocutors and, insofar as the assertions in question are moral in character, by all rational agents.6 Without this 5. Seyla Benhabib, “Liberal Dialogue versus a Critical Theory of Discursive Legitimation,” in Nancy Rosenblum, ed., Liberalism and the Moral Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 147. 6. Habermas calls this the universalization principle (U) and likens it to Kant’s categorical imperative, though with important modifications: “Discourse Ethics,” pp. 82, 57–65.

28 • TOWARD A PRAGMATIC THEORY

tacit understanding, he argues, the very idea of discourse would be unintelligible. Setting aside the elaborate epistemological and sociological argument that underlies this position, we may again ask ourselves whether this approach to justification begs the question that it claims to answer. Why could the skeptic not grant that there is such a thing as “discourse”—roughly speaking, a mode of communication untainted by strategic motives—to which these norms apply, and then refuse either to enter this discursive arena or to grant it any special authority? Here Habermas has recourse to what he calls an “ontogenetic” claim; namely, that it is only through discourse so understood that societies and cultures are able to reproduce themselves, and indeed that it is only through discourse that we become capable of comprehending and acting in the world in the first place. It is impossible, he maintains, to step outside of the sphere of communicative action without renouncing one’s status as a rational agent: egalitarian norms are embedded not only in the presuppositions of discourse but in the very fabric of social life.7 This is a formidable argument, and addressing it in detail would take us far afield. For present purposes, it is enough to point out that Habermas elides the distinction between the indispensability of discourse and its supposedly egalitarian nature. We can easily imagine a ruling class that claims, sincerely or not, that it has special insight into the nature of things and that it could justify its authority to the masses discursively if only they were capable of understanding plain reason. We can also imagine a society that successfully reproduces itself in these terms. It is in order to avoid this kind of paternalism that deliberative democrats emphasize the need for the actual, and not merely hypothetical, discursive validation of norms. But when the deliberative ideal is transplanted into the realm of actual politics, in which indefinite time, patience, good will, and rhetorical resources are not available and in which prompt decision making is often necessary, the inability to persuade others of the validity of one’s convictions is likely to be felt (perhaps justly) as a deficiency in the motives or capacities of one’s interlocutors. Thus, even if we grant that an implicit claim to discursive justifiability lies at the root of all of our utterances, it does not necessarily follow that the willingness or competence to evaluate 7. Ibid., pp. 99–102; see also Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, pp. 140–148.

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such claims is equally shared or that the inclusion of all affected parties in such discourses is desirable or even possible. Why not treat appeals to expert knowledge or superior wisdom (as opposed to provisional majority votes)8 as decisive in cases in which disagreement persists and a decision must be made? This line of argument suggests an even more fundamental objection to the deliberative approach: Why should we expect that free and open deliberation would lead to consensus on moral questions? Indeed, why should we suppose that such questions lend themselves to universally or even broadly acceptable answers at all? Why should we not expect instead that an inclusive and open-ended debate would only highlight and intensify an underlying plurality of moral convictions and thus play an ultimately divisive role in public life?9 In light of this consideration, might it not be wiser to restrict deliberation to certain preapproved topics, or to rest political decisions on an equilibrium of competing interests, rather than revive the intractable and often violent conflicts that have resulted in the past whenever we have tried to reach a consensus regarding our fundamental convictions?10 Faith in the unifying capacity of discourse is no less in need of defense than faith in a capacity to deliberate that is universally and, to some sufficient degree, equally shared; indeed, given our long and unhappy experience with disagreement, it may be more so. Needless to say, the practical implications of our beliefs on this matter will be profound, because, as deliberative democrats rightly emphasize, to restrict the scope of deliberation or rely on a balance of power among competing interests is to limit and perhaps even abandon the egalitarian aspirations 8. This is the mechanism favored by many deliberative democrats; see, for example, Joshua Cohen, “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” in Alan Hamlin and Philip Pettit, eds., The Good Polity (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 23; Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996 [1992]), pp. 179–180, 306. 9. This possibility is often emphasized by political liberals; see, for example, Rawls, Political Liberalism, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996 [1993]), pp. xviii–xix, xxvi–xxvii, 4, 36; Charles Larmore, The Morals of Modernity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 12, 122, 151, 215. 10. This line of argument is pursued in Stephen Holmes, “Gag Rules or the Politics of Omission,” in Jon Elster and Rune Slagstad, eds., Constitutionalism and Democracy: Studies in Rationality and Social Change (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 19–58.

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that lie at the heart of the deliberative ideal. By building an answer to this vexed issue into their procedure of justification, deliberative democrats assume away some of the most fundamental problems that democratic theorists must face. These are largely familiar objections. I have raised them here in order to highlight the prospective form that defenses of deliberation take when these issues are pressed. To the objection that the norms governing discourse are themselves in need of justification, Benhabib responds that, if discourse were fully open to all participants, then there would be no legitimate procedural objection that could not be addressed from within the framework of discourse itself. Because the norms governing discourse mirror those of reason itself—because “rationality and freedom entail each other”—anyone who sought to question or overturn the discursive norms of equality and reciprocity would ipso facto be acting irrationally.11 To the objection that citizens might be unwilling or unable to perform the deliberative tasks assigned to them, Joshua Cohen responds that “[n]either the commitment to nor the capacity for arriving at deliberative decisions is something that we can simply assume to obtain independent from the proper ordering of institutions.” Once deliberative norms have been properly institutionalized, he argues, then the interests and capacities that we bring to the deliberative forum will be transformed in such a way that they come to harmonize with the common good.12 To the objection that deliberation might ultimately be a divisive rather than a unifying force, Habermas responds that, in an age in which traditional beliefs no longer enjoy unquestioned authority, we are warranted in treating discursive rationality as if it could play this unifying and coordinating role. The alternative, he argues, is to endorse a willful and ultimately self-defeating subjectivism.13 These arguments share a common trait: each of them rests upon claims about the course of future experience whose validity cannot be demonstrated prior to their being tested in practice. We do not and cannot know in advance what procedural objections participants in “ideal” discourse might raise, nor how (or whether) their motivations might be 11. Benhabib, “Liberal Dialogue,” p. 153. 12. Cohen, “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” p. 26. 13. See, for example, Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987 [1985]), chapter 11.

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transformed in such a setting, nor indeed whether communicative rationality can play the “reconciling” role that Habermas assigns to it. To the extent that these thinkers intend to offer conclusive justifications of deliberative norms, they have fallen short of the mark. This is in itself not a particularly surprising finding; more significant for our purposes are its implications for procedural modes of justification more generally speaking. Because we cannot defend the legitimacy or attractiveness of our preferred procedures without making controversial claims about the nature of human reason, human motivations, and human association itself, and because our doubts about these claims can be resolved only by testing them in practice, the supposed minimalism of this approach is at best an illusion. Proceduralists, no less than other moral and political theorists, seek to persuade us to act upon an uncertain set of assumptions regarding the nature and conditions of human flourishing, in the hope that by doing so we will find that these assumptions are borne out in practice. It follows that the procedures in question will be accepted as a legitimate vehicle for resolving disagreements only insofar as those who are subject to them already agree with (or are unaware of) these broader assumptions. 3. The Limits of Agonism We have seen that an adequate defense of deliberative democracy requires that we appeal to beliefs about the course of future experience whose validity cannot be antecedently demonstrated. Because these beliefs have far-reaching implications and are thus likely to be highly controversial, we can conclude that the procedural strategy for managing fundamental disagreements does not live up to its initial promise. This claim will be met with sympathy (but not surprise) by those who are deeply suspicious toward the project of “managing” disagreement in the first place. These political theorists hold that the effort to fix the terms of political discourse in advance inevitably enacts certain exclusions even as it seeks to disguise them, thereby doing violence to the irreducibly plural character of public life. This mode of theorizing, which its proponents often describe as “agonistic,” finds democracy in the space that remains open for popular will formation once the appeal to transparently binding moral norms, and indeed to the constituted moral subject itself, has been abandoned or at least sharply circumscribed.

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Rather than articulate a stable conception of political legitimacy or justice, these thinkers are concerned to preserve the kind of ethical receptivity that becomes possible when these categories remain open for contestation. In their reluctance to limit the autonomy of political action, agonistic democrats carry the trend toward minimalism in political thought even farther than their deliberative counterparts, and so it is no surprise to find that this conception of democracy currently stands as the leading alternative to the deliberative approach that we have just examined. Of course, just as political procedures cannot themselves validate the norms by which they are governed, neither can the sheer absence of foundational norms provide the basis for a democratic politics— agonists, like proceduralists, must in the end appeal to a set of substantive moral and ethical commitments. And, again, because most agonists recognize and take responsibility for these commitments, it would be ungenerous to criticize them for failing to do something that they have never claimed to be doing. We can define agonism more precisely as the claim that the rejection of foundational (but not of all) moral judgments makes it possible for us to be receptive to a broad (but not unlimited) range of beliefs and practices that would otherwise be silenced or marginalized, and that this receptivity finds its (imperfect) expression in the politics of the agon. If the rejection of foundational norms is the enabling condition of an agonistic politics, its practical impetus can be found in the ongoing struggle against the rigid patterns of thought and action into which those norms tend to congeal. Thus, William Connolly argues that as democratic citizens we should pursue an “ethic of cultivation” through which we learn to accept the irreducible plurality of moral and ethical life and to resist “the evil that flows from the attempt to establish security of identity for any individual or group by defining the other that exposes sore spots in one’s identity as evil or irrational.” The temptation toward “evil” of this kind is, he insists, present in any conception of politics that claims final authority for its own moral perspective.14 Agonistic democrats often portray themselves as a kind of loyal opposition, committed to what Stephen White aptly describes as the “concerted deployment of new fictions against whatever fictions are 14. William E. Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 10, 8.

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socially in force, however they happen to be justified.”15 Although they acknowledge that politics is necessarily a matter of regulating behavior and that coercive norms and disciplinary institutions are therefore an essential feature of public life, agonists seek to deploy alternate perspectives tactically and provisionally in order to ensure that the dominant norms and institutions, whatever they may happen to be, are not allowed to consolidate their claims to power and pose as the sole perspective from which political claims must be adjudicated. Indeed, the agonistic commitment to “the perpetuity of political contest” can be understood in dialectical terms as an ongoing effort to disrupt established hegemonies in the name of human freedom: thus Bonnie Honig argues that agonism and foundationalism are “not two distinct options but two impulses of political life, the impulse to keep the contest going and the impulse to be finally freed of the burdens of contest.” It is necessary, she insists, to “maintain the friction” between these positions “for the sake of the political space engendered by their struggle and endangered by the victory of either impulse over the other.”16 Agonism so understood, far from refusing to engage in moral and ethical discourse, seeks instead to reshape our expectations about the possibilities of such discourse and (especially) the manner in which we orient ourselves toward it. Nevertheless, although some agonistic thinkers are inclined to push this purely oppositional stance very far, it would be a mistake to conclude that, in the end, agonists have nothing positive to say in favor of their political ideal or that they are willing to accept any challenge to the existing order as salutary or freedom-enhancing. At the root of the agonistic position lies a largely unstated but nevertheless familiar set of normative premises: namely, that as human beings we are all capable of practicing the arts of self-creation and -recreation that make up Connolly’s “ethic of cultivation” and that it is therefore wrong to deny the exercise of these capacities to any person or group. This protean conception of human nature and human flourishing, which is derived 15. Stephen K. White, Political Theory and Postmodernism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 27. 16. Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 3, 13–14. Connolly similarly holds that “[j]ustice and critical responsiveness are . . . bound together in a relation of dissonant interdependence”: The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), p. 187.

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in part from a democratized version of Nietzsche’s philosophy of selfovercoming,17 is not obviously at odds with the traditional liberal values of freedom and autonomy. Agonists typically combine this ideal, however, with a second and more characteristically agonistic premise: namely, the claim that any appeal to a fixed or universal set of moral principles in political life is itself a constraint upon this kind of freedom, an attempt to impose order upon an essentially disorderly world. Agonists hold that every effort to impose this kind of order is bound not only to fail but to do violence to those who refuse or otherwise find themselves unable to submit to the order in question. Once we have granted this premise, it is indeed natural to reject systematic or foundational modes of political thought as undemocratic and even inhumane. To be sure, agonists do not usually accuse their more systematic adversaries of consciously intending to inflict (in Honig’s words) “power, violence, cruelty, and arrogance” upon their fellow citizens; these evils are said to arise instead from a kind of ethical myopia or (in a more Nietzschean, diagnostic vein) from a pernicious and tenacious brand of psychological weakness.18 The very desire for “closure,” for a moral perspective that provides the correct standpoint from which our actions should be judged, is said to be a sign of ressentiment against the contingency and possible meaninglessness of human existence. Notice, however, that this claim cuts both ways: just as some are discomfited by the idea that human values might be thoroughly contingent, so do others find the notion of a rationally ordered universe to be stifling or deadening.19 To equate the choice between the pursuit of order and the accep17. This appeal to Nietzsche is not unproblematic, given that Nietzsche himself viewed the ability to do without moral and ethical fixed points as the fragile achievement of a “higher, rarer, privileged” class of men: Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York, Vintage, 1966 [1886]), sec. 221 (see also sec. 219). For one effort to read Nietzsche democratically, see Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics, chapter 3. 18. Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics, p. 195. 19. The symmetry between these positions is captured nicely, if perhaps unwittingly, by Honig, who disapprovingly records Kant’s confession that he would “have to hate or despise” mankind if there were no grounds for faith in rational progress, and then goes on to quote Nietzsche as saying that he “could [not] endure to be a man” if it were not for his own more open-ended conception of human possibilities. Ibid., pp. 55–56.

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tance of contingency with the choice between indifference and responsiveness, cruelty and care, is to overlook the fact that aesthetic cravings—hopes and fears, attractions and revulsions—are at work no matter which of these options we choose. If we do in fact live in a world governed by fixed moral standards (however imperfect our attempts to identify them may be), a world in which disorder and contingency can be overcome (in however distant and uncertain a future), then the indifference (and perhaps the cruelty as well)20 lies on the side of the agonistic project of perpetual self-overcoming. In short, the celebration of what Connolly calls the “rich an-arche of being” can itself be seen to rest upon a controversial metaphysical belief masquerading as a transparently valid premise.21 How then do we decide which of these aesthetic cravings to indulge? In practice this will be to some extent a matter of temperament, but when we seek (as we inevitably must) to justify our conceptions of political life to others, we will necessarily rely upon claims about the possibilities that the world will admit; we will argue that the universe is constructed in such a way that one set of cravings or the other must always lead to frustration. Thus, agonists do not (to my knowledge) hold that any particular political thinker claims to have “shut down the agon” once and for all—surely no one has been so immodest, at least in recent memory—let alone that anyone has actually succeeded in doing so, even temporarily. Nor do they claim that foundational or systematic political theorists are in general unwilling to admit their own fallibility or to see their accounts revised and 20. Richard Rorty notes, for example, that “[t]here is something potentially very cruel” about the claim that all identities are contingent and open for negotiation, “[f]or the best way to cause people long-lasting pain is to humiliate them by making the things that seemed most important to them look futile, obsolete, and powerless.” He concludes, somewhat unsatisfactorily, that “ironic redescription” is not a constructive form of public discourse, and should remain a private matter for intellectuals: Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), chapter 4, quoted at p. 89. 21. To be sure, Connolly often emphasizes the contestability of his own “ontopolitical” stance. However, he seems to mean by this a willingness to engage politically with those who hold other metaphysical “faiths,” not a willingness to admit that a univocal faith might legitimately occupy the center of political life. See especially the introduction to his Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

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improved upon. Rather, agonists insist that the very aspiration to discover and articulate foundational norms in political life is out of joint with the nature of things and that the belief that a unified conception of social and political life might be possible, even in principle, is therefore misguided or worse. In this way, they rely upon an impossibility theorem that is no less far-reaching and dogmatic than the aspiration to theoretical closure that they are sworn to oppose. It follows that to choose between agonism and proceduralism is to choose between two sets of moral and empirical expectations and, thus, to stake one’s conception of human flourishing upon an uncertain assessment of the possibilities that the world will admit. How then do we decide which of these possibilities to pursue? Here, again, we must rely upon uncertain claims about the course of future experience—claims whose validity we cannot fully assess prior to acting upon them. Indeed, the assumption that a genuine consensus about the nature and content of morality cannot be achieved plays exactly the same role in agonistic theories of democracy as the opposite assumption does in deliberative ones: in each case the strategy is to articulate a narrative by means of which a range of social and political ideals can be shown to be inconsistent with the nature and practice of human freedom and, indeed, with democracy itself.22 And in each case the same objection applies: we do not and cannot know in advance whether reason is ultimately a unifying or a divisive force in human experience, whether binding norms are a bulwark or a threat to the diversity of human practices, or whether conflict is a contingent or an inescapable feature of social and political life. These competing claims can be tested against one another only in practice, and in the meantime the effort to claim transparently binding authority for either of them is necessarily specious, whether the authority is drawn from Kant or from Nietzsche. Even the claim that agonism functions as nothing more than a loyal opposition to prevailing norms and practices assumes that fundamental 22. Thus, while Chantal Mouffe argues that “the desire to reach a final destination can only lead to the elimination of the political and to the destruction of democracy,” Habermas insists that “the principle of democracy . . . presupposes the possibility of valid [that is, universally acknowledged] moral judgments”: Mouffe, “Democracy, Power, and the ‘Political,’” in Seyla Benhabib, ed., Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 255; Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, p. 110.

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questions about (for example) the nature and status of human equality and freedom have been answered (at least to someone’s satisfaction) elsewhere, and that democratic institutions are therefore robust enough to withstand and even benefit from the corrosive force of the agonistic critique.23 In short, agonistic democrats, concerned as they are to avoid the pitfalls that they see in foundational approaches to political justification, are left with two alternatives: either to rely upon a narrative of modern experience and a set of claims about human nature that are themselves in need of justification, or else to depend upon the robustness of norms that have acquired their authority by other means. Agonists often fail to grasp this point, because they see themselves as carrying the proceduralist insight into the difficulty of justifying moral principles under modern conditions to its logical conclusion. That is, from an agonistic perspective the fact that the various forms of proceduralism have failed to bracket our moral and ethical disagreements shows that disagreement is itself the essence of political life, and that the adjudication of our disagreements should therefore be left not to fixed procedures but to “politics.” These appeals to “politics” often have a frustratingly talismanic ring; we are, after all, being referred to a procedure without being given any positive sense of what its character might be. In this sense agonists operate at an even higher level of abstraction than their proceduralist counterparts. Not only must we bracket our substantive disagreements about matters of public concern; we must also bracket our procedural disagreements and leave these to be resolved (how it is not clear) through “politics.” It is only when we abandon the quest for an uncontroversial starting point from which political inquiry can safely proceed—a quest in which, as we have seen, agonists are themselves implicated—that we are no longer obliged to be so reticent in articulating our social and political ideals. 4. Pragmatic Justification We have seen that, although deliberative and agonistic democrats each provide far-reaching and provocative insights into the moral and ethical 23. Thus Connolly assigns an important role to the “ethical proclivities” that citizens bring to political life, without which his “ethos of pluralization” could not generate attractive political outcomes. See, for example, Identity/Difference, p. 10.

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possibilities of human association, they are sharply divided on important questions regarding the structure of the good, the nature of human motivations and interests, and the limits of rational consensus. This will surprise no one. What is of greater interest is the fact that, despite their differences, they share a common approach to matters of justification. The aim of both projects is to identify a moral or ethical standpoint, rooted either in the inescapable presuppositions of rational discourse or in the irreducible multiplicity of human desire, that all people can be expected to accept. And it is, of course, precisely with regard to these foundational orientations, and in particular with regard to the expectations about the course of future experience to which they give rise, that their most fundamental differences arise. We can conclude that, however attractive their political ideals may be, and however suggestive their reconstructions of our moral and ethical self-understandings, proceduralists and agonists do not succeed either in sidestepping our differences or in demonstrating that they can be resolved in favor of one set of views or the other. It is not possible to bracket our disagreements by appealing to just political procedures, nor can we draw uncontroversial conclusions from the fact of disagreement taken in itself. Given these two incapacities, the prospects for success or even progress in meeting the challenges of political justification may seem bleak indeed. It is important to emphasize that this impasse does not arise simply from the fact that these thinkers have chosen to wrestle with fundamental moral and ethical questions. After all, the question of whether our disagreements on these questions are intractable or not is itself one of the issues in dispute. Nor does it arise from the fact that they are committed to the project of identifying common ground, even in the face of the many fundamental issues that divide us. Rather, the problem lies in the assumption that this common ground is already available to us, given our existing knowledge and self-understandings. This assumption is, as I hope to have shown, demonstrably false, because the positions in question ultimately depend upon speculative claims about the course of future experience whose validity cannot readily be assessed. Moreover, I believe that the peculiar mix of tentativeness and fractiousness that we find in contemporary theoretical discourse arises in large part from the fact that this assumption is so pervasive. On the one hand, if our aim is to identify principles of social and political organization that cannot coherently be doubted, then we will naturally try to avoid making ambitious

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(and thus obviously controversial) claims about social and political life. On the other hand, if we think that we have identified such principles, then we will be inclined to accuse those who disagree with us of willful blindness, or worse. Taken together, these tendencies have led to a kind of paralysis in normative political thought whose effect is to lend passive support to exactly the kind of ideological hegemony that all parties are committed to opposing. How, then, can we reorient debates about justification so that they speak to our disagreements more fruitfully? Recall that for the pragmatist a belief is justified if and to the extent that acting upon it does not lead to or exacerbate feelings of doubt. The removal of doubt functions, however, only as a regulative ideal; Peirce is careful to emphasize that “since belief is a rule of action, the application of which involves further doubt and further thought, at the same time that it is a stopping-place, it is also a new starting-place for thought.”24 This word of caution suggests a more dynamic sense in which we can speak of justification in pragmatic terms. Because beliefs can be tested only by acting upon them, and because in practice we must always choose between an indefinite number of potential courses of action of which (in most cases) more than one is sufficiently promising to tempt us, we can use the term “justification” more broadly to refer to the process through which we decide which of our uncertain beliefs we are prepared to act upon. Indeed, for the pragmatist the problem of justification is not to determine which of our beliefs are justified in the sense of being free from actual doubt, because if a belief were justified in this sense, then it would not occur to us to try to justify it in the first place. Rather, the problem is to decide which of our beliefs we deem sufficiently promising that we are willing to give it priority over the other beliefs upon which we might otherwise act. In other words, the essential question is not “Which of my beliefs are justified?” but rather “Which of my beliefs should I seek to justify?” Two methodological principles follow from this reorientation of the terms of justificatory discourse. First and most obviously, we can see that justification is inherently a prospective enterprise: when we seek to justify a given belief, we are making an uncertain claim about the future consequences of present changes in conduct. Moral and ethical inquiry, 24. Peirce, “How To Make Our Ideas Clear” (1878), Collected Papers, vol. 5, p. 255.

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and indeed all inquiry whatsoever, concerns matters whose resolution lies in the future, and the degree of fit between a given norm of action and the possibilities that the world will admit can be determined only over time. As we have seen, even political theorists who officially adhere to some other account of justified belief are driven to make prospective claims once their substantive commitments have been challenged. Second and perhaps less obviously, it follows that justification is necessarily a motivational enterprise: in order to justify a particular belief we must first generate a commitment to act upon that belief rather than another. Thus, because an uncertain belief can be evaluated only by carrying out the course of action that it proposes or implies, the task of justificatory discourse is to help us to choose among the competing courses of action that present themselves. This is an especially difficult task in discourses of political justification, because there we are trying to persuade others—and, in the limiting case, an entire society—to act in such a way that a particular conditional proposition about the future can be tested. We are also, of course, trying to persuade them that this course of action should, if necessary, be coercively enforced. As I have already pointed out, this model of justification does not require that we confine our inquiries to matters of practice narrowly construed. In fact, it presupposes that we are in doubt, not only as to which principles of behavior can be justified but also as to what the status of those principles might be. Can we make claims about human nature that could be universally acknowledged? Is it possible to think about human conduct from the standpoint of reason itself? Can we coherently conceive of the world as the creation of an omnipotent and benevolent God? Or must we abandon these aspirations and appeal only to the authority of particular cultural traditions or of competing structures of power? Our answers to questions such as these will, as we have seen, influence the way that we respond to our practical dilemmas, just as the experience that we acquire in responding to such dilemmas influences our more abstract beliefs. The pragmatic model of justification requires that, as with all of our beliefs, we identify the expectations about the course of future experience to which our higher-order beliefs commit us and then act in such a way that those expectations can be verified or disconfirmed. Our decisions as to which possibilities to pursue will, of course, be shaped by our existing beliefs about the world and our place in it, and these will be shaped in turn by the social con-

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text in which we find ourselves. Nevertheless, as I have already pointed out, the pragmatic theory of justification does not require that we adopt a contextualist view of the nature of morality or of moral obligation— though neither does it rule such a view out of court. It follows that the pragmatist need not diminish either the aspirations or the accomplishments of deliberative and agonistic democrats, insofar as each of these schools of thought seeks to appeal to (and to forge) a shared conception of who we are and who we would like to become, individually and as a community. The theory of political justification that I defend here begins from a premise that these approaches share in common: namely, that fundamental disagreements are a defining feature of modern societies and should therefore be respected and accommodated in some way. Given this premise, one of the things that we disagree about most strongly is the question of what the nature of our disagreements actually is. Pragmatism, taken in itself, does not require that we take a particular side on this question, though we will of course have to take some side, at least tentatively, in order to act at all. It simply urges us not to turn the fact of disagreement into a metaphysical necessity that drives us, on the one hand, to the construction of transcendental imperatives and, on the other, to the celebration of existential uncertainty as a quintessentially human mode of experience. Instead we should be willing, whatever our current beliefs, to admit to ourselves and to each other that we do not know what the content of our beliefs will ultimately be, because we do not know whether and to what extent any particular set of beliefs will prove to be compatible with the possibilities that the world will admit. The great challenge of a theory of political justification is to take account of this kind of uncertainty by making it possible for us to explore the full range of possibilities toward which it points. 5. Beyond Minimalism We have seen that deliberative and agonistic democrats each rely upon foundational claims about the nature of human autonomy and flourishing and that these claims rest upon a broader set of views regarding the meaning and trajectory of modern experience. According to the pragmatic model of justification that I have articulated, we can test the validity of these claims only in practice going forward: given our present state

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of understanding, no one can pretend to have transparently valid reasons for excluding either set of possibilities ahead of time. Thus, as attempts at antecedent justification—at identifying an uncontroversial starting point for further inquiry—these approaches miss the mark, relying as they do upon propositions whose predicates lie in the future. They are more promising when viewed prospectively; as accounts that impose a certain order upon our past experiences in order to highlight the attractiveness of a particular course of action. Many deliberative and agonistic democrats will no doubt be perfectly willing to describe their positions in these terms; if so, then I would be happy to welcome them as partners in the project of political justification set forth in the following chapters. A more telling measure of the success of this project will be the extent to which each party is willing to view the other as being similarly committed to an ideal of human flourishing that, while open to doubt, cannot be rejected out of hand. As we will see, the search for legitimate public ends in a pluralistic society will be possible only if and to the extent that all parties are willing to treat their interlocutors with this kind of charity, however deeply they may hold their own particular views. I have suggested that the adoption of a pragmatic approach to justification would allow us to admit controversial social and political ideals into public discourse without jeopardizing our underlying commitment to accommodating a diversity of beliefs. I will try in the remainder of the book to honor this draft on the reader’s credulity. So far we have found that we can test the validity of an uncertain belief only by acting upon it and that the leading task of political justification must therefore be to persuade others to act upon (and thus test) one set of uncertain beliefs rather than another. Of course, we should not lose sight of the fact that the pursuit of any course of action will exclude certain other possibilities, at least temporarily, but neither should we fool ourselves into thinking that we can avoid this kind of loss. In short, I wish to argue that political theorists should stop searching for an uncontroversial starting point from which discourses of justification can safely proceed, even if that starting point is the claim that discourses of justification must always fall short of their ambitions. Pragmatism entails, if nothing else, a rejection of this Cartesian approach to inquiry. We should abandon the theory of justification which says that a political ideal can be ruled out of court simply by virtue of its having been shown to be controversial, and commit ourselves instead to the difficult

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and uncertain work of defending our ideals as attractive, though not unimpeachable, candidates for public action. This approach to justification raises, however, two immediate difficulties. First, if we conceive of justification in purely prospective terms, then it is not clear what criteria we can appeal to as we try to decide which of our uncertain beliefs to act upon. That is, even if we accept the claim that our beliefs must be tested in practice in order to be justified, we must still begin by adopting certain principles of belief formation, which, though they cannot be fully justified prior to inquiry, are essential in order for it to proceed in an orderly fashion. Insofar as pragmatism encourages us to be less concerned with the origins of our beliefs than with their consequences, it does not place any obvious limits on the manner in which these guiding principles are chosen. We must therefore take seriously the charge that the pragmatic approach admits or even encourages a level of willfulness in inquiry that is imprudent and perhaps even pernicious. These issues are addressed most prominently, and also I think most perspicuously, in William James’s defense of the so-called “will to believe” and in the various (mostly hostile) responses that his account has inspired. No pragmatic doctrine has been subject to as much scorn as this one, even at the hands of thinkers who are otherwise willing to describe themselves as pragmatists. Nevertheless, because I believe that James’s position, when properly understood, is not only coherent but largely correct, I will devote Chapter 2 to an extended elaboration and defense of it, with an eye toward fleshing out the implications of prospectivism for the justification of moral and ethical beliefs. Even if we are able to show that idiosyncratic principles of belief formation can be rationally defended, however, it is still not clear how we can settle disagreements about matters of justification in cases when we must decide which beliefs to pursue as a political community—that is, when we must try to determine which beliefs should have the coercive power of the state behind them. This problem has at least two dimensions. The most obvious, given the terms of the discussion so far, is the question of what public ends we can legitimately pursue given the plurality of beliefs—and, a fortiori, of principles of belief formation—that we find in modern societies. This question will become the focus of Parts II and III, as we elaborate the political implications of the pragmatic approach. First, however, we must confront the prior

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question of how we could motivate a commitment to act according to any set of beliefs, given the uncertainty that inevitably attends justification when it is understood in purely prospective terms. In Chapter 3 I will argue that this difficulty disappears once we realize that our moral and ethical beliefs are embedded in larger frameworks of meaning within which it becomes possible for us to assess the degree of fit between a given course of action, our past experiences, and our present selfunderstandings. These narrative frameworks provide us with a point of orientation around which discourses of justification can take place, as well as a set of resources and strategies for identifying shared public ends even in the face of prospective uncertainty and disagreement. For some the shortcomings of the emerging order are serious enough to make debates about justification and legitimacy seem like an indulgence, one that tells us more about the insular concerns of political theorists than about the real problems that we face as a political community. Indeed, this view is often associated with the pragmatic tradition in political thought. It is true, as I have suggested, that political theorists who are preoccupied with problems of justification often overlook the fact that the world in which they live is increasingly dominated by one particular moral point of view and one particular set of social institutions. I therefore believe that we should consider more seriously the possibility that pluralism may be a vanishing feature of modern experience. However, those who are eager to challenge and improve upon prevailing beliefs and practices should not overlook the fact that this project draws much of its force from a concern to ensure that the values of freedom and equality are given adequate expression in social life, and that this concern is itself bound up with the project of ensuring that our public ends can be publicly justified. Here we confront again the tension between the two premises with which we began: first, that the emerging social and political order threatens to overwhelm our ability to make intelligent choices about the world in which we live and, second, that we do in fact find (and value) a wide range of beliefs and practices in modern societies. In order to respond adequately to this state of affairs we must be willing to face the difficult and uncertain task of political justification. A deeper objection concerns the pragmatic confidence in inquiry as a tool of justification. That is, if the test of a moral or ethical proposition lies in the experience of fulfillment or regret on the part of those who

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have acted upon it, then it seems likely that genuine values will be lost to us simply by virtue of the loss of opportunities for their being acted upon. We might endorse the outcome of one course of action without realizing that a greater, or at least very different, value lay at the end of another. This fear lies at the heart of the desire, on the one hand, for transparently binding moral principles and, on the other, for some assurance that the project of contestation will never come to an end. I hope to have shown that each of these desires must remain unconsummated. Our moral and ethical beliefs can be justified only, as it were, in the future conditional, and in the meantime we cannot judge the validity of the broader commitments upon which they rest. Our rulings on such questions are made de facto—we pursue certain possibilities, and in doing so we foreclose others, at least for the time being. This may seem to be a counsel of despair, given the possibility of irrevocable loss that I have just articulated. But the very ability to conceive of such regret suggests that our moral sensibilities are more robust than the objection allows. No state of satisfaction is untinged by doubt, not only about the worth of the path taken, but about the relative merits of other paths. The course of wisdom lies not in seeking to eliminate such doubts but in using them as a spur to further action, recognizing all the while the many constraints on our ambitions and accomplishments.

C H A P T E R TW O

Prospectivism and “The Will to Believe”

1. Scope of the Problem If the test of the validity of a proposition lies in its ability to guide experience reliably, then it follows that, for an uncertain proposition to be verified, it must be acted upon. That is, if some previously unproblematic aspect of our experience becomes a source of doubt, we can remove this doubt only by proposing possible courses of action, pursuing one or more of them, and assessing the degree of fit between the results and our original expectations. Of course, the outcome of such inquiries will reflect back upon, and may even transform, our original intentions. This kind of recursivity becomes especially significant in moral and ethical inquiry, because in such cases we are testing uncertain claims about, among other things, how we will evaluate a given outcome once achieved. It follows that, no matter what our views regarding the nature of morality—whether we believe that moral norms can claim objective status or that they are subjective “all the way down”—changes in moral behavior (and thus, if we adhere to a cognitivist view, the acquisition of moral knowledge) require a willingness to act upon uncertain propositions. Although we may think it likely that there are states of affairs that would be morally preferable to the status quo, we are often uncertain not only as to which of these states of affairs are realizable but also as to which of them we would find morally attractive were they to be realized. Our judgments regarding moral and ethical conduct are therefore shaped, as few of our judgments are, by our 46

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desires and inclinations—though they also depend, to the extent that they are intelligently formed, upon an assessment of the possibilities that the world will admit. This claim that desires and inclinations have a legitimate role to play in matters of belief formation lies at the heart of one of the more disreputable arguments in the pragmatic canon: William James’s defense of the so-called “will to believe.” Stated schematically, James’s position is that when (1) a question cannot be decided in advance on the basis of the available evidence, when (2) a decision on that question cannot be avoided, (3) the decision is between “living” options, and (4) the implications of the decision are “momentous,” we are justified in choosing the course of action that is most in accordance with our existing desires and inclinations, and we are indeed logically compelled to do so.1 James defends this claim against what is often thought of as the scientific ethic of belief, which he engages in the person of the English mathematician and philosopher W. K. Clifford. Clifford argues that “it is wrong always, everywhere, and for any one, to believe anything on insufficient evidence.” This position is stated somewhat more precisely by Bertrand Russell (himself a severe critic of the will-to-believe doctrine), who holds that “[w]e ought to give to every proposition which we consider as nearly as possible that degree of credence which is warranted by the probability it acquires from the evidence known to us.” James insists against this kind of evidentialism that “there is really no scientific or other method by which men can steer safely between the opposite dangers of believing too little or of believing too much. To face such dangers is apparently our duty, and to hit the right channel between them is the measure of our wisdom as men.”2 1. In James’s words, “Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds”; a “genuine” option having previously been defined as one that is “forced, living, and momentous”: “The Will to Believe,” in idem, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979 [1897]), pp. 20, 14 (emphasis removed). 2. William Kingdon Clifford, “The Ethics of Belief,” in idem, Lectures and Essays, ed. Leslie Stephen and Frederick Pollock (London: MacMillan, 1879), vol. 2, p. 175 (quoted in James, “Will to Believe,” p. 18); Bertrand Russell, “Pragmatism,” in idem, Philosophical Essays (New York: George Allen & Unwin, 1910), p. 86; James, “Preface” to The Will to Believe, p. 7.

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It is this antinomian claim—that there is no method, scientific or otherwise, upon which we can “safely” rely in forming our beliefs and that would therefore warrant the exclusion of personal desire from inquiry— that has above all drawn the wrath and scorn of critics. Indeed, although James’s philosophical reputation has revived considerably in recent years, history has not been kind to what is perhaps his most infamous doctrine, and there is little sign even today that it can claim many adherents. The judgment of posterity is perhaps most charitably stated by the theologian John Hick: [W]hen we have spelled out James’s conception of faith . . . we cannot help asking whether it is much better—or indeed any better— than an impressive recommendation of “wishful thinking.” Is he not saying that since the truth is unknown to us we may believe what we like and that while we are about it we had better believe what we like most? This is certainly unjust to James’s intention; but is it unjust to the logic of his argument? I do not see that it is: and I therefore regard James’s theory as open to refutation by a reductio ad absurdum.3 Others have been even less generous: James’s student Dickinson Miller mockingly referred to the doctrine as “the will to deceive” and “the Will . . . to Make-Believe,” and later denounced the essay in question as “one tissue of ingenious sophistry from outset to end.”4 Another contemporary reports of hearing the essay read at Harvard that “[h]ad James addressed a gathering of the Sons of St. Patrick, in the sense of demonstrating to them that the Pope of Rome was the Beast mentioned in the Revelations, he might have called forth a noisier response, but none less sympathetic than ours.”5 As we will see, even sympathetic critics have been able to bring themselves to

3. John Hick, Faith and Knowledge, 2nd ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966 [1957]), p. 44. 4. Dickinson S. Miller, “‘The Will to Believe’ and the Duty to Doubt,” International Journal of Ethics 9 (1899):173, 187; Miller, “James’s Doctrine of ‘The Right to Believe,’” in idem, Philosophical Analysis and Human Welfare (Boston: D. Reidel, 1975 [1944]), p. 295. 5. Edgar A. Singer, Modern Thinkers and Present Problems (New York: Henry Holt, 1923), p. 220.

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endorse James’s doctrine only by rejecting or modifying one or more of its central tenets.6 James introduces the essay “The Will to Believe” by noting that he intends to provide “a defence of our right to adopt a believing attitude in religious matters,” and so it is not surprising that the essay is often read as a treatise on the grounds of religious faith. It is clear, however, that religion was for James an important, but hardly exhaustive, example of an issue on which the will to believe might be exercised: he applies the doctrine not only to other metaphysical questions (such as the problem of free will), but also to questions of moral conduct and even to scientific inquiry itself. Indeed, he announces in the preface to the volume The Will to Believe that his main goal is to defend “the notion that . . . [t]here is no possible point of view from which the world can appear an absolutely single fact,” a formulation which suggests that he is motivated above all by epistemic concerns: [W]ere I addressing the Salvation Army or a miscellaneous popular crowd it would be a misuse of opportunity to preach the liberty of believing as I have in these pages preached it. What such audiences most need is that their faiths should be broken up and ventilated, that the northwest wind of science should get into them and blow their sickliness and barbarism away. But academic audiences, fed already on science, have a very different need. Paralysis of their native capacity for faith and timorous abulia in the religious field are their special forms of mental weakness, brought about by the notion, carefully instilled, that there is something called scientific evidence by waiting upon which they shall escape all danger of shipwreck in regard to truth.7

6. One exception is Hilary Putnam, who writes that “[a]lthough [“The Will to Believe”] has received a great deal of hostile criticism, I believe that its logic is, in fact, precise and impeccable”: Putnam, “A Reconsideration of Deweyan Democracy,” in idem, Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 191–192. For another sympathetic appraisal see Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 42–60. 7. James, “Will to Believe,” p. 13; “Preface” to The Will to Believe, pp. 6, 7. He later wrote that his essay was “only calculated for the sickly hotbed atmosphere of the philosophic-positivistically enlightened scientific classroom”: Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Boston: Little, Brown, 1935), vol. 2, p. 237.

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Thus, far from taking sides in a dispute between religion and science, James is instead responding to what he saw as the peculiar bias of his audience: indeed, it would be more accurate to say that he was against the strict evidentialism espoused by the likes of Clifford and Russell than that he was for religious faith per se. That his efforts were met with such hostility suggests that he judged his audience well. In another of his many gibes, Miller argues that just as James found “‘real possibilities,’ ‘real indeterminations,’ and ‘real conflicts’ in the world . . . just so there are real indeterminations and real conflicts contained within his own thought and text.”8 I will argue instead that, although James may at times be ambiguous, he is not confused or selfcontradictory. There is one point, however, on which this guiding assumption will not hold. A number of commentators have noted that James applies the will-to-believe doctrine to two distinct kinds of cases: those in which we believe an uncertain proposition in the hope of later finding it to be true, and those in which we believe such a proposition in order to help to make it true. The latter category includes cases in which belief in the truth of a proposition has a kind of motivational force—as when our belief that we can perform a task successfully makes it more likely that we will in fact do so.9 When this confusion of usage was pointed out to James (by Arthur Lovejoy) he conceded that “the whole ‘will to believe’ business has got to be re-edited with explicit uses made of the distinction,” but he never undertook such a process of revision

8. Miller, “‘Will to Believe,’” p. 183. 9. James’s best-known example is that of the “Alpine climber”: “Suppose . . . that you are climbing a mountain, and have worked yourself into a position from which the only escape is by a terrible leap. Have faith that you can successfully make it, and your feet are nerved to its accomplishment. But mistrust yourself . . . and you will hesitate so long that, at last, all unstrung and trembling, and launching yourself in a moment of despair, you roll in the abyss”: “Is Life Worth Living?” in The Will to Believe, p. 53; see also “The Sentiment of Rationality,” ibid., p. 80. Gail Kennedy suggests that we should reserve the term “will to believe” for this kind of case, and use “the right to believe” to describe cases in which we act upon uncertain beliefs in order to ascertain their truth. This would be a useful distinction to draw, but it does not correspond to James’s usage. See Kennedy, “Pragmatism, Pragmaticism, and the Will to Believe—A Reconsideration,” Journal of Philosophy 55 (1958):578–588.

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himself.10 Because we are concerned with belief as it bears on matters of moral and ethical conduct, I will ignore this second, “making hypotheses true by believing them” line of argument. This excludes from the field those commentators who take the questionable step of reducing James’s position to this argument, an approach that does indeed lead to “real conflicts”: after all, our belief or disbelief presumably has no bearing on the existence or nonexistence of God or of free will.11 My contention is that, far from being the confused, ridiculous, or pernicious doctrine that its critics have taken it to be, the will to believe highlights the possibilities and limits of justification in an especially perspicuous way. Indeed, I believe that we will not fully understand the nature and aims of the pragmatic theory of justification until we have cleared up the various misunderstandings that surround this position. I have tried so far to give some sense of what is and is not at stake in doing this; I have not yet made any effort to show why James’s doctrine of belief formation should be preferred to the one advanced by Clifford and Russell, nor have I done anything to answer the charge that James offers little more than a sophisticated defense of wishful thinking. To do this requires not only a careful engagement with “The Will to Believe” and its companion essays but an exploration of James’s broader philosophical position on matters of belief and inquiry. I will therefore begin with an examination of James’s use of the terms “belief” and “will,” especially as these are defined in his magnum opus, The Principles of Psychology (Section 2). This will equip us to analyze in some detail his position on the crucial question of the relationship between belief and evidence (Section 3). James also assigns an important role to the social and psychological context in which the believer acts, and it will be useful to address some difficulties to which this emphasis gives rise (Section 4). I conclude with a brief consideration of the relationship between the will-to-believe doctrine and pragmatic thought more generally speaking (Section 5). 10. Perry, Thought and Character, vol. 2, p. 481; see also Lovejoy, “The Thirteen Pragmatisms” (1908), in idem, The Thirteen Pragmatisms and Other Essays (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1963), pp. 6–10. 11. See, for example, Richard M. Gale, “William James and the Ethics of Belief,” American Philosophical Quarterly 17 (1980):1–14; Marcus G. Singer, “The Pragmatic Use of Language and the Will to Believe,” American Philosophical Quarterly 8 (1971):24–34.

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2. Belief and Will Much of the controversy surrounding the will-to-believe doctrine centers around the question of what James meant, or should have meant, by the terms “will” and “belief.” Confusion on this point is understandable given James’s own vacillations in terminology: his earliest published thoughts on the matter speak of a “duty to believe,” and he remarked more than once that his essay should have been called “the right to believe.” The latter formulation has enjoyed wide currency, in part no doubt because it lacks the connotation of wishful thinking suggested by the term “will.” Indeed, James’s appeal to “the right of the individual to indulge his personal faith at his personal risk” may make it seem as if he was concerned simply to secure the toleration of idiosyncratic beliefs.12 However, if this were the case, then we would expect him to focus, as Clifford does, on the social implications of such a policy rather than on the separate issue of how we as individuals might best pursue and discover the truth. After all, “the right to believe” is Clifford’s phrase, and it is the burden of his essay to show that we have no right to believe on insufficient evidence: “no one man’s belief is in any case a private matter which concerns himself alone . . . Our words, our phrases, our forms and processes and modes of thought, are common property, fashioned and perfected from age to age; an heirloom which every succeeding generation inherits as a precious deposit and a sacred trust to be handed on to the next one.” James’s indifference to this line of argument strongly suggests that he does not intend to defend what Clifford calls an “ethics” but rather what H. H. Price calls an “economics” of belief: that he is primarily concerned not with the question of whether individuals have a right to allow their desires to influence their beliefs—few,

12. James, “Preface” to The Will to Believe, p. 8. James proposed the existence of a “duty” to believe in an review of P. G. Tait’s The Unseen Universe (1875): Essays, Comments, and Reviews (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 293–294; see also Perry, Thought and Character, vol. 1, pp. 529–531. He wrote to L. T. Hobhouse in 1904 that the essay “should have been called by the less unlucky title the Right to Believe” (Perry, Thought and Character, vol. 2, p. 245 (original emphasis)) and repeats this claim in his Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978 [1907]), p. 124. In other correspondence he suggests “A Defense of Faith” and “A Critique of Pure Faith” as alternate titles: Perry, Thought and Character, vol. 2, pp. 243–244.

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pace Clifford, would deny that—but rather with whether they would be acting wisely or reasonably in doing so.13 Of course, this shift from an ethical to an epistemic perspective raises more questions than it settles, particularly when we recall that James is writing as an empiricist and that, according to traditional empiricist principles, our beliefs are imposed upon us by our experiences and thus cannot be acquired or rejected through an exercise of will. Hume, for example, famously argues that belief “depends not on the will, but must arise from certain determinate causes and principles, of which we are not masters.”14 Indeed, the very fact that we regard our beliefs as being “about” an external reality would seem to indicate that they must be thought of as existing independent of our volition, an insight that has been elaborated more recently by Bernard Williams: “If in full consciousness I could will to acquire a ‘belief’ irrespective of its truth, it is unclear that before the event I could seriously think of it as a belief, i.e. as something purporting to represent reality . . . With regard to no belief could I know—or, if all this is to be done in full consciousness, even suspect—that I had acquired it at will.”15 If Williams is right, then the various normative objections to the will-tobelieve doctrine are beside the point: James is defending a psychological impossibility, and the very title of his essay contains a contradiction in terms. Anything that we will cannot properly be called a belief, and anything that we believe cannot properly be regarded as resulting from an act of will. In order to respond to this intuitively powerful objection, we must be able to show that James’s use of the terms “belief” and “will” avoids the apparent paradox that Williams identifies and nevertheless remains close enough to ordinary usage as not to be itself willfully idiosyncratic. In fact, James includes an extended discussion of the relationship between belief and will in the second volume of his Principles of Psychology (published six years prior to The Will to Believe), and so we have reason to 13. Clifford, “Ethics of Belief,” p. 169. On the contrast between an ethics and an economics of belief see H. H. Price, “Belief and Will,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society supp. 28 (1954):26. 14. David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge & P. H. Nidditch, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978 [1740]), p. 624. 15. Bernard Williams, “Deciding to Believe,” in idem, Problems of the Self: Philosophical Papers, 1956–1972 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1973), p. 148.

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think that he chose his terms advisedly. There he agrees with Hume that beliefs are coerced by experience, and adds that to have an experience of any kind is to believe in its reality to that extent. He borrows the latter claim from another Scottish empiricist, his older contemporary Alexander Bain, whose doctrine of “primitive credulity” posits that “[w]e begin by believing everything; whatever is, is true.”16 This credulity is, however, short-lived, because we soon find that our immediate experiences contradict one another. James concludes that we must ultimately choose which of our experiences will constitute the reality within which we act, and that we are guided in doing so by our practical interests: “As bare logical thinkers, without emotional reaction, we give reality to whatever objects we think of, for they are really phenomena, or objects of our passing thought, if nothing more. But, as thinkers with emotional reaction, we give what seems to us a still higher degree of reality to whatever things we select and emphasize and turn to WITH A WILL.” It is therefore not enough to say that belief is coerced by experience, because we have many experiences— dreams, fantasies, illusions—to whose reality we rationally refuse to assent. At the level of perception our experiences are equally coercive, and we are able to discriminate between them only through a further act of will. James concludes that “Will and Belief . . . meaning a certain relation between objects and the Self, are two names for one and the same PSYCHOLOGICAL phenomenon.”17 How is it then that we can “will” to believe something? The common thread that binds together will and belief for James is the faculty of attention; that is, because belief entails a choice as to which of our experiences we will attend to as real or significant, changes in belief can be brought about through changes in our habits of attention. In other words, to the extent that beliefs can be acquired deliberately, this is done through a more or less conscious effort to keep certain experiences before the mind and to disregard others. James draws the striking conclusion that “the will’s work is in most cases practically ended when the bare presence to our thought of [a] naturally unwelcome object has been secured.” It is therefore wrong, or at least an oversimplification, to 16. Alexander Bain, The Emotions and the Will, 3rd ed. (London: Longmans, Green, 1888), p. 511. 17. James, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983 [1890]), pp. 925–926 (original emphasis), 948 (emphasis removed).

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say that we cannot choose to acquire a belief; nor is the effort to do so necessarily irrational: Truly enough, a man cannot believe at will abruptly . . . But gradually our will can lead us to the same results by a very simple method: we need only in cold blood ACT as if the thing in question were real, and keep acting as if it were real, and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real. It will become so knit with habit and emotion that our interests in it will be those which characterize belief.18 In short, not only do beliefs define habits of action; they can themselves be instilled through habits of action. More precisely, we can often acquire a belief simply by cultivating the appropriate habits of attention. Because belief and action are intimately related in this way, there is a difference of degree and not of kind between beliefs that lie so near to the core of our experience that they seem to have been determined by the very nature of things and beliefs that are held more deliberately, and thus more tentatively. It follows that the “will to believe” has a role to play only in situations in which we are concerned to alter our existing habits of action. It is crucial to grasp this point if we wish to understand James’s position properly: far from being a license for thinking as we are inclined to think, the will to believe comes into play precisely when we seek (or are compelled) to unsettle our established beliefs. This helps to explain why pluralism and the will to believe were so closely associated in James’s mind, and thus why he was concerned to preach the legitimacy of religious faith to scientific audiences, just as he was concerned to preach the legitimacy of scientific inquiry to the faithful. It is only by resisting and complicating our habitual patterns of thought that we acquire the kind of nuanced grasp of reality that makes it possible for us to respond 18. James, Principles of Psychology, pp. 1168, 948–949 (original emphasis). James’s position on this question finds an echo in Iris Murdoch’s claim that the “[w]ill continually influences belief, for better or worse, and is ideally able to influence it through sustained attention to reality.” Murdoch is more inclined than James to conceive of “attention” as a matter of correctly grasping an objectively given state of affairs, though she strikes a Jamesian note in speaking of “the infinite difficulty of the task of apprehending a magnetic but inexhaustible reality”: “The Idea of Perfection,” in idem, The Sovereignty of Good (New York: Routledge, 1970), pp. 40, 42.

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intelligently and fruitfully to our manifold experiences. Needless to say, this kind of effort is difficult to undertake, let alone to sustain. When understood in this way, James’s concerns are very similar to those of his “scientific” critics: the difference lies not, as is often supposed, in his greater credulity,19 but rather in his determination to subject the claim that we should believe only in accordance with the evidence to the same kind of critical scrutiny as other beliefs. Methodological dogmas such as this are particularly insidious because they block certain lines of inquiry in advance, and James wants to emphasize, as we have seen, that “a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule.”20 3. Belief and Evidence Some critics are, of course, happy to concede that beliefs can be acquired through acts of will and to point out that, indeed, this is done all too frequently. The problem for these critics is not that James defends a psychological impossibility but that, whatever his intentions, he indulges a human propensity to avoid or deny unpleasant truths. Here we come up against the properly normative objections to the willto-believe doctrine, and in particular against the overarching claim that James’s position amounts, intentionally or not, to a defense of wishful thinking. According to this line of criticism it is not only good policy but even tautological to say that the proposition for which the most evidence exists is the one that it is most rational to endorse: [W]hen we reflect on the meaning of the word “evidence,” we see that the policy of believing in accordance with the evidence is the only one which will ensure that the propositions we believe are more likely to be true than false. For when we say that such and such facts or experiences are evidence for a proposition p, we just mean 19. Miller notes acutely that James “does not believe, albeit with the best will to believe (at times), in the world. He has the courage of his assumptions, but not their serenity.” Perry adds that James “was deeply concerned with the need of belief and with the right to believe, but made no considerable use of that right”: Miller, “‘Will to Believe,’” p. 186 (my emphasis); Perry, Thought and Character, vol. 2, p. 211. 20. James, “Will to Believe,” pp. 31–32 (emphasis removed).

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that they make it likely in some degree to be true. And so in preferring a proposition for which the evidence is stronger to a proposition for which the evidence is weaker, we are ipso facto preferring the one which is more likely to be true.21 These critics do not deny that true beliefs can be arrived at in a number of ways; they simply argue that to follow any policy other than that of believing in accordance with the preponderance of the evidence is to create or encourage habits of inquiry that will have pernicious consequences in the long run. As Clifford puts it, “if I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief; it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward acts. But I cannot help doing this great wrong toward Man, that I make myself credulous.”22 This is a formidable objection—so formidable, indeed, that many of James’s defenders have responded to it by denying that he ever held the position that his critics attribute to him. Some have gone so far as to say that he intended the will to believe to be exercised only on questions for which evidence not only does not but could not exist, even in principle. A. J. Ayer, for example, argues that James’s defense of the will to believe “applies only to questions of faith or morals, with regard to which there are no ascertainable facts,” and that a failure to grasp this point “has been mainly responsible for the extent to which his position has been misunderstood.”23 This is certainly a bold attempt to resolve the difficulty at hand, but, unfortunately, not only does James fail to distinguish between scientific and moral questions in his writings on the subject, but his use of scientific examples to illustrate his position strongly suggests that he would have rejected such a distinction had it been proposed to him. Moreover, James is perhaps best known for arguing that the meaning of moral and religious propositions lies in the practical consequences of endorsing them, and thus that there are, at least in principle, experimental 21. Price, “Belief and Will,” pp. 25–26 (original emphasis). 22. Clifford, “Ethics of Belief,” pp. 173–174. 23. A. J. Ayer, The Origins of Pragmatism: Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce and William James (London: MacMillan, 1968), pp. 213, 191. For an ethical noncognitivist such as Ayer the will to believe moral propositions would seem to be something of a logical necessity.

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means of testing their truth.24 To the extent that he treats scientific and moral questions differently in this respect, he bases the distinction on the claim that decisions in the realm of scientific inquiry are usually not “momentous” when compared to decisions in moral and ethical life, but this is obviously not true for many professional scientists, especially when scientific inquiry is very costly.25 We find, then, that we cannot rescue James from his critics by insulating empirical inquiry from the more radical implications of his doctrine. Indeed, far from applying the will to believe only to questions on which the truth cannot be ascertained, James claimed to be motivated above all by a concern to seek the truth, and vigorously defended his doctrine as an advance in this respect over the view that we should always follow the preponderance of the evidence in forming our beliefs. A somewhat more modest way of limiting the scope of his doctrine would be to argue that he intended it to apply only in cases in which the evidence on a given question is more or less evenly balanced. Some critics have taken this to mean that the will to believe should be applied only when the evidence is exactly balanced between two options (if indeed such cases ever occur), whereas others hold that it may legitimately be invoked only when the evidence is of mixed or 24. Morton White raises a similar objection in his review of Ayer’s Origins of Pragmatism, “Logical Positivism and the Pragmatism of William James” (1969), reprinted in idem, Pragmatism and the American Mind: Essays and Reviews in Philosophy and Intellectual History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 110–120. On James’s use of scientific examples see, for example, Principles of Psychology, pp. 939–940, where he uses “the one-fluid and two-fluid theories of electricity” to illustrate his point, adding that “[t]he sciences are full of these alternatives.” On the empirical dimension of religious and moral beliefs see, for example, his “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results” (1898), in idem, Collected Essays and Reviews (New York: Russell & Russell, 1920), pp. 406–437, and Pragmatism, chapter 3. 25. James writes that “[an] option is trivial when the opportunity is not unique, when the stake is insignificant, or when the decision is reversible if it later prove unwise. Such trivial options abound in scientific life”: “Will to Believe,” p. 15. Compare Max Weber’s claim that “whoever lacks the capacity to . . . come up to the idea that the fate of his soul depends upon whether or not he makes the correct conjecture at this passage of this manuscript may as well stay away from science”: “Science as a Vocation” (1918), in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. & trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 135.

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uncertain import.26 James himself often emphasized that we should exercise the will to believe only once other factors, such as the state of the existing evidence, have been taken into account, and so unlike Ayer’s attempt to draw a distinction between moral and scientific inquiry this interpretation has considerable textual support.27 However, these commentators share with Ayer the view that the disagreement between James and his “scientific” critics rests upon a misunderstanding; that he never intended the will-to-believe doctrine to supersede scientific principles of belief formation but only to apply to those special (and probably rare) cases in which the ordinary rules of evidence break down. The immediate problem with this position is that it fails to account for the breadth of James’s concerns. Whatever else we may say about the will-to-believe doctrine, it is clear that James regarded it as a fundamental challenge to prevailing conceptions of belief formation and not simply as a footnote to them. More particularly, these commentators err in interpreting James’s ceteris paribus clause as an injunction to give dispositive weight to the existing evidence when its import is clear. In fact, in the most precise statement of the will-to-believe doctrine we find no mention of evidence at all but only the stipulation that the will to believe should be applied to questions that “cannot by [their] nature be decided on intellectual grounds.” James elsewhere attaches a much stronger meaning to this criterion than the mere preponderance of evidence; he speaks of “objective certitudes” and “complete objective proof” and goes out of his way to ridicule “the absurd abstraction of an intellect verbally formulating all its evidence and carefully estimating the probability thereof.”28 Needless to say, there are very few beliefs for which we can claim “objective certitude” (none at all, for a radical empiricist like James), and so he does not substantially limit the scope 26. See, for example, Peter H. Hare and Edward H. Madden, “William James, Dickinson Miller and C. J. Ducasse on the Ethics of Belief,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 4 (1968):115–129; Stephen T. Davis, “Wishful Thinking and ‘The Will to Believe,’” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 8 (1972):231–245. 27. For example, James wrote to Ralph Barton Perry that “other things being equal, the view of things that seems more satisfactory morally will legitimately be treated by men as truer than the view that seems less so”: Perry, Thought and Character, vol. 2, p. 468 (original emphasis). 28. James, “Will to Believe,” pp. 20, 32 (emphasis removed); The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to Pragmatism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978 [1909]), p. 139; “Sentiment of Rationality,” p. 77.

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of his doctrine by including this proviso. It is reasonable to conclude that he intended for the will to believe to be invoked not only when the evidence on a given matter was of mixed or uncertain import but even in cases in which the existing evidence was very much against the belief in question. In this respect his position is much more radical than many of his defenders realize. When properly understood, the will-to-believe doctrine entails neither a disregard for nor a preoccupation with the balance of evidence. Instead, it focuses our attention on the question of how the existing body of evidence came into being in the first place and, in particular, upon what prejudices may have influenced this process. As we have already noted, when we are talking about moral beliefs (religious and political beliefs being a subset of these), it is especially likely that subjective motivations will have played a significant role in previous inquiry and that much of the evidence bearing upon such questions will therefore remain to be gathered. In such cases, to require that we believe in accordance with the preponderance of evidence is to beg the question at hand, because there are matters about which evidence will be gathered only if a given hypothesis is endorsed prior to inquiry. Indeed, the investigation of certain beliefs may be justified precisely because they go against the weight of the existing evidence.29 This does not, of course, mean that we should be inattentive to additional evidence as it presents itself, but it does warn us against fetishizing the existing “balance” of evidence, because to do this is simply to introduce a conservative bias into inquiry. James’s central insight, around which the entire will-tobelieve doctrine is built, is that the state of the existing evidence on a given question is itself a function of the desires and inclinations of previous inquirers. Thus the proper question to ask is not what evidence is 29. Hilary Putnam presses this point in the case of the natural sciences: “In James’s day it was not as well understood as it is now that scientists who propose theories often do so before any real experimental evidence is available, and often defend their untested theories with a passion—without which the evidence would probably never be collected or the experiments performed”: “William James’s Ideas,” in idem, Realism With a Human Face (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 224. Even Clifford acknowledges that “there are many cases in which it is our duty to act upon probabilities, although the evidence is not such as to justify present belief; because it is precisely by such action, and by observation of its fruits, that evidence is got which may justify belief”: “Ethics of Belief,” pp. 177–178.

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available, but rather what evidence might become available if we were to act in a certain way.30 It may seem to follow that James is advising us to ignore prima facie probabilities whenever we form beliefs, and that the will to believe is thus an irrational and even anarchic doctrine after all. Here it is important to note that, although he does weaken the de jure constraints upon what may legitimately be invoked as grounds for belief, he emphasizes that powerful de facto constraints remain in place. To begin with, as we have seen, experimentation with new beliefs will take place only when we have been given some positive reason to doubt the adequacy of our existing ones. Indeed if we accept, as any pragmatist must, that the need for justification arises only when a belief has become a source of practical doubt, then it follows that the balance of evidence cannot exercise final authority over our decision to adopt a new belief: doubt is, after all, a matter of being dissatisfied with one’s previous assessment of the state of the evidence. When such doubt exists, “[i]t matters not to an empiricist from what quarter an hypothesis may come to him: he may have acquired it by fair means or by foul; passion may have whispered or accident suggested it; but if the total drift of thinking continues to confirm it, that is what he means by its being true.”31 Moreover, our desire to pursue attractive but uncertain beliefs is always checked by our equally pressing desire to render new facts consistent with previous experience. Thus James is careful to emphasize that two kinds of satisfaction are relevant to the adoption of a belief: the retrospective satisfaction of accounting for past experiences as well as the prospective satisfaction of rendering future experiences richer and more fruitful.32 James nevertheless remains vulnerable to the objection that, whatever the provisional merits of adopting an uncertain belief may be, he fails to guard against the possibility that our desires will lead us to disregard or fail to collect further evidence regarding the validity of such beliefs—just as they led us to disregard the existing state of the evidence when we decided to adopt them in the first place. On this view, 30. As he succinctly puts it, “[t]elles croyances, tels faits; d’autres croyances, d’autres faits” [roughly, “these beliefs, these facts; other beliefs, other facts”]: “Quelques Considérations sur la méthode subjective” (1878), in idem, Essays in Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 27. 31. James, “Will to Believe,” p. 24. 32. See, for example, James, Pragmatism, pp. 34–37.

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it is misleading at best to say that when we act under conditions of evidential uncertainty—however defined—we “believe” that our chosen course of action is the correct one: we act and are (or should be) simultaneously alert to any disconfirming evidence. As Miller succinctly puts it, echoing Williams, “in so far as a thought remains a hypothesis awaiting verification it is not a belief . . . [i]n so far as it is a belief it is no longer a hypothesis.”33 At one level this is simply a disagreement as to what is meant by belief. If we equate belief with conviction and therefore insist that belief and hypothesis be strictly distinguished from one another, then we may reasonably conclude that James is suggesting that we should smother our doubts through an act of will. However, James makes no such equation; he follows Bain (and Peirce) in saying that the test of belief in a proposition is simply the disposition to act upon it: we act insofar as we believe that a given course of action is the best one available to us, and we are inhibited from acting insofar as we doubt that this is the case. On this account it is perfectly consistent to act upon a proposition and simultaneously remain alert to its shortcomings.34 Insofar as this is not simply a semantic objection, it draws its force from the claim that the careful inquirer is the disinterested inquirer, and that to allow our desires to shape our beliefs is thus, if not to discourage, then at least to distort further inquiry. On this view “belief” cannot be equated with “working hypothesis,” because the investigator who tests an hypothesis does not—or at least should not—believe (let alone hope) that it is correct. To do so would be to corrupt the integrity of the inquiry in question. To this claim James offers a flat denial, and the keener psychological observation that the careful inquirer is the interested inquirer: “if you want an absolute duffer in an investigation, you must, after all, take the man who has no interest whatever in its results: he is the warranted incapable, the positive fool. The most useful investigator, because the most sensitive observer, is always he whose eager interest in one side of the question is balanced by an equally keen ner33. Miller, “Review of Julius Seelye Bixler, Religion in the Philosophy of William James,” Journal of Philosophy 24 (1927):209. 34. Bain, Emotions and the Will, pp. 505–507. Peirce writes that pragmatism is “scarce more than a corollary” of Bain’s definition of belief, and adds that he is therefore “disposed to think of him as the grandfather of pragmatism”: “Preface” (fragment, ca. 1906) to Collected Papers, vol. 5, pp. 7–8. See also James, “Will to Believe,” p. 14.

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vousness lest he become deceived.”35 This passage aptly summarizes James’s position on the question of belief and evidence: we are often (if not always) motivated to test an hypothesis by a desire to see it validated or refuted, and we therefore adopt beliefs not only because we find them congenial but because we hope to prove them correct. This means, among other things, that we should not only be willing but “eager” to seek further evidence regarding the belief in question. Thus, although James defends the role of desire in shaping our decision to adopt a given belief, he does nothing to lessen the obligation to test that belief in practice over time. The will-to-believe doctrine redefines the conditions under which we are justified in acting upon uncertain propositions, but it does not change the terms under which those propositions come to be justified.36 4. Belief and Context Having considered at some length James’s views on the relationship between belief and evidence, we are now prepared to examine the other criteria with which he limits the scope of application of his doctrine. These consist, as I have indicated, in the stipulation that the will to believe should be invoked only in the case of decisions that are “forced,” “living,” and “momentous.” By a “forced” decision James means one in which the option of suspending judgment is not open to us or, more precisely, one in which a decision to suspend judgment is practically equivalent to a decision to reject the belief in question. This is never the case when the choice that we face is among two or more substantive options, because in such cases we can delay our choice indefinitely without prejudicing the final outcome. The decisions with which the will-to-believe doctrine is properly concerned are instead those that involve the acceptance or rejection of a particular belief; those that say, in effect, “[e]ither accept this truth or go without it.”37 We may indeed be justified in 35. James, “Will to Believe,” p. 26. 36. In James’s words, “[t]ruth is constituted by verification actual or possible, and beliefs, however reached, have to be verified before they can count as true. The question whether we have a right to believe anything before verification concerns not the constitution of truth, but the policy of belief”: Perry, Thought and Character, vol. 2, p. 249 (original emphasis). 37. James, “Will to Believe,” p. 15.

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postponing our decision in such cases, but we should keep in mind that in doing so we forgo the particular consequences, good or bad, to which that belief would have led had it been acted upon: not to decide is to decide. In other words, the decision to invoke the will to believe is not simply a matter of choosing the most desirable belief from among a range of options but rather of weighing the evidence in favor of a given belief against the possible costs of pursuing or failing to pursue it. As James emphasizes, it is not clear that there is any fixed standard to which we can appeal in making such determinations. This lack of a fixed standard of evaluation raises the obvious question of how we are to weigh these costs and benefits, and with his final two conditions—that the decisions to which the will to believe is applied must be “living” and “momentous”—James makes it clear that such judgments are to be left up to the individual actor. A “living” option is one that “appeals as a real possibility to him to whom it is proposed,”38 and so by imposing this limitation on his doctrine James signals that our ability to choose our beliefs extends only as far as the beliefs in question have some claim, positive or negative, upon our existing desires. Given the premises of his position, this claim is something of a tautology: because hypotheses can be validated only if we act as if they were true, and because certain hypotheses will be acted upon only if we desire that they be true, we will act upon hypotheses of the latter sort only if our existing desires have a certain character. Although this does not mean that we should endorse whichever creed is locally popular, it does imply that certain hypotheses will be neglected simply because they fail to appeal to us as real possibilities. James is therefore exposed to the charge that, by arguing that belief is often a precondition of inquiry and that the decision whether or not to investigate a particular belief therefore depends in part upon the desires of the individual in question, he makes it likely that unpopular or unpalatable beliefs will not be properly investigated. This line of criticism led Russell to quip that according to James “a Frenchman ought to believe in Catholicism, an American in the Monroe Doctrine, and an Arab in the Mahdi.”39 Russell’s “ought” elides the crucial distinction between the question of whether we are presently justified in adopting a given belief and the question of whether that belief can presently be shown to be true or 38. Ibid., p. 14. 39. Russell, “Pragmatism,” p. 87.

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even likely to be true. It may very well be the case that the question of whether the Catholic faith is true or not will be more salient to someone who was raised in the Catholic tradition, or in a predominantly Catholic part of the world, than to someone who was not, and that such a person therefore “ought” to consider this question more carefully. This has nothing to do, however, with the question of whether anyone “ought” to believe in Catholicism; such an “ought” would apply only if and to the extent that the belief in question were in fact found to be true. Indeed, to say that an option is “living” for us does not necessarily mean that we or those around us are inclined to endorse it. Some options are living precisely because and to the extent that we are concerned to resist their influence: a dead option is not one to which we are hostile but one to which we are indifferent. As for the question of whether this doctrine places certain beliefs beyond the pale of serious inquiry, James frequently emphasizes not only that our desires are educable but that we have a practical obligation to educate them. Indeed, one of the chief aims of moral education of any kind is to render previously dead options living and previously living options dead. As we have seen, far from confining inquiry to the horizons of our existing beliefs, James hopes to unsettle those beliefs by causing us to reexamine the prejudices that have guided previous inquiry. Thus, although wishing that something were true is, taken in itself, the poorest of grounds for belief, the decision to act upon a cherished belief in order to investigate its truth can be perfectly rational. Under what circumstances, then, should we be willing to challenge our existing habits in this way? This question points to James’s final criterion, which states that we may legitimately appeal to our desires in forming our beliefs only when the decision in question is a “momentous” one. This claim, too, is something of a tautology given James’s premises: after all, it is unlikely that we would be willing to devote our energies to investigating an uncertain belief unless the potential benefits of doing so were significant. To Russell’s objection that this doctrine may lead us to pursue beliefs that are not in fact true or to shun beliefs that are, James wryly notes that “[w]e may regard the chase for truth as paramount, and the avoidance of error as secondary; or we may, on the other hand, treat the avoidance of error as more imperative, and let truth take its chance . . . he who says, ‘Better go without belief forever than believe a lie!’ merely shows his own preponderant private

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horror of becoming a dupe.”40 We must remember that when the evidentiary grounds for adopting a belief are uncertain and the choice is a forced one, to suspend judgment is in effect to decide the issue in the negative and thus to ignore a possible truth. Such caution is warranted only when the adverse consequences of deciding wrongly outweigh the possible benefits. James acknowledges that this determination will be made differently by different actors, but, in any case, to say that the consequences of rejecting a belief wrongly are not significant is to say, in effect, that the decision in question is not a momentous one. Some have concluded from James’s criticism of the decision to suspend judgment that he intends to persuade us that we cannot afford to decide certain questions of belief in the negative, given the momentousness of the goods in question. On this view, James defends not a “right-to-believe” but a “foolish-not-to-believe” doctrine that is meant to skew our belief decisions toward particular momentous goods such as those offered by religious faith. This interpretation is bolstered by the fact that James uses the example of Pascal’s wager to illustrate his position, because Pascal’s argument does of course have exactly this character.41 What this claim overlooks, however, is the fact that the decision to pursue a momentous good usually has momentous costs: to become a believer does not (on most accounts) require merely that one acknowledge the truth of certain propositions but also that one live one’s life in a radically different way—a life that may (so far as one can know for certain) be finite and irreplaceable, and thus of indefinite value. Given his concern to defend “the right of the individual to indulge his personal faith at his personal risk,” we may conclude that James is not concerned to justify any particular kind of belief but rather to defend the legitimacy of provisionally adopting uncertain beliefs when the possibility of their being true is both attractive and important to the actor in question. Indeed, he uses his discussion of Pascal as an opportunity to reiterate this point. Momentous decisions are not decisions that must be made in a particular way; they are decisions that cannot be taken lightly given their significance to the actor in question. 40. James, “Will to Believe,” pp. 24–25. 41. See, for example, C. S. Wernham, James’s Will to Believe Doctrine: A Heretical View (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987), chapters 5 and 10. James discusses Pascal’s wager in “Will to Believe,” pp. 16–17.

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5. Pragmatism and the Will to Believe I hope to have shown not only that the will-to-believe doctrine is internally consistent but that, contrary to the claims of its critics, it is predicated on a rational desire to seek the truth on questions of particular significance and complexity. Indeed, one way of expressing the difference between James and his critics is to say that he assumes that the motivation to seek out the truth is already uppermost in the minds of most inquirers, whereas his critics hold that this motivation can be sustained only if we submit our subjective inclinations to the “objective” test of congruity with the evidence. The problem with the latter position is not, of course, its concern with evidence but rather its assumption that the existing body of evidence can claim objective status—an assumption that overlooks the fact that all evidence is at least in part an artifact of the desires and inclinations of previous inquirers. This kind of bias is likely to be especially significant in lines of inquiry in which human values are directly at stake, as is the case in moral and ethical inquiry, and thus also in public affairs.42 James holds that in such cases we should be less concerned with the evidentiary grounds upon which our beliefs are adopted than with the manner in which they are tested over time, because it is only when we loosen the connection between our beliefs and the existing evidence in this way that it becomes possible for us to explore the full range of truths that are accessible to human understanding. In such cases, an unwillingness to take a risk on uncertain beliefs amounts, practically speaking, to an acquiescence in the dogmas of the status quo. It may seem that this discussion has led us rather far afield from the pragmatic theory of justification, given that the will-to-believe doctrine is usually more closely associated with James himself than with pragmatic philosophy more generally speaking. In fact, the essentials of the will-tobelieve doctrine are not, as is often supposed, peculiar to James among 42. Political history is full of examples of significant propositions that have been acted upon despite the fact that there was little evidence in their favor (and much against): consider, to take only two examples, the belief among the American Founders that a republic might flourish on a large scale in the modern world and the belief among early advocates of gender equality that women might come to play an equal role in the many areas of social life from which they were excluded by law and custom. Needless to say, the bias of previous inquirers played a leading role in shaping the body of “evidence” in each case.

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the founding pragmatists, nor can they readily be distinguished from the essentials of pragmatism itself.43 Dewey, for example, not only held that the will-to-believe doctrine was the “most precious” aspect of James’s philosophy but argued, in an important essay on his own philosophic method, that “every moral term . . . refers not to accomplished reality but to a desired future which our desires, when translated into articulate conviction, may help bring into existence.” For Dewey, as for James, our beliefs about matters of human concern are not merely reflections of the current balance of evidence but prospective claims about the degree of fit between our desires and the possibilities that the world will admit. We therefore begin “not from ascertained knowledge, but from moral convictions, and then resort . . . to the best knowledge and the best intellectual methods available . . . to give the form of demonstration to what [is] essentially an attitude of will.” Of course, the irreducible role of will in belief formation does not change the fact that our ultimate aim is “to effect a union . . . of the demands of our emotional and desiring nature with the claims of our intelligence and scientific knowledge,” and Dewey points to James as an exemplary figure in the effort to promote this kind of union.44 Although Peirce, to whom the volume The Will to Believe was dedicated, wrote in gratitude to James that the eponymous essay was “of great value” (adding, “I am quite with you in the main”), his views on the matter are probably better known from his later comment, also contained in private correspondence to James, that the book “was a very exaggerated utterance, such as injures a serious man very much.”45 The relationship between Peirce and James was a complicated one, both personally and philosophically speaking, and it is by no means uncommon to find Peirce chiding his friend for a lack of logical rigor or precision. However, to say 43. Russell, for one, held that “[s]ome practice in the will to believe is an almost indispensable preliminary to the acceptance of pragmatism; and conversely pragmatism, when once accepted, is found to give the full justification of the will to believe”: “Pragmatism,” p. 83. He did not, of course, consider this to be a point in favor of either doctrine. 44. Dewey, “William James as Empiricist” (1942), Later Works, vol. 15, p. 15; “Philosophy and Democracy” (1919), Middle Works, vol. 11, p. 44; “William James and the World Today” (1942), Later Works, vol. 15, pp. 6–7. 45. Peirce, letter to William James (March 13, 1897), Collected Papers, vol. 8, pp. 186–187; Peirce, letter to William James (March 9, 1909), in Perry, Thought and Character, vol. 2, p. 438.

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that an utterance is exaggerated is not to say that it is wrong, and Peirce elsewhere demonstrates a striking affinity for the essentials of the will-tobelieve doctrine as we have reconstructed them here: It is a very grave mistake to attach much importance to the antecedent likelihood of hypotheses, except in extreme cases; because likelihoods are mostly merely subjective, and have so little real value, that considering the remarkable opportunities which they will cause us to miss, in the long run attention to them does not pay. Every hypothesis should be put to the test by forcing it to make verifiable predictions.46 It is clear from other writings that when he uses the term “likelihood” Peirce is referring to the state of the evidence as it is known to us.47 We may conclude that, like James and Dewey, he holds that our belief decisions need not be determined by the existing evidence but can appropriately take into account the “remarkable opportunities” to which a given hypothesis may lead. And, like James and Dewey, he insists that whatever criteria we apply in adopting our beliefs, those beliefs must then be justified in experience going forward. Thus Peirce and James agree that when we are seeking the truth, our first concern must be to avoid blocking the path of inquiry, and that the brand of evidentialism defended by Clifford and Russell fails to meet this test. To the extent that they disagree on this issue, it is over the question of what kind of truth it is that we are seeking. According to James, we should not only respect but cherish the idiosyncratic beliefs that individuals hold, because they can provide us with irreplaceable insight into the fundamentally pluralistic character of the universe. On this view it is not only impractical but irrational to seek to keep our personal desires out of inquiry, because these desires have an essential role to play in the discovery of truth. Peirce is superficially in agreement with this view; he argues that a proposition is true if “belief in the proposition would, with 46. Peirce, “Methods for Attaining Truth” (fragment, 1903), Collected Papers, vol. 5, p. 419. 47. “I call that theory likely which is not yet proved but is supported by such evidence that if the rest of the conceivably possible evidence should turn out upon examination to be of a similar character, the theory would be conclusively proved”: “The Doctrine of Chances” (1878; note added 1910), Collected Papers, vol. 2, p. 407 (original emphasis).

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sufficient experience and reflection, lead us to such conduct as would tend to satisfy the desires we should then have.” However, because he conceives of truth in monistic terms as “[t]he opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate,” he insists that our beliefs and desires have a fundamentally social character and that, insofar as they are merely idiosyncratic, they should be regarded as transient phenomena that will be superseded as inquiry progresses toward the ideal end of rational consensus. Thus for Peirce the course of rationality lies not in the admission of personal interests into inquiry but rather in “the complete self-identification of one’s own interests with those of the community,” and indeed with mankind as a whole.48 There is nothing in the will-to-believe doctrine or in the pragmatic theory of justification that compels us to take a side in this dispute, but it is worth noting that James, despite his deep-seated commitment to the idea of a pluralistic universe, was willing to admit Peirce’s brand of monism as a legitimate hypothesis—and that the converse was not true of Peirce.49 Indeed, James’s greatest virtue as an exponent of pragmatism lies in the fact that he consistently draws a clear distinction between his pragmatism and his substantive philosophical views. This is one reason why it is useful to discuss the issue of prospectivism in his terms. Nevertheless, this open-mindedness raises difficulties of its own: to say that under certain circumstances we may legitimately allow our desires to influence our beliefs does little to tell us when we face those circumstances or what beliefs we should adopt when we do. In the absence of any shared criteria for resolving these issues, we have reason to worry that irresponsible attitudes toward belief are permitted, if not encouraged, by the pragmatic approach. As long as the focus remains, as it did for James, on the beliefs of individuals, we can accept a certain amount of irresponsibility as unavoidable and heed his counsel “delicately and profoundly to respect one another’s mental 48. Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief” (1877; note added 1903), Collected Papers, vol. 5, p. 232n; “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” ibid., p. 268; “Grounds of Validity of the Laws of Logic: Further Consequences of Four Incapacities” (1868), ibid., p. 221. 49. James affirms his willingness to consider monism as “an hypothesis” (and only that) in his “Preface” to The Will to Believe, pp. 5–7; see also James, A Pluralistic Universe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977 [1909]), p. 132. In contrast, Peirce wrote to James that “I am as sure as I am of anything that the logical doctrines connected with [pluralism] . . . are utterly false”: letter to William James ( June 23, 1905), Collected Papers, vol. 8, p. 192.

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freedom.”50 However, when we turn to the problem of justifying public ends and are faced with the problem of creating in others a willingness to act as if certain beliefs were valid, we cannot avoid these issues so easily. Having defended the validity of prospective justification in principle, we must now turn to the practical question of how this kind of justification might function in public life. 50. James, “Will to Believe,” p. 33.

CHAPTER THREE

Narrative and Moral Reasoning

1. Narrative and Moral Experience

T

aken in itself, a prospective orientation toward matters of justification would seem likely to exacerbate rather than alleviate the difficulties associated with the task of identifying legitimate public ends. After all, by loosening the connection between our beliefs and the state of the existing evidence, such an approach removes the most obvious public standard by which the reasonableness of beliefs—and thus of courses of action—could be assessed. In the absence of any replacement for this standard, it is difficult to see how we might be able to reach agreement on matters of political justification. I now wish to argue that, by focusing on the extent to which our beliefs and actions are embedded within larger narrative frameworks, we can bring some measure of determinacy back to justificatory discourse. Indeed, I will argue that it is only through such frameworks that we become able to interpret and evaluate our experiences at all. This may seem an unexpected claim to make on pragmatic grounds, given that none of the founding pragmatists, and few of their contemporary successors, treat narrative as an important category of analysis.1 Nevertheless, I wish to argue that the 1. The leading exception among contemporary pragmatists is Richard Rorty, who holds that moral and ethical commitments are based upon “redescriptions” of shared experiences, and who argues that literature plays a more significant role in shaping these commitments than does philosophy. See especially his Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). See also Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938), Later Works, vol. 12, chapter 12. 72

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appeal to narrative is not only compatible with the pragmatic theory of justification but essential to resolving some of the difficulties that it poses. In particular, narratives provide a conceptual framework within which we become capable of doubting and revising our moral and ethical commitments, and a mode of discourse through which it becomes possible— though by no means assured—that we can make those commitments intelligible to others. At its core the narrative approach rests upon the phenomenological claim that, because the complexity of our experiences far exceeds our cognitive capacities, we necessarily structure these experiences into discrete, though multiple and overlapping, sequences of events, each having a beginning, a middle, and an (actual or projected) end. By ordering and filtering our experiences in this way, the “skein of narratives” in which we find ourselves serves not only as an interpretive tool but also as an indispensable guide to conduct: narrative is, as Alasdair MacIntyre puts it, “the basic and essential genre for the characterization of human actions” and also, as Charles Taylor observes, one of the “inescapable structural requirements of human agency.”2 This dual function helps to explain why narrative has become an important category of analysis not only among historians, who seek to account for human motivations and behavior after the fact, but also among those philosophers and psychologists who are concerned to explain how human beings acquire a sense of self, orient themselves toward the world, and make decisions on an ongoing basis.3 Indeed, one important implication of the narrative 2. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 1984 [1981]), p. 208; Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 52. The term “skein of narratives” is Daniel Dennett’s: see his Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991), for example, p. 137. 3. In history see, for example, Louis Mink, “Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument,” in Robert H. Canary and Henry Kozicki, eds., The Writing of History: Literary Form and Historical Understanding (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), pp. 129–149, and Hayden White, “The Value of Narrative in the Representation of Reality,” in W. J. T. Mitchell, ed., On Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 1–23. In philosophy see, in addition to the works of Dennett, Macintyre, and Taylor already cited, Anthony Paul Kerby, Narrative and the Self (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991). In psychology, see, for example, Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986) and Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales (New York: Summit Books, 1985).

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understanding of human experience is that not only our actions but our very identities are shaped by the narrative roles in which we are implicated; Jerome Bruner goes so far as to say that “we become the autobiographical narratives by which we ‘tell about’ our lives,” and MacIntyre holds that “I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’”4 The plurality of narratives to which Bruner and MacIntyre allude is essential: because we are certain to be “doing” many things at any given time, narratives of the more trivial sort (reading a book, making a phone call) will typically be subsumed into larger narratives (teaching a class, striking up a friendship) that implicate a greater portion of past experience and hold correspondingly greater implications for future conduct. These constructs are placed in turn within even broader narrative arcs—one’s “career,” one’s “social life.” Needless to say, any move toward comprehensiveness in applying a narrative framework will be balanced by a corresponding move away from the fine-grained quality of the experiences themselves: if narrative is an essential tool for understanding our experiences, it also ensures that we will to some extent oversimplify and thereby misunderstand them. Moreover, it is important to keep in mind that the narrative frameworks that are available to us at any given time will be a function of the social context in which find ourselves; indeed, Bruner points out that “one important way of characterizing a culture is by the narrative models it makes available for describing the course of a life.”5 Thus, for example, the narrative selfunderstanding of the “self-made man” presupposes a social order in which effort and risk taking are rewarded, careers are open to talents, and in which a “man” is expected to make his own way. To the extent that these background conditions do not obtain, so will this particular narrative cease to provide a useful or credible means of organizing and evaluating one’s experiences. It is also important to emphasize that narratives play a normative as well as an explanatory role in ordering our experiences. Indeed, by defining a particular set of ends and a particular way in which those ends are to be valued and pursued, narratives do more to account for 4. Bruner, “Life as Narrative,” Social Research 54 (1987):15 (original emphasis); MacIntyre, After Virtue, pp. 215–216. 5. Bruner, “Life as Narrative,” p. 15.

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our beliefs and actions than a mere description of the ends themselves would warrant. The “self-made man,” for example, is oriented toward the achievement of worldly success, to be sure, but places this goal in the context of a broader narrative framework in which humble origins, hard work, resourcefulness, and resilience in the face of adversity play a constitutive role. In the absence of such a framework it would be difficult if not impossible to distinguish the way in which the “self-made man” values worldly success from the way in which this is done by, say, the aesthete, or the gambler. By tying our ends to a particular mode of self-understanding, narratives place them within a framework of beliefs and expectations within which they become meaningful, and thus subject to critical appraisal. To the extent that a particular self-understanding (or self-portrayal) can be called into question—say, by drawing attention to the role played by unearned advantages or unscrupulous behavior in the career of the “self-made man”—the credibility of the narrative in question can be cast into doubt. Needless to say, such judgments are likely to be disputed: it is notoriously difficult to distinguish between resourcefulness and unscrupulousness in the pursuit of worldly success, just as it is difficult to distinguish the contributions of effort from those of fortune. By thus placing our beliefs and actions within the horizon of past experiences and present self-understandings, narrative frameworks give us access to a richer normative vocabulary than a purely prospective orientation would admit—a normative vocabulary that can make sense of retrospective judgments such as pride and shame, gratitude and regret. The appeal to narrative also helps to flesh out what James has in mind when he describes certain options as “living” and certain decisions as “momentous.” From a narrative standpoint, living options are those that are comprehensible given the narrative structure of a person’s life to date, and momentous decisions are those that implicate a large number of the “subplots” of which that life is composed. Thus James’s position might be stated more precisely by speaking of more and less easily assimilated narrative turns. For example, some secularists may find themselves able to contemplate becoming religiously observant but unable to consider giving all of their possessions to the poor, even if this is an apparent implication of the religious beliefs that they propose to adopt. To take the latter course of action would be to alter or abandon so many of one’s narrative commitments as to call

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one’s very identity—and, a fortiori, one’s place in the social order—into question. Of course there are no truly dead options: radical conversions do occur, and mendicant orders do exist. And because our present choices are likely to render previously dead options living and previously living options dead, it is often possible to appreciate the momentousness of a decision only after it has been made. Thus, if the pragmatist urges us to justify our beliefs by pursuing the particular courses of action that they imply, narratives give these efforts content and direction by showing how and in what sense a given mode of self-understanding—and the beliefs upon which it rests—might be shown to be misguided or incomplete. These narrative frameworks can therefore provide a common basis for discussion even in the absence of a consensus on the balance or import of the evidence. In order to apply this insight in the realm of political justification, we must first determine whether the appeal to narrative commits us in advance to a particular set of views about the nature of the good. If narrative modes of explanation are not compatible with a wide variety of moral and ethical commitments, then they will be of little use in guiding discourses of justification in which this kind of diversity is present (Section 2). Next, we must show in more detail how and in what sense it is possible to test the adequacy of a narrative framework (Section 3) and what role narratives might have to play in cases in which a particular narrative framework begins to break down (Section 4). Finally, we must show how narrative modes of explanation can play a mediating role when different prospective beliefs come into conflict with one another (Section 5). This concern, which is of course central in discourses of political justification, requires that we shift our attention away from the formal character of pragmatic inquiry and toward an examination of the moral commitments that would be necessary to sustain a diverse polity oriented toward the identification of legitimate public ends. 2. Narrative and Moral Ontology It should be clear that narrative forms of explanation will serve as effective guides to practical decision making only insofar as they provide or presuppose a set of normative commitments that we experience as authoritative or binding and that provide a point of orientation for the particular narratives that we happen to be living. Indeed, given that

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narratives shape not only our actions but our very sense of self, it may seem that the adoption of a narrative approach to justification would entail at least the tacit endorsement of a teleological conception of human motivations and purposes. As Taylor puts it, “in order to have an identity, we need . . . some sense of qualitative discrimination, of the incomparably higher,” and “this sense of the good has to be woven into my understanding of my life as an unfolding story.”6 This raises the question of whether a narrative approach can accommodate nonteleological forms of moral reasoning such as, on the one hand, those to be found in various forms of Kantian constructivism and moral realism and, on the other, those that insist upon the radical contingency of any moral or ethical standpoint. Because we are concerned to use narrative frameworks to pursue mutual understanding within discourses of justification in which disagreement about these issues is likely to be present, the burden of proof here is particularly strong: we must show not only that it is possible to account for nonteleological moral commitments in narrative terms but that this can be done in a way that those who hold such commitments can recognize and endorse. Otherwise the appeal to narrative will begin by begging the very questions that it hopes to resolve. As it stands, narrative modes of explanation have been deployed in moral philosophy in at least two different and apparently contradictory ways. Taylor and MacIntyre argue that if we accept the fact that human experience must be understood in narrative terms, then we have already committed ourselves to the project of fashioning our lives into attractive narrative wholes by directing and organizing the particular “stories” of which they are composed. According to this line of argument, the appeal to narrative yields an important insight into the nature of the good: moral and ethical decisions are to be understood in terms of their contribution to a larger “narrative quest,” and, as MacIntyre observes, “without some at least partly determinate conception of the final telos there could not be any beginning to a quest.” He concludes that “the unity of an individual life . . . is the unity of a narrative embodied in a single life. To ask ‘What is the good for me?’ is to ask how best I might live out that unity and bring it to completion. To ask ‘What is the good for man?’ is to ask what all answers to the former question must have in common.”7 On 6. Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 47. 7. MacIntyre, After Virtue, pp. 218–219. Taylor borrows the idea that human life can be understood as a “quest” in Sources of the Self: see, for example pp. 51–52.

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this view, the best moral and ethical decisions are those that cohere with one’s individual purposes and those of the larger community or communities to which one belongs, up to and including the community of mankind itself. To be sure, our conception of what those purposes are will be shaped at least in part by the self-understandings of a particular time and place and will therefore be subject to change in the light of new experiences. Nevertheless, on this view the process of change should itself be seen as part of a larger effort to orient ourselves appropriately toward a good that is not of our own making. Others have drawn from the fact that we understand and express our moral and ethical commitments in narrative form the conclusion that nothing lies behind those commitments other than the narratives themselves. On this view, moral and ethical reasoning consists simply in the ongoing project of interpreting and reinterpreting various contingent and revisable cultural and linguistic practices, undertaken with the knowledge that there is no authority or guarantor for any interpretation beyond the allegiance that it is able to command from others whose practices are similarly contingent and revisable. According to Richard Rorty, this point of view “would, ideally, culminate in our no longer being able to see any use for the notion that finite, mortal, contingently existing human beings might derive the meanings of their lives from anything except other finite, mortal, contingently existing human beings.” If MacIntyre and Taylor are preoccupied with the project of orienting our actions toward an ultimate telos, Rorty views such language as “just a fancy way of commending one’s own sense of what is most worth preserving in our present practices.” He concludes that we should simply “drop the Aristotelian demand” that our narratives correspond to some conception of the good external to ourselves, “contenting ourselves [instead] with narratives tailored ad hoc to the contingencies of individual lives.” From this point of view an attractive community is one in which narrative modes of selfunderstanding are allowed to proliferate; in which we aim above all at “keeping a conversation going.”8 8. Rorty, Contingency Irony, Solidarity, p. 45; “Freud and Moral Reflection,” in Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 161; “Idealizations, Foundations, and Social Practices,” in Seyla Benhabib, ed., Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 334; Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 378.

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Despite Rorty’s effort to disavow the term, each of these views assumes a particular moral ontology: we are asked to view ourselves as creatures with definite purposes that are realized or left unrealized depending upon which narratives we choose to pursue, or (alternatively) as the spontaneous creators of new narratives whose only “purpose” is to prevent this process of self-creation from coming to an end. To the extent that these positions differ from one another, the difference lies not in the way in which they make use of narrative modes of explanation, but rather in the prospective claims they make as to which narrative roles will prove to be coherent and sustainable over time. For MacIntyre and Taylor, to abandon the idea of a determinate end toward which our actions are oriented is to fail to understand our ontological position: anyone who lacked such an orientation would find himself unable to act or even to conceive of himself as an actor. They are committed to showing that in cases in which someone claims to do without a determinate end it is nevertheless present, at least tacitly, in his own self-understanding. For Rorty, on the other hand, to treat one’s ends as if they reflected something more than contingently existing desires and inclinations is to blind oneself to the irreducible multifariousness of human experience. He is committed to showing that any effort to identify or align our ends with an externally binding standard can itself be exposed as a product of the human imagination and “redescribed” as such. Far from paralyzing our capacity for creative action, such a self-understanding allows, in his view, for its full expression. Despite their disagreement regarding the status of our moral and ethical commitments, these thinkers agree that any effort to justify these commitments must be addressed to particular agents situated in particular historical and cultural contexts or, in other words, that discourses of justification must be expressed in terms of the narrative self-understandings of a given individual or group.9 The fact that they agree about the means of justification while disagreeing about its ends is itself enough to suggest that the appeal to narrative does not entail the endorsement or 9. See, for example, MacIntyre, “Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative and the Philosophy of Science,” The Monist 60 (1977):453–472; Taylor, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” in idem, Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers, vol. 2, pp. 15–57; Rorty, “Solidarity or Objectivity?” in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 21–34.

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rejection of any particular moral ontology. Indeed, the idea of shaping one’s life into a coherent narrative can be expressed in terms of realizing a specifically human telos, seeking an appropriate orientation toward binding moral principles, identifying norms of action that are consistent with the exercise of human rationality and freedom, or cultivating an appreciation of the fact that no moral standpoint can be “justified” without remainder or loss. In pragmatic terms, any of these narrative selfunderstandings is admissible, provided that some distinct set of expectations about the course of future experience can be shown to follow from it, that these expectations are met over time, and that we continue to approve the consequences of their being met. Although it is true that the particular narrative framework to which one adheres will shape or even determine the way in which one goes about exploring the moral and ethical possibilities that the world will admit, this framework need not become the object of moral commitment. In short, narrative can be said to provide a phenomenology, but not an ontology, of moral experience. This finding suggests that narrative modes of explanation might be of use even in discourses of justification that are marked by fundamental moral and ethical disagreements. There are, however, at least two other and more serious difficulties raised by the narrative approach. First, although James’s effort to loosen the connection between our beliefs and the state of the existing evidence is meant to encourage us to examine the desires and inclinations that influenced the formation of that body of evidence, there is nothing in his position that prevents us from putting it to the opposite use—that is, from using it to insulate our existing desires and inclinations from critical scrutiny. The same openness and flexibility that allows for the pursuit of uncertain ideals also allows for the persistence of beliefs that are atavistic, reactionary, or worse. This is, as we have seen, one of the leading objections raised by those who are critical of the “will-to-believe” doctrine and indeed of pragmatism more generally speaking. Second, and perhaps even more importantly, it is not yet clear that narratives can provide us with the necessary resources for adjudicating disputes between parties who hold different prospective beliefs. As long as we are not asked to make a decision that is binding upon all, we can heed James’s call to “tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however unintelli-

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gible these may be to us.”10 However, this advice cannot be readily applied in public life, where, because decisions are made collectively and enforced coercively, the value of mutual intelligibility cannot be so easily dismissed. We will proceed, then, by considering each of these issues in turn. 3. Narrative and Evidence We have seen that the pragmatic theory of justification provides no guarantee that the flexibility it introduces into moral and ethical inquiry will be used to unsettle rather than to further entrench our existing desires and inclinations. Once we have adopted a prospective orientation toward matters of belief and evidence, it is no longer clear what we can say to those who remain stubbornly committed to beliefs whose empirical presuppositions seem increasingly out of joint with the possibilities that the world will admit. This line of criticism extends from James’s “will-to-believe” doctrine to the very center of pragmatic thought: for example, Peirce’s claim that the goal of inquiry is to arrive at beliefs that are free from actual doubt, as opposed to beliefs that are free from all possible doubt, seems to allow for the same kind of willful disregard for contradictory evidence.11 It is not immediately clear how the appeal to narrative might help us to resolve this difficulty, because narrative modes of explanation are not generally regarded, even by their proponents, as being subject to empirical verification in any straightforward sense. Louis Mink, for example, holds that narrative is “a product of imaginative construction which cannot defend its claim to truth by any accepted procedure of argument or authentication,” and Bruner agrees that “[s]tories have no need for testability,” because “[b]elievability in a story is of a different order that the believability of even the speculative 10. James, “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” in idem, Talks to Teachers on Psychology, and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983 [1899]), p. 149. 11. See, for example, Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief” (1877), Collected Papers, vol. 5, pp. 231–233. Peirce supposes that we will ultimately be unable to disregard evidence that calls our beliefs into question. He is therefore willing to concede, rather strikingly, that “if one could believe what one pleased that would be true. But the fact is that one cannot”: letter to William James (December 6, 1904), cited in Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Boston: Little, Brown, 1935), vol. 2, p. 433.

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parts of physical theory.”12 If these claims are correct, then narratives do not and cannot provide the kind of shared criteria of evaluation upon which an effective theory of justification depends. Mink and Bruner are right to point out that it is difficult to show, even in principle, how one narrative can be said to be more “true” than another, but it would be misleading to conclude that narrative modes of explanation are not constrained by the “facts” for which they seek to account. After all, every nonfictional narrative implicates events that have not yet taken place, and it is always possible that these events will be of such a character that the narrative in question will have to be modified or even rejected outright. This is easiest to see when a narrative framework is applied to the actions of a particular individual over time: we can all think of cases in which an unexpected moment of insight, an unforeseen tragedy, a chance encounter, or (perhaps most typically) the sheer cumulative weight of a given set of experiences has led us to reevaluate our ends and, perhaps, the very meaning and direction of our lives. Indeed, no matter what narrative roles we are enacting, there exists some conceivable set of circumstances in the face of which at least some of these roles would come to seem untenable. This insight applies with equal force when narratives are used to account for events that have already taken place, because the range of narratives that can plausibly be constructed around a given body of evidence depends at least in part upon that body of evidence being held constant. However elegantly a narrative fits the available facts, or however irreducibly plural a particular set of narrative explanations may seem, it is always possible that new evidence will come to light in the face of which the current constellation of narrative possibilities will be necessarily and decisively reordered.13 A second challenge to the adequacy of a narrative framework arises when the first-order narratives of which it is composed are found to conflict with one another. Again, this is easiest to see through the lens of 12. Mink, “Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument,” p. 145; Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, p. 14. 13. This is the sense in which the pragmatic theory of justification applies to propositions about the past: see for example Peirce, “Belief and Judgment” (ca. 1902), Collected Papers, vol. 5, p. 380; James, “A Dialogue,” in idem, The Meaning of Truth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978 [1909]), pp. 154–159; Dewey, “A Short Catechism Concerning Truth” (1909), Middle Works, vol. 6, pp. 6–8.

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an individual life: someone who tries simultaneously to enact the roles of (say) parent and professional, or of patriot and person of conscience, is likely to find this to be a difficult task precisely because these modes of self-understanding often seem to call for incompatible courses of action. This is not to say that we always or even usually make these tensions and conflicts explicit, even to ourselves: it is no more possible to demand perfect coherence from one’s narrative self-understanding than it is to demand perfect certainty from the evidence upon which one acts. Still, we have all experienced moments of crisis, large and small, in which the conflict between the various narrative roles that we were enacting became so conspicuous that we could proceed only by altering or abandoning one or more of them. It may be that we become aware of the nature and depth of our narrative commitments—or even of the fact that those commitments are multiple—only at such times. It follows that the adequacy of a narrative framework will depend not only on its success in accounting for our experiences over time but also on its ability to preserve a certain degree of harmony and coherence among the various subnarratives of which it is composed. Indeed, because the reevaluation of conflicting narrative commitments is generally precipitated by an unanticipated experience or set of experiences, these considerations are in fact closely related to one another. Thus the claim that narrative modes of explanation are not subject to empirical verification fails to properly consider the reciprocal relationship between narrative frameworks and the experiences for which they seek to account. Although it is often if not always the case that a variety of narratives can plausibly account for the same combination of experiences, it does not follow that any combination of experiences can readily be assimilated within a given narrative, or that any combination of narrative roles can coherently be pursued by the same individual or group. By committing ourselves to a narrative framework we also commit ourselves to a set of expectations regarding the course of future experience that, if violated, would provide empirical grounds for doubting the validity of the beliefs upon which that framework rests. It is important to acknowledge, of course, that the mere presence of contradictory evidence or of conflicting narrative roles is not always or even usually enough to persuade us to reexamine our existing commitments. We are often torn between the desire to leave our existing narrative frameworks in place and the desire to account for evidence that appears to

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contradict them. Indeed, it is only from within a narrative framework that it becomes possible to distinguish between experiences that can be ignored or explained away and experiences that pose a threat to the coherence of the framework itself. Because the means of balancing these considerations will vary substantially from person to person, the threshold for doubt and the propensity to conduct further inquiry will be likely to vary substantially as well.14 As we have seen, there can be no prior guarantee that common ground is available on this or indeed on any other issue. Still less can we know in advance where that common ground lies. Nevertheless, we can specify two conditions that a narrative framework would have to satisfy in order for it to play a constructive role in discourses of political justification. First and most obviously, we would have to ensure that the expectations about the future that the framework entails are publicly stated, so that it is possible to determine whether those expectations have in fact been met. In other words, we must ensure that our narrative commitments are, at least for the purposes of public debate, open for inspection. This is one reason why we require the taking of public oaths in many politically salient contexts, as for example in the swearing-in of public officials, the granting of citizenship, the taking of marriage vows, and the provision of testimony in a court of law. In taking such oaths, and others like them, we publicly commit ourselves to enacting a given narrative role (that of public servant, loyal citizen, faithful spouse, or truthful witness), and thereby ensure that we can be held accountable should we fail to do so. For similar reasons, we expect political parties, candidates, and interest groups to tell us not only 14. This is the central insight of Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970 [1962]). Although I cannot do justice here to the rich and varied debate that Kuhn’s book has provoked, I believe that its interest lies not (where attention has often focused) in the question of whether scientific theories as Kuhn understands them can be said to correspond to the realities that they claim to describe, but rather in the question of when it is appropriate to revise such theories in the face of recalcitrant experience—a question that can be answered only from the standpoint of the particular inquirer or community of inquirers involved. Understood in this way, Kuhn’s position is similar to the one suggested by the pragmatic theory of justification. For a useful discussion (one that does not draw explicitly on pragmatic premises) see Imre Lakatos, “Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes,” in Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 91–195.

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which policies they support but also to specify the reasons why they support them. Here, again, a public declaration of intent makes visible the expectations about the course of future experience to which these actors are committing themselves, and thereby makes it possible for them to be held accountable should those expectations not be borne out in practice. Needless to say, it is difficult even under the best of circumstances to ascertain whether a course of action undertaken under conditions of complexity and uncertainty has had the desired or intended effect. At best, public statements of purpose provide a shared point of reference around which a discussion of these matters can take place. This means that we must seek to ensure not only that the presuppositions of a given narrative framework are publicly visible but also that the narrative in question is robust enough that doubts about its adequacy cannot simply be “resolved” in an ad hoc manner. Any narrative framework that can be adjusted at will to accommodate new and apparently contradictory evidence, or different and apparently contradictory courses of action, does not provide a promising basis for public justification, even if such adjustments are not made with the conscious intention of avoiding criticism. As MacIntyre notes, “[i]t is the mark of a degenerate tradition that it has contrived a set of epistemological defenses which enable it to avoid being put in question or at least to avoid recognizing that it is being put in question by rival traditions.”15 And of course this kind of vagueness is often used to deceive the unwary: the appeal without further elaboration to values such as “equality” and “freedom” tells us very little about the intentions of those who make such appeals, except perhaps that we should be suspicious of them. If narratives are to play an effective role in guiding public discourse, they must match intentions with courses of action in a way that makes it possible to discriminate, at least in principle, between success and failure. 4. Narrative and Doubt We have seen that narratives provide us with a framework of expectations, rooted in an interpretation of our past experiences, through 15. “Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative and the Philosophy of Science,” p. 461. He adds, provocatively, that “[t]his is . . . part of the degeneracy of modern astrology, of some types of psychoanalytic thought, and of liberal Protestantism”: ibid.

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which it becomes possible to evaluate the meaning and consequences of our actions going forward. Because our beliefs cannot be completely insulated from doubt so long as such a framework is in place, the appeal to narrative removes at least some of the indeterminacy to which a purely prospective theory of justification would otherwise give rise. To be sure, the criteria that we apply in deciding when doubt is called for under the narrative approach will be considerably more flexible than the single standard proposed by strict evidentialists such as Clifford and Russell, but I hope to have shown that this flexibility is on the whole an asset rather than a liability. This brings us to a second difficulty with the narrative approach; namely, that it does not provide us with any obvious resources for removing doubts once they have arisen. Even if narrative modes of explanation succeed in placing our actions within a framework of expectations that can be tested over time, it is not immediately clear what role they have to play in cases in which those expectations are not met. After all, the experience of doubt becomes possible only if and to the extent that we already hold an established set of beliefs, but the very presence of doubt implies that those beliefs are in need of revision. If it is true, as I have argued, that doubt can exist only within a preexisting narrative framework, then it is difficult to see how this framework, taken in itself, could help us to resolve our doubts. In other words, it is not clear how narrative can serve both as a precondition and as a tool of moral reasoning. Ironically, it is the very looseness of our narrative self-understandings that provides us with the resources for responding to this dilemma. Recall that we are likely to be enacting a number of narrative roles at any given time, roles that may be as transitory as “host of a dinner party” or “member of an audience,” as enduring as “citizen” or “parent,” and as (potentially) comprehensive as “humanist” or “Christian.” Needless to say, the range of roles that is available to us—in James’s terms, the range of “living” options—is a function of our historical and cultural context, as is the substantive content of any particular role: what it means today to be a Christian—or, for that matter, the host of a dinner party—is no doubt very different from what it meant in the fourth, twelfth, or eighteenth century. Nevertheless, it is possible to chastise someone (or oneself) for being a bad host, a bad parent, or a bad Christian precisely because and to the extent that each of these roles as it is enacted carries a more or less well-defined set of expecta-

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tions for conduct. Of course, when we deploy narrative frameworks critically in this way, we often only succeed in opening (or continuing) a discussion as to what the narrative role in question “really” means or entails. However, our ability to engage in such a discussion itself presupposes that some set of shared understandings, however fragmentary and inchoate, is already in place. As we have seen, even if we believe that the authority of the norms by which we are guided transcends the context in which we act, we cannot adopt a critical standpoint toward them without engaging the narrative self-understandings of particular actors in a particular time and place.16 It follows that, no matter what we believe we are reasoning about when we face moral or ethical dilemmas, we are in practical terms being asked to do one of two things. First and most obviously, because every narrative carries with it its own characteristic set of ambiguities and internal tensions, we must often decide for ourselves what a given narrative role requires of us in a particular case. For example, if I am a Marxist, then I must decide whether the Marxian narrative entails a commitment to a life of revolutionary agitation, of devotion to social and political reform, or of fatalism in the face of historical forces over which I have no real control. Needless to say, I will face this particular menu of choices only so long as I am persuaded that the Marxian narrative plausibly accounts for the trajectory of human history to date, that it correctly predicts that the capitalist system must (or should) collapse, and so long as this particular ambiguity in Marxian theory remains unresolved. So long as this is the case, it is up to me to decide what particular role I have to play in this larger narrative; which of the existing programs of reform or revolution I should support (if any), and how. In making this decision I am deciding how best to realize my aims as a Marxist, just as when I decide whether and how to discipline my children I am deciding how best to realize my aims as a parent. In each case, I draw upon the narrative role in question to articulate a relationship between my past experiences, my expectations about the future, and my actions in the present. The fact that I am committed to enacting 16. This line of thought has been pursued in greater detail by Michael Walzer: see, for example, his Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987) and Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994).

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these particular narratives roles is, for the purposes of the decision at hand, held constant. A second and more difficult class of decisions arises when we are asked to decide which of the narrative roles that we are enacting at a given time should take precedence over the others—as, for example, when we are asked to choose between the demands of career and family or between those of citizenship and religious conviction. Indeed, the more comprehensive a narrative is, the more likely it is to come into conflict with other narratives of a similar degree of generality. In the limiting case we may decide that the demands of one of the roles in question should be given no weight at all; that it is better, say, to forgo having children than to compromise one’s career goals, or better to engage in civil disobedience than to seek an accommodation between one’s personal convictions and the imperatives of the state. Seldom, however, do we subordinate our actions so strictly to the demands of a single narrative. It is more typical to respond to such conflicts by appealing to a broader narrative framework within which each of the commitments in question plays a subsidiary role: we may, for example, try to conceive of the apparently contradictory demands of faith and citizenship as elements of a larger moral or ethical project, or we may appeal to a conception of a “complete” life in which family and career each have a place, however uncertain their ultimate relationship to one another might be. These appeals are often accompanied by an effort to limit the practical demands of a particular narrative to a distinct sphere of activity: to distinguish, for example, between “work time” and “family time” in an effort to prevent these narrative roles from interfering with one another. The relative familiarity of these strategies for adjudicating between competing narrative demands should not obscure the fact that each of us has a strong and often overriding desire to leave our existing narrative frameworks, however imperfect, more or less intact. Indeed, because the need to place our experiences within a broader narrative context is so pressing, we have a tendency both to downplay experiences that contradict our existing narrative self-understandings and to temporize in the face of competing narrative demands. Even relatively fragmentary and incoherent narratives often command a stubborn allegiance. The reason for this apparently myopic behavior can be found in the fact that narratives not only guide our actions but provide the points of ori-

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entation that make meaningful action possible in the first place. To modify or reject an existing narrative framework requires not only that we resolve to act differently in the future (which is difficult enough) but that we admit to ourselves that our past actions were in some sense predicated upon a misunderstanding; that there is (and was) a lack of fit between our self-conception and our circumstances. In short, the collapse of a narrative framework confronts us with a crisis of meaning, and the more comprehensive the narrative in question, the more profound will the crisis be. Given the deeply disorienting character of this kind of narrative displacement, it is not surprising that we tend to seek out experiences—including companions, activities, and sources of information—that reinforce rather than challenge our existing beliefs and expectations. Such behavior is difficult to account for in purely prospective terms, because someone who was strictly oriented toward the future would presumably be perfectly willing and even, as James says, “eager” to abandon beliefs and expectations that were found to be in conflict either with each other or with the possibilities that the world will admit. When we recall, however, that our actions are evaluated not only with an eye toward their expected consequences, but also in light of their coherence with our past experiences and, in particular, with the narrative self-understanding that we have constructed to account for those experiences, then the reluctance to seek out or confront contradictory evidence becomes easier to understand. This insight provides us with a deeper and more nuanced appreciation of the difficulties posed by the pragmatic approach to justification. The leading concern is not, as is often thought, the possibility that a certain wantonness of belief will result once the constraints of attending to the existing evidence have been loosened; that “wishful thinking” will become the order of the day. We have greater reason to be concerned about the inherent conservatism of human understanding—a conservatism that plays a central role in all inquiry and indeed in all behavior of any kind. This concern cuts across the dispute between the defenders and critics of the “will to believe” because, as we have seen, the brand of evidentialism espoused by Clifford and Russell is at least as vulnerable to charges of conservative bias as is James’s more flexible approach. It remains to be seen how this kind of bias might be accounted for in discourses of political justification.

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5. Narrative and Public Discourse The pragmatic theory of justification that we have articulated encourages us to conceive of our moral and ethical commitments as resolutions to pursue particular courses of action; resolutions that are taken at least in part with an eye toward validating our existing desires and inclinations. It follows that justification is, properly speaking, a motivational enterprise: a justified norm is not something worth having, but something worth doing. The appeal to narrative allows us to refine this insight by showing that when we seek to motivate others to pursue a particular course of action, as we inevitably must in cases of political justification, we must engage their desires and inclinations by articulating a relationship between the proposed course of action, their past experiences, and their present self-understandings. Moreover, the narrative approach helps us to see more clearly that our assessment of the available possibilities—of which courses of action are “living” and which “dead,” which decisions “momentous” and which “trivial”—is itself a product of our previous experiences and that options that we currently regard as dead and decisions that we view as trivial might one day be viewed in a different light, depending upon which courses of action we choose to pursue in the present. In short, whatever our beliefs about the nature and status of our moral beliefs—whatever moral ontology we endorse—the practical foundations of moral and ethical conduct are to be found in the narrative frameworks through which we organize and evaluate our experiences. Discourses of political justification must therefore be expressed, implicitly or explicitly, in narrative form. Moreover, narratives, by providing a framework within which our beliefs and actions acquire meaning, can also provide a shared basis for evaluating them. That is, to the extent that our narrative commitments are publicly known, they can in principle be used to gauge the degree of fit between our behavior and our announced intentions and between the consequences of our actions and the narrative expectations under which they were undertaken. We can, for example, examine whether an actor’s self-understanding (or self-portrayal) as a “self-made man” is consistent with the trajectory of his life to date or whether the frustration of his intentions in the present makes this narrative a suitable tool for interpreting his actions going forward. To be sure, the relationship between the consequences of one’s actions and the narrative framework

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through which they are evaluated is bound to be an imperfect one. Narratives are, as we have seen, resilient and capacious things, and it is often easy to ignore, explain away, or simply overlook evidence that does not readily fit our narrative expectations. Moreover, each of us has a significant cognitive and affective investment in the narratives according to which we live: they not only tell us what to do but who we are, and so our very sense of self can stand or fall with them. The resulting reluctance to confront gaps or inconsistencies in our own self-understanding, coupled with the inevitable looseness of fit between our experiences and our narrative frames, makes it likely that any effort to deploy a narrative critically in public discourse will be hotly contested. Nevertheless, just as it is often possible—though not necessarily easy—for an individual to harmonize apparently conflicting narrative roles by appealing to a larger narrative within which they can each be comprehended, so also may it be possible—though not necessarily easy—for the parties to a public dispute to conceive of their conflicting aims as elements or versions of a larger narrative that is in some important respect shared. These shared understandings may allow the parties in question to view the dispute as a disagreement about the viability of a particular set of narrative expectations rather than as a fundamental and irreconcilable difference regarding narrative ends. For example, many policy debates in modern democracies center around the question of what it would mean for equality of opportunity to be realized in a thoroughgoing way: parties who disagree deeply about what the consequences of, say, a given change in tax, education, or social welfare policy would be, or whether those consequences are desirable, are each committed (at least publicly) to realizing this broader end, and so share at some level of abstraction a common framework for evaluating their more particular policy goals. Because they provide a set of criteria through which it becomes possible to adjudicate disputes about more particular matters, shared narrative understandings such as these are an essential precondition for political justification in a morally and ethically diverse society. Indeed, as we will see, the boundaries of these shared understandings mark the boundaries within which a peaceful, open, and pluralistic public culture can be sustained.17 17. Here again Walzer’s work on social criticism is apposite: see, in addition to the works already cited, his Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983).

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It is important to emphasize that the “nested” character of narrative modes of explanation provides only a potential resource for political justification; taken in itself it does nothing to ensure that agreement will be reached or even sought. In order to pursue this possibility further, we must turn from an analysis of the formal features of the pragmatic theory of justification to an exploration of the moral commitments that would be necessary to ground a politics oriented toward the identification of legitimate public ends. This raises a complicated set of issues, which will occupy us for the remainder of this book. I will begin in Part II by seeking to identify a narrative framework that might succeed in binding the citizens of a modern democracy together as a community of discourse in this way. The most common way of approaching this task within the tradition of pragmatic political thought has been to appeal to a narrative within which the aims and methods of modern science and of modern democracy can be shown to coincide.18 This line of argument, which has often been misconstrued by both friends and enemies of pragmatism, is not without merit, and I will endorse its main outlines here. However, because, as we will see, its political implications are neither as robust nor as firmly grounded in science as is often supposed, it leaves the substantive character of public life largely undetermined. We must, therefore, seek an additional set of moral commitments that would make it possible for us to explore uncertain social and political ideals as a community in a way that respects the variety of beliefs and commitments that we hold as individuals. In Part III, I will argue that this is exactly the project in which “political” liberals are already engaged, and that political liberalism therefore offers a solution to our original dilemma of determining how it might be possible to pursue controversial social and political ends even as we seek to accommodate the many kinds of diversity that we find in modern societies. However, in order to show that this is the case, it will be necessary to rethink some of the fundamental premises of political liberal thought as it is currently defended. Political liberals have generally sought to articulate a set of moral principles that could serve as the basis for a commonly endorsed framework of just political 18. See, among many possible examples, John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920), Middle Works, vol. 12, chapters 7–8; Freedom and Culture (1939), Later Works, vol. 13, pp. 63–188.

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institutions. They have therefore sought to construct a hypothetical moment of consent from which these institutions might draw their legitimacy (the “original position”) and to elaborate a fixed set of moral criteria (the norms of “public reason”) that would appropriately govern their actions over time.19 This way of describing the aims of political liberal thought has given rise to the objection that political liberals seek to limit the domain of political action in a way that enacts or solidifies particular patterns of domination and exclusion.20 Whatever the merits of this line of criticism, our findings suggest that the preoccupation with identifying antecedently binding principles is misguided and that we should focus instead upon the prospective character of political liberal thought—the extent to which it can secure the allegiance of citizens holding a wide variety of narrative commitments. Once the aims of political liberalism are understood in this way, we find that it need not place prior constraints upon the range of public ends that may legitimately be pursued. I hope to have shown by now that the strategy of responding to the challenge of political justification by seeking to identify an uncontroversial starting point for further inquiry rests upon a flawed conception of what justification consists in. The proper task of a theory of justification is not to identify secure premises from which we can safely proceed, but rather to determine which of the uncertain moral and ethical possibilities that lie before us—and, thus, which of the narrative commitments upon which those possibilities rest—should be given an opportunity to be tested in practice. It follows that the two lines of argument that I have just sketched cannot function independently of one another: we must rely upon a shared narrative framework in order to generate a commitment to accommodate a diversity of views, even as we use the space for inquiry that is thereby created to get a clearer sense of what that narrative framework entails. In short, we must be willing as citizens to engage in the difficult and contentious task of pursuing uncertain 19. See, especially, John Rawls, Political Liberalism, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996 [1993]), lectures 1 and 6, and “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited” (1997), in idem, Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 573–615. 20. See, for example, Chantal Mouffe, “Political Liberalism. Neutrality and the Political,” Ratio Juris 7 (1994):314–324; Sheldon S. Wolin, “The Liberal/Democratic Divide: On Rawls’s Political Liberalism,” Political Theory 24 (1996):97–119.

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public ends—including ends with which we are personally out of sympathy—with an eye toward assessing their merits over time. It will of course be difficult to reconcile the task of identifying legitimate public ends with the moral, cultural, and ideological pluralism that characterizes modern societies, but we must not allow this difficulty to discourage us from addressing the many pressing social and political challenges that we face. Neither, of course, should we lose sight of the fact that the moral commitments needed to face these challenges are themselves in need of further articulation and defense. This will be the task of the remaining chapters.

PA R T I I

Pragmatism and Democracy How shall we read what we call reality . . . so that we may essay our deepest political and social problems with a conviction that they are to a reasonable extent sanctioned and sustained by the nature of things? —John Dewey, “Philosophy and Democracy” (1919)

CHAPTER FOUR

Against a Second Pragmatic Acquiescence

1. Acquiescent Pragmatism For a polity oriented toward the identification and pursuit of legitimate public ends to be sustainable, there must be a shared narrative framework, however fragmentary, that binds its citizens together as a community of discourse in the first place. Without some such common point of reference, neither the possibility for agreement nor, a fortiori, the motivation to seek it is likely to exist. The need to identify common ground before discourses of political justification can get under way raises two immediate difficulties. First, and most obviously, it is not clear where or how this common ground might be located, given the fundamental moral and ethical disagreements that characterize modern societies. Indeed, the aspiration to identify a shared starting point for discourses of justification has provided the impetus for the trend toward minimalism in political thought whose influence I have sought to resist. Second, and even more perplexingly, if it were possible in principle for a shared set of narrative commitments to be identified, it is nevertheless difficult to see how anything of interest could be said about it, given its necessarily unstable and dynamic character. Because justification is an irreducibly prospective enterprise, and because narrative frameworks are often only loosely constrained by the experiences for which they seek to account, the selfunderstandings that guide public discourse are themselves likely to change, perhaps radically, over time. While this consideration, unlike the 97

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first, does not call into question the possibility that public ends might be publicly justified, it does raise significant obstacles against any attempt to articulate a theory of political justification. This chapter and the one that follows it will be devoted to examining the resources that the tradition of pragmatic social and political thought makes available for responding to these difficulties. As it stands, we can identify two leading and to some extent conflicting views on the matter. The first seeks to capitalize on the affinity between the pragmatic and scientific approaches to inquiry by constructing a narrative within which the practices of modern science and of modern democracy can be shown to have a common origin, and thus to point toward a set of ends that are (or should be) shared in common as well. This account of the relationship between science and democracy is meant to provide critical leverage on existing social and political practices by drawing upon beliefs and self-understandings that are central to the modern experience but relatively independent of the cultural traditions of more narrowly drawn communities. The leading figure in articulating this narrative is, of course, John Dewey, who held that the proper task of modern philosophy is to determine “the relation that exists between the beliefs about the nature of things due to natural science and beliefs about values” because, as he saw it, “beliefs about values are pretty much in the position in which beliefs about nature were before the scientific revolution.” Dewey believed that once we had understood ourselves as participants in this particular narrative—once we had properly grasped the nature and significance of our historical moment—then a scientific revolution in values and a corresponding commitment to a participatory democratic politics would naturally follow.1 I will defer to the next chapter an examination of the Deweyan and neo-Deweyan efforts to draw a substantive link between pragmatism, science, and democracy, focusing here on a second and currently more influential school of pragmatic political thought: one that begins with the insight that the defense of any moral or ethical norm is a process of “redescription rather than inference” and concludes that, politically speaking, pragmatism “clears the underbrush; it does not plant the forest.” These 1. Dewey, The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action (1929), Later Works, vol. 4, p. 204. For a more politically oriented recounting of this narrative, see, for example, Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920), Middle Works, vol. 12, pp. 77–201, especially chapters 7–8.

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thinkers hold that although pragmatism, as a theory of knowledge, has something important to tell us about the origins and grounding of our moral and ethical commitments, it has little if any direct role to play in determining the form that those commitments ultimately take.2 It is rather ironic that this claim is now defended by thinkers who describe themselves as pragmatists, given that it was first set forth by critics who took it to be a decisive objection against pragmatism as a tool of social and political inquiry. Indeed, the relative eclipse of pragmatism in social and political thought in the middle decades of the twentieth century was largely brought about by the belief that, whatever its merits as an epistemological doctrine, it was incapable of distinguishing between good and bad consequences and so necessarily collapsed into an affirmation of, or “acquiescence” to, prevailing cultural norms. We can therefore find in the unqualified contextualism of many contemporary pragmatic thinkers the signs of a second pragmatic “acquiescence,” one that threatens again to undercut the commitment to social and political reform with which pragmatism was originally associated. The phrase “pragmatic acquiescence” was coined by the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford, drawing on a line of criticism suggested by Randolph Bourne and further elaborated by Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and other leading public intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s. Mumford argued that pragmatism, as a doctrine that treats inquiry as the distinctive mode of human experience, is incapable of generating standards through which the motives or findings of inquiry might be evaluated. He concluded that, whatever may have been the progressive intentions of individual pragmatists, pragmatism itself tended “to bolster up and confirm by philosophic statement tendencies which are already 2. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 78; Richard A. Posner, “What Has Pragmatism to Offer Law?” in Michael Brint and William Weaver, eds., Pragmatism in Law and Society (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991), p. 44. Stanley Fish has staked out an even more insouciant position: “If pragmatism is true,” he argues, “it has nothing to say to us . . . it doesn’t commit those who are persuaded by it to any particular course of action or way of proceeding . . . In the end—and this has been my single note—nothing follows from pragmatism”: “Truth and Toilets: Pragmatism and the Practices of Life,” in Morris Dickstein, ed., The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 419, 420, 429. Of course, according to Peirce’s pragmatic maxim, a philosophical doctrine from which “nothing follows” is not a meaningful doctrine at all. Fish would no doubt relish the paradox.

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strong and well-established in American life” while remaining “apathetic or diffident about things which must still be introduced into our scheme of things if it is to become thoroughly humane and significant.”3 This line of criticism grew increasingly intemperate in the later 1930s as pragmatists, and Dewey in particular, were accused of lacking the moral backbone to stand up to Nazism and Stalinism. Thus Mumford wrote in 1940 that “pragmatic liberalism [is] incapable of making firm ethical judgments,” and so “cannot distinguish between barbarism and civilization,” and he ridiculed the isolationist and pacifistic liberals—of whom, it must be said, Dewey was one—whose policy of “queasy non-resistance” threatened to hasten the coming of “another Dark Age.” Broadsides such as these succeeded in tarring pragmatism for decades to come as a wellmeaning but morally and ethically barren school of thought.4 The reputation of pragmatic philosophy has of course undergone a considerable revival in recent years, not least in the area of social and political thought. Nevertheless, the neopragmatists have done little to dispel the suspicion that pragmatism provides an admirable account of the process of inquiry that is of little if any use in defining or evaluating its ends. Indeed, Richard Rorty, the best-known contemporary pragmatist, has sought to make a virtue of this supposed necessity, arguing that “[t]o say that a certain course of conduct is more in accord with human nature or our moral sense, or more rational, than another is just a fancy way of commending one’s own sense of what is most worth preserving in our present practices.”5 This seeming embrace of subjectivism has inspired a well-founded uneasiness among other progressively minded pragmatists, who recognize, as Mumford did, that a philosophy that is incapable of 3. Lewis Mumford, The Golden Day: A Study in American Experience and Culture (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1926), pp. 264–265. 4. Mumford, “The Corruption of Liberalism,” The New Republic 102 (1940):570– 572. See also Waldo Frank, “Our Guilt in Fascism,” ibid.:603–608 and Herbert Marcuse, “John Dewey’s Theory of Valuation,” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9 (1941):144–148. Dewey’s position on American involvement in the Second World War is aptly summarized in the title of his brief statement “No Matter What Happens—Stay Out” (1939), Later Works, vol. 14, p. 364. For a useful discussion, see Robert Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 510–523. 5. Rorty, “Idealizations, Foundations, and Social Practices,” in Seyla Benhabib, ed., Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 334.

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providing evaluative standards is likely to yield little more than an “apologia for the status quo.”6 Some have sought to respond to this line of criticism by treating the critique of foundational ideals as itself a kind of democratic practice. Having discredited traditional attempts to base moral and political norms in transcendental categories of reason, schedules of natural rights, or universally approved human goods, pragmatism, it is said, liberates the participatory and deliberative energies of the common citizen. Given that we have an interest in constructing public norms and institutions fairly and rationally, we are compelled to open political processes to as many perspectives and experiences as possible.7 It is true, as we will see, that Dewey drew a link between philosophical and political absolutism and between democracy and the pragmatic rejection of such absolutes. Nevertheless, there is no escaping the fact that the only genuine alternative to an acquiescent pragmatism is one that ties the critique of philosophical absolutism to a morally and politically substantive rendering of the human condition, in the absence of which a world without absolutes would be as likely to have a Hobbesian as an Emersonian cast. Dewey was wise enough to have grounded his own political ideal in this way—though the particular narrative to which he appealed in doing so may be likely to attract only a limited following today. Despite this reservation, which I will elaborate more fully in the next chapter, I will follow Dewey here in arguing that pragmatism gives us access to a politically salient narrative, grounded in the special authority of scientific practices under modern conditions, which is not peculiar to any narrowly defined time or place and which therefore avoids the charge of “acquiescence” (Section 2). By using this narrative framework as a basis for further inquiry, we are able to find in pragmatism a morally substantive conception of human capacities and purposes, grounded in an appreciation of the significance of the faculty of experimental intelligence (Section 3). Once we have clarified the extent to which this political narrative can be said to be grounded in science (Section 4), we are prepared to consider the promise and limitations of this distinctively pragmatic defense of democracy (Section 5). 6. Richard J. Bernstein, “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: Richard Rorty on Liberal Democracy and Philosophy,” Political Theory 15 (1987):541. 7. See, for example, Benjamin R. Barber, “Foundationalism and Democracy,” in Benhabib, ed., Democracy and Difference, pp. 348–359; Jack Knight and James Johnson, “Political Consequences of Pragmatism,” Political Theory 24 (1996):68–96.

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2. The Problem of Context As we have seen, one of the oldest and most enduring ways of dismissing pragmatic philosophy is to argue that it is a parochial, typically American school of thought. In its crude form this line of criticism associates pragmatism with commercialism, taking James’s appeal to the “cash value” of propositions in a rather literal sense. The point is well stated by George Santayana, that consummate outsider of the American academy: Dewey . . . is the devoted spokesman of the spirit of enterprise, of experiment, of modern industry . . . his philosophy is calculated to justify all the assumptions of American society . . . He is not interested in speculation at all, balks at it, and would avoid it if he could; his inspiration is sheer fidelity to the task in hand and sympathy with the movement afoot: a deliberate and happy participation in the attitude of the American people, with its omnivorous human interests and its simplicity of purpose.8 A somewhat more nuanced if equally patronizing view is put forth by Bertrand Russell, who associates pragmatism with the youthful optimism of a frontier society: Pragmatism appeals to the temper of mind which finds on the surface of this planet the whole of its imaginative material; which feels confident of progress, and unaware of non-human limitations to human power; which loves battle, with all the attendant risks, because it has no real doubt that it will achieve victory; which desires religion, as it desires railways and electric light, as a comfort and a help in the affairs of this world, not as providing non-human objects to satisfy the hunger for perfection and for something to be worshipped without reserve.9 8. George Santayana, “Dewey’s Naturalistic Metaphysics,” in Paul Arthur Schilpp and Lewis Edwin Hahn, eds., The Philosophy of John Dewey (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1939), pp. 247–248. James does not escape censure; “too spontaneous and rare a person to be a good mirror of any general movement,” he is said to be “more representative of America in the past than in the future”: ibid., p. 247. 9. Bertrand Russell, “Pragmatism,” in idem, Philosophical Essays (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1910), p. 110. For a more recent statement of this line of criticism see John Patrick Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

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Russell objects not so much to pragmatism’s provincialism as to its superficiality—a trait that is, he notes, “perhaps natural in a young, growing, and prosperous country, where men’s problems have been simpler than in Europe and usually soluble by energy alone.”10 In any case, each of these critics echoes Mumford in arguing that pragmatic philosophy not only reflects the cultural iconography of American public life but reinforces it in its most pernicious aspects. Santayana and Russell appeal, at least tacitly, to the virtues of a philosophical standpoint that transcends its immediate social and cultural context. Pragmatism’s supposed unwillingness or inability to do this has lately been judged a point in its favor, most notably by Rorty, who defends what he calls an “ethnocentric” approach to social and political inquiry: “Our identification with our community—our society, our political tradition, our intellectual heritage—is heightened when we see this community as ours rather than nature’s, shaped rather than found, one among many which men have made. In the end, the pragmatists tell us, what matters is our loyalty to other human beings clinging together against the dark, not our hope of getting things right.”11 Rorty hopes to replace the ideal of “objectivity”—the aspiration to “stand on neutral ground illuminated only by the natural light of reason”—with that of “solidarity,” according to which the proper role of philosophy is to “convince society that loyalty to itself is loyalty enough, and that such loyalty no longer needs an ahistorical backup.” He is often accused, understandably enough, of being rather complacent about the shortcomings of those societies to whose traditions he appeals, but his position is not as blindly conventional as it may seem at first blush: the “loyal” philosopher is loyal to what is best in his own tradition by his own lights, and he must seek to persuade the community that his lights are worth following. Thus we are to understand ourselves as being engaged in the process of “making rather than of finding” a moral identity.12 Nevertheless, Rorty’s celebration 10. Russell, “Professor Dewey’s ‘Essays in Experimental Logic,’” Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 16 (1919):26. 11. Rorty, “Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism,” in idem, Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972–1980 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. 166 (original emphasis). 12. Rorty, “Solidarity or Objectivity?” in idem, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 25; “Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism,” ibid., p. 199; “Introduction: Pragmatism and Philosophy,” in Consequences of Pragmatism, p. xxx.

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of “ethnocentrism” resonates with Santayana’s and Russell’s claim that pragmatism not only reflects but amplifies the cultural prejudices of its native land. Each of these thinkers correctly associates pragmatism with the claim that philosophical thinking—and, indeed, all thinking whatsoever—is a product of the experiences and motivations of particular people in particular social and cultural circumstances. It is indeed a corollary of the pragmatic theory of meaning and justification that we must give up the aspiration to arrive at an account of the nature of things that entirely transcends the contingent point of view of those who articulate it. Whatever metaphysical or ontological beliefs we may hold, in practice these beliefs influence our behavior by orienting us toward a particular narrative end or set of ends, and these ends are necessarily grounded in the self-understandings of a particular time and place. Santayana, Russell, and Rorty seek to make this insight reflexive; to explore the narrative commitments and self-understandings upon which pragmatic philosophy itself rests. This, again, is an entirely appropriate thing to do from a pragmatic point of view; indeed, each of the founding pragmatists not only undertook to provide such a narrative but took this to be an essential part of his philosophical project.13 I have already suggested that a pragmatic narrative of this kind might provide a shared point of orientation for people who disagree not only about the merits of their first-order moral and ethical commitments but also about the nature and status of those disagreements. The problem with the accounts that we have examined is not, then, that they tie pragmatism to a particular historical and cultural context but rather that they do so in an objectionably narrow way. Although it is true that the pragmatic theory of meaning and justification entails the claim that our beliefs are necessarily context-bound, it would be misleading to suggest that pragmatism begins with this claim. Instead, pragmatism begins with the claim that human experience centers around a process of inquiry that is motivated by doubt and that should, at least in principle, be guided by an assessment of the likely consequences of the available courses of action. This pragmatic theory of inquiry goes 13. See, especially, Dewey’s Reconstruction in Philosophy and The Quest for Certainty, but also Peirce’s “The Fixation of Belief” (1877), Collected Papers, vol. 5, pp. 223–247, and James’s “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results” (1898), Collected Essays and Reviews (New York: Russell & Russell, 1920), especially pp. 434-437.

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beyond a bare commitment to contextualism to specify a particular method by which our beliefs should be evaluated, a method that is derived from “that experimental method by which all the successful sciences . . . have reached the degrees of certainty that are severally proper to them today,” and not from social or cultural norms more generally speaking.14 The founding pragmatists were perfectly willing to admit that the scientific method is itself the product of a particular set of historical and cultural circumstances, but they associated it not with the culture of the United States or of any other society but more broadly with, in Dewey’s words, the empiricist “tradition of Bacon carried on in diverse ways by Hobbes, Locke, and Hume.”15 This is a tradition in which we are all implicated. Each of us relies on the methods and makes use of the findings of experimental science to some extent, and so to point out that these methods and findings are culturally specific is not to say that we could simply dismiss them out of hand. Indeed, the founding pragmatists repeatedly argued that pragmatism’s ability to account for and build upon this quintessentially modern method of inquiry was a great point in its favor relative to other philosophical approaches. Of course, pragmatism not only purports to explain why inquiry is undertaken and how it should be conducted; it also points out that the particular interests and expectations that we bring to inquiry are themselves a product of the context within which it is undertaken. It would be wrong, however, to conclude that the context in question therefore determines the course that further inquiry will take. Our past experiences, insofar as they have failed to meet our expectations, motivate us to seek out new beliefs, but they do not tell us which beliefs to adopt. We adopt new beliefs because we expect (or hope) that they will guide our subsequent actions fruitfully, and this expectation can be tested only in practice over time. It follows that, although the shared experiences of a particular society or culture may lead its members to the shared conceptualization of a set of problems, those experiences taken in themselves do nothing to establish the merits of a particular solution. This is not to deny that, as an empirical matter, the range of solutions that are considered is likely to be limited to those with which the society in question has some familiarity. Nevertheless, the pragmatic theory of inquiry does not require that any special weight be given to familiarity as such. In short, although it is correct to say that, for the 14. Peirce, “A Survey of Pragmaticism” (ca. 1906), Collected Papers, vol. 5, p. 317. 15. Dewey, “Pragmatic America” (1922), Middle Works, vol. 13, p. 307.

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pragmatist, inquiry is irreducibly context-bound, pragmatism does nothing to discourage us from revising or overturning the norms that govern the context in which we find ourselves. If we cannot think our way entirely out of our present circumstances, it is still incumbent upon us to think as creatively and radically as is necessary to resolve or ameliorate the particular problems that we face. Thus, whereas Santayana, Russell, and Rorty are right to point out that context has a fundamental role to play in pragmatic philosophy, they fall short both in the way in which they characterize the contextual basis of pragmatic thought and in the particular role that they assign to context in the pragmatic theory of inquiry. In the first place, they fail to recognize that the context within which pragmatism becomes intelligible is “limited” only to those societies in which human beings have sought systematically to adapt the environment to their needs and desires. This context is of course considerably broader and more plastic than the terms “parochial” and “ethnocentric” suggest. More importantly, these thinkers overlook the crucial fact that, to the extent that “context” does any substantive work for the pragmatist in defining the character of a given inquiry, it does so by showing how it was possible for the doubts to arise that made that inquiry necessary in the first place, not by suggesting how those doubts might best be resolved. In other words, pragmatic contextualism is a contextualism of shared problems, not of preferred solutions: we recognize a given problem to be “our” problem, but we pursue a given course of action not because it is “ours” but because we expect or hope that it will enable us to respond effectively to the problem at hand. It follows that any narrative framework to which pragmatism as such might refer us in public life will be built not around a particular set of substantive ends but rather around the salience of a particular set of problems. In other words, pragmatic political inquiry must begin with a politically salient and distinctively modern form of doubt. 3. Experience as Experiment The claim that pragmatism provides a shared point of orientation for discourses of public justification in the guise of salient problems does not entirely remove the suspicion that it is, politically speaking, an objectionably malleable philosophical position. Indeed, the notion that pragmatism lacks an adequate account of the ends of social and political

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life is nearly as old as the movement itself. This line of criticism has its roots in the reasonable suspicion that any philosophy that assigns a central role to “consequences” as the metric of evaluation will have difficulty distinguishing desirable from undesirable consequences. The canonical account is Randolph Bourne’s: [T]here was always that unhappy ambiguity in [Dewey’s] doctrine as to just how values were created, and it became easier and easier to assume that just any growth was justified and almost any activity valuable so long as it achieved ends . . . You must have your vision and you must have your technique. The practical effect of Dewey’s philosophy has evidently been to develop the sense of the latter at the expense of the former.16 Like Mumford and many other progressive intellectuals of his generation, Bourne began his career as a disciple of Dewey, who, he once remarked, had “universally important things to say on almost every social and intellectual activity of the day.”17 And, like Mumford, Bourne found Dewey’s philosophy to be inadequate to the challenges of wartime—though for opposite reasons. Whatever we make of Bourne’s decision to reexamine his pragmatic roots in 1917,18 the choice that he poses is starkly drawn: either the worth of an end must be evaluated in terms of the “vision” of the actor in question, in which case pragmatism 16. Randolph Bourne, “Twilight of Idols” (1917), in idem, The War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays, 1915–1919, ed. Carl Resek (New York: Harper, 1964), pp. 60–61. 17. Bourne, “John Dewey’s Philosophy,” The New Republic 2 (1915):154. 18. In fact, a careful reading of Bourne’s wartime essays shows that his criticism is directed not at Deweyan philosophy per se but more narrowly at Dewey’s contention (later recanted) that American intervention in the First World War was an intelligent response to the geopolitical circumstances. Bourne insists that the use of war as a means of intelligent reconstruction is impossible: “War is just that absolute situation which is its own end and its own means.” His diagnosis is not that pragmatism is incapable of projecting ends, but rather that in wartime all ends are subordinated to those of war itself; war is “precisely the one situation in which [Dewey’s] philosophy will no longer work.” The only way to resist the degenerate logic of war is, he argues, to “wait and hope for wisdom when the world becomes pragmatic and flexible again”: Bourne, “Conscience and Intelligence in War” (1917), in Debra Morris and Ian Shapiro, eds., John Dewey: The Political Writings (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), pp. 199, 200, 201 (my emphasis). For Dewey’s position on this war, see, for example, his essay “What America Will Fight For” (1917), Middle Works, vol. 10, pp. 271–275, and the discussion in Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, pp. 202–212.

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would seem to collapse into subjectivism, or else some external standard must be invoked that pragmatism is itself unable to supply. Some contemporary pragmatists are happy to embrace the view that pragmatism has no substantive political implications and to treat it instead as a tool for use in whatever critical task lies at hand. Far from being a liability, its flexibility as a philosophical method is from this perspective one of its greatest assets. According to this line of argument, the pragmatic approach to inquiry may be potentially radical in the sense that it shows little regard for traditional ideas, but there is nothing about it that can appropriately be termed radical (or conservative) in an ideological sense. Richard Posner has defended this position forcefully: Pragmatism in the sense that I find congenial means looking at problems concretely, experimentally, without illusions, with full awareness of the limitations of human reason, with a sense of the “localness” of human knowledge, the difficulty of translations between cultures, the unattainability of “truth,” the consequent importance of keeping diverse paths of inquiry open, the dependence of inquiry upon culture and social institutions, and above all the insistence that social thought and action be evaluated as instruments to valued human goals rather than as ends in themselves. These dispositions . . . have no political valence.19 Posner pointedly and effectively uses his “no political valence” thesis to impugn the pragmatism of his liberal and progressive colleagues, especially in the field of legal theory, arguing that “those pragmatists who attack the pieties of the Right while exhibiting a wholly uncritical devotion to the pieties of the Left . . . are not genuine pragmatists, they are dogmatists in pragmatists’ clothing.”20 Bourne, Posner, and like-minded critics acknowledge that pragmatism has (or should have) substantive, even revolutionary, implications for the theory and practice of inquiry; they simply insist that, for better or worse, these implications have little if any direct bearing on social and political life. 19. Posner, The Problems of Jurisprudence (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 465. 20. Posner, “What Has Pragmatism to Offer Law?” p. 34. For a skeptical look at Posner’s conception of pragmatism see Knight and Johnson, “Political Consequences of Pragmatism.”

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It is true that pragmatism does not establish the validity of any particular set of social and political ends, if by this it is meant that the feasibility and attractiveness of such ends cannot be demonstrated prior to inquiry: James famously and accurately states that pragmatism “has no dogmas, and no doctrines save its method.”21 It is also the case, however, that any theory of inquiry must rest upon a set of assumptions about the relationship between human capacities and the world in which they are exercised and that these assumptions will play an important role in determining the direction of further inquiry. Pragmatism is no exception in this regard: it begins, as we have seen, with the claim that the most reliable path to knowledge under conditions of doubt is to form beliefs about potential courses of action, identify the consequences that would be expected to follow if a particular belief were correct, and then act in such a way that it becomes possible to see whether those expectations are borne out in practice. To call these premises into question would be to render pragmatism (and, according to the pragmatist, modern experience itself) incoherent. Pragmatists find in the demonstrated success of this experimental approach to inquiry a clue to the significance of certain human capacities and thus to the conditions of human flourishing: because inquiry is constitutive of conscious experience, it should be possible for experimental intelligence to guide our practices more systematically and extensively than is currently the case, and because the application of this faculty has led to such enormous successes in the securing of human goods, we should whenever possible seek to extend it to new fields of endeavor. The appeal to experimental intelligence is egalitarian in the sense that all may reasonably be thought capable of developing this faculty more fully and profiting thereby. Experimental thinking, far from being the rare achievement of an enlightened mind, is fundamental to action under conditions of uncertainty: we all routinely face problematic situations, posit hypothetical courses of action, and evaluate our success in terms of the degree to which our favored hypothesis secures the expected result. Thus, pragmatists do not call for the development of a new and esoteric form of cognition but rather seek to encourage individuals to apply the experimental intelligence that they exercise in daily life in a more self-conscious and thoroughgoing way. The ideal endpoint 21. William James, Pragmatism: A New Name For Some Old Ways of Thinking (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978 [1907]), p. 32.

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of this process would be, in Dewey’s words, a community in which “every individual . . . share[s] in the duties and rights belonging to control of social affairs” and that “eliminate[s] those external arrangements of status, birth, wealth, sex, etc., which restrict the opportunity of each individual for full development of himself.”22 In this sense the pragmatic theory of inquiry provides a point of orientation (a “valence”) for social and political inquiry, and places the burden of proof upon inegalitarian thinkers of various stripes to show why the experimental intelligence of certain people either cannot or should not be further developed and expressed. Pragmatism may not tell us that the achievement of the experimental ideal is possible, and thus carry no “valence” with respect to that question, but it does suggest that, all other things being equal, we are justified in pursuing this ideal given our other beliefs and commitments. It is therefore crucial to emphasize that even as pragmatism places the challenge of developing and applying experimental intelligence at the center of social and political inquiry, it admits a variety of responses to this challenge. After all, there is room for reasonable disagreement as to whether and to what extent all people have the capacity to approach public life in the critical and reflective way that the experimental ideal demands. To the extent that experimental intelligence is imperfectly and unevenly developed among the citizens of a given polity, the pragmatic approach would seem to countenance and indeed to call for inequalities of political access and influence. Thus, Walter Lippmann, a student of William James who was himself deeply influenced by pragmatism, argues that, whatever role experimental intelligence may have to play in daily life, the ability to treat one’s beliefs about public affairs flexibly and to alter them in the face of countervailing evidence requires a breadth of perspective and a level of sophistication that the average person cannot be expected to possess. He concludes that “the common interests . . . can be managed only by a specialized class” which is “irresponsible, for it acts upon information that is not common property, in situations that the public at large does not conceive.”23 Lippmann’s views remain at the center 22. Dewey (with J. H. Tufts), Ethics, 2nd ed. (1932), Later Works, vol. 7, pp. 348–349. 23. Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Free Press, 1965 [1922]), p. 195. I discuss Lippmann’s views more fully in my “Experience as Experiment: Some Consequences of Pragmatism for Democratic Theory,” American Journal of Political Science 43 (1999):554–557.

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of an ongoing debate about the limits of democratic participation, and so to equate the pragmatic commitment to experimental intelligence with a commitment to participatory democracy is to overlook the wide range of social and political arrangements that can be justified on the basis of these premises—up to and including the elite or plebiscitary forms of democracy with which we are familiar.24 For present purposes it is important to notice two things about these debates. First, they center around a salient problem that all of the participants regard as being central to and even constitutive of modern political thought: that of determining what degree and kind of popular control over public affairs it might be possible or desirable to achieve. This is the leading political question posed by the acceptance of an experimental conception of human experience, and it is a question that no political thinker has since been able to ignore. Second, all participants in these debates acknowledge that, all other things being equal, greater popular participation in and control over public affairs would be a good thing. To the extent that a case is made against this ideal, it is made not by criticizing the norm of inclusion itself but rather by drawing attention to the practical constraints (largely having to do with asymmetries of information) that stand in the way of its realization. Thus to be engaged as a pragmatist in normative political inquiry is to be concerned with the problem of bringing the experimental intelligence of all citizens to bear in public life to the fullest extent possible. Although there is room for disagreement as to when the claims of expertise should be invoked against the claims of inclusion, there is always a prima facie case to be made against elite rule as such.25 This is exactly the kind of shared “vision” that Bourne saw as essential for principled argument in public life, and the character of 24. The most influential statement of the plebiscitary model of democracy is probably Joseph A. Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1942), part 4. See also Robert A. Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), and Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper Collins, 1957). For a historical overview see, for example, Edward A. Purcell, The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1973). 25. This rebuttable presumption against elite rule is similar to Ian Shapiro’s view that democracy entails a suspicion of hierarchy as such. See, for example, his “Three Ways to Be a Democrat,” in idem, Democracy’s Place (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 122–127.

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this vision is very much in line with our earlier claim that certain lines of inquiry may be forced upon us by the pressure of experience, without any particular endpoint to those inquiries being implied.

4. Science and Democracy The claim that there is a close relationship in pragmatic political thought between the ideals of democracy and the practices of modern science is of course a familiar one, and it gives rise to a familiar set of concerns. In particular, pragmatic political thinkers have had to contend with the persistent objection that the effort to tie the ideal of democratic inclusion to the authority of scientific practices overlooks important differences in approach and aim between political and scientific communities. To begin with, scientific communities are highly exclusive bodies, not only in terms of the training and expertise that are necessary to enter into them but also with regard to the points of view that they are willing to take into account. It may therefore seem that the association of democracy with science threatens to undermine the very ideals of equality and inclusion upon which a democratic polity is meant to rest. Moreover, scientific communities share a fairly well-defined set of ends—roughly speaking, the explanation and prediction of empirical phenomena—whereas the proper ends of a political community are precisely what is at issue in discourses of political justification. The effort to conceive of politics in scientific terms might therefore be seen as an effort to sidestep the open and contested nature of public life in favor of a narrower focus on manipulation and control. In order to respond to these concerns—that pragmatism as a political doctrine necessarily amounts to a form of technocratic elitism, or scientistic reductionism, or both—we must examine more carefully the nature of the relationship between science and democracy in pragmatic thought. It is certainly appropriate for those who wish to defend an inclusive and participatory form of democracy to worry that the effort to apply scientific standards of reasoning in public life would lead inexorably to a conception of politics in which technical sophistication and expertise become the decisive credentials for gaining access to political power. This concern provides an uneasy counterpoint to Lippmann’s

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claim that some form of scientific paternalism is all that democracy can sensibly amount to in a large and complex society such as our own. I have already pointed out that there is nothing in the pragmatic appeal to experimental intelligence that rules out an elitism of the kind that Lippmann espouses; we must now ask whether the association of democracy with science admits any alternative to his view, given what we know about the practices of existing scientific communities. The high barriers to entry into scientific discourse are themselves enough to indicate that, in the view of its practitioners at least, the advancement of scientific understanding depends upon a frank acceptance of the fact that neither the capacity nor the inclination to exercise experimental intelligence is equally distributed in the population. The standard of proof in science is the consensus of all competent inquirers, and emphatically not the consensus of all inquirers whatsoever. To treat all viewpoints with equal regard, as the democratic ideal would seem to require, would be to paralyze scientific inquiry altogether. Given these considerations, it is not immediately clear how the pragmatic appeal to science could be used to ground an egalitarian politics. There is, however, at least one rather robust sense in which scientific inquiry is egalitarian: it proceeds from the basic assumption that no hypothesis should be accepted or dismissed solely on the basis either of its provenance or its agreement with established points of view. Instead, all scientific theories are to be held to the standard of reliably accounting for empirical phenomena.26 Needless to say, as science has become an increasingly complex and costly field of endeavor, the importance both of credentials and of orthodoxy as heuristic devices for determining which lines of inquiry are worth attending to has correspondingly increased, to the extent that there is almost no place for the dilettante or the eccentric in scientific discourse today. Nevertheless, the essential criteria for participation in a scientific community are honesty and publicity in inquiry; no amount 26. This claim is not, in my view, gainsaid by the profound critique of the scientific self-understanding set forth in Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970 [1962]). After all, Kuhn’s argument has force precisely to the extent that he is able to show that existing scientific communities fall short, to some extent necessarily, of this self-imposed ideal.

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of training or orthodoxy can justify a lapse on either of these counts. Apart from this there are no de jure barriers to participation. The fact that there are very significant de facto barriers does not arise from the norms of scientific inquiry themselves, but rather from the tradeoffs, necessary in principle but in need of justification in their particulars, that are made between the ideal of openness and the need to define a manageable field of inquiry. In other words, these forms of exclusion represent a concession to the finite resources of this particular community of inquirers, and they are justified in pragmatic terms to the extent that they help that community to pursue its appointed end— that is, the prediction and control of empirical phenomena—more efficiently. Thus, not only does the appeal to experimental intelligence entail a commitment to egalitarianism with respect to the standard to which competing views are held; it also requires that any constraints that are placed upon the free and open participation of all interested parties in any field of inquiry be justified in terms of the exigencies and ends of the inquiry in question. As I have already indicated, there is always a prima facie case to be made on experimental grounds in favor of inclusion. In any case, whatever our judgment as to the practical balance that should be struck between efficiency and openness—and a great deal of normative and empirical work remains to be done on this question, even in the realm of science—we have reason to doubt that the same criteria should be applied to political as to scientific communities, given the very different ends that these communities pursue. This raises the very difficult problem of determining what the proper ends of a political community might in fact be. Because this is itself one of the leading issues, and in the end the decisive issue, at play in discourses of political justification, it is difficult to see how it could be resolved ahead of time in any general and non-question-begging way. Indeed, political communities differ from other types of communities precisely in the fact that they place reflection about their proper ends at the center of their common life. To say that the problem of balancing the claims of efficiency against those of openness is to be resolved by appealing to the ends of the political community is therefore to sharpen the question at hand rather than to answer it. A political community differs from a scientific one in a second and even more fundamental way: it is endowed with the power to impose its

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will upon its members (and, at times, upon the members of other polities) by coercive means. In other words, the “experiments” in which a political community is involved are experiments in which the members of the community (and perhaps others) are themselves the subjects; experiments that determine, directly or indirectly, not only which courses of action are to be met with reward and sanction, but also the extent to which it is possible to pursue any course of action with some hope of anticipating its results. It follows that in politics, to a much greater extent than in science, there is an irreducible tension between the ends of the community and those of the individuals of which it is composed. We must never lose sight of the fact that the pursuit of any public end is likely to do violence to the beliefs and aspirations of certain people in a very literal sense. Here again the claim that political communities should seek to develop and apply the experimental intelligence of their citizens raises more questions than it settles. On the one hand, this might be taken to mean that the resources of the state should be mobilized in such a way that solutions to pressing matters of public concern can be identified and pursued. On the other hand, it might be thought that the state should be prevented from interfering with the experimental projects of its citizens, even (or perhaps especially) in the name of the common good. The appeal to experimental intelligence, taken in itself, does nothing to help us choose between these competing ends. The larger conclusion to be drawn here is that the normative implications of the pragmatic commitment to experimental inquiry, while substantive, are considerably weaker than either friends or enemies of the pragmatic project have often supposed. To begin with, the pragmatist does not seek to use public institutions for the manipulation and control of human behavior, as the charge of scientism implies. To be sure, pragmatists will be eager to ensure that political communities make intelligent use of the best available empirical knowledge in pursuing their ends. However, the distinctively political import of the success of science in predicting empirical phenomena lies simply in the fact that it highlights the significance and potential of the human capacity for experimental intelligence—an insight that, taken in itself, tells us nothing about how that capacity might best be developed or applied. Still less does the pragmatist seek to apply the standards of training and expertise that govern scientific communities in political life, as the charge of technocratic elitism holds. Rather, the high barriers to entry

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into scientific discourse serve to highlight the fact that all communities of inquiry must strike a balance between efficiency and openness, without telling us anything very definite about how this balance should be struck in the political realm. Finally, and most importantly, because the distinctive means at the disposal of a political community is the use of physical force, attention to the cultivation of experimental intelligence in public life raises the very difficult problem of balancing individual and social interests—a problem that arises only in a limited way, if at all, in scientific inquiry.

5. Pragmatism and Egalitarianism I began this chapter by pointing out that, in order to meet the challenges of political justification, we must first identify a narrative framework that binds a given polity together as a community of discourse. The aim of the foregoing discussion has been to come to terms with the school of thought that identifies the pragmatic approach to political justification, for better or worse, with the claim that this framework can have no firmer grounding than the beliefs and self-understandings of a particular community. In one sense this view is undeniably accurate: as we have seen, pragmatism does indeed entail the claim that there is no standpoint available, in any field of inquiry, that entirely transcends the beliefs and expectations of those who are conducting it. Nevertheless, this rendering of the pragmatic position raises the concern that political inquiry so conceived will serve only to rationalize and reinforce the particular biases of the community in which it is undertaken. After all, our ability to question prevailing norms and practices would seem to depend upon the existence of a critical standpoint that is in some way independent of them. What is more, the strong contextualist reading of pragmatism fails to take into account the pluralism of fundamental beliefs that exists in modern societies. If moral and ethical discourse consists only in a series of appeals to the narrative self-understandings of a given community, and if those self-understandings are themselves not only multiple but in conflict with one another (as they manifestly are), then it is difficult to see how pragmatism so conceived could play a constructive role in public life.

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The key to overcoming these difficulties lies, as we have seen, in the pragmatic appeal to science as a defining feature of modern experience. After all, pragmatic philosophy begins not with an appeal to context per se but rather with an appeal to the scientific method of experimental inquiry as a particularly reliable and effective means of resolving doubt. Although this method is of course a historically and culturally local phenomenon, it nevertheless has a broader sphere of application than that of any particular time or place: we are all implicated, directly or indirectly, in its achievements. Moreover, science for the pragmatist is not, as the caricature has it, a mode of inquiry that renders traditional ethical discourse obsolete, nor is it simply a method that can be applied indiscriminately to all kinds of social problems. Instead, the rise of experimental forms of inquiry points toward a conception of human capacities and purposes that itself has substantive moral and ethical implications—one in which the development and application of the faculty of experimental intelligence is shown to be an essential condition of human well-being. This conception provides the basis for a defense of participatory democracy that finds its egalitarian roots in the fact that experimental intelligence, as a fundamental feature of conscious experience, is not the special possession of a particular class of people, and its participatory thrust in the promise that the development of this faculty offers for the realization of individual potentialities, the pursuit of individual and collective goals, and the promotion of the general welfare. Pragmatism so conceived provides a narrative framework for discourses of political justification that is widely shared and relatively independent of the norms and practices of more narrowly drawn communities. This pragmatic narrative of modern experience places the project of developing the experimental intelligence of individuals and bringing it to bear in public life at the center of political discourse. As I have emphasized, this way of framing the issue does not tell us which ways of responding to this challenge it might be possible or desirable to pursue, and so this is a narrative that centers around a set of salient problems, not necessary or appropriate solutions. Nevertheless, and despite this qualification, the pragmatic appeal to experimental inquiry does imply that the experimental intelligence of all people should, all other things being equal, be developed and expressed, and so it places the burden of proof upon those who would limit the

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application of this faculty not only to show why this should be done but to defend their position by appealing to the ends of experimental inquiry itself. In this way pragmatism gives positive content to the democratic tenet that people should be treated as equals, in contrast to the negative claim that popular sovereignty is all that remains in the absence of any transparently binding ideal. Pragmatists should not be so naïve as to think that this political conception will be uncontroversial, but neither should they be too modest to recognize that it provides a point of orientation for further inquiry that can be defended in terms other than those of a narrowly defined community. The appeal to experimental intelligence as the most promising tool for managing problematic experience leads us to expect that matters of public concern will be managed intelligently to the extent that the members of the political community are willing and able to approach them experimentally. This aspect of pragmatic political thought raises a problem familiar to social scientists: namely, how can an experimental approach to politics be sustained in an era of extreme social complexity? That is, how can public life be approached experimentally when it is shaped by forces far removed from the concrete experiences of ordinary citizens, and how can avenues for effective action be identified when the consequences of our actions are too distant or too indirect to be easily grasped? Most fundamentally, how can an interest in public life be cultivated and sustained given these formidable barriers to intelligent participation? These questions point to a difficulty that bears more directly on matters of political justification: Given what we know (or think we know) about the limits of public engagement in complex societies, how are we to take account of the resulting inequalities of knowledge, experience, and power as we deliberate about public ends? So long as there is disagreement about the extent to which the ability and inclination to approach public affairs experimentally are equally shared, political justification will necessarily be a matter both of negotiating the ends that the political community should pursue and of deciding which voices and points of view should be given weight in making such decisions. I will defer a detailed consideration of these difficulties to Part III, which is devoted to a reconstruction and defense of the political liberal conception of legitimacy. First, however, we cannot do justice to the pragmatic tradition of political thought without coming to terms more

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directly with the achievement and legacy of John Dewey. After all, it is largely because of Dewey’s efforts that there is a pragmatic tradition of political thought in the first place, and it is Dewey who is responsible for the fact that pragmatism is associated with a radically participatory form of democratic politics. It follows that the validity of each of the main conclusions of this chapter—that pragmatism stands for more than an “ethnocentric” commitment to contextualism, and that it leaves room, at least in principle, for something less than a fully participatory politics—is bound up in one way or another with the viability of Deweyan political thought. On the positive side, it was Dewey who was most directly implicated in the various charges of pragmatic acquiescence, and I have followed him here in finding a response to those charges in the pragmatic appeal to the scientific method and experimental intelligence. More negatively, it was also Dewey who felt the full force of Lippmann’s “scientific” defense of technocratic elitism, and in suggesting that Lippmann’s ideal is a possible endpoint for pragmatic inquiry I have at least implied that Dewey did not offer an entirely satisfying response to this challenge—at least not on pragmatic grounds. The following chapter will be devoted to a more detailed defense of the latter claim. For present purposes I hope to have shown that pragmatic political thought neither begins nor ends with the claim that our political ideals are a product of the social context in which we find ourselves. That would be a sterile insight indeed. Instead, the pragmatic commitment to experimental intelligence provides a point of orientation for political inquiry that is at once contextually grounded, morally substantive, and general in application. This point of orientation can be used not only to rebut the charges of “acquiescence” leveled by critics of pragmatism past and present, but also to combat the second acquiescence that threatens to claim some of its most visible contemporary defenders. For the pragmatist, politics is, like science, a tool of human purposes, and plays a mediating role between those purposes and the constraints of the environment. Our judgments about matters of public concern should therefore be the subject of an ongoing investigation undertaken within a shared context of meaning and oriented toward an assessment of the possibilities that the world will admit. This experimental ideal poses a great challenge, not because of the fundamental irrationality of (some) human beings but because of the ideological and practical

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barriers that make it difficult for any of us to approach the public realm experimentally. By focusing our attention upon these barriers, pragmatism reclaims for political philosophy its traditional role: that of forging a shared sense of purpose in a divided and divisive world. It is in this way that the pragmatist seeks to defend the cause of democracy to those who have grown skeptical of its promise and indifferent to its ends.

CHAPTER FIVE

Against Deweyan Democracy

1. The Deweyan Revival We have seen that pragmatic political thought has its roots in the claim that we should seek to create the necessary conditions for all citizens to bring their experimental intelligence to bear upon matters of public concern. However, given the complexity of the issues facing modern societies, there is considerable room for disagreement about the extent to which this experimental ideal can or should be translated into a commitment to a participatory democratic politics. It follows that, although pragmatism provides a set of salient problems for political inquiry and a standard against which the various efforts to solve those problems can be measured, it does nothing taken in itself to establish the viability or attractiveness of any particular set of political arrangements. This insight has two immediate implications for our understanding of the relationship between pragmatism and democracy. First, pragmatic political inquiry consists in simultaneous reflection upon the appropriate ends of a political community and upon the means—largely in the form of realized and unrealized human capacities—that are available to pursue them. Second, this process of reflection will necessarily be guided by beliefs and commitments that are themselves extrapragmatic in origin. Such beliefs, which at the highest level of abstraction may properly be described as “metaphysical,” provide the indispensable raw material from which political inquiry must proceed, even as they must themselves be submitted to the pragmatic test of justification through an 121

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assessment of the extent to which they lead to the expected consequences when acted upon. This conception of the scope and aims of pragmatic political thought may seem rather insubstantial to those who associate pragmatism with the more robust defense of democracy set forth in the writings of John Dewey. The tendency to equate pragmatic with Deweyan political thought is certainly understandable, given that Dewey was by far the most politically engaged of the founding pragmatists, both intellectually and practically speaking. However, this usage is misleading to the extent that it equates the metaphysical underpinnings of Dewey’s political thought with those of pragmatism more generally speaking, thereby treating his democratic ideal as the necessary endpoint rather than a possible starting point for pragmatic political inquiry. In order to avoid this kind of confusion, we must attend more closely to the extrapragmatic roots of Dewey’s position, the most important of which lie, as I shall argue, in the tradition of neo-Hegelian idealism. I should immediately emphasize that my effort to tie Dewey to Hegel (which is in itself not particularly novel)1 is not undertaken with the intention of discrediting him as a political thinker, let alone as a pragmatist. As I have indicated, extrapragmatic beliefs and commitments are an essential element of pragmatic inquiry in any field of endeavor. My aim instead is to highlight the fact that Dewey’s commitments offer only one among many possible starting points for pragmatic political inquiry and, thus, to illustrate my larger claim that the pragmatic contribution to political thought cannot be reduced to any particular political program— whether that of Dewey or of anyone else. The tendency to overstate the connection between Dewey’s politics and his pragmatism is partly due to the fact that the terms of the Deweyan revival in political thought, as elsewhere in philosophy, have largely been dictated by Richard Rorty. As we have seen, Rorty argues that pragmatism, understood as the claim that we should give up “[t]he urge to make philosophy into . . . the search for some final vocabulary which can somehow be known in advance to be the common core, the 1. Dewey himself once sardonically remarked that he “should never think of ignoring, much less denying, what an astute critic occasionally refers to as a novel discovery— that acquaintance with Hegel has left a permanent deposit in my thinking”: “From Absolutism to Experimentalism” (1930), Later Works, vol. 5, p. 154.

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truth of, all the other vocabularies which might be advanced in its place,” prepares the way for “[a] post-Philosophical culture . . . in which men and women feel themselves alone, merely finite, with no link to something Beyond.”2 The line of argument leading from the first of these claims to the second is, roughly speaking, as follows: (1) All metaphysical arguments, all attempts to identify philosophical foundations or to articulate a universally binding evaluative vocabulary, have heretofore failed. (2) It is difficult to imagine how any such argument could succeed, given that human interests are divided among too heterogeneous a set of practices, and have changed too much over time, to make the quest for philosophical fixed points a promising one. (3) It therefore serves no useful purpose to invoke metaphysical commitments when debating possible courses of action. (4) We are warranted, on pragmatic grounds, in acting as if the objects of such commitments did not exist. Pragmatism so understood is said to point the way toward a “liberal utopia” in which we focus on performing “ironic” acts of self-creation against the backdrop of an “unjustifiable” sense of social solidarity.3 Rorty therefore sees a fundamental tension between the “metaphysical” and the “pragmatic” elements of Dewey’s philosophy, and argues that, to the extent that Dewey sought to ground his commitment to democracy on anything more robust than the contingent vocabularies of particular communities, he was guilty of a failure to emancipate himself from the metaphysical tradition to which his pragmatism was, properly speaking, opposed.4 Many Dewey scholars have taken pains to point out that Rorty’s “liberal utopia” bears little resemblance to the radical vision of democratic community that Dewey himself defended, and they have tried to reconstruct the latter vision—which is based on a philosophically intricate account of the relationship between individual and social purposes—in such a way that it can serve as a pragmatic alternative to 2. Rorty, “Introduction: Pragmatism and Philosophy,” in Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972–1980 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), pp. xlii–xliii. 3. See especially Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 4. See, for example, Rorty, “Dewey’s Metaphysics,” in Consequences of Pragmatism, pp. 72–89 and, more recently, “Dewey Between Hegel and Darwin,” in Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, vol. 3 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 290–306.

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Rorty’s view.5 As a matter of intellectual history, these scholars are surely right to argue that Dewey would have found little to admire in Rorty’s celebration of “bourgeois liberal” irony. Indeed, Rorty has admitted that he is at times unfaithful to the letter, if not the spirit, of Dewey’s work: he offers the rejoinder that he is as free to invent his own “Dewey” as anyone else. To the extent that Rorty’s critics go beyond a concern with what the “real” Dewey would have thought to make a broader claim about the political implications of pragmatic philosophy, they tend to argue that Dewey’s democratic commitments arose directly from his pragmatic conception of inquiry, and that Rorty is therefore wrong to imply that the two can be divorced from one another.6 As I have already suggested, I believe that Rorty is right to argue that Dewey’s metaphysical commitments do not follow necessarily from his pragmatism but wrong to draw the conclusion that pragmatists must therefore learn to do without metaphysics. The claim that nothing can be known in advance to provide the key to human experience is indeed genuinely pragmatic, and it does indeed mean that whatever our ultimate objects of allegiance may be, our appeals to them must be mediated through vocabularies and self-understandings that we share with our interlocutors. However, there is nothing in the claim that metaphysical beliefs cannot be justified a priori that implies that they can or should be dismissed as superfluous or incoherent. Such a view confounds ontology and epistemology; that is, it draws conclusions about 5. See, for example, Alfonso J. Damico, Individuality and Community: The Social and Political Thought of John Dewey (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1978), which predates Rorty’s influence; and, more recently, Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Matthew Festenstein, Pragmatism and Political Theory: From Dewey to Rorty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), part 1; David Fott, John Dewey: America’s Philosopher of Democracy (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998); William R. Caspary, Dewey on Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000). On the gap between Rorty’s political views and Dewey’s, see, for example, Richard Bernstein, “One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward: Richard Rorty on Liberal Democracy and Philosophy,” Political Theory 15 (1987):538–563; Richard Shusterman, “Pragmatism and Liberalism Between Dewey and Rorty,” Political Theory 22 (1994):391–413; James T. Kloppenberg, “Democracy and Disenchantment: From Weber and Dewey to Habermas and Rorty,” in idem, The Virtues of Liberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 82–99. 6. This is the central claim of Kloppenberg’s “Pragmatism: An Old Name for Some New Ways of Thinking?” Journal of American History 83 (1996):100–138, which surveys much of the recent literature on pragmatism in social and political theory.

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what exists from premises about what it is (or seems) possible to know. But the genuine pragmatist does not draw the boundaries of inquiry at what it is possible to know but rather at what might come to influence practice, and it is clear from a moment’s reflection that many if not most metaphysical beliefs satisfy this criterion. Indeed, Rorty’s own claim that we are nothing more than “finite, mortal, contingently existing human beings” depends no less upon an a priori assumption about the nature of reality, is no less pregnant with implications for conduct, and is thus no less metaphysical, than its contrary. As its very name suggests, his “postmodernist bourgeois liberalism” rests on what might be called a postmodern metaphysics—a metaphysics of radical contingency.7 The ongoing dispute over Dewey’s political legacy has therefore tended, I think, to obscure rather than to clarify the larger question of what pragmatism as a theory of meaning and justification has to offer to normative political theorists today. On the one hand, rather than use the word “metaphysical” as a term of abuse for views that we do not wish to take seriously, we should instead acknowledge that metaphysical commitments of some kind are an essential part of any substantive moral or political position. The proper task of pragmatic political inquiry is to clarify the practical implications of such commitments and to order political life in such a way that their merits can be investigated in a fair and intelligent manner. On the other hand, rather than treat Dewey’s political writings as the final word in pragmatic political thought, we should instead distinguish more carefully between the pragmatic and the extrapragmatic elements of his position. Needless to say, the plausibility of this latter claim depends upon my ability to show that Dewey’s theory of democracy does indeed have an extrapragmatic basis. I will therefore proceed by exploring the Hegelian roots of his philosophical position (Section 2) and then examine in some detail the ways in which these commitments 7. This conception of the role that metaphysics has to play in pragmatic thought is in line with R. W. Sleeper’s claim that “[w]hat we should be doing, as a consequence of pragmatism, is assigning new functions to these old disciplines, not dismissing them altogether—not building up new foundations, of course, but discovering what metaphysics and epistemology can do for us once they have been relieved of their old foundational responsibilities”: The Necessity of Pragmatism: John Dewey’s Conception of Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 2; see also p. 108. Sleeper is inclined to argue that pragmatism so understood yields a metaphysics—a conclusion that I want to resist.

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shaped his political thought (Sections 3 and 4). I will conclude by arguing that Dewey’s call for inquiry into the limits and possibilities of political community is more genuinely pragmatic than his vision of an ideal democratic community and that he therefore has more to contribute as a pragmatist to liberal than to democratic theory (Section 5). 2. The Hegelian Deposit It is a well-established fact that Dewey began his philosophical career as a devotee of Hegel: Hegelian jargon pervades his early writings, and his “early” career spanned more than fifteen years, extending nearly to his fortieth birthday. It is equally well known that, although he ultimately broke with this tradition (largely under the influence of James’s Principles of Psychology), a Hegelian strain remained prominent in his mature philosophy; as he later put it, “the Hegelian emphasis upon continuity and the function of conflict persisted on empirical grounds after my earlier confidence in dialectic had given way to skepticism.”8 Thus Dewey, like Peirce before him, stands as a crucial link between the German and American philosophical traditions.9 Nevertheless, because of his shift toward an experimental conception of knowledge and his consequent rejection of the more rigid aspects of the Hegelian system, Dewey’s mature position is usually described as “naturalistic,” “pragmatic,” and “pluralistic,” in contrast to his earlier “metaphysical,” “idealistic,” and 8. Jane Dewey, ed., “Biography of John Dewey,” in Paul Arthur Schilpp and Lewis Edwin Hahn, eds., The Philosophy of John Dewey (LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court, 1939), p. 18. In the same biographical statement Dewey dates his break with Hegel to his “earlier years at Chicago”; that is, to some time after 1894. He sketches the grounds for this shift more fully in “From Absolutism to Experimentalism,” pp. 154–160, where he assigns a central role to his encounter with James’s Psychology. For a more detailed examination of the links between Dewey’s early Hegelianism and his later work, see part one of Steven C. Rockefeller’s John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991) and Sleeper, Necessity of Pragmatism, chapter 2. 9. Peirce’s philosophical roots lay in Kant rather than Hegel. Indeed, his choice of the term “pragmatism” to describe his theory of meaning reflects Kantian usage; see his “What Pragmatism Is” (1905), Collected Papers, vol. 5, pp. 273–274. James, by contrast, saw himself as building on the tradition of British empiricism and held that “[t]he true line of philosophic progress lies . . . not so much through Kant as round him to the point where now we stand”: “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results” (1898), Collected Essays and Reviews (New York: Russell & Russell, 1920) pp. 436–437 (original emphasis).

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“monistic” stance. I intend to argue that this break was not as decisive as is often supposed and, in particular, that although Dewey did abandon the Hegelian position regarding the manner in which our beliefs come to be justified, he did not substantially alter his original views about their overall function in harmonizing and unifying human experience. Before we turn to a consideration of his political thought, it will therefore be useful to consider briefly the points of contact between idealism and pragmatism and the grounds upon which Dewey came to reject the former in favor of the latter. For Dewey, as for Hegel, the leading task of reason or intelligence is to overcome the various divisions—between fact and value, ideal and real, individual and society—that run throughout human experience, frustrating human desires and thereby limiting human freedom.10 For Hegel, of course, this task is accomplished dialectically, as the various contradictions in our conceptions of the world are rationally overcome (aufgehoben) and resolved into more expansive (but still partial) conceptions that, in turn, give rise to new contradictions. In his social and political thought Hegel elaborates this insight by positing an organic relationship between individual and state in which the particular will of the former is both realized and dissolved through its incorporation into the universal will of the latter. Dewey’s earliest political writings bear the imprint of this holistic conception of political life; we find him arguing that “so far as society has a common purpose and spirit, so far each individual is not representative of a certain proportionate share of the sum total of will, but is its vital embodiment . . . A national consciousness which does not give itself outward reality, which does not objectify itself, is like any other consciousness in a similar plight—simply nonexistent.”11 Even in this early period, however, Dewey is not tempted, as Hegel was, to argue that the rationality of the modern state renders democratic participation superfluous. On the contrary, he insists that 10. Dewey later wrote that Hegel’s thought “supplied a demand for unification that was doubtless an intense emotional craving . . . Hegel’s synthesis of subject and object, matter and spirit, the divine and the human . . . operated as an immense release, a liberation. Hegel’s treatment of human culture, of institutions and the arts, involved the same dissolution of hard-and-fast dividing walls, and had a special attraction for me”: “From Absolutism to Experimentalism,” p. 153. 11. Dewey, “The Ethics of Democracy” (1888), Early Works, vol. 1, pp. 237, 238 (original emphasis).

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“democracy approaches most nearly the ideal of all social organization” in which “every citizen is a sovereign.”12 This tendency to regard a fully participatory democracy as the ideal form of human association becomes, as we will see, the centerpiece of his mature political thought. Dewey’s break with Hegelian orthodoxy was, as I have indicated, precipitated in large part by his encounter with the naturalistic approach to human intelligence set forth in James’s Principles of Psychology. An early expression of the synthesis of pragmatism and idealism that characterizes his mature position is found in his seminal essay on “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,” which was published in 1896. There Dewey argues that the ability to speak of a reflex “arc” presupposes that a preexisting equilibrium between organism and environment has been disrupted: “[this] temporary disintegration and need of reconstitution . . . occasions . . . the conscious distinction into sensory stimulus on one side and motor response on the other.”13 Only when such a disruption has occurred do we become conscious of our ends as objects to be pursued and of ourselves as subjects seeking more effective means of pursuing them. It is therefore more accurate to speak of the psychological process in question as a continuous circuit of activity, a “circle” that can be distinguished into discrete “arcs” of stimulus and response only within particular contexts and for particular purposes. Here Dewey uses James’s naturalistic psychology to bring together a Hegelian claim—that subject and object are distinguished through an experience of contradiction that disrupts the unity of consciousness— with a Peircean one—that the function of intelligence is to formulate plans of action in cases in which our existing habits have been frustrated in practice. The belief that human experience is fundamentally characterized by continuity and conflict forms the basis for Dewey’s mature theory of inquiry.14 This naturalized brand of Hegelianism differs from the orthodox variety in its insistence that we unify experience by intervening in the world and not, as the objective idealist would have it, simply by apprehending its rational character: “Instrumentalism . . . assigns a positive function to 12. Ibid., p. 237; compare Hegel, Rechtsphilosophie, §§308–311. 13. Dewey, “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology” (1896), Early Works, vol. 5, p. 109. 14. See especially Dewey, Experience and Nature (1925), Later Works, vol. 1, and Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938), Later Works, vol. 12.

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thought, that of re constituting the present stage [sic ] of things instead of merely knowing it.” Nonetheless, although an “idealization through actions that are directed by thought” differs recognizably from an “idealization through purely intellectual and logical processes,” Dewey leaves intact the underlying Hegelian assumption that subject and object are essentially continuous entities and that the task of reason is to reveal or restore this continuity.15 He goes on to make the more radical and distinctively Deweyan claim that, because the purpose of thinking is to mediate particular ruptures in experience, “its validity is entirely determined by its efficacy in the pursuit of [this] end,” so that “[a]nything that in a given situation is an end and good at all is of equal worth, rank and dignity with every other good of any other situation, and deserves the same intelligent attention.” As he sees it, this local and experimental conception of knowledge stands in sharp contrast to the Hegelian view that particular judgments lie on a dialectical continuum with more comprehensive ones, leading ultimately to an apprehension of the universe itself as “Absolute Spirit”: a unified object of rational contemplation. He argues instead that “experience” is the only proper authority over action, and “growth” within particular situations the only properly moral end.16 Dewey gives this line of argument a political edge by equating the “belief in the ability of human experience to generate the aims and methods by which further experience will grow in ordered richness” with democracy and freedom, and its contrary, “the idea that experience must be subjected at some point or other to some form of external control; to some ‘authority’ alleged to exist outside the processes of experience,” with hierarchy and domination.17 We have already seen that a concern with the development of experimental intelligence is fundamental in pragmatic political thought; Dewey argues not only that this capacity should be developed to the fullest extent possible but that its authority should not be limited in any way: experimental intelligence is the only proper authority over action. Thus, for Dewey there is a direct link between philosophical and political absolutism: to place external limits 15. Dewey, “The Development of American Pragmatism” (1925), Later Works, vol. 2, p. 18 (original emphasis); The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action (1929), Later Works, vol. 4, pp. 240–241. 16. Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920), Middle Works, vol. 12, pp. 180–181. 17. Dewey, “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us” (1939), Later Works, vol. 14, p. 229; see also Reconstruction in Philosophy, chapter 7.

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on the process of inquiry is to betray a lack of faith in human intelligence that is pregnant with political implications. His own faith in the experimental ideal rests upon three related assumptions about the nature of reality: that it has a fundamentally rational character, that its rational character can be grasped by unaided human reason, and that we can ultimately (and perhaps only) grasp its rational character in common and thus come to agree as a community about the meaning and value of human experience. Unless we accept each of these propositions, it is difficult to see how Dewey can be so confident that the appeal to “intelligence” as a principle of social organization eliminates the need for “external control”—authorities or fixed principles—of any kind.18 It was of course the desire to justify a faith in the possibility of rational harmony that led Hegel to posit the existence of the Absolute in the first place, and so it is appropriate to ask whether and how Dewey’s position differs from this one. Before we do so, however, we should pause to clarify two points. First, we must distinguish between the general claim that reality has a discernibly rational character and any particular claim to have discovered what that character is. Dewey rejects all claims of the latter sort as illegitimate attempts to exercise “external control” over inquiry, and, insofar as certain Hegelians have made such claims, he parts company with them.19 Still, even the claim that rational harmony can be achieved in principle has, as we will see, substantial political implications, regardless of what form that harmony is expected to take. Second, we must keep in mind Peirce’s admonition that “different beliefs are distinguished by the different modes of action to which they give rise”: this is the pragmatic burden of proof that must be met if we are to associate Dewey’s democratic faith with that of Hegelian idealism.20 From a pragmatic point of view the question is not whether the mature Dewey would have described himself as a Hegelian in this sense but whether his appeal to intelligence as the only legitimate authority over human conduct is pragmatically distinguishable from the analogous Hegelian appeal to the Absolute. For the pragmatist these positions differ only insofar as they call for different “modes of 18. Peter T. Manicas argues that this feature of Dewey’s political thought has anarchistic implications; see his “John Dewey: Anarchism and the Political State,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 28 (1982):133–158. 19. Consider, for example, his withering attack on the scientific pretensions of historical materialism in Freedom and Culture (1939), Later Works, vol. 13, chapter 4. 20. Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (1878), Collected Papers, vol. 5, p. 255.

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action.” We must therefore approach Dewey’s political thought with an eye toward determining whether and to what extent this is the case. 3. Individuality and Community Despite the many hostile references to Hegel in Dewey’s political writings—he is dismissed at one point as a thinker whose “effect was to consecrate the Prussian State and to enshrine bureaucratic absolutism”— we find that in political as in epistemological matters the two thinkers work from a common premise: namely, that the overarching purpose of human association is to achieve the self-realization of every individual and that the pursuit of this goal entails certain positive responsibilities on the part of social institutions. This ethical ideal is used both to explain the developmental logic of social forms through history and to project the ends of social life going forward. As Dewey puts it: “Government, business, art, religion, all social institutions have a meaning, a purpose. That purpose is to set free and to develop the capacities of human individuals without respect to race, sex, class or economic status. And this is all one with saying that the test of their value is the extent to which they educate every individual into the full stature of his possibility.” Although Dewey often describes this process of education as one in which our “individuality” finds expression, the pursuit of self-realization is in his view emphatically not a matter of liberating individuals from social forces altogether, but depends instead upon the active control of those forces. Indeed, for Dewey, as for Hegel, there is no such thing as “the individual” in the abstract apart from society; rather, “social arrangements . . . are means of creating individuals.” The view that “individuality is not originally given but is created under the influence of associated life” gives rise in turn to his conviction that a theory of education necessarily lies at the center of any social or political ideal.21 21. Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, pp. 188–189, 186, 191, 193 (original emphasis). Dewey attributes this insight to Hegel, who “destroyed completely—in idea, not in fact—the psychology that regarded ‘mind’ as a ready-made possession of a naked individual by showing the significance of ‘objective mind’—language, government, art, religion—in the formation of individual minds”: Democracy and Education (1916), Middle Works, vol. 9, p. 64. He credits the British neo-Hegelian T. H. Green with introducing this idea into the liberal tradition: Liberalism and Social Action (1935), Later Works, vol. 11, pp. 19–21.

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Dewey’s most obvious departure from Hegelian political thought lies, as we have already seen, in his use of the term “democracy” to describe this ideal of self-realization; in a well-known formulation he argues that democracy “is not an alternative to other principles of associated life” but rather “the idea of community life itself.” However, this is in itself only a terminological difference, given that Dewey distinguishes democracy from other social and political forms simply by the fact that it takes the self-realization of every individual as its end. Indeed, he regards even the most familiar features of democratic rule as dispensable insofar as they fail to advance this goal: “There is no sanctity in universal suffrage, frequent elections, majority rule, congressional and cabinet government. These . . . devices served a purpose; but the purpose was rather that of meeting existing needs which had become too intense to be ignored, than that of forwarding the democratic idea.”22 For Dewey the institutional heritage of the democratic tradition should be viewed as a series of attempts—usually imperfect and belated ones—to realize an ethical ideal that transcends these particular forms, even as it may depend upon them for its realization. His own commitment to democracy consists in the aspiration that “each individual shall have the opportunity for release, expression, fulfillment, of his distinctive capacities, and that the outcome shall further the establishment of a fund of shared values.”23 Hegel would of course agree that the ideal of individual self-realization through participation in social life is at best only contingently related to the existence of “democratic” institutions, and so at this level of abstraction he and Dewey remain very close to one another. However, just as Dewey rejects the claim that there is a hierarchy among our judgments according to how closely they approach the ideal of absolute rational comprehension, so also does he reject the claim that there is a hierarchy of human associations, culminating in the modern European state, within which our capacities are developed and realized. He views the state not as the end of human association, still less of human reason, but as a coordinating mechanism charged with ensuring that the various voluntary associations into which its citizens enter work together smoothly: 22. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (1927), Later Works, vol. 2, pp. 328, 326. 23. Dewey (with J. H. Tufts), Ethics, 2nd ed. (1932), Later Works, vol. 7, p. 350.

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Its “supremacy” approximates that of the conductor of an orchestra, who makes no music himself but who harmonizes the activities of those who in producing it are doing the thing intrinsically worth while . . . Only nominally is it in any modern community the end for the sake of which all the other societies and organizations exist. Groupings for promoting the diversity of goods that men share have become the real social units.24 Dewey concludes that the heart of human activity and development lies neither in “mere isolated individuals” nor in a “supreme and single political organization” but in voluntary associations that pursue particular goods within particular contexts. On this view the state is little more than a referee between these associations, charged with managing the external consequences of their activity in the interest of the community as a whole. He concludes that “[t]here is no antecedent universal proposition which can be laid down because of which the functions of a state should be limited or should be expanded. Their scope is something to be critically and experimentally determined.”25 It is this decentralized and pluralistic conception of social life, and not the democratic rhetoric, that most clearly distinguishes Deweyan from Hegelian political thought. Dewey’s brand of pluralism gets its democratic punch from two closely related dialectical arguments. According to the pragmatic theory of inquiry, intelligence is exercised in situations in which our existing habits have failed us and we are compelled to seek more fruitful modes of thought and action. Dewey draws from this theory of inquiry a conception of human experience in which our growth as individuals depends upon the extent to which we are compelled to use our problemsolving skills to confront and intelligently engage unfamiliar situations. Given the overwhelmingly social character of human experience, he concludes that individual growth depends above all on the fullest range of interaction and communication among different social groups: Every expansive era in the history of mankind has coincided with the operation of factors which have tended to eliminate distance between peoples and classes previously hemmed off from one 24. Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, p. 196. Dewey borrows the orchestral metaphor from the cultural pluralist Horace M. Kallen: see the latter’s Culture and Democracy in the United States (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1924), for example pp. 124–125. 25. Dewey, Public and Its Problems, p. 281.

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another . . . more numerous and more varied points of contact denote a greater diversity of stimuli to which an individual has to respond; they consequently put a premium on variation in his action. They secure a liberation of powers which remain suppressed as long as the incitations to action are partial, as they must be in a group which in its exclusiveness shuts out many interests.26 Thus for Dewey the pursuit of human self-realization depends upon the following dialectic: We are led through association with others to have new and unfamiliar experiences, these experiences allow (or compel) us to develop a broader range of our capacities, and this process of development makes it possible for us to enjoy still wider and more enriching forms of association. On this view, “[t]o learn to be human is to develop through the give-and-take of communication an effective sense of being an individually distinctive member of a community.”27 The development of political institutions is driven by a similar kind of dialectic. Recall that for Dewey the function of the state is to manage the externalities of social interaction both within and among the various voluntary associations of which the political community is composed. He refers to any group that is affected by these externalities as a “public,” and argues that once a public becomes aware of itself it will organize and create the necessary political institutions for pursuing its interests: “Indirect, extensive, enduring and serious consequences of conjoint and interacting behavior call a public into existence having a common interest in controlling these consequences.” Of course, the new institutions will themselves prove to be only partially inclusive and so will in time generate a public representing still broader interests, which will construct its own institutions, and so on. Dewey concludes that the fundamental challenge of a democratic politics is not that of adjudicating between interests that are fundamentally opposed but rather that of helping the nascent public, the one that represents the genuinely common interest, to “identify and distinguish itself,” to become aware of its unifying role and of the obstacles that stand in the 26. Dewey, Democracy and Education, pp. 92–93; see also Ethics, pp. 302–303. 27. Dewey, Public and Its Problems, p. 332. This aspect of Dewey’s political thought is the focal point of Damico’s Individuality and Community. See also Axel Honneth, “Democracy as Reflexive Cooperation: John Dewey and the Theory of Democracy Today,” trans. John M. M. Farrell, Political Theory 26 (1998):763–783.

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way of its realization: “When these conditions are brought into being they will make their own forms.” This belief that the problem of democracy “is primarily and essentially an intellectual problem” helps to explain how Dewey was able to reconcile his refusal to defend a specific program of political reform with his repeated urgings that political thought become more concrete.28 This dialectical account of the relationship between individual and social development has two important implications for Dewey’s understanding of the nature and aims of democratic government. First, the claim that the development of individual capacities depends upon the existence of a genuinely inclusive community provides him with an answer to those critics who seek to impugn the capacities of the average citizen, because on this view the intelligence of even the most accomplished citizens is a function of the degree to which all have been effectively integrated into the life of the community. Dewey draws a shrewd analogy here with the social basis of property: “[t]he notion that intelligence is a personal endowment or personal attainment is the great conceit of the intellectual class, as that of the commercial class is that wealth is something which they personally have wrought and possess.” It follows from this conception of intelligence that it is misguided to believe that social problems can be solved by the kind of benign technocracy envisioned by “realists” such as Walter Lippmann; again, “in the absence of an articulate voice on the part of the masses, the best do not and cannot remain the best, the wise cease to be wise.” Although experts are, of course, essential to good government, “[i]n the degree in which they become a specialized class, they are shut off from knowledge of the needs which they are supposed to serve.” Lippmann’s selfless elite is, in any case, a chimera; we know from experience that “[n]o government . . . in which the masses do not have the chance to inform the experts as to their needs can be anything but an oligarchy managed in the interests of the few.”29 Even more striking than Dewey’s critique of elitism is his belief that a genuinely democratic community would not harbor any fundamental conflicts of interest. To be sure, social conflicts exist, but they 28. Dewey, Public and Its Problems, pp. 314, 327. 29. Ibid., pp. 367, 364, 365; compare Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Free Press, 1965 [1922]), chapter 8.

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appear in Dewey’s political thought as symptoms of a kind of selfdefeating ignorance or blindness rather than as essential features of public life.30 What, then, stands in the way of the achievement of a fully inclusive community? There is, of course, the inherent rigidity of political institutions; the fact that “the power and lust of possession remains in the hands of the officers and agencies which the dying public instituted.” A still greater obstacle, in Dewey’s view, is the influence of dogmatic beliefs that obscure the basic unity of interest between individual and society. Thus his tireless polemics against those who see political life in terms of a fundamental conflict between “individual” and “society,” “environment” and “human nature,” instead of analyzing the various meanings and functions that these concepts assume under different social conditions. As he sees it, only a blind (and therefore unintelligent) allegiance to ideology can explain the unwillingness to adopt a “scientific” approach to such questions, and until these prejudices are overcome it will be difficult, and perhaps impossible, for the emerging public to identify itself. Thus, again, “[i]t is not the business of political philosophy and science to determine what the state in general should or must be . . . [but] to aid in creation of methods such that experimentation may go on less blindly, less at the mercy of accident, more intelligently.”31 It should be clear that the plausibility of this line of argument depends upon a prior acceptance of Dewey’s dialectical conception of 30. This view is perhaps most clearly expressed in one of Dewey’s earliest ethical writings, in which he states what he sees as the fundamental “ethical postulate”: “IN THE REALIZATION OF INDIVIDUALITY THERE IS FOUND ALSO THE NEEDED REALIZATION OF SOME COMMUNITY OF PERSONS OF WHICH THE INDIVIDUAL IS A MEMBER; AND, CONVERSELY, THE AGENT WHO DULY SATISFIES THE COMMUNITY IN WHICH HE SHARES, BY THAT SAME CONDUCT SATISFIES HIMSELF ”: Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics (1891), Early Works, vol. 3, p. 322 (original emphasis). See also the contemporaneous “Christianity and Democracy” (1892), where he argues that “[t]here is but one fact—the more complete movement of man to his unity with his fellows through realizing the truth of life”: Early Works, vol. 4, pp. 8–9. 31. Dewey, Public and Its Problems, pp. 255, 256–257. This feature of Deweyan political thought led Reinhold Niebuhr to complain that it was “too enamored of the function of reason in life”: Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York: Scribner’s, 1936), p. xvi. As the title of his book suggests, Niebuhr’s Augustinian pessimism caused him to question Dewey’s basic assumptions regarding the relationship between individual and community.

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the relationship between individual and social interests. After all, the claim that the self-realization of each is a necessary condition for the self-realization of all, although attractive, is also eminently controversial. It is certainly possible to imagine a society in which the well-being of the many depends upon the enlightened rule of a class possessing superior wisdom, or (on the contrary) a society in which the flourishing of one part of the population requires that another compromise or give up its own distinctive mode of flourishing. Nor can Dewey’s position on these questions be justified solely by drawing upon pragmatic premises. We have seen that the pragmatic theory of inquiry commits us to a vision of social and political life in which the experimental intelligence of each citizen is developed and expressed to the fullest possible extent. However, attention to the practices of the scientific community from which this theory of inquiry was drawn alerts us to the fact that this stipulation, though it does commit us to an egalitarianism of a certain kind, is also compatible with forms of elitism, exclusion, and conflict which fall far short of Dewey’s democratic ideal. It follows that, although Dewey’s pragmatism may have led him to become preoccupied with the problem of bringing experimental intelligence to bear in public life, his robust faith in the possibilities of democratic community must have an extrapragmatic basis. An examination of his theory of moral inquiry will help to further clarify the metaphysical roots of this faith. 4. The Problem with the Public We have seen that the leading challenge facing pragmatic political thought under current circumstances is that of determining whether and how the ideal of experimental intelligence can be realized in complex modern societies. Dewey shares this assessment; he argues that “the machine age has so enormously expanded, multiplied, intensified and complicated the scope of the indirect consequences [of social interactions] . . . that the resultant public cannot identify and distinguish itself,” and that as a result “many consequences are felt rather than perceived; they are suffered, but they cannot be said to be known.” He concludes that the enormously complex and interdependent “Great Society” in which we live must somehow be transformed into a “Great Community” in which we enjoy once more the enriching contact of face-to-face associations, even as we learn to exercise intelligent control over the

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wider social structures in which they are embedded.32 Still, Dewey does not offer any specific advice as to how this challenge might be met, beyond an exhortation to conduct “inquiry” into “particular and concrete conditions” with an eye toward “consequences.” He writes, for example, that “[t]he prime necessity is . . . first, to promote search for problems . . . and, secondly, to solve these problems by generalizations that state interactions between analytically observed events.”33 It is difficult to read this passage (and the many others like it in Dewey’s political writings) without a sense of frustration: How can “inquiry,” however concrete and particular it might be, help us to find solutions to social problems in cases in which there is disagreement as to which public ends should be pursued? Part of the answer lies in the fact that Dewey believed that questions of value are no less susceptible to objective analysis than questions of fact, and indeed that the very distinction between fact and value was suspect. Given this premise, it became possible for him to argue not only that a genuine public interest exists but that free and impartial inquiry is all that is needed to discern it. The key to understanding his position on this question is to recall again that for Dewey the function of inquiry is to restore the equilibrium between individual and environment once it has been disrupted in some particular situation: Valuation takes place only when there is something the matter; when there is some trouble to be done away with, some need, lack, or privation to be made good, some conflict of tendencies to be resolved by means of changing existing conditions. This fact in turn proves that there is present an intellectual factor—a factor of inquiry—whenever there is valuation, for the end-in-view is formed and projected as that which, if acted upon, will supply the existing need or lack and resolve the existing conflict. 32. Dewey, Public and Its Problems, chapters 4–5, quoted at pp. 314, 317. Dewey borrows the term “the Great Society” and much of his analysis of the character of industrial society from Graham Wallas’ book of that name (New York: Macmillan, 1914). The term “the Great Community” is probably derived from Josiah Royce’s The Hope of the Great Community (New York: Macmillan, 1916). Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn has argued that there is a fundamental tension between Dewey’s celebration of “face to face” communities and his call for “scientific” control of larger social forces: “John Dewey and the Liberal Science of Community,” Journal of Politics 46 (1984):1142–1165. 33. Dewey, Freedom and Culture, p. 145.

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Insofar, then, as the need in question is a definite one, it calls for a definite modification in the environment. Dewey concludes that “[s]ince the situation is open to observation . . . the adequacy of a given desire can be stated in propositions” which “are capable of empirical test” as we try to ascertain “the connection that exists between a given desire and the conditions with reference to which it functions.”34 Thus for Dewey the objectivity of value judgments follows from the fact that to state a problem is to define a situation in such a way that the objective features of a solution are already implied. As Gail Kennedy has put it, “the only possible answer to the question, ‘Why should I do this?’ must be of the form, ‘Because this is the most adequate solution of the problem indicated by your question.’”35 We may leave aside for present purposes the question of whether Dewey’s theory of valuation accomplishes as much as he thinks it does, though we may note in passing that it seems only to push the problem of objectivity back a step to the point at which problems are defined. Even if we grant, however, that valuations take on an objective character within particular existential situations, it is difficult to see how this insight can be applied when situations are experienced collectively; that is, when we are seeking solutions to social and political problems. After all, and despite Dewey’s persistent tendency to lapse into the passive voice, situations do not make demands; individuals make demands within situations. Thus, his situational ethics cannot resolve ethical disagreements between individuals unless we make the further assumption that different individuals, and indeed entire communities, can meaningfully be said to participate in the same “situation”—in short, that they share a fundamental unity of interest, which all are capable of perceiving. This tacit assumption pervades Dewey’s ethical and political writings and explains his broader tendency to elide the distinction between individual and social intelligence; to hold that the integration of purpose that exists within an individual can also obtain in the relationship between individual and society. In other words, in order to retain the claim to objectivity, which makes possible the bare appeal to “inquiry” and “intelligence” in public life, we must posit the existence of a perspective, accessible to all parties concerned, from which it is possible to discern the objective needs of the community qua community. 34. Dewey, Theory of Valuation (1939), Later Works, vol. 13, pp. 221, 205. 35. Gail Kennedy, “The Hidden Link in Dewey’s Theory of Evaluation,” Journal of Philosophy 52 (1955):94. The quoted proposition is the “hidden link” referred to in the title.

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We saw in the previous chapter that critics and apologists alike have attributed this feature of Dewey’s political thought to the fact that he was appealing, consciously or not, to the norms of his own time and place to define a community of interest and thus to bring a degree of coherence and determinacy to collective inquiry. Because the formative period for Dewey’s mature philosophy corresponds roughly with the Progressive era in American political history, his political writings are often said to partake of the sense of optimism and common purpose that supposedly characterized that movement. Arthur Murphy describes the period in question as follows: Events were on the march and the reformer who sought to reconstruct society for beneficent purposes had only to put himself in line with them, in an intelligent and forward-looking fashion, to point the way ahead toward a better world. Social change was naturalized as evolutionary growth, and to make it “progress” all that was required was the free use of coöperative intelligence by progressively educated men in the solution of their common problems.36 There is something to be said for this view: for example, Dewey’s erstwhile disciple Randolph Bourne later admitted with some chagrin that “[w]e were instrumentalists, but we had our private utopias so clearly before our minds that the means fell always into its place as contributory.” The claim that Dewey’s appeal to the public interest was really an appeal to the dominant values of a particular time and place is also very much in line with Rorty’s claim that “our society . . . need be responsible only to its own traditions,” though Rorty is inclined to praise rather than blame Dewey for his unwillingness (at times) to seek an “ahistorical backup” for his political views.37 Nevertheless, just as this brand of contextualism misconstrues the tradition of pragmatic political thought more generally speaking, so also does it fail to account for Dewey’s own democratic faith. To begin with, the bulk of his political writings date not from the Progressive era 36. Arthur E. Murphy, “John Dewey and American Liberalism,” Journal of Philosophy 57 (1960):420. 37. Randolph Bourne, “Twilight of Idols” (1917), in idem, The War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays, 1915–1919, ed. Carl Resek (New York: Harper, 1964), p. 60; Rorty, “Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism,” in idem, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 199.

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but from the period between 1927 and 1939: hardly a time either of optimism or of ideological consensus. Moreover, Dewey does not, apart from the occasional rhetorical flourish, defend his commitment to democracy in “ethnocentric” terms but rather, as we have seen, through a dialectical account of the relationship between individual and community. Indeed, it is more typical to find him inveighing against the “pecuniary culture” of the United States as an obstacle to democratic reform.38 Finally and most importantly, the central claim of Dewey’s political writings, from The Public and Its Problems forward, is that there is a gap in contemporary social life between the premodern values that most people hold and the modern methods of inquiry by which those values might be tested and verified. As a result, the public is said to be too divided and confused to articulate any coherent set of ends. The contextualist reading of Dewey fails to account for this crucial aspect of his political thought and, thus, asks us to believe either that he was obtuse (insofar as he believed in an unspoken consensus in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary), self-contradictory (insofar as he appealed to such a consensus despite his own diagnosis of the disordered state of current culture), or naïve (insofar as he thought that he could generate such a consensus by assuming it as a premise). The more natural—and charitable—way of reading Dewey on this question is to say that he placed his faith not in the values of a particular culture but rather in the claim that, given the essential unity of interest between individual and society, social conflicts must ultimately be susceptible to intelligent resolution in a way that benefits all parties concerned. This claim rests upon three related assertions, each of which we have examined in turn: first, that there is no need for any authority over human conduct other than that of experimental intelligence; second, that conflict is a contingent feature of social and political life, a sign of an imperfect fit between the public interest and the institutional forms created to pursue it; and third, that disagreements about value judgments, including judgments about matters of public concern, admit of objective solutions that can be discovered through intelligent inquiry. Each of these assertions is, as we have seen, essential to Dewey’s democratic faith, and none of them can be justified on empirical or pragmatic grounds alone: indeed, they are at least as open to doubt 38. See especially Individualism, Old and New (1930), Later Works, vol. 5, chapters 1–3.

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today as they were when he first articulated them. We can therefore conclude that Dewey’s democratic faith has its roots in a particular set of metaphysical commitments that are only contingently related to his pragmatism. Moreover, the substantive content of this metaphysical faith—the belief that there exists a common good that can be rationally known and that will subsume and cancel all particular interests—is pragmatically indistinguishable from the tenets of the Hegelian brand of idealism that he espoused as a young man. We can clarify the implications of this claim for our understanding of the pragmatic tradition of political thought by considering two possible rejoinders to it. The first is simply to deny that Dewey ever appeals to the objective interests of the community as a whole, and, in particular, to note that there is nothing in his use of the term “public” that requires that the term be understood in this way. Given that Dewey defines a public as a community of interest brought into being by the unintended or undesirable consequences of social interaction, why should we not attribute to him the same pluralistic view of these groups that he holds of associations more generally? Granted, he did not write a book called “Publics and Their Problems,” but he does occasionally speak of “publics” rather than of “the public,” and in at least one case—when he notes that under current conditions “the publics are amorphous and unarticulated”—he seems to use the plural form in a nonpejorative sense.39 Notice, however, that if we remove the appeal to an inclusive public interest, then Dewey’s theory of intelligent political conduct collapses into an apology for the kind of pluralistic balance of power that preoccupied political scientists during the 1950’s and 60’s.40 “Publics” would then be equivalent to “interest groups,” and “social intelligence” would mean little more than “knowing how to get what you want from society.” Such a use of Dewey’s term, while logically consistent with the definition that he offers, severs the link to the ideal of a fully democratic community that gives it its moral resonance. It therefore does violence to the spirit if not to the letter of his thought. 39. Dewey, Public and Its Problems, p. 317. In at least two other cases he complains that there are “too many publics”: ibid., pp. 314, 320. 40. See for example David Truman, The Governmental Process (New York: Knopf, 1951); Robert A. Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971) and, more recently, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), especially chapter 20.

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A second and more promising response would be to argue that, although Dewey’s democratic faith does indeed depend upon an appeal to the existence of an objectively discernable public interest, this appeal functions as a regulative ideal and not as a dogmatic claim about the necessary end of human association. On this view, we can bracket this appeal and retain his underlying faith in democracy as the most promising vehicle for the development of human capacities. Indeed, to tie Dewey too closely to the ideal of a completely harmonious community may seem to be to construct a straw man, given that he explicitly warns that this ideal is not to be confused with reality: [Democracy] is an ideal in the only intelligible sense of an ideal: namely, the tendency and movement of some thing which exists carried to its final limit, viewed as completed, perfected. Since things do not attain such fulfillment but are in actuality distracted and interfered with, democracy in this sense is not a fact and never will be. But neither in this sense is there or has there ever been anything which is a community in its full measure, a community unalloyed by alien elements.41 I agree that we should be willing to weaken Dewey’s assumptions about the extent to which human ends can be harmonized. However, it is important to note that when we do this, his political vision loses its distinctively (and radically) democratic character and becomes instead a call for inquiry into the boundaries of political community, whatever those may turn out to be. As we have seen, there is nothing in the experimental ideal taken in itself that determines where this kind of inquiry will lead; after all, many nondemocratic regimes claim, sincerely or not, to be pursuing the full development of the capacities of their citizens and to be as inclusive as is possible given that goal.42 Notice, moreover, that even the appeal to a harmonious democratic community as a regulative ideal contradicts Dewey’s official position that no “external controls” are to be placed upon inquiry. I have argued against this view that inquiry can get under way only if it is guided by 41. Dewey, Public and Its Problems, p. 328. 42. Dewey himself notes that even an aristocratic polity such as the one envisioned in Plato’s Republic aims at “the manifestation, the realization of the capacities of the individual,” so that we “cannot find here any ground upon which to distinguish the aristocratic from the democratic ideal”: “Ethics of Democracy,” p. 241; compare Ethics, p. 363.

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“external” beliefs and commitments of some kind, up to and including beliefs that are so general in scope as to be properly termed “metaphysical.” The willingness to treat one’s fundamental beliefs as regulative ideals rather than as necessary truths marks the distinction between a pragmatic and a nonpragmatic approach to metaphysics, not between a metaphysical and a non- (or post-) metaphysical approach to inquiry. Indeed, if the mark of a metaphysical commitment is its tendency to encourage certain lines of inquiry to the exclusion of others, then surely Dewey’s refusal to question or substantially alter his democratic faith between 1885 and 1945 can be attributed to just such a commitment. I do not mean to suggest that he was wrong to remain loyal to his convictions; uncertain claims about the future are involved in the defense of any ideal, and we can often test those claims properly only if we adhere to them stubbornly. The alternative is the kind of malleability in the face of events that is termed “pragmatic” in the colloquial and pejorative sense. Dewey’s fault, pragmatically speaking, lay not in his stubborn commitment to an uncertain ideal but in his tendency to treat his position as if it followed from an objective analysis of the nature of experience rather than from the projection of a provisional set of assumptions about the nature of human interests. 5. Dewey’s Enduring Contribution We have seen that at the heart of Dewey’s theory of democracy lies the claim that the competing interests found in political communities can be harmonized, at least in principle, through the application of experimental intelligence to social problems. We have furthermore seen that this claim depends upon the supposition that there exists a perspective, accessible to all, from which the underlying unity of interest between individual and community can be discerned. I have argued that this latter claim plays a role in Dewey’s political thought that is, pragmatically speaking, indistinguishable from the role played by the Absolute in orthodox Hegelian philosophy. That is, both positions seek to justify a particular kind of optimism about human nature and human society by appealing to an ideal standpoint from which each appears in its fully developed form. As I have said, I do not view this claim taken in itself as a criticism or rebuttal of Dewey’s position; indeed, I have argued that pragmatism acquires definite moral and political content only when it is supple-

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mented with commitments of this kind. What makes a metaphysical position pragmatic is not its content but the manner in which it is held; the extent to which it is treated as a means of defining a given course of action rather than as a necessary insight into the very nature of things. Once we have grasped this point, it is possible to see that the distinction between pragmatic and nonpragmatic political thought does not depend on the acceptance or rejection of metaphysical commitments but rather on whether we regard those commitments as timeless insights or as necessary but fallible guides to conduct.43 However, to say that metaphysical commitments of the kind that Dewey held have an essential role to play in public life is not to say that they have a similarly central role to play in a theory of political justification. Such a theory must be able to show how the multiple and conflicting commitments that the citizens of modern societies hold might be accommodated within a public discourse oriented toward the identification and pursuit of legitimate public ends. The burden of the previous two chapters has been to show that the pragmatic theory of inquiry provides us with a shared point of orientation for such discourses but little substantive guidance as to how they should proceed. The polemical “against” in each of the chapter titles should therefore be taken in a relatively narrow sense: my aim has been to argue against the “acquiescent” and “Deweyan” positions insofar as these are taken to be definitive statements of the political import of the pragmatic tradition. I have argued instead that pragmatism commits us to something more than a mere appeal to the self-understandings of particular communities and to something less than Dewey’s democratic ideal. However, this line of argument should not be allowed to obscure the fact that neither of these positions is ruled out by the pragmatic approach: we begin with a concern to realize the experimental capacities of citizens, and we may end (for all we know) by affirming a utopian vision of the Rortyan or Deweyan variety. In the meantime, whatever their ultimate merits may be found to be, having these ideals (and others) clearly before our minds serves as an indispensable aid to reflection and inquiry into our considered aims. 43. In James’s words, “[i]t is not that . . . metaphysical postulates of rationality are absolutely barren—though barren enough they were when used, as the scholastics used them, as immediate propositions of fact. They have a fertility as ideals, and keep us uneasy and striving always to recast the world of sense until its lines become more congruent with theirs”: The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983 [1890]), pp. 1263–1264.

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To be concerned with the challenge of accommodating multiple and conflicting views regarding the proper ends of public life is to confront a series of problems that are central to, and indeed constitutive of, the liberal tradition in political thought. In the remainder of this book I will argue that the pragmatic theory of meaning and justification has much to contribute to our efforts to resolve these problems. Nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind that our views about how best to approach these matters will be shaped, perhaps decisively so, by our beliefs about what possibilities are in play. In this respect the Deweyan theory of democracy sheds useful light upon the strengths and limitations of contemporary liberal discourse. The liberal ideal, like the Deweyan, is that of a society in which political power is exercised in the name of ends that are understood and deemed reasonable by all citizens, and in recent years so-called “political” liberals have argued that a commitment to this ideal requires that we seek to justify our public ends by appealing to principles that can be endorsed from within a wide range of metaphysical standpoints.44 What separates contemporary proponents of this view from Dewey is not their commitment to the public justification of public ends but their pessimism about the extent to which this kind of justification can be extended to our broader views about the nature of human motivations and interests. Indeed, liberals today typically begin with the assumption that modern societies are marked by fundamental disagreements about such matters that persist not in the absence of, or even in spite of, but as a result of the exercise of reason.45 44. See, especially, John Rawls, Political Liberalism, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996 [1993]) and Charles Larmore, The Morals of Modernity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), chapter 6. Rawls draws attention to this point of contact between his own project and Dewey’s at the outset of his Dewey lectures, and he attributes it to their shared debt to Hegel’s critique of Kant: “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory” (1980), in idem, Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 303–304. 45. As Larmore puts it, “[the] crucial element of modern experience is the realization that on the meaning of life reasonable people tend naturally to disagree with one another. We have come to expect that in a free and open discussion about the fulfilled life, the human good, the nature of self-realization . . . the more we converse, the more we disagree, even with ourselves”: Morals of Modernity, p. 12; see also pp. 122, 151, 215. Rawls refers to this phenomenon as “the fact of reasonable pluralism”: Political Liberalism, pp. xvii, 4, 36.

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From a Deweyan perspective, this kind of pessimism threatens to place the kind of “external control” on experience that stifles the exercise of experimental intelligence. Deweyan liberals will therefore be concerned to ensure that political liberals, rather than dogmatically asserting that a further harmonization of interests is impossible, allow instead for the development of mutual understanding, and thus for the extension of the boundaries of political community, whenever this is possible. Only by leaving open the possibility of this kind of consensus, they will argue, can we discover and release the potential for growth that lies within each of us. From a political liberal perspective, Dewey’s democratic faith appears, at best, as one “comprehensive” vision of the good among many and, at worst, as one that dangerously denies the basic political liberal claim that consensus on the good can be achieved only through the illegitimate use of force.46 While these liberals will applaud Dewey’s view that voluntary associations, and not the state, are the primary vehicles for the pursuit of human goods, they will be wary of his appeal to a “Great Community” that stands above or behind these particular groupings. They will therefore resist the Deweyan effort to link the idea of shared public ends to a community in which our broader commitments and aspirations are shared as well. Such a position will seem to them to be hostile to the possibility that there might be an ultimate plurality of reasonable worldviews, and thus to point to a political order in which ways of life that seem to the majority to be archaic, insular, or simply exotic are treated with suspicion if not hostility. I will defer a consideration of how these competing views might be accommodated within a single theory of political justification to the following chapters. For now it will suffice to emphasize that the choice between Deweyan and more pluralistic forms of liberalism is not a choice between a more and a less inclusive conception of political life but rather between two competing ideals of human flourishing, neither 46. Rawls calls this “the fact of oppression”: Political Liberalism, p. 37. Damico notes that Dewey’s “somewhat breathtaking thesis that authority and freedom are reconciled in the experiential activity of ‘intelligent problem solving’” bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the position held by “advocates of coercive freedom,” and concludes that Dewey “is not sensitive to the dangers attending his belief that a greater reliance on intelligence will lead to a society with substantial harmony”: Individuality and Community, p. 99.

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of which is, taken in itself, more or less inclusive than the other. We tend to think of Dewey’s position as the more exclusive one because it seems to point to a political order that is less tolerant of diversity and pluralism as such. The idea of appealing to a robust conception of the common good is likely to seem suspect to present audiences, quite apart from the question of what the content of that good is said to be or how it is to be pursued. Indeed, Dewey’s brand of naturalized Hegelianism was, philosophically speaking, rather unfashionable even during his own lifetime.47 But fashion is an imperfect and highly fallible guide to inquiry, and if we live in the kind of world that Dewey thinks we live in—if his metaphysical views are the correct ones—then the acceptance of an irreducible pluralism of viewpoints and ways of life is itself the path of exclusion, because it prevents certain people from enjoying the opportunities for growth that would be provided in a more fully integrated democratic community. Paradoxically, then, any effort to accommodate the diversity of viewpoints that we find in modern societies will have to rely upon potentially controversial assumptions as to what accommodation itself consists in. Thus, if a dubious belief in the possibility of a genuinely common good lies at the heart of Dewey’s democratic ideal, an equally dubious pessimism about such a possibility is central to much contemporary liberal theory. Dewey’s faith in the harmonizing possibilities of social life poses a challenge to our more particularist dispositions, but not an unreasonable one; after all, the alternative to inquiry into the limits of mutual understanding is, as he would have been the first to argue, an unintelligent acquiescence in the prejudices of the day. Notice, however, that to appeal to Dewey in this way is to subordinate his commitment to democracy to his concern to liberate our experimental intelligence from the constraints of currently prevailing beliefs and practices. This places the focus not upon his Hegelian theory of democracy but rather upon his pragmatic refusal to accept the present state of social integration as fixed or final and upon his articulation of a method for revising and possibly extending its boundaries over 47. The odd disjunction between the terms of Dewey’s political thought and those of his contemporaries (especially in Europe) is a leading theme of Alan Ryan’s John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (New York: Norton, 1995).

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time.48 This is exactly the kind of liberal sensibility that I have identified with the pragmatic tradition of political thought more generally speaking. Dewey once remarked that the proper vocation of philosophy is that of ensuring “that we may essay our deepest political and social problems with a conviction that they are to a reasonable extent sanctioned and sustained by the nature of things.”49 Even if we do not share his optimism about the extent to which our interests can be harmonized, we should nevertheless be willing to commit ourselves to exploring the nature of things, with an eye toward better understanding the nature and limits of our ties to one another. 48. This is the pragmatic conception of political inquiry defended by Marion Smiley; see especially her Moral Responsibility and the Boundaries of Community: Power and Accountability From a Pragmatic Point of View (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 49. Dewey, “Philosophy and Democracy” (1919), Middle Works, vol. 11, p. 48.

PAR T III

Political Liberalism Moral truth which has to be physically enforced, or which does not depend upon moral means for its acceptance, ceases to be true. It is corrupted by the means used to secure its recognition, and the corruption is the more certain to occur in the case of those who wield coercive power than in the case of those who are forced to submit. —John Dewey, “Religion and Morality in a Free Society” (1949)

CHAPTER SIX

Political Liberalism and the Limits of the Political

1. Desiderata I have argued that the leading challenge facing modern democracies is that of balancing a commitment to accommodate a wide range of moral and ethical beliefs with the need to take intelligent action on pressing matters of public concern. The former commitment is, of course, especially difficult to honor in a society as diverse as the typical modern democracy, and the latter concern is especially salient in light of the proliferation of the institutions of global capitalism, which have shown an unprecedented (and increasing) ability to resist democratic supervision and control. I have argued, furthermore, that in their efforts to respond to the first of these tasks, political theorists have made it more difficult to respond adequately to the second. That is, by remaining wedded to a theory of justification that seeks to rest the legitimacy of state action on a set of minimal and transparently valid premises, they have found themselves trapped in a vicious cycle in which a program of political action can be blocked on grounds of legitimacy, at least prima facie, by the mere observation that it is controversial. Indeed, it is only a slight exaggeration to say that in current debates about justification the rhetorical high ground belongs to the person who can claim to have said the least controversial thing about social and political life. Whatever the motives behind this trend toward theoretical minimalism—and they are, on the whole, admirable 153

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ones—the result has been a great victory not for toleration but rather for the status quo. In order to meet the challenges of our historical moment, we need a theory of political justification that is more flexible and capacious than the going alternatives. I intend to argue that the political liberal conception of legitimacy, once it has been reconstructed along pragmatic lines, meets these requirements. This claim will seem rather suspect to many readers, given that political liberalism is often thought, even by some of its defenders, to embody the quest for minimal and transparently valid premises in a particularly pure form and to stand, above all, for the claim that fixed constraints must be placed upon political outcomes in order to ensure that those outcomes are just. This is, after all, a school of thought whose stated goal is to identify an “overlapping consensus” on “constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice” by abstracting from the various “comprehensive” views that citizens hold in an effort to create a “neutral” justification for the liberal state. All of this terminology would seem to point toward rather than away from what I have identified as the shortcomings of contemporary theories of justification. It may seem even more peculiar that I should propose to reconstruct the political liberal position along pragmatic lines, given that its central concepts—the claim that “the right has priority over the good,” the emphasis on the use of “free public reason,” and the idea that principles of justice are to be “rationally constructed,” for example— are drawn from the Kantian tradition in moral and political thought, a tradition that is at best distant from the pragmatic one. In light of these widely divergent origins and aims, it may be difficult to see how political liberalism could be reconstructed pragmatically in such a way that its central concerns and insights are preserved intact.1 Before we turn our attention to these difficulties, it will be useful to review briefly the line of argument that we have developed so far, in 1. Two influential statements of the political liberal position are John Rawls, Political Liberalism, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996 [1993]), in which all of the quoted terms are discussed, and Charles Larmore, The Morals of Modernity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), chapter 6. For related views see Ronald Dworkin, “Liberalism,” in idem, A Matter of Principle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 181–204; Bruce Ackerman, “What is Neutral about Neutrality?” Ethics 93 (1983):372–390; Thomas Nagel, “Moral Conflict and Political Legitimacy,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 16 (1987):215–240.

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order to see how and in what sense it points in a political liberal direction. In Part I we identified two insights that the pragmatic theory of inquiry yields into the problem of justification. The first is that discourses of justification are necessarily prospective in orientation. Justification becomes necessary only when some belief that we hold has been placed into doubt, and in such cases all arguments about how to proceed will necessarily rest upon claims about the course of future experience, whose soundness cannot immediately be ascertained. We must therefore attend to the fact that our moral and ethical ideals rest, at least tacitly, upon an appeal to a future state of affairs in which these uncertain claims have been tested in practice. The second insight, which follows from the first, is that discourses of justification are ultimately motivational in aim. Because proposed changes in belief can be justified only, as it were, in the future conditional, the justification of a given end depends not on our ability to identify indubitable first principles that support it but rather on our ability to persuade others to act upon one set of uncertain beliefs rather than another. This insight allows us to discern the underlying narrative structure of political justification—to see that the challenge of normative political thought is to put forth an account of social and political possibilities that orders and interprets past events, speaks persuasively to our present self-understandings, and defends the promise of a proposed course of action. It follows that discourses of political justification can get under way in a pluralistic society only if there exists some narrative framework to which all of its members can be expected to subscribe in common— some story in which they all understand themselves to be playing a role, and whose outcome they are concerned to work out together. We found in Part II that the pragmatic theory of inquiry contains the seeds of such a narrative in its commitment to the development and application of the human capacity for experimental intelligence. This appeal to experimental intelligence draws its categories and assumptions from a set of practices that are familiar to and valued by the citizens of modern societies—those of scientific inquiry—and uses the salience of these practices to construct an account of recent historical experience (as the gradual replacing of ad hoc and traditional with experimental methods of approaching practical problems), our present self-conceptions (as citizens daunted by the complexities of modern social and political life, yet concerned to preserve and extend

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certain democratic ideals), and a future course of action (one in which practices that have proven fruitful in empirical inquiry are selfconsciously extended to the realm of social and political organization). It is important to emphasize, however, that this narrative places the emphasis upon the problem of bringing experimental intelligence to bear upon matters of public concern without picking out any particular solution to that problem. It is therefore compatible in principle with a wide range of political arrangements, including, we must admit, those with which we are most familiar. Needless to say, the mere existence of a shared narrative framework, especially one of such uncertain import, does not in itself ensure that discourses of political justification will be fruitful, or indeed that they will be undertaken at all. There must also exist a moral commitment to seek terms of cooperation that can in fact be publicly justified. A complete theory of political justification must therefore show how such a commitment might be motivated and sustained, and spell out what it requires of us in public life. It is here that the intersection of pragmatic and political liberal thought becomes an especially fruitful one. On the one hand, as I have just indicated, the pragmatic theory of inquiry requires as its complement a moral commitment to public justifiability, and the practical implications of this commitment are most clearly and persuasively spelled out, I think, in the political liberal conception of legitimacy.2 On the other hand, I intend to argue that the pragmatic appeal to experimental intelligence provides a firmer motivational basis for the norm of public justifiability than political liberals have themselves been able to provide. To the extent that political liberals have addressed the problem of motivation at all, they have done so by limiting the scope of application of their doctrine to a core set of “constitutional” principles and by making strong and even dogmatic claims about the limits of rational agreement 2. The norm of public justifiability is perhaps most clearly stated in T. M. Scanlon, “Contractualism and Utilitarianism,” in Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams, eds., Utilitarianism and Beyond (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 103–128, where it is applied to the domain of morality more generally speaking. It is invoked as the basis for a liberal politics in Nagel, “Moral Conflict and Political Legitimacy.” Rawls credits Nagel and Scanlon with developing the idea in Political Liberalism, pp. 121n and 124 respectively, and emphasizes its compatibility with the form of moral constructivism defended in his A Theory of Justice, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999 [1971]).

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under modern conditions. Neither of these lines of argument sits comfortably, in my view, with the underlying premises of their position, and one of the leading advantages of the pragmatic reconstruction of political liberalism that I develop here is that it allows us to drop them. My defense of political liberalism will therefore be unorthodox in at least two respects. First, I will argue that the political liberal standard of legitimacy should be understood to apply to all political decisions that authorize the use of coercive force, and not only to “constitutional” matters. Second, I will argue that public ends can be publicly justified even when there is substantial disagreement about their attractiveness or feasibility, and that political liberals therefore need not and should not seek to spell out the boundaries of legitimate state action in advance. Taken together, these stipulations point toward a more open and flexible brand of political liberalism—one that is appropriately sensitive to the prospective uncertainties of public life. I will begin by briefly outlining the content of the norm of public justifiability upon which the political liberal position rests and by highlighting what I take to be the main shortcomings in the way it is currently defended (Section 2). I will then examine in more detail how and in what sense this norm defines the limits of political community—first, by suggesting how the norm of public justifiability might be understood in experimentalist terms (Section 3), second, by showing that it need not restrict the boundaries of legitimate state action in any fundamental way (Section 4), and finally by showing that the appeal to public reasons is compatible with the existence of deep disagreements on matters of public policy (Section 5). I conclude by identifying two areas of political liberal thought that require a fundamental reexamination in light of the pragmatic approach to political justification defended here (Section 6).

2. Public Justifiability The distinguishing feature of the political liberal position is the claim that the legitimacy of a political decision does not depend simply upon its having been arrived at by majority vote or in some similar process of democratic will formation, even in cases in which the free and equal participation of all citizens in the deliberations leading up to the

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decision has been substantively as well as formally secured.3 Political liberals require in addition that such decisions be justified on the basis of “public” reasons—that is, in terms that all citizens can accept. The claim that political decisions should be publicly justifiable in some sense is common to all varieties of liberalism: it establishes that the legitimacy of state action depends upon consent, but it is in itself compatible with any number of views as to what consent (and thus legitimacy) properly consists in.4 Thus, for example, a regime that devoted itself to the pursuit of the Kantian ideal of rational autonomy might appeal to some notion of counterfactual consent to such an ideal, but such a regime would not (under current conditions) satisfy the political liberal standard of legitimacy. Political liberals interpret the norm of justifiability in stronger terms to mean that the grounds for state action should be, insofar as is possible, public in the sense that they are actually understood and accepted by all citizens. When we find that a particular rationale for state action has failed to meet this standard, we must seek to base the decision in question on reasons that are more broadly accepted—recognizing, of course, that fully public reasons may not be available.5 Political liberals consider the issue of public justifiability to be a pressing one because political decisions serve, directly or indirectly, to authorize the use of coercive force against those who refuse or otherwise fail to obey. Given this basic fact about public life, and given the fundamental disagreements that characterize modern societies, it is 3. As we saw in Chapter 1, this is the conception of legitimacy endorsed by many deliberative democrats; see, for example, Joshua Cohen, “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” in Alan Hamlin and Philip Pettit, eds., The Good Polity (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 17–34, and more generally Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996 [1992]). 4. For a defense of the claim that the norm of justifiability is foundational in liberal thought, and for a useful discussion of the various ways in which this norm might be understood, see Jeremy Waldron, “Theoretical Foundations of Liberalism,” Philosophical Quarterly 37 (1987):127–150. 5. On public reason see especially Rawls, Political Liberalism, lecture 6, and “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited” (1997), in idem, Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 573–615. See also Larmore, “Public Reason,” in Samuel Freeman, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Rawls (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 368–393.

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appropriate that we be conscious of the extent to which political decisions rest upon beliefs and commitments that some citizens do not share. Because political liberals are concerned to justify the use of coercive force to those upon whom it is (or might be) exercised, and not (directly) with holding public ends to a universally accepted standard of truth or justice, it is important to emphasize that their position does not require that political decisions be justifiable to all conceivable agents— that would probably be an impossible task—but only to those who are to be subject to the decision in question. It follows that the boundaries and content of public reason are endogenous not only to a given public culture but to a particular moment in a given public conversation. In adopting this contextually bounded approach to political justification, political liberals depart from orthodox Kantian usage, according to which a reason is genuinely public only if it is addressed to all of humankind or, in the limit, to all rational beings.6 Nevertheless, it should be clear that there are certain political outcomes that are more or less universally excluded: no one would be likely to accept a rationale for state action that treated the sacrifice of her fundamental interests as an acceptable price to pay for the achievement of some larger public end.7 Perhaps the most familiar objection to the political liberal position is the claim that the norm of public justifiability inappropriately limits the ability of citizens to articulate their fundamental beliefs in the public sphere, thereby preventing them from giving full expression to their concerns and interests.8 These critics tend to elide the fact that every political debate eventually comes to a point at which discussion must temporarily be brought to a close and a decision taken and enforced. They focus instead on ensuring that the discussion leading up to such 6. For a useful discussion see Onora O’Neill, “Political Liberalism and Public Reason: A Critical Notice of John Rawls, Political Liberalism,” Philosophical Review 106 (1997):411–428, and, more generally, idem, Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant’s Practical Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), chapter 2. 7. Michael Sandel is therefore wrong to suggest that a political liberal would have been obliged to side with Stephen Douglas against Abraham Lincoln in their debates about the justifiability of slavery: see his “Political Liberalism,” Harvard Law Review 107 (1994):1778–1782, and Rawls’s response in “Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” pp. 609–610. 8. See, for example, Seyla Benhabib, “Liberal Dialogue Versus a Critical Theory of Discursive Legitimation,” in Nancy Rosenblum, ed., Liberalism and the Moral Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 143–156.

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moments is as unconstrained as possible, and they assume that once this has been done, then a majority vote will suffice to satisfy the requirements of legitimacy (given, as we must suppose, that a consensus has not been reached). In fact, political liberals have no reason to deny the value of unconstrained discourse in the public sphere.9 However, a majority vote by definition allows the unpersuaded minority to be coerced in accordance with the majority view, and if the terms on which such a vote is taken are unconstrained, then the power of the state is likely to be placed in the service of views that are unacceptable, and perhaps even unintelligible, to many citizens. For this reason, when disagreement persists and a decision must be taken, political liberals ask that we abstract from our points of difference and seek to justify the decision in terms that all parties can accept. This withdrawal to the use of public reasons is only temporary; once a decision has been made, we can and indeed should resume our efforts to identify a broader and more inclusive basis for agreement by bringing all of our beliefs and commitments to the table. In this respect political liberalism is actually more inclusive, more sensitive to difference, than the going alternatives. It is, however, exclusive to the extent that it holds that public reasons should trump nonpublic ones in justifying the use of coercive force. We must therefore show how this claim can be defended, and seek to do so in terms that can be accepted by all citizens. As it stands, political liberals have taken a twopronged approach to addressing this problem. First, they have relied heavily on the claim that reasonable disagreement is not only a distinguishing but a permanent feature of modern experience. Once we admit, so the argument goes, that a broader consensus on matters of public concern could not be reached except through the use of coercive force, then we should be willing to admit that the appeal to public reasons provides the only legitimate basis for the use of state power. Acceptance of what Rawls calls the “burdens of judgment” is thus one of the conditions of being admitted into the “reasonable overlapping consensus” 9. Larmore points out, for example, that political liberalism presupposes a “forum in which we try to convince others of the worth of our views so that they can become part of the shared allegiances the state should promote,” in part because “[t]he recognition of our differences is necessary for exercising the equal respect we owe one another as beings capable of affirming a vision of the good life”: Morals of Modernity, pp. 134–136; see also Rawls, “Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” pp. 575–576.

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upon which a political liberal polity rests.10 Second, political liberals have argued that the norm of public justifiability applies only at the level of constitutional principles, not to all public decisions in which the use of coercive force is authorized. Although the rationale behind this claim is not always made explicit, the idea seems to be that the availability of public reasons, as well as the motivation to appeal to them, will tend to diminish as we move away from basic principles and into more contentious areas of public life. By limiting the scope of their doctrine in this way, political liberals seek to limit its direct impact on everyday political decision making.11 Despite the conciliatory spirit in which these arguments are offered, each of them raises more questions than it settles. On the one hand, it seems arbitrary for political liberals to argue that there is and always will be an irreducible plurality of views on questions of the good, and then to assume that a sufficient amount of agreement nevertheless exists on matters of basic justice to make a “reasonable overlapping consensus” possible. If reasonable disagreement is as pervasive as political liberals suppose, then it would seem to follow that the meaning of justice is likely to remain a legitimate topic for disagreement as well. And if agreement on matters of basic justice is in fact possible, then political liberals should at least remain open to the possibility that a broader agreement regarding particular public ends might also be achieved.12 The appeal to “constitutional essentials” is equally difficult to explain. After all, the line between constitutional and nonconstitutional issues is notoriously difficult to draw, even within a single policy domain, and it seems peculiar to expect citizens to limit the reasons to which they appeal on one issue, or one aspect of a given issue, and not to do so on another. It seems equally peculiar to argue that because the norm of 10. Rawls, Political Liberalism, pp.º54–58; see also Larmore, Morals of Modernity, p. 122. 11. Rawls, Political Liberalism, pp. 227–230; see also Larmore, Morals of Modernity, p. 126. 12. “Whether it is possible to reason our way to agreement on any given moral or political controversy is not something we can know until we try. This is why it cannot be said in advance that controversies about comprehensive moralities reflect a ‘fact of reasonable pluralism’ that controversies about justice do not. Whether a moral or political controversy reflects reasonable but incompatible conceptions of the good, or whether it can be resolved by due reflection and deliberation, can only be determined by reflecting and deliberating”: Sandel, “Political Liberalism,” p. 1789.

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public justifiability has been satisfied at the constitutional level, citizens should be willing to accept ordinary policy decisions as legitimate even when they have been justified in nonpublic terms. Given that political liberals are concerned with the legitimate exercise of coercion as such, it is not clear that this restriction of the scope of their doctrine can be justified in any principled way.13 Although each of these lines of criticism has considerable force, it is important to note that neither of them calls into question the attractiveness or coherence of the norm of public justifiability itself. They merely question whether this norm has been defended as perspicuously as it might be. I therefore believe that political liberals should respond to these objections by simply dropping the “burdens of judgment” and “constitutional essentials” arguments. In other words, I think that political liberals should be willing to apply the norm of public justifiability to all political decisions in which the use of coercive force is authorized, and that they should admit that the boundaries of agreement as to what constitutes a legitimate public reason—and thus the boundaries of legitimate state action—cannot and should not be specified in advance. Needless to say, this change in tactics entails significant adjustments in how the political liberal conception of legitimacy is defended. In particular, it becomes necessary to show how the appeal to public reason might be possible in everyday political life, where conflicting moral and ethical beliefs are almost always in play, and to show how the commitment to appeal to public reasons can be sustained if we no longer hold that agreement on fundamental matters can be achieved only through the use of coercive force. I believe, however, that the pragmatic theory of justification provides us with the resources to respond to these difficulties and that, once they have been removed, we will be left with a 13. “It would be odd to say that you can freely use religious (and other comprehensive) perspectives to argue about constitutional essentials when the essentials are not directly involved . . . but you should not freely use such perspectives when the essentials are directly at stake . . . it would also be odd to say that you can use any religious arguments for ‘nonessentials’ except for any argument that draws from constitutional essentials . . . Most citizens and ordinary legislators in all branches of government would probably find it strange that references to sources of truth for most political issues were in some degree barred to them for a particular category of issues, not always so easy to identify. This difficulty seriously compromises the practical usefulness of Rawls’s distinction”: Kent Greenawalt, Private Consciences and Public Reasons (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 119 (original emphasis).

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version of political liberalism that is more stable, more capacious, and more self-consistent than the one that is currently defended. 3. Right and Reasonable Political cooperation in a pluralistic society is possible only to the extent that its citizens are willing to distinguish between those beliefs and practices that they consider to be “right,” in the sense of being correct or optimal, and those that they consider to be “reasonable”—that is, acceptable or permissible, but not (necessarily) “right.” If we were willing to accept social and political outcomes as legitimate only if they happened to be in accordance with our own beliefs and preferences, then in cases of disagreement there would seem to be no middle ground between despotism and civil war. The willingness to distinguish between right and reasonable outcomes creates the space with which a liberal politics becomes possible, and the central problem of liberal political thought has therefore always been to determine not only how this distinction—and the related distinction between reasonable and unreasonable outcomes—might be drawn, but also, and more fundamentally, how the citizens of a pluralistic society might be persuaded to respect it. This problem took its paradigmatic form in the struggles over religious toleration in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when it became necessary to determine how citizens committed to incompatible and nevertheless universalistic creeds might be persuaded to coexist peacefully within a single society (or continent). It continues to play a central if somewhat less dramatic role in everyday political life, as when we obey laws with which we are personally out of sympathy, follow leaders whom we did not (or do not) support, and tolerate behavior that we find distasteful or even abhorrent. Political liberalism belongs to the branch of liberal thought that holds that the solution to this problem can and should be moral in nature: that political cooperation should not depend upon a balance of power between competing interests, or upon indifference, skepticism, or weariness in the face of disagreement, but rather upon a positive commitment to respect the beliefs and practices of our fellow citizens, even when they differ from our own. What sets political liberals apart from others who seek a moral basis for liberal politics is, as we have seen, their insistence that the exercise of political power be justified in

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“public” terms; that is, in terms that all citizens can accept. Political liberals therefore ask that we distinguish between those public ends that we believe to be misguided or wrong, but for which a public justification can be given, and those for which no such justification is available. As with any attempt to define the boundaries of legitimate state action, there are a number of difficulties with regard to how this distinction might be applied in practice. Before we turn to those difficulties, however, we must first consider whether this conception of legitimacy can meet its own standard of justification. After all, while political liberals have been clear in arguing that the traditional grounds for a liberal politics—whether arising from Lockean theism, Kantian transcendentalism, or Millian fallibilism—do not meet the test of public justifiability (and are not likely to do so for the foreseeable future), they have been less clear in demonstrating that the appeal to public reason can claim to be philosophically “neutral” in the way that their position demands.14 It is here that the pragmatic theory of meaning and justification begins to do useful normative work. Recall that according to this account we should judge all of our beliefs on the basis of their success in removing practical doubt, not according to their provenance or compatibility with prevailing views. Recall also that according to the pragmatic theory of inquiry we cannot know whether a given belief will succeed in meeting this test until we have in fact acted upon it. In the meantime the belief is, so far as we are concerned, at best merely “reasonable” and not (necessarily) “right.” We can conclude that what the political liberal conception of legitimacy requires, pragmatically speaking, is that when we find ourselves in a state of doubt as a political community, we present our beliefs about how to proceed in experimental terms; as defining a prospectively promising but presently uncertain course of action. It also requires, of course, that we be willing to regard at least some of the differing views of others in similar terms. This means, among other things, that we must be able to make the terms of the “experiment” in question transparent to our fellow citizens: that some account be given of the narrative expectations to which our 14. Rawls is careful to distinguish the kind of neutrality that political liberalism enjoins—neutrality in the justification of state action—from both strict procedural neutrality and neutrality of outcome: Political Liberalism, pp. 191–194. See also the discussion in Dworkin, “Liberalism,” pp. 191–192, and Larmore, Patterns of Moral Complexity, pp. 42–47, both cited by Rawls.

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beliefs give rise and that no appeal be made to special insight or revelation that others do not and could not expect to possess. Unless these conditions are met, there is no way for the community to judge for itself the prospective merits of the beliefs in question, or to assess their adequacy over time.15 Taken together, these conditions restate the norm of public justifiability in pragmatic terms. This pragmatic reconstruction of political liberalism threatens to give rise to two immediate misunderstandings. First, it may seem that by requiring citizens to defend their beliefs in experimental terms, the norm of public justifiability as I have defined it requires that they admit to themselves that the beliefs in question are uncertain or dubious. This stipulation would not only be difficult to accept for many people who hold strong beliefs; it would also seem to rule out the possibility that some beliefs might be justified in terms other than those of free and open inquiry. Such a position would not provide a promising basis for public justification in a morally pluralistic society. In fact, the pragmatic conception of public justifiability rests upon two more modest claims. First, it says that if one of our beliefs is placed into doubt, then the most reliable means of revising it is through experimental inquiry, broadly conceived. No larger claim is made as to whether any particular belief that we hold should (or could) actually be placed into doubt. Second, it says that if we find that one of our beliefs is controversial—that is, dubious from a social point of view—and if we wish to appeal to that belief to justify the use of state power, then we should be willing to present it to our fellow citizens in experimental terms so that they can have a chance, at least in principle, to verify it for themselves. If we find ourselves unwilling or unable to do this, then the belief in question cannot serve as a legitimate basis for public action. This does not necessarily mean, however, that its validity has been called into question so far as we are concerned.16 15. “Like his empiricist counterparts in science, the liberal insists that intelligible justifications in social and political life must be available in principle for everyone . . . If there is some individual to whom a justification cannot be given, then so far as he is concerned the social order had better be replaced by other arrangements, for the status quo has made out no claim to his allegiance”: Waldron, “Theoretical Foundations of Liberalism,” p. 135 (original emphasis). 16. Of course, the discovery that a particular belief that we hold is unacceptable or unintelligible to others will often cause us to doubt it ourselves. This is, however, a fact of life in a pluralistic society, and not a special implication of the norm of public justifiability.

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It may also seem that, by referring the adjudication of controversial beliefs to experimental inquiry, I am assuming that all disagreements are in the end disagreements about matters of fact. This claim will seem objectionable not only to those who think that some beliefs have (or might have) a nonempirical basis but also to those who hold that some beliefs must be given a firmer grounding than they can find as the subjects (or potential subjects) of experimental inquiry. Here again we must keep in mind that, according to the pragmatic theory of justification, experimental inquiry is called for only when some belief that we hold has actually been placed into doubt. In such cases it is difficult to see how a more satisfactory belief could be arrived at except by gathering new information and testing new courses of action. To say that this should be done experimentally is simply to say that it should be done methodically and intelligently. There is nothing in this conception of inquiry that implies that moral doubts will normally be settled by “facts,” or indeed that they can be settled at all. All we can say is that a moral belief is justified in pragmatic terms if and to the extent that no further doubts arise from acting upon it. As we have seen, this theory of justification is compatible in principle with any number of beliefs about the nature and content of our moral and ethical obligations, so long as those beliefs yield definite expectations about the course of future experience, so long as those expectations are borne out in practice, and so long as we continue to find the consequences morally attractive. Finally, we must keep in mind that political liberalism rests upon at least one moral principle whose validity cannot be called into question without stepping outside the bounds of a political liberal politics. This is, of course, the claim that the exercise of political power is legitimate only if it is justified in terms that all citizens can accept. The pragmatic theory of justification, and the narrative of modern experience upon which it rests, provides us, I think, with reasons for endorsing this principle that depend neither upon an appeal to a particular moral ontology nor to the attractiveness of a particular future state of affairs, but we should not lose sight of the fact that the principle itself is moral in character.17 It requires, among other things, that we be willing to admit that a course of action may be “reasonable”—dubious but 17. This is the central claim of Larmore’s “Moral Basis of Political Liberalism”; see also Morals of Modernity, pp. 145–151.

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provisionally acceptable—even if it is not “right” in the sense that its merits have been demonstrated to our satisfaction. The norm of public justifiability provides us with a framework for inquiry within which we must decide as a community which public ends are reasonable in this sense and which are not. In short, political liberalism, as I understand it, holds that the best way to accommodate the diversity of beliefs that we find in modern societies is not to seek to impose a particular standard of justification once and for all but to commit ourselves to examining the justifiability of our public ends over time, and to revising those ends when necessary. The flexibility, openness, and commitment to collective inquiry upon which this conception of legitimacy rests is, I think, deeply pragmatic in spirit.

4. Right and Good Having argued that political liberalism, once it has been reconstructed along pragmatic lines, provides a uniquely open-ended and flexible approach to political justification, we must acknowledge that the motivations for placing prior constraints upon the exercise of political power lie very deep in liberal thought. Indeed, any recognizably liberal politics must limit the domain of the political in some way, and these limits provide an obvious (and often legitimate) target for those whose values and interests are thereby placed outside the sphere of public concern. The question is not, then, whether political liberals constrain the range of acceptable political outcomes but whether they are willing to modify those constraints in the light of new experiences and insights. I see no reason why this should not be the case; indeed, the emphasis on public justifiability would seem to make political liberalism an especially promising vehicle for ensuring that the boundaries of legitimate state action are subject to revision over time. After all, what is distinctive about the political liberal conception of legitimacy is the fact that, although constraints are placed upon the exercise of political power, the exact nature of those constraints can change as the content of public reason itself changes over time. In principle, then, the way is always open for new interests to be heard and for new public ends to be articulated and pursued. To the extent that the norm of public justifiability does not point toward any particular

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set of political outcomes, it would seem to allow for the kind of narrative openness that we have been seeking in a theory of political justification. Nevertheless, this issue is complicated by the fact that the leading proponent of political liberalism is also the author of an enormously influential treatise on social justice. In particular, several of the leading ideas in Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness have been carried over wholesale into his defense of political liberalism, despite the fact that they do not hold quite the same meaning or significance in their new context. Central among these is the familiar claim that the right should take priority over the good, a claim that lies at the very heart of A Theory of Justice. There Rawls argues that individuals choosing just principles of social organization should (or will) begin by endorsing a scheme of basic liberties that are common to all and that constrain the ends that the individuals in question may collectively pursue. This stipulation ensures not only that individual interests are given equal weight in deliberations about justice but that certain fundamental interests will not be sacrificed in the pursuit of a particular conception of the good, no matter how widely it is endorsed.18 Rawls recognizes, of course, that ideas about the good cannot be excluded from deliberations about justice altogether, so he introduces the concept of “primary goods”: a set of “all-purpose means” that “a rational man wants whatever else he wants,” and that “he would prefer more of rather than less.” He thereby makes interpersonal comparisons of welfare possible, at least in principle—something that is essential if the so-called “difference principle,” which states that only those inequalities are to be tolerated which benefit the least advantaged, is to be a useful guide to policy making.19 The priority of right is, of course, as central to political liberalism as it is to justice as fairness: as we have seen, the requirement that public ends be justified in terms that all citizens can accept can be seen as another way of securing the basic liberties that are agreed upon in the 18. Rawls, Theory of Justice, for example pp. 10–19; compare Political Liberalism, pp. 22–28. 19. On primary goods, see Theory of Justice, pp. 78–81 (quoted at p. 79); compare Political Liberalism, pp. 178–190. On the difference principle, see Theory of Justice, pp. 65–73.

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original position.20 It may also seem natural that primary goods should play a central role in political liberal thought, given the concern to identify public ends that are acceptable to all citizens. Indeed, Rawls argues in Political Liberalism that “this construct provides, given the fact of reasonable pluralism, the best available standard of justification of competing claims that is mutually acceptable to citizens generally.”21 However, there is an important gap here between the concerns of a theory of justice and those of a theory of legitimacy. In the former context it is appropriate to limit public deliberations about the good to what is needed to ensure that we have robust and stable criteria for measuring the well-being of the worst off. As part of a theory of legitimacy, however, this claim takes on a more controversial meaning: it implies that no more (or less) substantive conception of the good could be justified in public terms, or, in other words, that a broader consensus regarding the good is impossible even in principle. Whatever its merits, this empirical (or epistemic) claim about the limits of consensus does not follow from the moral claim that the right should take priority over the good. The latter claim says nothing about the degree to which consensus on public reasons might be achieved but only that such consensus is a necessary condition for legitimate state action. The priority of right also plays a role in justifying Rawls’s claim that the norm of public justifiability applies only at the level of “constitutional essentials.” According to this line of argument, once we have guaranteed basic rights and established orderly political procedures, the legitimacy of ordinary legislation is indirectly guaranteed, even if it has been justified in terms that are not accepted by some citizens. This effort to limit the domain of public reason would seem to follow naturally from Rawls’s view that no broader consensus on public reasons is possible beyond the allowance that a certain bundle of “primary goods” is necessary for the pursuit of any life plan. To be sure, the claim that matters of distributive justice lie outside the bounds of this “constitutional” consensus is, as many commentators have noted, a striking retreat from the strong claims made on behalf of the difference principle 20. Rawls makes this explicit in Political Liberalism, pp. 24–25 and note. 21. Ibid., p. 188.

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in A Theory of Justice.22 Nevertheless, such a narrowing of the domain of public reason may seem necessary if the norm of public justifiability is to be a viable guide to public action. After all, if legitimate political action were to depend in all cases upon our ability to reach consensus about public reasons, then it would seem that the ability of the state to act on matters of public concern would be severely limited at best. By constraining ordinary political decisions only indirectly through principles agreed to at the constitutional level, Rawls seeks to ensure that the boundaries of legitimate state action will not simply collapse into the narrow and idiosyncratic points of agreement between otherwise incompatible points of view. However, just as we had reason to worry that an emphasis on primary goods would cause more substantial conceptions of the good to be excluded from the realm of legitimate state action even if they were found to be publicly justifiable, so also should we be concerned that by limiting the domain of public reason to “constitutional essentials” we would exempt many state actions from the kind of scrutiny that the norm of public justifiability demands. After all, the political liberal conception of legitimacy holds that political decisions should be publicly justifiable, not because of their particular content or significance but simply by virtue of the fact that they involve the (actual or potential) exercise of coercion. It is not clear how the fact that a political decision was made through an established procedure in which norms of free expression, assembly, and so on were observed changes the fact that it authorizes the use of force in terms that some citizens find themselves unable to accept. It seems more natural to hold that the political liberal conception of legitimacy requires that all coercively binding decisions be justified through an appeal to public reasons. This is what the priority of right properly means for a political liberal: not that fixed constraints should be placed upon the kinds of goods that the state can legitimately pursue, or that these constraints should be lifted beyond the range of a few core 22. Ibid., pp. 228–230. For commentary see, for example, Brian Barry, “John Rawls and the Search for Stability,” Ethics 105 (1995):913, and Iris Marion Young, “Rawls’s Political Liberalism,” Journal of Political Philosophy 3 (1995):181–190. For an argument to the contrary see David Estlund, “The Survival of Egalitarian Justice in John Rawls’s Political Liberalism,” Journal of Political Philosophy 4 (1996):68–78.

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political principles, but that precisely those public ends are legitimate whose pursuit can be justified to all citizens. In the absence of a principled argument to the contrary it is not clear how we can stop short of applying this conception of legitimacy to all political decisions without contradicting the fundamental premises of political liberal thought.23 In short, there is nothing in the political liberal commitment to the priority of right that requires that we place prior limits upon the domain of legitimate state action—whether such limits take the form of constitutional principles or of excluded public ends—beyond those that are imposed by the norm of public justifiability itself. Because the content of public reason is itself a function of the beliefs and commitments that are held in a particular political community at a particular point in time, we can conclude that any restrictions placed upon public action by the political liberal conception of legitimacy can and should be subject to revision as those beliefs and commitments are themselves revised over time. However, to say that the political liberal conception of legitimacy does not foreclose the substantive possibilities of public life in principle is not to make the more difficult and important case that it does not do so in practice. After all, given the fundamental disagreements that political liberals regard as being a constitutive feature of modern experience, it may not seem likely that any actually existing political community would be able to reach agreement on any but the most abstract political 23. In fact, Rawls does not rule out the possibility that the norms of public reason might be applied more broadly. His equivocation on this point is worth quoting at length: “[W]hy not say that all questions in regard to which citizens exercise their final and coercive political power over one another are subject to public reason? Why would it ever be admissible to go outside its range of political values? To answer: my aim is to consider first the strongest case where the political questions concern the most fundamental matters. If we should not honor the limits of public reason here, it would seem we need not honor them anywhere. Should they hold here, we can then proceed to other cases. Still, I grant that it is usually highly desirable to settle political questions by invoking the values of public reason. Yet this may not always be so”: Political Liberalism, p. 215. He elsewhere admits, with typical candor, that “[a] satisfactory account of public reason would show how [legislative] questions differ from fundamental questions, and why the restrictions imposed by public reason do not apply to them, or if they do, at least not in the same way or so stringently”—the implication being that he had not provided such an account himself: Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 91.

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questions (if at all). Any discussion about the potential openness of the political liberal position is purely academic unless this difficulty can be resolved. In order to show that political liberalism provides a genuinely flexible and capacious approach to public justification, we must therefore be able to show how and in what sense the appeal to public reasons is compatible with the existence of deep disagreements on matters of public concern. It is to this task that we now proceed. 5. Public Reason and Reasonable Disagreement The pragmatic reconstruction of the norm of public justifiability helps us to see that political liberalism does not, despite the claims of some of its critics, require or presuppose the existence of a consensus on important matters of public concern. To say that we accept a reason as public is not to say that we regard it as uncontroversial, or that we believe that it provides decisive grounds for action, but only to say that we recognize its authority as a reason. This means, among other things, that the reason in question does not appeal to values that are not commonly accepted as such; that it does not appeal to an epistemic authority that is not commonly recognized—such as a sacred text, an experience of revelation, or an esoteric metaphysical insight; and that it does not appeal to empirical premises that are extremely far-fetched given our current state of understanding. To fail to meet these requirements is to fail to provide one’s fellow citizens with grounds for treating what they regard as a dubious claim as a promising candidate for public action; or, in pragmatic terms, as a belief that could in principle be experimentally verified. It should be clear that within these broad constraints legitimate public reasons—not decisive reasons, but public ones—are likely to exist on more than one side of almost any significant matter of public concern. It should also be clear, as I have already suggested, that the question of what exactly constitutes a legitimate public reason is itself likely to remain a matter of dispute for the foreseeable future. In each of these ways the appeal to public reason will tend to foster public debate rather than to foreclose it. There are at least two kinds of cases in which we might be willing to accept a reason as legitimately public but nevertheless continue to disagree, perhaps deeply, with the policy position that it supports. Most obviously, there are cases in which apparently incommensurable values must be traded off against one another. In such cases, as

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long as each of the values in question is publicly recognized as such, it is perfectly legitimate on political liberal grounds for citizens and public officials to weigh them as their consciences dictate and to justify their public actions accordingly. In the case of abortion, for example, we must balance the life of the fetus (whether it is regarded as an actual or as a potential or nascent life) against the woman’s freedom to terminate an unwanted pregnancy and thereby relieve herself of the physical, psychological, and material burdens that it carries. If all parties are willing to accept that genuine values are being pitted against one another here, then there is no reason to think that this debate cannot be carried on in public terms. Thus, an opponent of abortion rights might admit that his position, if enforced, would place disproportionate burdens on women, and that this is a bad thing, but nevertheless maintain that the value of protecting unborn life outweighs this consideration. A supporter of abortion rights might argue, on the contrary, that while the termination of a pregnancy is, all other things being equal, a moral loss, the reproductive freedom of the woman in question is of greater moral weight. Neither of these arguments appeals to a value that cannot be publicly accepted as a value, however deeply we may disagree with a particular way in which those values have been weighted.24 Another possibility is that there is agreement on the question of whether a reason is legitimately public, but disagreement on the question of whether it has been properly applied in a particular case. For example, the claim that the state should grant certain legal privileges to married couples in order to promote what Rawls calls “the orderly reproduction of society over time” is not uncontroversial, but most people can probably accept it as a legitimate reason—perhaps one among many—for supporting such policies. The claim that homosexuals are inherently unfit parents and should for that reason be denied those legal privileges is very controversial, but if the empirical premise were true—and many people believe (or claim to believe) that it is—then that policy position would 24. Rawls seems to argue in Political Liberalism (pp. 243–244n) that it would be unreasonable to oppose the right to an abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy, but he later denied that this was his intent: see “Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” pp. 605–606n, and the introduction to the second edition of Political Liberalism, pp. lv–lvin. His considered position seems to be that this issue requires that we balance a number of moral considerations, as I have suggested here.

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seem to have a reasonable basis as well.25 This argument appeals to a widely shared value, but it rests upon an empirical premise that is dubious and could in principle be shown to be false: an obvious rejoinder would be to maintain that children raised by same-sex parents are and will be just as “well-adjusted” as other children, or that no lasting damage would be done to the institution of marriage if homosexual unions were to be legally recognized. Of course, given the complexity and ambiguity of such claims, these issues are likely to be resolved only gradually, if at all. It will therefore be more accurate to speak of the degree to which the evidence is conclusive on a given matter. Nevertheless, as long as the underlying empirical question remains open to dispute, citizens and public officials can act according to their own assessment of the evidence without stepping outside the bounds of public reason. There are of course many cases in which we must simultaneously weigh competing values and assess controversial empirical claims; indeed, this is the usual state of affairs. In the case of affirmative action, for example, we must not only weigh the value of allowing all people to compete according to the same meritocratic standard against that of removing the pernicious social effects of discrimination, we must also find some way of measuring the extent to which discrimination affects the ability of certain people to compete for scarce goods on an equal footing with others. Perhaps more problematically, we must find some way of determining how the success (or failure) of such programs might be measured and of deciding what would constitute evidence that discrimination was no longer pervasive or harmful enough to warrant an effort at compensation. There is also likely to be disagreement as to whether some of the values that are invoked in this debate—such as the value of diversity—are values that all should be expected to recognize as such. Setting aside the last question for the moment, the boundaries of public reason are likely to be quite broad on this issue as well: it is possible to argue that, say, the social costs of affirmative action programs outweigh their benefits without appealing to reasons that could not be accepted, as reasons, by those to whom they are addressed. This is not to say that we must agree with the policy position that these reasons support; indeed, it is our disagreements on such questions that motivate us to defend our own beliefs in the public sphere and, if neces25. Rawls raises this possibility in “Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” p. 587 and note.

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sary, to question the “public” credentials of those beliefs with which we disagree. According to the pragmatic reconstruction of the political liberal position that I have offered here, our aim in appealing to public reasons should not be to identify a set of first-order moral commitments that all citizens must accept given their present beliefs, because on many if not all contentious issues there simply are no such commitments waiting to be identified. The appeal to public reason requires instead that we ask ourselves which policy positions can be publicly justified at all. It therefore commits us to examining over time the empirical premises upon which those policies rest and the tradeoffs between publicly recognized values that they entail. We can see by looking back on our historical experience how this process can bear fruit. There are many policy positions that were once widely regarded as publicly justifiable for which it would be difficult to think of any acceptable rationale today: racial segregation, for example, or the disenfranchisement of women. It might be possible to construct arguments in favor of these policies that are, formally speaking, public (“separate but equal” would seem to be a promising candidate in this regard), but it is difficult to see how we could expect others to accept the empirical assumptions and the weighting of moral values upon which those arguments would necessarily rest, given our experience with those policies and, perhaps more decisively, given our experience without them. It is therefore reasonable to expect that someday one or more of the existing positions in the debates about abortion, gay marriage, or affirmative action will seem as morally unthinkable as the idea of racial segregation or of disenfranchising women seems today. In the meantime, the political liberal conception of legitimacy requires that we be willing to pursue, at least provisionally, public ends with which we are personally out of sympathy, so long as they have not been ruled upon in this way. This does not mean, of course, that we should passively accept policies that we believe to be misguided or worse. On the contrary, the norm of public justifiability requires that we be vigilant in bringing controversial empirical premises and neglected moral considerations to the attention of our fellow citizens. This is why it is crucial that we conceive of public reason in dynamic terms; that we acknowledge that its content can change over time, both by addition and subtraction. We must also keep in mind that there are limits to the

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amount of forbearance that we can expect from people who feel that their moral commitments have been improperly overridden, even temporarily. We should hope that the boundaries of public reason will be broad and flexible enough to handle even the most contentious disagreements, but when these feelings run deeply enough, then the willingness to appeal to public reasons, and indeed ordinary politics itself, can no longer be sustained.26 Nor should political liberals regard this as an outcome to be avoided at all costs: the success of a liberal polity depends upon a shared motivation to seek common ground, but there are limits to how far this motivation can extend, and these limits define the limits of political community itself. One of the leading virtues of the political liberal conception of legitimacy is that it places this motivation at the center of public life, thereby forcing us to confront both its promise and its limitations. 6. Two Difficulties For political liberals the legitimacy of our public ends depends upon the fact that they have been defended in such a way that all can accept them as reasonable candidates for public inquiry. This conception of legitimacy rests on the insight that there are few if any fundamental beliefs that can or (crucially) should serve as an uncontroversial basis for public action under current conditions—an insight that is, of course, very much in line with the pragmatic emphasis on the essential role that prospective claims play in discourses of justification. The boundaries of public reason must instead be worked out over time: on certain issues there may once have been, but no longer is, room for reasonable disagreement; on others once-settled convictions have since been found to be controversial. Rather than treat public reason as a stable arena to which we can withdraw in an effort to resolve or sidestep our disagreements, then, we must instead view the process of defining the content of 26. Rawls vacillates on the question of whether and when it might be permissible to depart from the use of public reasons in the face of especially grave injustices, the paradigmatic case being the Abolitionists’ appeal to Christian ideals in the antebellum United States. Compare the discussion in Political Liberalism, pp. 247–254, with the revised position set forth in “Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” pp. 591–594, and stated again in the introduction to the second edition of Political Liberalism, pp. li–lii. For a useful discussion see Larmore, “Public Reason,” pp. 384–390.

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public reason and that of resolving our substantive differences as aspects of the same ongoing conversation. This open-ended conception of political justification is, again, consistent with the terms of the pragmatic narrative of modern experience, according to which we are (or should be) engaged in the project of developing and applying the experimental intelligence of all citizens, but unable to say anything very definite about where this project might lead. The most pressing issue facing political liberalism so understood is that of determining how we should respond to those situations in which disagreement about matters of justification persists, as it often will. I have tried to clear the way here for a more sustained consideration of this question, in part by showing how some of the leading controversies in which political liberals are currently engaged tend to distract from it. In particular, I hope to have dispelled two widespread but contradictory misconceptions. The first holds that political liberalism seeks to define the boundaries and content of public reason in advance of public inquiry, and thus places fixed constraints upon the ends that can legitimately be pursued in public life. On this view, the leading question raised by political liberal thought is whether Rawls has succeeded in showing that his principles of justice might become the object of a “reasonable overlapping consensus” in a society that disagrees in fundamental ways about matters of fundamental concern. Whatever our views on this question, it bears only obliquely on the central concerns of political liberalism properly speaking. The main question raised by the political liberal conception of legitimacy is not whether it provides a stable grounding for any particular conception of justice, but rather whether it succeeds in showing that political decisions can be made in a way that respects the experimental intelligence of citizens holding a wide variety of beliefs and commitments. The success of political liberalism in this regard should not be judged by its ability to forge a consensus on a particular set of public ends, but rather by its ability to motivate a commitment to engage in an ongoing process of inquiry in which the justifiability of our public ends and, thus, the boundaries and content of public reason itself are worked out over time. A second and related misconception centers around the claim that political liberalism is merely concerned to defend a set of constitutional principles that all can accept as just and that it therefore requires no fundamental changes in everyday processes of political decision making.

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Political liberals, like all liberals, are of course concerned to ensure that a basic set of rights is insulated from majoritarian politics. They take an indirect route to accomplishing this end: any first-order conception of the good is said to be admissible as a basis for public action so long as it satisfies the second-order norm of public justifiability. Because no rationale for public action that involves the transgression of fundamental rights would be likely meet this test, an acceptance of the constraints of public reason is equivalent to an endorsement of the basic principles of a liberal politics. Having said this, it is important to note that the norm of public justifiability leaves a great deal of room for disagreement about even the most morally controversial matters of public policy, so long as those disagreements are expressed in terms that all citizens can understand and accept. We therefore have reason to think that it would be possible to apply this norm not only to “constitutional” matters but also to matters of ordinary legislation, where deep moral disagreements often play a central role. Indeed, because the political liberal conception of legitimacy rests upon the claim that public justification is called for whenever the use of coercive force is authorized, to limit its sphere of application to “constitutional” matters would be to rob it of much of its distinctive moral character. As I have suggested, this pragmatic rendering of political liberal principles raises its own set of difficulties. Chief among these is the concern that, by extending the domain of public reason to all political decisions, we create an enormous temptation to use the appeal to public reason to advance nonpublic ends. Indeed, as the issues facing the political community become more divisive, and as the stakes of political decision making become correspondingly greater, it is likely to become increasingly difficult to ensure that the norm of public justifiability is being observed. This is not only because the necessary moral motivations will become difficult to sustain, but also, and perhaps more importantly, because it becomes difficult under such circumstances to see where the boundaries of public reason lie, and thus to determine when those boundaries have been crossed. If the constraints of public reason are too loosely defined, and thus too easily evaded, then the norm of public justifiability will place only nominal constraints on the sphere of legitimate state action. Moreover, because many policy positions can plausibly be supported on both public and nonpublic grounds, we must find some way of determining when an appeal to public reasons has been

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made with the intention of showing respect for others, and when it has been made in order to manipulate or deceive those who do not happen to share a particular set of nonpublic ends. In other words, it is not enough to determine whether a legitimate public reason has been offered; we must also find some way of determining whether it has been offered in good faith. These difficulties will be taken up in Chapter 7. A second difficulty is raised by the narrative framework within which the political liberal conception of legitimacy has heretofore been embedded. As we have seen, political liberals have relied heavily on the claim that disagreement about the ends of life is the inevitable and permanent outcome of the free exercise of reason. Once we have accepted this claim about the modern condition—a claim that, on this view, no candid observer of modern social life can reasonably deny— then we must choose between the appeal to public reasons or the use of brute force to accomplish our public ends. However widely accepted this narrative framework may be when applied to recent historical experience, when considered prospectively it lends credence to the claim that political liberals place fixed constraints upon the range of legitimate political outcomes. It is therefore appropriate to consider whether the political liberal position can be tied to a more capacious narrative that does not define the limits of reasonable agreement in advance of further inquiry. Of course, to point out that political liberals have appealed to a controversial set of narrative claims is not to offer a decisive objection; we must be alert to the danger that, by admitting the possibility of a broader (or narrower) consensus in the future, we may jeopardize the commitment to the norm of public justifiability in the present. In order to advance a genuine objection against this position we must therefore be able to show that some equally effective but less prescriptive motivational grounding for the norm of public justifiability is available to us. This will be the task of Chapter 8. Given our inability to articulate transparently binding norms that would support a radical reformation of current practices, and our persistent intuition that morally preferable states of affairs are nevertheless available to us, we must seek a theory of public justification that allows us to pursue promising courses of action in a way that respects the doubts and uncertainties of our fellow citizens. Political liberals seek to take account of this double urgency—this mingling of hope and uncertainty— by combining a profound regard for the human capacity for experimental

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intelligence with an equally profound regard for the narrative openness of public life. They conclude that the use of coercive force must be justified, not just from the privileged perspective of those by whom it is exercised, but from the point of view of each citizen to whom it is applied, and that we should refrain from pursuing public ends that cannot be justified in this way even when we have the power to do so. This commitment to public justifiability gives moral content to the pragmatic theory of political justification, just as the pragmatic commitment to the development and application of experimental intelligence provides a more stable motivational basis for the political liberal conception of legitimacy than political liberals have heretofore been able to provide. It remains to be seen whether political liberalism, so understood, can break the stalemate between parties who refuse to acknowledge that a public end that is dubious from their own point of view might nevertheless be publicly justifiable—a stalemate in which political liberalism has so far appeared as a partisan rather than an arbiter.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Public Reason and Public Institutions

1. Embodying Public Reason It is a striking fact about the recent debates regarding political liberalism that little attention has been paid to the question of how its central norms might be embodied in a functioning political system, even though the practical obstacles to doing so are obvious—and not obviously surmountable. Critical attention has focused instead on the question of whether political liberals, despite their professed commitment to inclusion, place fixed constraints upon the range of acceptable political outcomes, either directly (by defining public ends prescriptively) or indirectly (by placing a strong emphasis on consensus). I hope to have shown that these concerns are misplaced, but the line of argument that I have followed in doing so points to a deeper problem that neither political liberals nor their critics have adequately articulated: the problem of determining when an appeal to public reason is genuinely motivated by a desire to justify oneself to others and when it is used instead as a cover for the pursuit of nonpublic ends. After all, to show that the use of public reason is possible even in the face of deep disagreement on matters of public policy is not to rule out the possibility that political decision making might be held hostage by those who refuse to accept certain reasons as public ones or to admit that their own views lack a public basis. Moreover, even if there were agreement about the content of public reason, we would still face the problem of ensuring that people respect its boundaries given that it would seem to be impossible, or at 181

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least unacceptably onerous, to attach sanctions to their violation. In short, we must face the possibility that the constraints of public reason, far from being too strict, might be evaded too easily. It should be clear from what has been said so far that the norm of showing respect through the use of public reasons imposes ethical and not legal constraints on public behavior. Political liberals do not hold that we should disenfranchise voters or impeach public officials who act in the name of nonpublic reasons; they simply hold that such people are acting unjustly, and that any decision that follows from their actions is to that extent illegitimate.1 In a properly-functioning political liberal polity, violations of the norm of public justifiability would be treated in much the same way as violations of the norm of honesty: they would be met with public condemnation, and when committed by elected officials would result in a loss of public support roughly proportionate to the significance and frequency of the infractions. It follows that the norm of public justifiability requires as a condition of its realization that citizens come to public life with the expectation that it will be observed, just as we now expect that the norm of honesty will be observed (though that expectation is of course often disappointed). We may assume, as Thomas Scanlon has observed, that the desire to appear justified in the eyes of others has a great deal of motivational force.2 Given this, a first step toward instilling a commitment to public justification would be to cultivate an appreciation of the special difficulties involved in justifying oneself to others in a society that is deeply divided on matters of fundamental concern. In other words, the willingness to appeal to public reasons must rest upon an appreciation of the nonpublic basis of much of what we otherwise regard as truth. 1. “That public reason should be . . . understood and honored by citizens is not, of course, a matter of law. As an ideal conception of citizenship for a constitutional democratic regime, it presents how things might be, taking people as a just and wellordered society would encourage them to be”: John Rawls, Political Liberalism, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996 [1993]), p. 213. 2. “People are willing to go to considerable lengths, involving quite heavy sacrifices, in order to avoid admitting the unjustifiability of their actions and institutions. The notorious insufficiency of moral motivation as a way of getting people to do the right thing is not due to simple weakness of the underlying motive, but rather to the fact that it is easily deflected by self-interest and self-deception”: T. M. Scanlon, “Contractualism and Utilitarianism,” in Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams, eds., Utilitarianism and Beyond (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 117.

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Despite the fact that the pervasiveness of disagreement plays an essential role in defining their position, political liberals nevertheless depend upon the presence of a certain amount of consensus in modern societies, not only at the level of fundamental moral values but also, and perhaps more importantly, with regard to the kinds of evidence and reasoning that are accepted in public debate. In the absence of such a consensus, citizens with the best intentions in the world would not be able to make their beliefs and commitments intelligible to others. It may seem that this appeal to consensus takes away with one hand what political liberals claim to give with the other: given that an appreciation of the “fact of reasonable pluralism” gives rise to the need for public justification in the first place, it seems problematic to assume away just enough of that pluralism to make such an approach to justification viable.3 Nor can we appeal to the norm of “reasonableness” to solve this difficulty, because to the extent that political liberals define “reasonableness” in such a way that it means little more than “disposed to accept a particular standard of justification” (or worse, a particular set of public ends), they make their commitment to inclusion seem disingenuous at best.4 For the political liberal conception of legitimacy to do the work that is required of it, political liberals must be able to explain why the disagreements that characterize modern societies should not be expected to extend, or at least not with the same force, to matters of justification. They must also explain why disagreement about such matters does not pose a threat to the viability of the norm of public justifiability itself. Even if we were able to define the boundaries and content of public reason in some widely accepted way, we would not yet have provided a sufficient motivation for citizens to adhere to the norm of public justifiability. This is because there would still be significant costs attached to the unreciprocated use of public reasons. In a political system in which decisions are made through an elaborate process of compromise, horse trading, and logrolling, it would be foolish to restrict oneself to the use of public reasons, because to do so would be to exclude oneself from the bargaining process to that extent. That is, if I am too principled to 3. On the “fact of reasonable pluralism” see Rawls, Political Liberalism, for example pp. 36–37. See also Charles Larmore, The Morals of Modernity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), for example p. 122. 4. William Galston lodges this accusation in his “Pluralism and Social Unity,” Ethics 99 (1989):711–726.

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appeal to, say, my religious beliefs in concert with others in order to pursue certain policy goals, then I am simply clearing the way for others who hold different but similarly nonpublic beliefs to pursue their own goals without opposition. In the United States and in many other democratic societies, the conception of political decision making as a process of bargaining among a plurality of often deeply divided factions runs very deep.5 Obviously if the political liberal conception of legitimacy is to be anything more than an abstract ideal, we must be able to show how this bargaining process could be constrained in such a way that it would not be irrational to restrict oneself to the use of public reasons. In other words, to secure a stable and reliable commitment to the norm of public justifiability we must have some means of determining whether our fellow citizens are complying with it as well—and, crucially, of ensuring that they are not merely pretending to do so in an effort to disguise their own nonpublic ends. It follows that at least two conditions would have to be met if the norm of public justifiability were to be successfully embodied in a system of public institutions. First, there would have to exist a set of reasons that qualified, and were seen to qualify, as publicly acceptable grounds for political decision making, while still allowing sufficient room for state action on matters of public concern. This brings us immediately up against the apparently crushing conservatism of the constraints of public reason, which would seem to render the legitimacy of the state hostage to anyone who holds (or claims to hold) idiosyncratic beliefs. Unless we can identify some non-question-begging way of distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate appeals to public reason, then it would seem that under a political liberal dispensation the state would, even in the most optimistic scenario, find itself unable to take legitimate action on many important matters. Second, there would have to exist some means of measuring compliance with the norm of public justifiability. In particular, we would not only have to identify some way of distinguishing between public and nonpublic reasons; we 5. The canonical account in American political thought is The Federalist number 10, though it is of course a matter of dispute whether Madison himself held the view in question. Among contemporary political scientists it has been most influentially stated in David Truman’s The Governmental Process (New York: Knopf, 1951), drawing in turn upon Arthur F. Bentley’s pioneering The Process of Government: A Study of Social Pressures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1908).

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would also have to distinguish between appeals to public reason that are made with the intention of showing respect and those that are made with the intention of providing a respectable cover for the advancement of nonpublic ends. Unless this has been done, even well-intentioned people will not be persuaded to assume the justificatory burdens that political liberalism imposes, because they will have reason to doubt that those burdens have been assumed in good faith by their fellow citizens. The latter problem is, I think, the more difficult one to solve, but this is not to say that those who have raised doubts about the possibility of consensus on matters of justification do not deserve a more satisfying response than they have been given so far. As we saw in the previous chapter, political liberals have responded to these critics primarily by applying their standard of legitimacy only to basic matters of constitutional design and allowing other political decisions to be made on nonpublic grounds. I will argue that political liberals can deal with the problem of disagreement about the content of public reason more straightforwardly than this, and that the possibility of insincere appeals to public reason therefore poses a more fundamental problem for their position (Section 2). Because the strategy of limiting the domain of public reason not only fails to address this problem but contradicts the moral premises of the political liberal conception of legitimacy itself (Section 3), I argue that it would be better to apply the norm of public justifiability to all political decisions and to rely upon collective inquiry to ensure that the potential for noncompliance is constrained within acceptable bounds (Section 4). After arguing that this type of inquiry could be conducted most efficiently in a decentralized political system (Section 5), I conclude by briefly considering the conditions under which a commitment to the norm of public justifiability might nevertheless break down (Section 6). We can then proceed to the final step in my pragmatic reconstruction of political liberalism: a reconsideration of the larger narrative framework within which it has so far been embedded. 2. Disagreement, Consensus, and Respect We saw in the previous chapter that the appeal to public reason leaves a great deal of room for disagreement about even the most morally controversial matters of public policy, as long as those disagreements are expressed in terms that all citizens can understand and accept. However,

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we must suppose that there will always be some citizens who are unwilling to regard certain reasons as genuinely public ones, even when they are widely used and accepted in public debate, or to admit that the public credentials of their own reasons might be called into question, even when others reject them. Some of these citizens—those who refuse to respect certain basic liberties, for example—can presumably be regarded as having rejected the norm of public justifiability itself. Others, however, will simply be unwilling to admit that the evidence on a particular question is inconclusive, that competing values might be weighed in more than one way, or that a particular value must be recognized as such: they may refuse, for example, to doubt the validity of a particular empirical claim, to admit that individual liberty could really be thought to trump public safety in a given case, or to accept that any consideration could legitimately be weighed against a value that they hold particularly dear. Such objections cannot always be accepted at face value; after all, if we placed no boundaries around what could legitimately be offered or rejected as a public reason, then political decision making would, as I have suggested, be hostage to those who hold (or claim to hold) unusual or idiosyncratic beliefs. Nevertheless, any effort to define these boundaries is sure to be highly controversial.6 In fact, although it may seem that for political liberals legitimacy accrues to the extent that consensus has been reached on matters of justification, it is more consistent with political liberal principles to say that the important thing is not that we agree but that we demonstrate respect for one another by trying to justify our public actions in terms that all can accept. Thus Rawls argues that “[o]ur exercise of political power is proper only when we sincerely believe that the reasons we would offer for our political actions . . . are sufficient, and we also reasonably think that other citizens might reasonably accept those reasons.”7 This formulation is notable for what it does not say: that we must always find that 6. Rawls stipulates that when we use public reason “we are to appeal only to presently accepted beliefs and forms of reasoning found in common sense, and the methods and conclusions of science when these are not controversial”: Political Liberalism, p. 224. This statement raises more questions than it settles, especially given his account of the “burdens of judgment” at pp. 56–58. 7. Rawls, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited” (1997), in idem, Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 578 (my emphasis); see also Political Liberalism, pp. 226–227.

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others in fact accept our reasons as public. In other words, it is not necessary that our public reasons actually be accepted by all citizens, but only that we sincerely believe that they might be. On this view, legitimacy arises simply from the fact that citizens have made a genuine effort to justify their political actions to one another in publicly acceptable terms. This understanding of the norm of public justifiability has the considerable advantage of resting legitimacy on a good—that of showing one another respect—that is, unlike consensus, of considerable intrinsic value. Moreover, by ensuring that political decisions need not rest on unanimously accepted standards of justification, this approach does not raise the fear that the state will find itself unable to take legitimate action on pressing matters of public concern. We thereby avoid the obvious opportunities for manipulation that exist whenever unanimity is a condition for decision making. Nevertheless, this kind of flexibility raises its own set of difficulties. In particular, by treating the boundaries of public reason as to some extent a matter of individual judgment, we raise the possibility that some citizens will appeal to reasons that they claim to regard as public simply in order to deceive or manipulate their fellow citizens. We thereby open the door to a new and more insidious form of disrespect. This kind of manipulation could take two forms. Most obviously, we might have reason to doubt that our fellow citizens are putting forth reasons that even they truly regard as public; that is, we may believe that they are using the rhetoric of public reason with the full knowledge that the reasons they offer do not meet the threshold of public justifiability. Thus, for example, there may be some who believe that homosexual acts are prohibited by holy scripture and who refuse to treat such an argument as nonpublic even after they have become aware that it appeals to an authority that many cannot be expected to accept. Perhaps more problematically, we may be willing to accept that the reasons offered by our fellow citizens are genuinely public ones but believe that they are using those reasons as proxies for other, nonpublic reasons that they genuinely endorse but do not wish to defend. For example, some citizens may claim to oppose the legalization of homosexual unions because it would pose a threat to the institution of the family, when in fact their opposition rests on scriptural grounds. If either of these kinds of deception is, or is thought to be, widespread, then compliance with the norm of public justifiability will be difficult to secure even among citizens of good will.

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It may seem that we can dismiss the second kind of suspicion on the grounds that political liberalism does not require that one’s publicly offered reasons be the only or even the principal reasons that lead one to act.8 It may therefore seem that we need never consider the relationship that obtains between public reasons and personal beliefs, because the relevant consideration is whether a particular reason is publicly acceptable, not whether the person who offers it actually regards it as a decisive ground for action. Recall, however, that the political liberal conception of legitimacy does not require that we agree that a particular reason is public but rather that we agree that the appeal to it was made with the intention of showing us respect. Clearly, an appeal to apparently legitimate public reasons might be made instead with the intention of providing disrespectful beliefs with a respectable veneer. Consider, for example, the defense of racial segregation in the American South: the term “separate but equal” has an impartial ring to it, but it would of course require a great deal of naïveté to believe that this rationalization of racial prejudice was crafted in order to show respect to African Americans or to others who were working to secure their civil rights.9 It follows that the underlying beliefs of those making an appeal to public reason are not always or even usually irrelevant to the question of how we should respond to the appeal in question. We must therefore distinguish not only between sincere and insincere attempts to define the boundaries of public reason but also between those appeals to public reason that are made with the intention of showing respect and those that have a less palatable aim. If the viability of the political liberal conception of legitimacy does not hinge on our ability to reach consensus on matters of justification but rather on the fact that we show one another the kind of respect that the effort to reach consensus presupposes, then it becomes easier to see how there might exist a sufficiently capacious set of reasons upon which the state might legitimately act. However, if there is room for disagreement regarding the boundaries of public reason, then we must identify some way of distinguishing, at least in principle, between sincere and insincere efforts at public justification. In other words, in the very effort to satisfy the first condition for implementing 8. As Rawls puts it, “[i]t is left to citizens individually . . . to settle how they think the values of the political domain are related to other values in their comprehensive doctrine”: Political Liberalism, p. 140. 9. Needless to say, in practice the racially segregated South manifestly failed to provide “equal” public facilities for African Americans, quite apart from the question of whether the policy could be said to be publicly justifiable in principle.

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the norm of public justifiability we are driven to confront the second: that of identifying a mechanism by means of which the degree of compliance with that norm might be assessed. As it stands, we can identify two basic strategies for addressing this problem. The most straightforward is to apply the constraints of public reason to all public decisions that authorize the use of coercive force, and then seek to identify some way of distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate appeals. This approach has the obvious advantage of leaving the core intuition of political liberalism—that the exercise of political power is legitimate only when it has been justified in terms that all citizens can accept—intact and undiluted. Moreover, we have seen that it cannot be ruled out on the grounds that public reasons are unavailable on many contentious matters of public policy. On the contrary, this alternative requires that we confront the possibility that the norm of public justifiability might in fact be too permissive. However, because our motives are not transparent to one another— or, often, to ourselves—it is not immediately clear how we might implement such a strategy. Any effort to address the problem of insincerity in public life will necessarily be indirect, and thus imperfect, and even at its best such an arrangement would leave a great deal of room for us to suspect the motives of our fellow citizens. Given that there is likely to be frequent disagreement as to what constitutes a genuinely public reason, and pervasive doubt as to whether those who claim to be acting on public reasons are doing so sincerely, any effort to extend the domain of public reason may seem likely to exacerbate existing tensions and animosities. Far from creating a sense of mutual respect among citizens, such an approach threatens to foster an even more cynical and divisive public culture. It may therefore seem that we should seek instead to ensure that the fundamental disagreements that tempt us to appeal to public reason in illegitimate ways are placed outside of its domain. On this view, we should use public reason only as a means of agreeing upon basic constitutional principles and allow other political decisions to be made in the ordinary way, so long as the outcomes are consistent with the norms agreed to at the constitutional level. As we have seen, this is the approach that has been adopted by most of the political liberals who have confronted this issue. Before we examine the resources that a pragmatic reconstruction of the norm of public justifiability provides for addressing the problem of insincerity, it will therefore be useful to examine the merits of this effort to sidestep the problem.

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3. The Judicial Model The most straightforward means of ensuring that controversial appeals to public reason are not made, and a fortiori that the suspicion of insincerity will not arise, would be to prevent the state from acting in cases in which there is not already consensus about the reasons available for doing so. In its strict form the limitations of this approach are clear: because we cannot always predict when social relations are going to become exploitative or otherwise harmful to human wellbeing, to decide ahead of time that certain matters are beyond the scope of state action is to allow potential injustices to go unexamined and unremedied.10 Many political liberals have accordingly argued that we should leave the boundaries of political authority more or less undefined, and limit the domain of public reason in such a way that disagreements about its content and implications are less likely to arise. On this view, we may legitimately appeal to nonpublic reasons in most cases of political decision making, so long as those decisions are governed by a set of moral and procedural norms that meet the higher standard of legitimacy that public reason imposes. This approach is modeled after the familiar two-tier conception of law in constitutional democracies, in which the ability of democratic majorities to legislate is constrained by a “higher law” with which ordinary laws must agree. Because the authority to interpret and apply this “higher law” is usually placed in a court with the power of judicial review, these political liberals view the United States Supreme Court as the foremost practitioner of public reason. I will therefore refer to this as the judicial model of public reason.11 It is important to emphasize that the judicial model does not restrict the exercise of public reason solely to the judiciary. The U.S. Supreme Court is the “institutional exemplar” of public reason because it deals (almost) exclusively with constitutional matters and (usually) seeks to defend its actions publicly in a manner that all citizens can accept. Nevertheless, according to the judicial model the norm of public justifi10. This is an important theme in Ian Shapiro’s recent work; see for example his Democratic Justice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 6–10, and Democracy’s Place (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 113–116. 11. Rawls, Political Liberalism, pp. 231–240, drawing in part on Bruce Ackerman’s We the People, vol. 1: Foundations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991).

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ability is binding upon all citizens and all branches of government whenever they are asked to decide constitutional matters, so it has a role to play in these more participatory venues as well. Defenders of this brand of political liberalism hold that as long as there is consensus on just political procedures at the constitutional level, and as long as ordinary political decision making is constrained within these bounds, then there is no need to jeopardize this achievement by extending the use of public reasons into the (supposedly) more controversial area of ordinary political decision making. After all, as I have suggested, the effort to extend the domain of public reason in this way may seem likely to exacerbate the suspicion that manipulative and deceptive appeals to public reason are widespread and that the very idea of public reason is therefore something of a sham. Defenders of the judicial model argue that we should instead concentrate the exercise of public reason in one well-insulated and highly visible institution, because it is better to have a politics of interest groups, coalition building, and the pursuit of selfish ends openly acknowledged for what it is than to cloak it in spurious claims of public justifiability. As we have seen, this line of argument raises the obvious objection that it is difficult to see how the fact that a core set of political decisions have been publicly justified can compensate, from the standpoint of legitimacy, for the fact that most have not. Moreover, we have also seen that the effort to limit the domain of public reason in this way cannot be justified on the grounds that public reasons are generally not available in ordinary policy debates. The attractiveness of this approach therefore rests squarely on the claim that it will somehow help to ensure that appeals to public reason are motivated by a genuine desire to show respect for others. However, the logic of the judicial model tends, I think, to detract from this possibility. The political liberal conception of legitimacy holds that we should show respect for our fellow citizens by refraining from imposing our will in the name of reasons that we believe to be unacceptable to others, even when we have the power to do so. We demonstrate respect in this way only when we seek publicly shared reasons in the face of, and not apart from or prior to, our substantive disagreements. These are, of course, exactly the kinds of cases that the judicial model seeks to exclude from the domain of public reason. More generally, we should keep in mind that the robustness of any norm depends in part upon the existence of opportunities to obey it and

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to see others doing so, even under duress. By limiting the domain of public reason we ensure that ordinary citizens will only rarely be asked to show this kind of respect for one another. In each of these ways the judicial model tends to undermine the robustness of the norm of public justifiability. Moreover, far from “bracketing” fundamental disagreements about matters of public policy, this two-tier conception of legitimacy simply requires that we translate those disagreements into constitutional language. The boundary between constitutional and ordinary politics is notoriously porous, and those who are familiar with the ongoing debates over such deeply controversial issues as abortion, affirmative action, civil rights, and the separation of church and state will also be familiar with the pathologies involved when these debates are conducted in “constitutional” terms. Rather than simplify the task of assessing the legitimacy of public ends, such an approach provides a procedural fig leaf for the defense of substantively divisive beliefs, thereby increasing rather than decreasing the opportunities for deceptive and manipulative behavior. In the United States, for example, constitutional norms such as “due process,” “states’ rights,” and “strict construction” are routinely invoked so that certain groups can avoid having to defend eminently controversial and even distasteful policy positions directly. The content and tenor of the debates over these “constitutional” matters suggest that few are fooled by this kind of indirection. In this respect the judicial model seems no more likely to prevent manipulative and deceptive appeals to public reason than an approach that takes a broader view of its domain. Indeed, this model seems to offer the worst of both worlds: it ensures neither that there will generally be agreement on matters of public justification, nor that all acts of political coercion will be asked to satisfy the norm of public justifiability.12 Perhaps the strongest argument in favor of the judicial model lies in the fact that most political decisions involve struggles over scarce resources in which there is nothing to which the participants can plausibly appeal other than their own self-interest. It may seem that to apply the norm of public justifiability to these kinds of decisions would require that we pretend that this is not the case, and that this kind of 12. For an extended argument against the proposition that fundamental disagreements can or should be handled through constitutional adjudication see Jeremy Waldron, Law and Disagreement (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), especially part one.

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open hypocrisy would if anything tend to detract from the legitimacy of the decisions in question. Here we must distinguish between decisions that authorize the pursuit of a given public end—say, allowing tax revenues to be spent on national defense—and decisions that make the necessary tradeoffs that the constraints of scarcity impose—deciding how defense spending should be allocated, how it should be balanced against other legitimate public ends, and so on. It is perfectly consistent to say that the norm of public justifiability applies only to the first kind of decision and that tradeoffs between legitimate public ends can appropriately be made through a process of bargaining governed by selfinterest. Of course, it may be that the outcome of a particular bargaining process departs so widely from the public interest as some understand it that a dispute about means turns back into a dispute about ends, as when defense spending far exceeds any credible threat to national security or when spending on welfare programs leaves many citizens chronically unable to meet their basic needs. These are exactly the kinds of cases in which we should want the claims of self-interest to be checked by an appeal to a broader notion of the public good. A final objection to the judicial model is that it tends to foster a larger ambiguity about the aims of political liberal thought. Either political liberalism is committed, as I have argued it should be, to the principle that we should show respect for one another by seeking to justify our political decisions in terms that all citizens can accept, or it expresses in somewhat different language the traditional liberal impulse to place substantive constraints on democratic processes, and to regard people who reject those constraints as being beyond the pale of legitimate political discourse (“unreasonable”). In the former case it is easy to see why public reason should be a leading concept for political liberals, but hard to see why its scope of application should be limited to constitutional matters. In the latter case it is easy to see why we should focus on defending a just constitution, but hard to see what this has to do with the use of public reason: after all, if by assumption we already agree (insofar as we are reasonable) about these matters, why should there be any need to seek a vocabulary for defending them that transcends our disagreements? Those (usually sympathetic) critics of Rawls who hold to the first vision tend to emphasize the affinity between political liberalism and deliberative democracy and to highlight the extent to which public reason is itself a fluid and

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negotiable category.13 Those (usually hostile) critics of Rawls who see the second project at work tend to emphasize political liberalism’s tendency systematically to exclude certain voices from public debate.14 The judicial model provides support for both interpretations without fitting comfortably into either.

4. Insincerity Examined We have seen that the norm of public justifiability does not require that we always agree on matters of justification but only that we consistently demonstrate respect for one another by refraining from imposing our will in the name of reasons that we believe others could not accept. In pragmatic terms, to say that a reason is public in this sense is to say that we believe that it does not appeal to forms of evidence, modes of understanding, or standards of evaluation that could not in principle be experimentally verified to the satisfaction of all concerned. We have also seen that this understanding of the boundaries of public reason leaves a great deal of room for individual judgment and thus for manipulation and deception of various kinds: we often have reason to believe that the public reason that is used to justify a particular position is actually being used to disguise a set of beliefs that have no genuinely public basis. One obvious source of contention arises when our fellow citizens advance reasons that they regard (or claim to regard) as public but that we do not (or vice versa). The most straightforward way of satisfying the norm of public justifiability in such cases would of course be to accept all such objections at face value and to treat the disputed reasons as nonpublic. However, as we have seen, this would mean in practice that the legitimacy of state action would be hostage to those who hold (or 13. See for example J. Donald Moon, Constructing Community: Moral Pluralism and Tragic Conflicts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), especially chapters 4–5. Rawls draws an explicit link between political liberalism and deliberative democracy in “Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” pp. 579–581. 14. See, for example, Seyla Benhabib, “Liberal Dialogue Versus a Critical Theory of Discursive Legitimation,” in Nancy Rosenblum, ed., Liberalism and the Moral Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 143–156, and “Toward a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy,” in Seyla Benhabib, ed., Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 67–94.

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claim to hold) idiosyncratic beliefs. Moreover, given the prospective nature of inquiry, we often have reason to think that a consensus on matters of justification could be forged even in cases when it does not presently exist. It follows that, although we should be sensitive to the objections of those who refuse to regard our reasons as public, we need not treat such objections as sufficient grounds for disallowing a particular course of action. In order to evaluate such objections adequately we must also attend to the historical trajectory of the line of inquiry in which they are deployed. With regard to religious beliefs, for example, patterns of disagreement are sufficiently well established and persistent that it no longer seems reasonable to expect that we might reach agreement about their publicity through a process of collective inquiry. On other issues, such as, for example, matters of racial and gender equality, our beliefs and self-understandings have been found to be sufficiently fluid that the latitude for appealing to controversial reasons—to support, say, a program of forced integration or of preferential hiring—is correspondingly greater. This is not to say that agreement on matters of religious belief (or disbelief) could not in principle be achieved or that beliefs regarding racial and gender equality could not become so stable that further public experimentation in that realm would come to seem illegitimate. It is simply to say that, given our current level of understanding, the burden of proof lies on anyone who wishes to assert either of these claims as grounds for public action (or inaction). More generally, we can say that when there is disagreement about the legitimacy of an appeal to public reason, such disagreements can be adjudicated only (if at all) through further inquiry, as we seek to determine whether a given line of public inquiry is tending toward consensus or toward further division. Another kind of disagreement arises when we are willing to grant that there are genuinely public reasons available to support a particular policy position, but we doubt the motives of those who offer them. For example, we may believe that there are reasonable grounds for doubting the justice or efficacy of affirmative action programs but nevertheless believe that many people who appeal to these reasons are actually motivated by racial or other kinds of prejudice. It is of course impracticable to assess the sincerity of such appeals directly; indeed, given the ease with which we are able to disguise our motives, even

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from ourselves, it is hard to see how this could be done even in principle. However, we can take advantage of the fact that our stated reasons appeal to expectations about the likely course of future experience and thus play a role in defining larger narrative frameworks, within which we become committed to still other beliefs and expectations. As we saw in Chapter 3, these broader commitments provide a shared point of reference for assessing the publicity of the reasons in question. To be sure, the degree to which a given set of experiences can be said to have rendered a particular appeal to public reason dubious is itself likely to be a matter of dispute. Moreover, many narrative frameworks absorb countervailing evidence so readily that it is difficult to see how they could be placed into doubt at all. Nevertheless, to show that a particular set of expectations has not been met, or that a narrative framework has been altered in an ad hoc way to respond to contrary evidence, is to detract to that extent from the plausibility of the reason or reasons in question. How does the fact that narrative expectations can be falsified help us to address the problem of manipulation or deception in public life? According to the pragmatic theory of meaning, if there is a genuine difference between sincerity and insincerity in a given appeal to public reason, then there must be some possible set of circumstances in which the two kinds of appeals would point to a different set of outcomes.15 It follows that in order to identify an insincere appeal (if it is possible to do so at all), we would have to identify what those circumstances are and use the discrepancy to expose the nonpublic basis of the appeal in question. There are two ways in which this might be done. First and most obviously, we may find that there is a lack of fit between a reason that has been offered in support of a given policy and the consequences of the policy itself. If the reason in question has been controversially advanced as a public one, then its defenders will be obliged either to change their position or to appeal to some other, possibly even more controversial, set of reasons. For example, as I suggested in the previous 15. More precisely, if I am in doubt as to whether a given appeal to public reason has been made sincerely or insincerely, then if these are distinct beliefs, there must be some difference in expected consequences that hangs on the choice between them. In Peirce’s words, “different beliefs are distinguished by the different modes of action to which they give rise”: “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (1878), Collected Papers, vol. 5, p. 255.

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chapter, if it could be shown that children raised by homosexual couples were on average just as “well adjusted” as the children of heterosexual couples, then people who oppose same-sex marriage for scriptural or other nonpublic reasons would no longer be able to use this “public” argument to disguise their views. Resourceful opponents will be likely to find other apparently public reasons to invoke against this particular policy, but this kind of flexibility is likely to seem disingenuous and will tend over time to undermine the credibility, and thus the legitimacy, of their position. A second possibility is that we may seek to identify a discrepancy between the stated reason for supporting a given policy and the other public commitments to which that line of reasoning, if sincerely endorsed, would give rise. For example, we may be willing to accept that the claim that there should be no “special privileges” for any group is an acceptable (though perhaps not decisive) public argument against affirmative action programs, but we may nevertheless believe that this argument is often advanced by people who are motivated by racial or other kinds of prejudice or (what may amount to the same thing) who wish to maintain a set of social arrangements in which they hold unfair advantages. Now in practice we know that in the absence of affirmative action programs we often see highly discriminatory outcomes. In order to defend those outcomes on public grounds the opponent of affirmative action would have to argue that they are not the result of racial prejudice but of real differences in training or ability. Of course, to attribute them to innate differences in ability (or motivation) is in itself to make a prejudicial argument. To attribute them to differences in training is to acknowledge that certain groups do not have access to the educational and other resources that are needed to compete on an equal footing. Since it is not obvious (to say the least) how that state of affairs could be publicly justified, to rely on this line of argument is to commit oneself in principle to redressing those inequities. To the extent that no effort, or only an inadequate effort, is made to do this, then we will have reason to doubt the sincerity of this particular appeal to public reason. If we are in doubt as to whether a reason offered in public debate has a genuinely public basis, we are in doubt as to whether a given line of inquiry, if pursued, might yield results that we would be obliged to recognize as valid. Similarly, if we are in doubt as to whether an appeal to

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a legitimate public reason has been made with the intention of showing us respect, we are in doubt as to whether those making the appeal would be willing to accept all of the practical consequences to which (we believe) that appeal commits them. In each of these cases the existence of an opportunity to use public reasons insincerely is an artifact of the incomplete or imperfect state of our present understanding. In order to put teeth into the constraints of public reason in such cases, we would have to show either that the empirical premises upon which a given appeal rests are false or that those who are making the appeal are not consistent in accepting its broader implications. Of course, the fact that an inaccurate claim has been made, or that a given actor has not fully grasped the commitments to which the use of a particular reason gives rise, does not in itself demonstrate an intent to manipulate or deceive. Nevertheless, to the extent that some people persist in making such claims even in the face of countervailing evidence, or respond to such evidence by invoking ever more tendentious “reasons,” we may reasonably infer that they are not genuinely motivated by a concern to show respect for their fellow citizens. The practical question, then, is how we might design public institutions in such a way that this kind of insincerity can most efficiently be exposed.

5. The Federal Model We have seen that one promising way to identify insincere appeals to public reason is to seek out inconsistencies of various kinds between a given appeal and the facts of the case. In order to respond to the threat of insincerity in this way, we must of course be willing and able to investigate the accuracy of the claims that are made in public debate. We can assume that there will be sufficient motivation to do this, at least among those who feel strongly about a given issue: each of the parties to the dispute over abortion rights, for example, is quite vigilant about investigating and advertising the practical implications of its own position vis à vis the alternative. However, in order for this method to be effective, there must also exist opportunities to learn about controversial issues: in the case of granting legal recognition to homosexual unions, for example, the very fact that we have relatively little practical experience with such a policy makes it difficult for its supporters to

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reply convincingly to the leading objections. I now wish to argue that we can address the latter problem by relying upon a decentralized set of political institutions, thereby multiplying the opportunities for public inquiry by creating alternate venues for those whose beliefs and commitments would otherwise be frustrated in public life. By exploiting the information-gathering capacities of these local policy-making bodies we can acquire the kind of knowledge that is needed to constrain appeals to public reason within acceptable bounds. Because this institutional model maps nicely onto the multilayered system of government that we find in the United States, I will refer to it as the federal model of public reason. The model of federalism that I have in mind draws in part upon recent work of Joshua Cohen, Michael Dorf, and Charles Sabel; in particular upon the decentralized method of policymaking that they call “directly-deliberative polyarchy.”16 Their central claim is that the quality of public decisions will be improved to the extent that they are the product of deliberation by those who are most directly familiar with the relevant problems and the resources available for solving them. We should therefore, all other things being equal, not only promote deliberative approaches to policy making but delegate policy-making authority to local deliberative bodies. The main drawback of such an approach is, of course, that localities often fail to learn from the experiences of others who are similarly situated: local deliberation is always to some extent provincial deliberation. The solution, as Cohen, Dorf, and Sabel see it, is to pool information regarding the merits and defects of various policy approaches at the national level and to allow localities to draw upon this repository of accumulated experience in fashioning their own approaches. The central government, in addition to guaranteeing the basic rights of citizenship that make just and effective deliberation possible, makes the relevant information from other jurisdictions available to local deliberative bodies and evaluates the success of those bodies relative to their peers—a process referred to as “benchmarking.” Thus we have “a system with both substantial local problem-solving, and

16. Joshua Cohen and Charles Sabel, “Directly-Deliberative Polyarchy,” European Law Journal 3 (1997):313–342; Michael C. Dorf and Charles F. Sabel, “A Constitution of Democratic Experimentalism,” Columbia Law Review 98 (1998):267–473.

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continuous discussion among local units about current best practice and better ways of ascertaining it.”17 Directly-deliberative polyarchy shares with the federal model of public reason a belief in the superior information-gathering capacities of a decentralized system of political institutions, but the motivations and aims of the two approaches nevertheless diverge in important ways. In particular, the defenders of directly-deliberative polyarchy are not primarily concerned with policy areas in which consensus is difficult to achieve but rather with those in which the ascertainable will of the public is thwarted by cumbersome political institutions. Thus we are to assume that for some substantial range of current problems, citizens agree sufficiently about the urgency of the problems and the broad desiderata on solutions that, had they the means to translate this general agreement into a more concrete, practical program, would improve their common situation, and possibly discover further arenas of cooperation.18 Political liberals are concerned with exactly those areas of public policy that this approach seems to exclude: those in which disagreement about matters of justification is pervasive and political institutions are all too efficient at pursuing ends that some citizens regard as illegitimate. However, as I have suggested, the strategy of designing public institutions in such a way that the public can learn from the experiences of local communities can also help to ensure that the claims made in the name of public reason are constrained within certain bounds: that people cannot 17. Dorf and Sabel, “Constitution of Democratic Experimentalism,” pp. 286–287, 345–348; Cohen and Sabel, “Directly-Deliberative Polyarchy,” p. 326. Compare John Stuart Mill’s claim that the state “should have a right to know all that is done, and its special duty should be that of making the knowledge acquired in one place available for others”; the goal being to achieve “the greatest dissemination of power consistent with efficiency; but the greatest possible centralisation of information, and diffusion of it from the centre”: On Liberty, in idem, On Liberty and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989 [1859]), pp. 109–115, quoted at pp. 114, 113. 18. “Directly-Deliberative Polyarchy,” p. 323. The defenders of directly-deliberative polyarchy therefore tend to apply their model to policy areas (such as those of public safety and natural resource management) in which the value of the various goods is not in question, and the challenge lies in making the necessary tradeoffs in a suitably flexible and context-sensitive way. See, for example, “Constitution of Democratic Experimentalism,” pp. 356–388.

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get away with making unfounded claims about the dangers of same-sex marriage, or hypocritical claims about the injustice of affirmative action, for example. In other words, the epistemic advantages of decentralized decision making need not be limited to those policy areas in which a great deal of consensus already exists. Of course, to say that it is possible to constrain insincere appeals to public reason by examining the grounds on which such appeals are made is not to say that this strategy will always succeed, even in the long run. It may be that the terms of a given dispute are so abstract that it is difficult to see, even in principle, how common ground might be discovered through collective inquiry, or it may be that the disagreements in question are so profound that it does not seem likely that the various parties could be brought to accept the publicity of the opposing views. In the limiting case, we may find that there are simply no publicly accepted reasons available on either side of a given dispute and, thus, that any decision is likely to be viewed as illegitimate by some parties. Here another familiar virtue of a federal system becomes apparent: its ability to tolerate a certain degree of pluralism and even inconsistency in the substantive content of public policy. Even when only nonpublic reasons seem to be available, the political liberal conception of legitimacy suggests that we should nevertheless continue to seek whatever points of compromise may exist, and by agreeing to decide some policy differences at the local level we can often avoid or at least delay the need to take an “all or nothing” decision. The aim of temporizing in this way is to preserve the commitment to mutual respect through collective inquiry upon which the norm of public justifiability depends—that is, to leave the lines of communication open so that the motivation to identify legitimate public ends can be sustained, even when the effort to do so has broken down in a particular case. It may seem that the federal model is vulnerable to a reductio ad absurdum. After all, if a plurality of approaches to morally controversial matters of public policy is desirable, what is to stop us from devolving more and more political authority to smaller and smaller jurisdictions, thus creating a politics of particularism and isolation rather than of harmony and mutual respect? Here we must recall that the federal model, unlike the model of directly-deliberative polyarchy, does not hold that local decision making is desirable in itself: whether it is or not must be

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determined on a case-by-case basis. Rather, this model holds that a plurality of policy approaches may in some cases help to ensure that the opportunities will exist to test controversial claims that are made in the name of public reason. In principle, such opportunities might exist even in a unitary national system, though in such a system the learning process would be likely to be halting and cumbersome. The virtues of federalism are thus related only indirectly to the demands of legitimacy. Decisions are not more legitimate to the extent that they are made by localities; rather, local decision making can in certain cases provide a useful means of testing their legitimacy. Because the relationship between federalism and legitimacy is contingent in this way, the design and implementation of the federal model can appropriately take into account considerations of political unity and stability. In the American context this means that in practice the federal model would be likely to incorporate rather than fundamentally alter the terms of the existing federal system. Once we recognize that the boundaries and content of public reason are to some extent a matter of individual judgment, then our attention shifts from the question of whether the constraints of public reason are too rigid in theory to the question of whether they might be too easily evaded in practice. In this respect the federal model of public reason has at least three important advantages over the judicial model. First, to the extent that it functions properly, it lends a certain degree of legitimacy to all public decisions by obliging the majority at least to pay lip service to the various dissenting viewpoints. This is not the case with the judicial model, which removes this obligation in most cases. Second, the federal model allows a certain degree of flexibility in handling those cases in which some are dissatisfied with or suspicious of the reasons on which the state has acted. The judicial model advises us to shy away from these cases by restricting the use of public reason to a narrow set of norms that have been agreed to at the “constitutional” level. Finally, the federal model forces us to face the fact that we cannot always avoid having to coerce people in the name of reasons that they refuse to accept, and that this can have very bad consequences. The dramatic failure in American political history of the various efforts to resolve controversial matters of public policy at the constitutional level does not tend to recommend this particular strategy for dealing with fundamental moral conflicts. Such conflicts require instead a fundamen-

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tal commitment to public dialogue, even in cases where that dialogue has by necessity been interrupted.19 6. Is Injustice Justifiable? I have argued that the norm of public justifiability does not place fixed constraints on political outcomes but, instead, provides the moral content for a narrative framework within which we become committed to showing respect for the experimental intelligence of our fellow citizens by refraining from justifying public ends in terms that they cannot accept. Because legitimacy rests not on consensus but on mutual respect, and because the beliefs and commitments that we bring to inquiry are often transformed in the process of inquiry itself, the norm of public justifiability so understood does not require that agreement exist on matters of justification before legitimate state action can be taken. It requires instead that each citizen sincerely believe in the publicity of his or her own reasons and nevertheless remain willing to revise that belief in the face of persistent evidence to the contrary. As we have seen, by leaving the boundaries and content of public reason subject to change over time, this pragmatic reconstruction of the political liberal conception of legitimacy makes it possible for some citizens to suspect (perhaps rightly) that a particular appeal to public reason has not been made in good faith; that public reason is functioning as a kind of smokescreen for a nonpublic agenda. I have suggested an institutional mechanism by means of which such appeals might be constrained over time, but this mechanism is of course highly fallible and depends upon the vigilance and diligence of those who are willing and able to make use of it. Disagreement about the use of public reason is therefore likely to be an irreducible feature of public life in a political liberal polity. Where there is disagreement about public justification, there is bound to be disagreement about public policy. In particular, if we allow local communities to dissent from national majorities in enacting morally controversial policies, then it is likely that some of them will pursue policies that we (whomever “we” may happen to be) deem morally 19. For a defense of the claim that disagreement about the content of public reason is compatible with an underlying moral commitment to deliberation, see James Bohman, Public Deliberation: Pluralism, Complexity, and Democracy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), chapter 2.

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objectionable: some may legalize homosexual unions, others may limit or even deny access to a legal abortion. It is here that the political liberal commitment to the norm of public justifiability becomes something more than a rhetorical gesture: if we are willing to admit that there exist legitimate public reasons on either side of controversial issues such as these, then we should also be willing to accept that either position might legitimately be enacted into law. If we doubt that the reasons in question will stand up to scrutiny, but nevertheless find that a significant number of our fellow citizens advance them, then we should be willing to allow their merits to be tested in practice, even as we are vigilant in attending to and exposing their shortcomings. If we are unwilling to do this, then our commitment to the norm of public justifiability may be called into question, and we may legitimately be asked whether we are claiming privileged access to moral truth in a way that we would find objectionable in others. More traditional (ideological) liberals may find this discomfiting, but if political liberalism is to be something other than ideological liberalism couched in inclusive rhetoric, then we should expect that it will require a more radical renovation of existing political practices than a mere change in vocabulary. This line of criticism points, however, to a deeper objection to the pragmatic theory of political justification that I have defended here. After all, if the boundaries and content of public reason are left up to the judgment of individual citizens, and ultimately to the total drift of collective inquiry in a given polity, who is to say that such a polity will not find itself, through the contingencies of history, endorsing and legitimately enacting a set of public policies that are unjust or even morally abhorrent? This objection restates in political terms a traditional worry about pragmatism as a theory of moral justification: if the test of the adequacy of a moral proposition lies in its tendency to remove moral doubts once acted upon, then what can we say, on pragmatic grounds, to someone who holds morally abhorrent beliefs and gives no sign of harboring the slightest doubts about their validity? This is not merely a hypothetical objection: it is not difficult to think of societies and cultures that have pursued (and continue to pursue) morally objectionable policies without any admission—at least on the part of those who benefit from such policies— that they might be morally dubious, let alone unjust. If we were to find ourselves in a society in which racism, sexism, slavery, genocide, and so on were not regarded as being unjust—a society in which no one actually

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doubted the legitimacy of such practices—then it seems that the pragmatist would have no grounds for regarding such a society as morally objectionable. Such a possibility would seem to provide strong grounds for supporting a more rigid conception of legitimacy. This line of criticism depends, I think, on a kind of sleight of hand. Insofar as these critics ask us to imagine a state of affairs in which the injustices that I have named are no longer recognized as such, pragmatists have exactly the same resources for condemning such a state of affairs from our current standpoint as anyone else. Indeed, as I have argued, pragmatism is compatible in principle with any number of theories as to why we do or should find such a world morally objectionable. These critics are asking, I think, for two additional things. The first is some assurance that, even if our present moral commitments were somehow to pass away, even if our moral doubts were to cease, we would still have grounds for describing this hypothetical state of affairs as morally wrong. The problem with this demand is that, in asking us to imagine an immoral world in which moral doubts no longer exist, it assumes away the existence of the very perspective from which it asks us to find such a world repugnant. That is, if such an outcome were to be realized, it is by no means clear how a more rigid theory of moral justification than the pragmatic one would be of any use in opposing it, any more than such a theory is of any use in helping us to oppose injustices that are not already recognized as such. In the world with which we have experience, wherever racism, sexism, slavery, and genocide have existed, they have been accompanied by moral doubts of a more or less articulate kind. To live with such practices has required that one hide or explain away the disturbing consequences to which they lead, and neither of these strategies has proven to be sustainable in the long run.20 But what if some way were found of making them sustainable? What if these consequences no longer seemed so disturbing? This brings us to the second demand implicit in this criticism of the pragmatic position: that we be given some prior assurance that our moral ideals will not pass away over time. I find this demand easier to understand than the previous one, but again I do not see how it can be satisfied by a theory of moral justification. On the pragmatic view the only assurance we can 20. Needless to say, injustice has often been overcome not (only) by forces internal to the society in which it exists but by a confrontation—sometimes a violent one—with societies holding contrary values. And, needless to say, the opposite exchange has sometimes taken place.

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have that our moral ideals will not pass away is our own efforts, and those of like-minded people, to ensure that they do not. Once we acknowledge that the justifiability of our beliefs depends upon an uncertain appeal to future experiences, and not to (currently) demonstrable truths, we must become vigilant in attending to the circumstances under which they might be defeated or disconfirmed. This prospective approach to justification not only broadens our sense of the moral possibilities of public life; it also highlights how fragile our moral achievements really are. There are indeed (and always have been) people who hold beliefs that lead them to be hostile to the idea of, say, racial and gender equality, and who regard those beliefs as being publicly justifiable. My view requires that, as people committed to contrary values, we engage these views directly and identify the places at which they can be shown to break down. In the limit it may require that we resist them with force. In this respect the pragmatic approach strikes a balance between the nihilism that can result from a belief in absolute contingency and the complacency that can result from a belief that our ideals are already beyond questioning. Political liberalism requires that in cases in which my fellow citizens do not share my beliefs and commitments, I should nevertheless try to justify the exercise of political power in terms that I think they can accept. This obligation is not an absolute one, because I may properly conclude either that some of my fellow citizens are failing to show this kind of respect to me or that other moral considerations trump the obligation to seek common ground in a particular case. Nor should we shy away from the fact that some things really are worth fighting for: as we have seen, political liberalism is ultimately not a doctrine of consensus but of respect. We need only think back on the troubled history of race relations in the United States, from slavery to the civil rights movement and beyond, to see that harmony and stability cannot be the highest political values. Nothing that has been said here changes the fact that in order for public justification to be a meaningful practice we must all bring certain expectations to public life; in particular the expectation that special pleading on behalf of obviously nonpublic beliefs will be recognized and condemned as unacceptable. We have intuitions that support this expectation already; this is why we are often uneasy about the political activities of sectarian groups and individuals, even when we share some of their

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policy goals. Political liberalism seeks to make these intuitions articulate, but it is up to us as citizens and as a community to see that the norm of public justifiability, and the norm of mutual respect upon which it rests, have a voice not only in our public culture but in our public institutions.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Fact of Reasonable Pluralism

1. The Pluralist Narrative The final step in our pragmatic reconstruction of political liberalism concerns the way in which political liberals account for the fundamental disagreements that divide modern societies. Needless to say, these disagreements can be a source of bewilderment and frustration to those who believe that theirs is the superior point of view or way of life—and surely more of us are tempted to adopt this view than we often care to admit. Moreover, because our fundamental beliefs define, among other things, our expectations about the possibilities that the world will admit, our disagreements on these matters have an irreducibly public dimension. Liberals seek to account for these disagreements in such a way that we are not tempted to try to eliminate them by political means; indeed, the varieties of liberal thought can be distinguished in large part by the various responses that they offer to this challenge. There are those who trace disagreement to depravity or sinfulness, and their secular counterparts who attribute it to defective reasoning or false consciousness. Such accounts are recognizably liberal only to the extent that they stipulate that sinfulness and right reasoning are not, properly speaking, concerns of the state. Others have argued that the spread of reason, suitably understood, will ultimately drive the divisive influences of tradition and superstition out of public life and pave the way for an enlightened society in which conflict is managed by peaceful and transparent means. This view has largely been eclipsed by the many conflicts, lively and deadly, that have been waged in the name of reason over the last two hundred years or more. These forms of liberal thought attribute disagreement to unreason of one kind or another. Political liberals hold on the contrary that our 208

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disagreements are, at least to a large extent, reasonable; that is, that they are compatible with and even arise from the free exercise of our reasoning faculties. Indeed, many political liberals hold that our differences will persist as long as this freedom is valued and exercised. The latter claim is perhaps most clearly articulated by Charles Larmore, who argues that “[the] crucial element of modern experience is the realization that on the meaning of life reasonable people tend naturally to disagree with one another. We have come to expect that in a free and open discussion about the fulfilled life, the human good, the nature of self-realization . . . the more we converse, the more we disagree, even with ourselves.”1 According to this line of argument, as opportunities for the free exercise of reason are extended, opinions about matters of religious belief, virtue, and the content of the good life tend naturally to diverge and proliferate. And as the degree of repression necessary to maintain or restore consensus on these matters becomes apparent, toleration of opposing viewpoints becomes the norm, not merely (though perhaps initially) out of a desire to avoid conflict but because people come to recognize that disagreement is itself a natural byproduct of free inquiry. Rawls makes acceptance of this “fact of reasonable pluralism” a condition for being included in the “reasonable overlapping consensus” that supports a political liberal regime. Indeed, it is a corollary of his view that, where we find consensus on fundamental matters, we should expect to find illegitimate coercion at work—a phenomenon that he calls “the fact of oppression.”2 1. Charles Larmore, The Morals of Modernity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 12; see also pp. 122, 151, 215. 2. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996 [1993]), pp. 54, 37. On “reasonable pluralism” see ibid., for example pp. xviii–xix, xxvi–xxvii, 4, 36. My use of the terms pluralism and reasonable calls for some clarification. (1) Larmore distinguishes what he calls the “expectation of reasonable disagreement” from the idea (associated with Isaiah Berlin) that human goods cannot be reduced to a single scale of value, and he reserves the term pluralism for the latter view: Morals of Modernity, chapter 7. My use of pluralism, like Rawls’s, refers only to the epistemic constraints on our ability to persuade others of the validity of our own beliefs and implies no ontological claim about the nature of truth or value. (2) By reasonableness Larmore means simply “the free and open exercise of the basic capacities of reason”; his use of the term, unlike Rawls’s, is descriptive and not normative. Nevertheless, he endorses the norms contained in “reasonableness” as Rawls defines it, so the difference is strictly terminological: Larmore, “The Moral Basis of Political Liberalism,” Journal of Philosophy 96 (1999):601–602; compare Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 54.

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Although political liberals do not attribute disagreement on fundamental matters to defective reasoning, neither do they insist that there are no “right answers” to such questions. Instead, they trace our disagreements to what Rawls calls “the burdens of judgment”; that is, to the fact that ambiguous evidence, uncertainty about the meaning of key terms, and other such factors limit our ability to persuade others to adopt our own standards of justification. We must therefore try to justify public ends in terms that abstract from these disagreements. The roots of this strategy can be found in Kant’s moral and political thought, which holds that because “[m]en have different views on the empirical end of happiness and what it consists of,” we must arrive at just principles of coercion from the standpoint of “pure reason, which legislates a priori, regardless of all empirical ends.”3 Political liberals modify this Kantian model in two important ways. First, they do not appeal to a metaphysical conception of reason but to an understanding of modern European history, within which the experience of fundamental disagreement acquires a special salience. By resting their position on a historical narrative in this way, they seek to render it compatible with a wide range of philosophical views while relying on none of them in particular.4 Second, as I have indicated, political liberals do not treat the fact of reasonable pluralism as a sign that our beliefs are uncertain or inconclusive but rather as an indication that there are limits to our ability to persuade others of their

3. Immanuel Kant, “On the Common Saying: ‘This May be True in Theory, but it does not Apply in Practice’” (1793), in idem, Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 73. On the “burdens of judgment” see Rawls, Political Liberalism, pp. 54–58. 4. The most sophisticated attempt to develop a historical grounding for political liberalism is Larmore’s. As he sees it, “[t]he task of liberal theory today is to see how the principle of state neutrality can be justified without having to take sides in the dispute about individualism and tradition,” because the modern self-understanding is defined by the intersection of Enlightenment (or individualistic) and Romantic (or tradition-based) ideals. Insofar as political liberalism succeeds in bridging this divide, he believes that it should recommend itself to modern audiences: see, for example, Morals of Modernity, pp. 127–134, quoted at p. 132.

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validity. It follows that skepticism is neither an implication of nor a prerequisite for a political liberalism.5 It is a matter of great importance to political liberals that the fact of reasonable pluralism not be taken to impugn the underlying justifiability of our fundamental beliefs; after all, this is what it means to treat our disagreements as “reasonable.” Nevertheless, most political liberals continue to follow Kant in ruling out the possibility of consensus regarding our “empirical ends,” on the grounds that such a consensus would itself be incompatible with the free exercise of reason. Thus, while we are allowed to believe in the justifiability of our own ends, we are asked to adopt a certain pessimism about the possibility of justifying them to others. This line of argument projects the fact of reasonable pluralism indefinitely into the future: Rawls argues that “the diversity of reasonable comprehensive religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines found in modern democratic societies is not a mere historical condition that may soon pass away; it is a permanent feature of the public culture of democracy,” and Larmore agrees that “reasonable disagreement about the nature of the good life and even about the philosophical foundations of morality is not a passing phenomenon, but rather the situation we should expect.”6 It is easy to see why this pluralist narrative has become a widely accepted feature of political liberal thought: our long experience with fundamental disagreements makes it an intuitively plausible claim about the historical trajectory of human inquiry, and by treating our disagreements as reasonable it does not provide an inherently unstable basis for a liberal politics, as would any account that traced disagreement to unreason. Nevertheless, this line of argument raises its own set of difficulties. To begin with, if the content of public reason, and thus the range of legitimate public ends, is to be determined through experimental inquiry over time, then it is not clear how we can say in advance where this process of inquiry will lead. Although experience does suggest that on 5. See Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 63; Larmore, Morals of Modernity, pp. 126–127, 171–174. Brian Barry has argued, on the contrary, that political liberalism requires that we adopt an attitude of “moderate scepticism” toward our nonpublic beliefs: see his Justice as Impartiality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), chapter 7. I examine this claim in Section 5 of this chapter. 6. Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 36 (see also pp. 129, 136, 216–217); Larmore, Morals of Modernity, p. 215 (my emphasis).

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certain matters reasonable agreement is not likely to be achieved, in other cases collective inquiry has revealed unexpected points of convergence. The pluralist narrative does not provide a sufficiently nuanced way of distinguishing between these possibilities, and to the extent that political liberals argue that disagreement is inevitable except on certain “constitutional” principles of their own devising, they tend to make their commitment to inclusion seem disingenuous. Moreover, a commitment to the pluralist narrative renders the political liberal position incompatible with and even hostile to those systems of belief that commit their adherents to the possibility of achieving agreement on certain fundamental matters. That is, many people believe not only that their fundamental beliefs are correct but that they are (or may be) destined to be agreed to by everyone in the fullness of time. Many more would endorse the more modest proposition that some belief or set of beliefs will be the object of consensus. Our expectations about the ultimate fate of our beliefs cannot simply be divorced from the beliefs themselves, because it is these narrative expectations that give the beliefs in question meaning and motivational force. When these expectations are cast into doubt, so too are the beliefs themselves. The most straightforward way of resolving these difficulties would be to deny that the pluralist narrative plays an essential role in political liberal thought, at least in its strong form. This claim could be defended in two ways. First, it might be argued that, although this narrative defines the problem with which political liberalism begins, it plays no further role in grounding the norm of public justifiability and so need not be accepted by those who find it objectionable (Section 2). Second, it might be argued that the pluralist narrative rests on a falsifiable inference from past experience and need not entail the stronger claim that our disagreements are permanent (Section 3). These rejoinders overlook the fact that a fully articulated defense of the norm of public justifiability requires a robust and commonly accepted narrative framework within which its implications and motivational basis become apparent. It follows that political liberals must either defend the pluralist narrative in its strong form or else provide some other account that plays an analogous role. In light of the doubts that I have raised about the first strategy, I will pursue the latter alternative here. In particular, I propose that we replace the Kantian conception of divergent reason with a kind of Millian fallibilism that is better able to accommodate the views of those who are committed to the possi-

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bility of reasonable agreement (Section 4). After showing that a commitment to fallibilism does not require that we adopt a skeptical attitude toward our own beliefs (Section 5), I conclude by arguing that this approach helps us to understand the relationship between public and nonpublic reasons in a more flexible way (Section 6). 2. Is Pluralism Necessary? We have seen that political liberalism’s commitment to inclusiveness is potentially at odds with the divergent conception of reason that it uses to account for the fundamental disagreements that characterize modern societies. This raises the question of whether the pluralist narrative might be a dispensable aspect of the political liberal position and, indeed, whether political liberals should make any effort at all to attach a “public” explanation of the fact of reasonable pluralism to their position. The strong claims about the impossibility of consensus on fundamental matters might be taken instead as a way of highlighting the salience of the problem with which political liberalism begins—in Rawls’s formulation, “how is it possible for there to exist over time a just and stable society of free and equal citizens, who remain profoundly divided by reasonable religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines?”—but to play no further role in justifying the political liberal response to this problem. On this view, Rawls’s first criterion of reasonableness—“the willingness to propose fair terms of cooperation and to abide by them provided others do so”—can and should be divorced from the second—“the willingness to accept the burdens of judgment and to accept their consequences for the use of public reason.”7 The political philosopher’s version of Ockham’s razor should shave off the conceptual accoutrements of the burdens of judgment and the pluralist narrative, or whatever theoretical constructs aim to take their place, leaving intact the underlying moral commitments that they seek to express. Political liberalism should rest on a shared set of moral principles and nothing more.8 7. Rawls, Political Liberalism, pp. 4, 54. 8. As one scholar has put it, “[f]avoring one version of history and one attitude toward pluralism is no business of a liberal theory. People should be accepted as reasonable members of society so long as they are now ready to cooperate on fair terms with their fellow citizens, whom they regard as free and equal”: Leif Wenar, “Political Liberalism: An Internal Critique,” Ethics 106 (1995):48.

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It is of course possible to describe a moral ideal in terms of the norms of conduct that it imposes without elaborating upon the conditions under which those norms acquire motivational force. Such parsimony does not, however, offer a promising basis for a theory of political legitimacy. To begin with, we have seen that discourses of political justification can get under way only if the citizens of a given polity understand themselves to be participating in a narrative—fragmentary and inchoate as it may be—whose outcome they are concerned to work out together. In societies characterized by fundamental disagreements this public narrative must provide, in addition to a shared point of reference for further inquiry, some way for citizens to incorporate the fact of reasonable pluralism into their own self-understandings. It is not enough to appeal to a past experience of deep and persistent disagreement, no matter how vivid, because, as we have seen, we can make sense of the past only by placing it within a framework of expectations about the likely (or desired) course of future experience. In the absence of such a framework, the norm of public justifiability would lack both substantive content and motivational force. We need an account that not only tells us that we disagree (and that we have for some time) but gives us some sense of why we disagree and thus provides us with a shared set of expectations about the prospects for collective inquiry going forward. It is no accident, then, that Locke, Kant, Mill, Rawls, and other leading liberal theorists provide narrative groundings, implicit or explicit, for their broader normative claims on this matter.9 The prospect of doing without a public explanation of the fact of reasonable pluralism is especially problematic for political liberals, who are committed to the task of justifying public ends in a way that can be accepted by all citizens. A political liberalism that simply posited binding political norms, without saying anything further about whether they are or might be compatible with the beliefs and commitments that citizens already hold, would fail to apply the norm of public justifiability to 9. See, for example, John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, in idem, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1960 [1690]), §§105–112; Kant, “Idea of a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose” (1784) and “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’” (1784) in Reiss, ed., Political Writings, pp. 41–60; John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, in idem, On Liberty and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989 [1859]), chapters 1–3; Rawls, Political Liberalism, pp. xxiii–xxx.

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its own conception of legitimacy. If we were to place the burden of justifying this conception entirely on the individual citizen, we would ensure that the “reasonable overlapping consensus” upon which the political liberal polity rests would be composed only of those who are already inclined to accept political liberal principles. It is not clear that political liberalism so understood would represent an advance, from the standpoint of inclusiveness, over more traditional liberal views. If political liberals are genuinely concerned to show respect for the experimental intelligence of all citizens, they must not only articulate the norms upon which their position rests but also provide a narrative framework within which those norms become comprehensible to citizens whose existing beliefs are not obviously congenial to them. In other words, they must not simply assert the validity of their premises and dismiss those who reject them as unreasonable; they must seek to provide a narrative account that renders the norm of public justifiability attractive to people who find themselves divided on matters of fundamental concern, but nevertheless committed to the validity of their own views. A genuinely capacious political liberalism must therefore rest upon a public explanation of the fact of reasonable pluralism—an explanation that provides a motivational link between that fact and adherence to the norm of public justifiability. This narrative account cannot be dismissed as superfluous without calling the political liberal commitment to public reason, and indeed the very idea of reasonable disagreement itself, into question. I have already pointed out that the pluralist version of this narrative raises certain objections from the standpoint of inclusiveness, but this should not obscure the fact that it succeeds in conveying the motivational basis of the political liberal conception of legitimacy in a way that does not rely upon a particular moral or philosophical point of view. This line of argument ties the commitment to the norm of public justifiability to a special kind of epistemic modesty: we are to refrain from imposing our nonpublic beliefs on others because we recognize that our disagreements, though reasonable, cannot be overcome through the free exercise of reason. In other words, we should seek to justify the exercise of state coercion in public terms for the simple reason that our fellow citizens (or at least many of them) could not be brought to accept our nonpublic beliefs. This is of course not an uncontroversial claim, either morally or empirically speaking, but we should not fool ourselves into thinking that an uncontroversial defense of political liberal principles is available. All we

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can ask is that such an account be as capacious as possible, given the need to identify and pursue legitimate public ends. There remains the possibility that political liberals might formulate an explanation of the fact of reasonable pluralism that is addressed to citizens whose beliefs lie outside of the existing liberal consensus while allowing others to put forth their own such accounts should they prefer. This “public” explanation might then be an essential component of a fully articulated political liberal position, but its acceptance would be an optional requirement of liberal citizenship. This line of argument overlooks the fact that discourses of political justification require not only a shared set of norms by which they are guided but a shared framework of expectations within which those norms are interpreted and applied. Without such a framework it would be impossible to adjudicate disagreements about what the norm of public justifiability requires. For example, a citizen who accepted the pluralist narrative, and was consequently pessimistic about the possibility of achieving consensus on matters of fundamental concern, might give first priority to securing the conditions under which diverse ways of life could flourish and consider it unimportant to ensure that those ways of life are open to the intrusion of critics, skeptics, and iconoclasts. A citizen who was more openminded about the possibility of reaching agreement, and thus more concerned to secure the conditions of critical inquiry under which it could be achieved, might hold the opposite view. It is difficult, in the absence of a shared understanding of why a pluralism of fundamental beliefs exists in the first place, to see how the norm of public justifiability taken in itself could help us to choose between these possibilities.10 It is essential for political liberals that public ends be justifiable in terms that all citizens can accept. Because we cannot assume that this 10. Jeremy Waldron has made this point forcefully: “The idea of liberal neutrality, like that of toleration, is an abstract concept in political theory of which various conceptions are possible. These conceptions differ considerably in the practical requirements they generate and the burdens they impose on governments . . . each argument yields a distinct conception which in turn generates distinct and practically quite different principles of political morality and social justice. So the liberal cannot afford to be indifferent or offhand about the justificatory task. The line of justification that is taken matters for the articulation of the position he wants to adopt”: “Locke: Toleration and the Rationality of Persecution,” in Susan Mendus, ed., Justifying Toleration: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 79 (original emphasis).

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conception of legitimacy is itself universally endorsed, political liberals must provide a narrative account that might persuade those who are inclined to regard the presence of disagreement as a standing reproach to their own beliefs and commitments to accept the constraints of public reason. It is only by providing such an account that political liberals can accomplish their stated goal of accommodating as wide a range of beliefs and commitments as is possible given the need to identify and pursue legitimate public ends. Moreover, because there is genuine uncertainty about what the aims and limits of political justification are or should be, and because political decisions must nevertheless be made on such matters, this public explanation of the fact of reasonable pluralism cannot be regarded as an optional or peripheral element of the political liberal position. It is therefore no accident that Rawls makes acceptance of the burdens of judgment, and thus of the pluralist narrative, one of the two conditions of being included in the “reasonable overlapping consensus” that supports a political liberal regime. Whatever its shortcomings, this narrative provides us with grounds for regarding the views of those with whom we disagree as reasonable, and thus with a motivational basis for accepting the constraints of public reason. It is only by sharing such an account in common that citizens can give their commitment to the norm of public justifiability the robustness that it needs to guide political conduct effectively. 3. Is Pluralism Permanent? If we cannot dismiss the pluralist narrative as a superfluous component of the political liberal position without casting the proposition that our disagreements are reasonable into doubt, we might nevertheless seek to weaken its claims. This raises the second of the possibilities that I mentioned at the outset: that the pluralist narrative might be regarded as a plausible but falsifiable inference from past experience, rather than in stronger terms as the claim that reasonable agreement on fundamental matters is impossible under any foreseeable circumstances. The former interpretation would seem to offer a promising response to the objections I have raised: if the pluralist narrative is nothing more than a claim about the likely course of future experience, then it is clearly less vulnerable to the objection that it illegitimately places prior constraints upon the course of inquiry. Here again, however, the proposed

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interpretation is at odds with Rawls’s stated position, which says not only that fundamental disagreements are “a permanent feature of the public culture of democracy,” but that “a continuing shared understanding on one comprehensive religious, philosophical, or moral doctrine can be maintained only by the oppressive use of state power”—a “fact of oppression” to which there are “no exceptions.” A weaker understanding of the pluralist narrative would also contradict Larmore’s observation (paraphrasing Montaigne) that “the more we converse, the more we disagree, even with ourselves.”11 It is therefore appropriate to ask why these political liberals find it necessary to defend such a strong claim about the nature of human disagreement. One way to weaken the claims of the pluralist narrative without violating the letter of Rawls’s and Larmore’s positions would be to emphasize that it does not predict disagreement of just any kind, but only disagreement arising from the free exercise of reason. This leaves open the possibility that agreement on fundamental matters might be achieved by extrarational means, such as through an experience of divine grace or revelation. Such an amendment to the political liberal position might be enough to appease those religious believers for whom the possibility that all citizens might come to accept the one true faith is an essential aspect of their worldview, but it would of course fail to satisfy those whose objections to the pluralist narrative are not religiously based or who do not rest their religious beliefs on extrarational grounds.12 Indeed, it is important to emphasize that the objections that I have raised against the pluralist narrative are not specifically religious in nature: many forms of belief—philosophical and moral as well as religious—depend for their coherence on the possibility of reasonable agreement. In order to accommodate such views, political liberals must allow for the efficacy of rational as well as extrarational means of persuasion. We are therefore thrown back on the possibility that, despite the stated positions of Rawls and Larmore, the pluralist narrative does not rule out the possibility of reasonable agreement, but simply states that it is not likely. On this account, those who seek consensus on matters of fundamental concern are required only to defer their hopes, not to set them aside altogether. 11. Rawls, Political Liberalism, pp. 36–37 and note (my emphasis); Larmore, Morals of Modernity, p. 12 (see also p. 151). 12. Needless to say, it would also require that we draw a politically volatile distinction between the “saved” and the “unsaved” in a given community.

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We have seen that a fully articulated political liberalism must rest upon a publicly accepted explanation of the fact of reasonable pluralism, one that provides a motivational basis for accepting the constraints of public reason as well as a shared point of orientation for applying the norm of public justifiability in political life. We have also seen that in order for this narrative account to do the motivational work that is required of it, it must not only account for our past experiences with disagreement but also seek to accommodate a plurality of beliefs regarding the likely course of future experience—including beliefs about the ultimate fate of the ideals that citizens cherish most deeply—in such a way that we are not tempted to impose our nonpublic beliefs on others by force. The pluralist narrative does this by asserting that the effort to pursue consensus on fundamental matters in public life is inherently unjust: because agreement on such matters can be achieved only through the use of coercive force, such agreement cannot be the legitimate aspiration of a liberal society. Once this assumption is granted, the choice is starkly drawn between the appeal to public reason and the resort to force. Indeed, one of the attractions of the pluralist narrative is that it provides a strategy for identifying and exposing coercive practices that might not otherwise be open to view. If it is true that, wherever we find a broad consensus on matters of fundamental concern, it is likely that the conditions for free and open inquiry do not genuinely exist, then this insight would provide us with a useful heuristic for distinguishing between liberal and illiberal societies. If we were to weaken the pluralist narrative by admitting that a reasonable consensus on fundamental matters is a possible (if unlikely) outcome of collective inquiry after all, then the familiar tension in liberal thought between an imagined state of consensus (or, more precisely, many different ones) and an actual state of disagreement would be one that the political liberal conception of legitimacy, taken in itself, could no longer defuse. That is, if disagreement is only the probable outcome of the free exercise of reason, then the possibility exists that our current disagreements are due to something else (say, the perverse influence of demonstrably false beliefs), and it is no longer clear why we should be willing to regard those disagreements as reasonable. As I have already suggested, I think that a pragmatically inclined political liberalism, or indeed any political liberalism that seeks to be maximally inclusive, should take a more open-minded view regarding

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the possible or likely direction of future inquiry on matters of fundamental concern. However, if we are to allow the limits of agreement to be worked out experimentally over time, then it is not enough to leave the public explanation of the fact of reasonable pluralism ambiguously defined, as those who wish to weaken the claims of the pluralist narrative suggest. Such an approach requires instead that we spell out the narrative expectations under which the task of public justification is undertaken in such a way that the reasonableness of our disagreements is not cast into doubt. As it stands, the argument from pluralism to the norm of public justifiability collapses if it is not framed quite strongly. Our principal worry about political liberalism from a pragmatic point of view has concerned its ability to attend to the prospective dimension of public life—that is, to the various social and political possibilities that a fixed conception of legitimacy might prematurely foreclose. In this respect a reliance on the pluralist narrative raises exactly the same kinds of concerns as the emphasis on primary goods and constitutional essentials that we have considered already. Because our fundamental beliefs incorporate claims about the nature of the world, the forms of value that it will admit, and the opportunities for human flourishing that it offers, they will often contain premises that, if the underlying beliefs are to be coherent at all, must be capable not only of being true but of being widely recognized as such. This is, of course, exactly the possibility that the pluralist narrative excludes. Moreover, to the extent that they predict that the free exercise of reason will necessarily lead to division on the most important and vital issues, political liberals who endorse the pluralist narrative regard the presence of agreement on such matters as itself evidence that coercion and repression (or, at the very least, unreason) are at work. Having ruled out the possibility of reasonable agreement on fundamental matters, this view requires that we question, as a matter of principle, the legitimacy of communities that seem to have secured this kind of unity. This raises the obvious concern that a political liberalism that relies upon the pluralist narrative rules out the pursuit of more robust conceptions of political community even prior to further inquiry into their attractiveness and viability. I do not of course mean to defend a political order in which the pursuit of victory by adherents of various fundamental beliefs is the

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chief aim of public life. Jeremy Waldron has argued that the people who pose the greatest threat to a liberal regime are those who “find themselves with commitments so fervent that they cannot be pursued except through the endeavour to impose them on others,”13 and he is surely right, if by “impose” he has in mind the effort to remake society in one’s own image by coercive means. A liberal politics of any kind requires that we respect the capacity of each person to work out and pursue his or her own ends, and to seek to impose one’s own views by force is to fail in this regard. However, it is perfectly legitimate on political liberal grounds to seek to convince others not only of the merits but of the publicity of one’s (currently) nonpublic views, and I see no reason to rule out the possibility that such efforts might in certain cases succeed. Indeed, the dynamic conception of public reason that I have defended here depends upon this possibility. Moreover, in many cases part of what it means to be committed to a belief is to believe that one should try to persuade others of its validity and to believe further that one might succeed in doing so. Insofar as political liberals rule out this possibility, they fail to respect or even to understand such beliefs. These concerns tend to cast doubt on the promise of the pluralist narrative as a “public” explanation of the fact of reasonable pluralism, whatever its other merits might be. They therefore compel us to seek a narrative framework that fills this role more adequately.

4. The Fallibilist Narrative The alternative that I propose, which I will refer to as the fallibilist narrative, explains the fact of reasonable pluralism on matters of fundamental concern by emphasizing the fallibility of human understanding on such matters. That is, I believe that Mill’s rationale for tolerating the fullest diversity of opinions and practices that is compatible with the exercise of individual liberty can be adapted for political purposes, much as political liberals have heretofore adapted Kantian premises by seeking a foundation for liberal principles that is prior to and independent 13. Waldron, “Theoretical Foundations of Liberalism,” Philosophical Quarterly 37 (1987):145 (original emphasis).

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of any particular conception of the good. Briefly stated, the fallibilist narrative states that disagreement about fundamental matters should be regarded as a sign of the partiality of human understanding and therefore requires that this understanding remain open for revision in the larger interest of seeking the truth. In the absence of consensus, we should refrain from imposing any set of fundamental beliefs coercively for fear of foreclosing the truth-seeking process prematurely. This does not mean, of course, that everyone must expect that consensus will ultimately be achieved; some may believe that reasonable disagreement is inevitable on a certain range of questions, and the validity of this belief may be borne out over time. Nevertheless, just as the norm of public justifiability requires that we respect the capacity for experimental intelligence in others, even if we do not value or make use of that capacity ourselves, so does the fallibilist narrative require that we respect the belief held by some that reasonable agreement on a certain range of beliefs might be achieved, even if we do not consider this to be a likely outcome. It should be clear that the fallibilist narrative is better able to accommodate those who are committed to the pursuit of agreement on matters of fundamental concern than the pluralist alternative. It also provides an explanation of the fact of reasonable pluralism that is more congenial to the flexible and open-ended conception of public reason that I have defended here. The pluralist narrative requires that we distinguish in advance between those questions on which reasonable agreement is possible—typically, those regarding certain “constitutional essentials” and matters of basic justice—and those for which it is not. This leaves political liberals vulnerable, as we have seen, to the objection that they define the limits of agreement, and indeed “reasonableness” itself, in a way that is favorable to their own position. I have argued that the use of public reason does not require a pre-existing consensus on substantive matters, but rather that a reason is public to the extent that all are willing to accept it as a reasonable candidate for public inquiry. Because our beliefs and commitments are often unexpectedly transformed through inquiry, an acceptance of the norm of public justifiability so understood entails an acceptance of the possibility that the boundaries of public reason will change over time. The fallibilist narrative therefore does not take a rigid position on the limits of agreement in public life, though it does require, as we saw in the previous

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chapter, that we attend to the prior trajectory of inquiry on a given question in determining the burden of proof that lies on anyone who wishes to argue that a controversial course of action can be defended on public grounds. Unlike weaker forms of the pluralist narrative, however—those that treat pluralism as the likely rather than the inevitable outcome of free inquiry—the fallibilist narrative provides us with a clear set of narrative expectations with which to approach discourses of political justification. In particular, it asks that we think of ourselves in such contexts as being engaged in a common project of truth-seeking whose outcome no one should be allowed to foreclose coercively. If some are committed to beliefs that aspire to universal endorsement or recognition, they are free to pursue this end by any noncoercive means they deem fit: through direct attempts at persuasion in speech or writing, by leading exemplary lives, or by forming and nurturing attractive communities, for example. If they wish to advance such beliefs as candidates for public action, they are similarly free to try to persuade their fellow citizens that the beliefs in question meet the standard of public justifiability. Anyone who holds contrary beliefs, or who finds the pursuit of consensus to be a dubious or unsavory ideal, is likewise free to resist these efforts and, if necessary, to try to expose the nonpublic basis of their opponents’ views. It may be the case that, after long experience in investigating a particular question, everyone will conclude that dissensus on that question is the inevitable outcome of free inquiry. In the meantime, discourses of political justification should be designed in such a way that they do not rule out the opposite possibility. If political liberals are concerned to show that our disagreements are not unreasonable, then they should also be willing to treat our agreements in the same way. By providing a more capacious conception of the possibilities of collective inquiry, a political liberalism that rests on the fallibilist narrative also provides us with a firmer basis for defending the traditional liberal rights of expression. That is, it is easier to grasp the rationale for granting freedoms of speech, press, and assembly from a fallibilistic standpoint than from one that places fixed limits on our powers of persuasion in public life. The pluralist narrative, by basing the commitment to the norm of public justifiability on the expectation of disagreement, would seem to discount those rights that are oriented

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toward the possibility of reaching agreement.14 The fallibilist narrative requires that we view these freedoms not only as a means of showing respect for the experimental intelligence of all citizens but as a potential resource for working out a richer and more genuinely inclusive set of public ends. In other words, it holds that we should grant citizens a great deal of latitude to pursue and defend their fundamental beliefs, not only for the negative reason that the state should avoid taking sides in disputes that cannot be resolved by reasonable means but for the positive reason that free and open inquiry has proven to be the most efficient way of reaching reasonable agreement when such agreement is possible. This means, among other things, that citizens should be allowed to defend their beliefs directly, in speech and print, and through indirect means such as by enacting them in vital communities and associations. In this way, the fallibilist narrative offers a more straightforward grounding for the full range of liberal rights than does the pluralist alternative. It may nevertheless seem that this narrative framework is too prescriptive to serve as an essential component of a political liberal conception of legitimacy. That is, to the extent that the fallibilist narrative rests the motivational basis for the norm of public justifiability on the promise of reaching reasonable agreement on matters of fundamental concern, it may seem likely to alienate those who are skeptical about or hostile to the idea that the pursuit of agreement on such matters should be the aim of public life. The apparent tradeoff between the effort to accommodate monists and pluralists on this question suggests that political liberals would do better to seek a more modest explanation of the fact of reasonable pluralism. Here we must keep in mind that the fallibilist narrative does not rest upon any general claim that consensus can (or cannot) be achieved in public life. Rather, it requires that we approach this question on a caseby-case basis, always keeping in mind that grounds for agreement have been unexpectedly discovered on apparently intractable issues and that 14. Will Kymlicka has argued, for example, that “[p]lurality, divorced from revisability, may require that current adherents of different faiths be allowed to practise their creed. But I don’t yet see why it would require, or even support, either the right to publicly defend your creed to non-believers, or the right to hear what the members of other groups can say in their defence. The importance liberal societies attach to freedom of expression is only explicable, I think, if the assumption of plurality is accompanied by . . . revisability”: Liberalism, Community and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 60.

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apparently settled matters have since been opened to dispute. In this respect it offers a more flexible approach to investigating the limits of agreement than the pluralist alternative. Although the quest for consensus on fundamental matters is not a project that political liberals should officially endorse, they should nevertheless take account of the fact that many citizens are engaged in such a quest and recognize that at least some of these quests have a public dimension. The question is how (or whether) we can show respect for these aspirations while nevertheless continuing to treat our existing disagreements as reasonable. The fallibilist response to this challenge does not require that all citizens view politics as a truth-seeking enterprise, but it does require that we view the public sphere as an arena in which the truth-seeking activities of all citizens are to be respected. By allowing a great deal of flexibility on the question of whether consensus might be achieved on any particular issue, this fallibilist narrative is able to make sense of the lived experience of those whose narrative commitments depend on this possibility, although, as I have emphasized, it does not require that this possibility be realized. Some will be skeptical that the quest for ultimate truth of any kind is a valuable endeavor, and they are as free as anyone else to propagate this view should they choose to do so. Some will relish the chance to defend and question their own views, modifying, extending, and perhaps abandoning them as they encounter others with different but similarly deep convictions. Some will remain dogmatic, unwilling or unable to call their own beliefs into question. This last group poses the greatest challenge to a liberal polity, but even they can be accommodated within the fallibilist scheme: if they are convinced that their views are fated to be agreed to and (or) that it is their duty to pursue such agreement, they are free to try to persuade their fellow citizens of the publicity of their views, and should they fail at this, they may nevertheless seek to propagate those views in nonpublic venues through any noncoercive means they deem fit. Anyone who is not so pessimistic or cynical as to think that his beliefs can gain adherents only through force should be amenable to such an arrangement. 5. Fallibilism without Skepticism A deeper objection to the fallibilist narrative centers around the question of whether it is reasonable to expect all citizens to regard their

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nonpublic beliefs as being fallible. Fallibilism is typically taken to describe a willingness to acknowledge that a particular belief that one holds might, under appropriate circumstances, be shown to be false. The thoroughgoing fallibilist holds that all human knowledge is partial and therefore open to revision—a point of view that, in the orthodox Millian conception, entails the ethical responsibility of striving to improve one’s own beliefs by seeking out and responding to those who challenge them.15 It is clear that neither of these claims will be congenial (as Mill well knew) to those who rest their beliefs on special revelation or who view them as being embedded in a tradition that must be taken as valid on its own terms. Indeed, Willmoore Kendall, in a critical appraisal of Mill’s essay On Liberty, argues that the notion that “each competing idea is at most a partial truth . . . is incompatible with religious or any other belief.”16 This line of argument raises an objection to the fallibilist narrative that is identical in kind to the one that we have been urging against the pluralist alternative. That is, many citizens hold that their most cherished beliefs are not open to doubt; that to question them would be (say) to commit blasphemy or to deny a constitutive aspect of their identity. We must therefore not only show that the fallibilist narrative does not require that citizens regard their fundamental commitments as being dubious in this sense; we must also explain why a position that does not require this can properly be called “fallibilistic.” In fact, some have argued that the pluralist narrative itself is not robust enough to ground the norm of public justifiability and that political liberalism must rest upon the stronger claim that a belief that cannot be publicly justified is to that extent dubious. Brian Barry, for example, has argued that the only way to move from the claim that 15. “In the case of any person whose judgment is really deserving of confidence, how has it become so? Because he has kept his mind open to criticism of his opinions and conduct. Because it has been his practice to listen to all that could be said against him; to profit by as much of it as was just, and expound to himself, and upon occasion to others, the fallacy of what was fallacious. Because he has felt, that the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner”: Mill, On Liberty, pp. 23–24. 16. Willmoore Kendall, “The ‘Open Society’ and Its Fallacies,” American Political Science Review 54 (1960):975 (my emphasis).

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public ends should be justifiable to the further claim that this justification should be conducted in terms that are acceptable to all citizens is to require that we adopt an attitude of “moderate scepticism” toward our nonpublic beliefs. Otherwise, he argues, citizens could legitimately appeal to their nonpublic views in discourses of political justification, because these views would be, from their point of view, perfectly justifiable.17 Moderate skepticism plays exactly the same role in Barry’s defense of political liberalism that the pluralist narrative plays for Rawls and Larmore; indeed he argues that the pluralist narrative itself presupposes a kind of skepticism, although they flatly deny this.18 Barry’s argument turns on the claim “not simply that this [skeptical] premise can do the job [of motivating a commitment to the norm of public justifiability] . . . [but] that it is the only one that can”; in other words, that no other coherent grounding for this norm exists.19 It should be clear that any objections that can be raised against the pluralist narrative from the standpoint of inclusiveness will apply with equal if not greater force to Barry’s position. If the fallibilist narrative is to offer an improvement in this regard, we must therefore be able to show that it does not depend upon the kind of skepticism that he invokes. We have already seen that the pluralist narrative, unlike traditional ontological or moral pluralism, makes no claim about the nature of value or of the good, but only about the ability of human beings to reach agreement about its nature. In this way it is able to accommodate those who hold monistic views on the former question.20 The fallibilist narrative similarly modifies the claims of epistemological fallibilism in order to accommodate those who are not willing to admit the fallibility of some of their beliefs. Indeed, this modification is already implicit in the claim that it might be possible to reach reasonable agreement on certain fundamental 17. Barry, Justice as Impartiality, pp. 168–173. 18. Ibid., p. 177. Rawls emphasizes that “[a]bove all, [political liberalism] does not argue that we should be hesitant and uncertain, much less skeptical, about our own beliefs”: Political Liberalism, p. 63; see also Larmore, Morals of Modernity, pp. 126–127, 171–174. 19. Barry, Justice as Impartiality, p. 172 (my emphasis). He does not claim to have proven this outright, but only to have shown that “alternative premises that have been put forward in recent years either presuppose skepticism or can be made coherent only if taken to entail skepticism”: ibid., p. 173. 20. For a useful discussion see Larmore, Morals of Modernity, chapter 7.

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matters—a claim that implies not only that there may be right answers to these kinds of questions but that some individual or group may already have discovered them. In other words, the fallibilist narrative allows us to exempt some of our beliefs from the claims of fallibilism if we wish, so long as we continue to attribute the contradictory beliefs of others (if we are concerned to explain such contradictions) to the fallibility of human understanding and seek to change those beliefs (again, if we are concerned to do so) only by noncoercive means. Understood in this way, fallibilism refers to the common-sense notion that human understanding is both imperfect and corrigible: we are prone to error, but not (necessarily) condemned to it. Such a view, like the pluralist alternative, allows anyone to believe that a given nonpublic belief is correct, but it is more inclusive than the pluralist account in that it allows for the possibility that such a belief might someday be shared by all. In other words, the fallibilist narrative allows citizens to view themselves as having infallible knowledge on certain matters—say, the nature of true religious belief—as long as they seek to bring that knowledge to others only by using means that respect and seek to educate their fallible understanding. Fallibilism, so understood, can account for the existence of beliefs that seem partially or completely false by our lights, but it is not understood to apply to all human knowledge as such. Nor does it depend on a skeptical premise, as Barry maintains, but rather on the claim that citizens should be allowed to form and pursue their fundamental convictions in a way that is free from illegitimate coercion—a claim that the fallibilist and pluralist narratives share in common. Barry rejects this nonskeptical defense of the norm of public justifiability on the grounds that it presupposes the overriding value of autonomous choice and thus “rest[s] on a distinctively liberal conception of the good,” thereby violating the political liberal commitment to maximal inclusiveness.21 This line of argument collapses the distinction between autonomous choice and what Stanley Benn has called “autarchic” choice: the latter requires only the absence of coercion or undue interference, while the former implies a stringent ethics of belief formation that assigns a central role to critical inquiry.22 A concern to prevent the illegitimate use of coercion is perfectly compatible with an acceptance of heteronomy in the formation of nonpublic beliefs (say, through an uncritical 21. Barry, Justice as Impartiality, p. 183. 22. Stanley I. Benn, A Theory of Freedom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), especially chapters 8-9.

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acceptance of tradition or religious dogma), and I find it hard to see how this regard for unforced or “autarchic” choice could be thought to be more controversial than the brand of skepticism that Barry defends. We have seen that the pragmatic reconstruction of the norm of public justifiability does not rest upon the claim that all of our beliefs must be justified before the tribunal of experimental intelligence, but says only that if we find that one of our beliefs is controversial and if we wish to advance that belief as a ground for public action, then we should be willing to defend it to our fellow citizens in experimental terms. The fallibilist narrative simply reverses this claim by requiring that we be willing to regard the beliefs of those with whom we disagree in similar terms as the products of a fallible but educable human understanding. Of those who refuse to admit the fallibility of their own beliefs on a certain range of questions, the fallibilist narrative requires that this certainty be coupled with a respect for the fallible beliefs of others, and a corresponding willingness to seek to change their minds only (if at all) by noncoercive means. In the meantime, such people must allow others to practice and propound their own (as they suppose) partially or completely false beliefs, but are not otherwise compelled to consider alternative ways of life or to seek out objections to their own point of view. We may call such people, borrowing Rawls’s terminology, “reasonable dogmatists.” That is, they satisfy, mutatis mutandis, Rawls’s two conditions of reasonableness as we have amended them here: they accept the fallibilist account of disagreement with which we have replaced the pluralist narrative and are, by assumption, willing to propose and abide by fair terms of cooperation given a similar willingness on the part of others to do so.23 The fallibilist narrative, like political liberalism itself or indeed any viable philosophy of politics at all, does not claim to be completely inclusive, still less to be completely neutral among the fundamental beliefs that citizens hold. To those who view what they see as the errors or perversions of their fellow citizens as being remediable only through state intervention it offers both moral condemnation and legal restraint. Nevertheless, this narrative has the considerable advantage of resting on a conception of public reason, and thus of 23. Barry considers and seems to reject the possibility that there might be such a thing as reasonable dogmatists in his “John Rawls and the Search for Stability,” Ethics 105 (1995):901–903.

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reasonableness, that must be worked out through collective inquiry over time. It therefore does not counsel despair to those whose beliefs and commitments compel them to seek a more (or less) robust form of political community than currently exists—though it does of course place limits on the manner in which such ideals can be pursued. In particular, it requires that, when we advance our beliefs as grounds for public action, we grant our fellow citizens the same freedom to choose their ends that we have enjoyed ourselves. In the meantime, we have a political obligation to tolerate alternative points of view, but not an ethical obligation to solicit viewpoints that challenge our own beliefs. In other words, while this narrative requires that we regard ourselves for political purposes as fallible beings engaged in a common project of truth seeking, it does not require that we adopt a skeptical attitude toward our nonpublic beliefs, nor that we order our private lives in accordance with the experimental ideal. It is therefore much less hostile toward existing orthodoxies than is a traditional (“comprehensive”) Millian liberalism.

6. Legitimacy without Neutrality Once we acknowledge that the free use of reason has led not simply to secularism and rationalism, as many Enlightenment liberals hoped and expected, but rather to persistent and even widening disagreement about matters of fundamental concern, much of the appeal of a liberal perfectionism is lost. We are then obliged to view liberalism either as an attempt to impose a particular way of life under the guise of freedom and toleration, or to conceive of the liberal project instead as an effort to accommodate diverse viewpoints, secular and nonsecular, rationalist and traditionalist, within a common political framework. The latter approach is, of course, the one espoused by political liberals, and it too can be understood in at least two ways. Most obviously, we might hold that our fundamental disagreements are irresolvable, and conclude that we should concentrate on defending basic liberal norms and institutions by appealing to a narrow set of principles that can be defended from within a wide range of moral and philosophical standpoints. This has been the approach taken by most political liberals to date. Alternatively, however, we might seek an explanation of the fact

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of reasonable pluralism that treats our fundamental beliefs as going concerns within, and not simply as potential threats to, the existing political order. This view, resting as it does upon a commitment to narrative openness and collective inquiry, is more consonant with the regard for experimental intelligence that we have associated with the pragmatic theory of political justification. It also allows us to defend a conception of legitimacy that is, I think, more stable and capacious than the going alternatives. If political liberalism, so understood, can accommodate a wide range of beliefs about the limits of reasonable agreement, this raises the question of how citizens holding conflicting beliefs on this matter might nevertheless agree upon legitimate public ends in the present. In other words, we must consider whether the norm of public justifiability requires that citizens who agree that a given course of public action is legitimate also agree about how it is likely to play out over time. Political liberals seem to hold at least two views on this question. Rawls views the norm of public justifiability as an injunction to seek a set of public ends that is “freestanding”; the object of an “overlapping consensus” in which “[i]t is left to citizens individually . . . to settle how they think the values of the political domain are related to other values in their comprehensive doctrine.” On this view, legitimate public ends must be compatible with a wide range of nonpublic beliefs but may be understood differently depending upon which set of beliefs is used to interpret them.24 Another strand of political liberal thought takes the norm of public justifiability to require that when choosing our public ends we abstract, insofar as possible, from any controversial premises. Thus, Larmore holds that “people should respond to points of disagreement by retreating to neutral ground” and that, when disagreement persists, they should “seek a solution of 24. Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 140. To be sure, a “freestanding” political conception must rest not only on a shared set of public ends but also on a shared endorsement of the norm of public justifiability. However, this norm can itself be understood in a number of different ways: for example, as a means of ensuring that political principles are constructed from the standpoint of reason itself, as a means of subjecting political power to norms whose validity is independent of human volition, or as a representation of the moral standpoint of a particular time and place. Although these interpretations are mutually exclusive, Rawls accepts each of them as legitimate: see the discussion in Political Liberalism, pp. 90–99.

232 • POLITICAL LIBERALISM

the problem on the basis simply of this common ground.”25 Such a view would seem to rule out the possibility that a legitimate public decision might rest upon conflicting expectations about the course of future experience. The distinction between these two understandings of what public justification might require sheds additional light on the contrast between the pluralist and fallibilist narratives as competing explanations of the fact of reasonable pluralism. If my argument is correct, the pluralist narrative fails both tests: not only does it contain a controversial claim about the limits of agreement, thus violating Larmore’s requirement that public justification rest upon “neutral ground,” but it could not consistently be affirmed from within any point of view whose coherence depends upon the possibility that all people might ultimately be convinced of its validity, and so it could not serve even as the kind of “freestanding” object of an overlapping consensus that Rawls envisions. The fallibilist narrative also fails the test of neutrality: it is surely controversial to claim not only that there might be one right answer to certain fundamental questions but that everyone might someday recognize it. On this count the choice between the pluralist and fallibilist narratives is inconclusive. However, although it is not possible for someone committed to the proposition that their fundamental beliefs might someday become the object of reasonable agreement to endorse the pluralist narrative, it would be perfectly consistent for a committed pluralist to endorse fallibilism as a political conception, though with different expectations than the monist. Such a pluralist should see no harm in the fact that some people choose to frustrate themselves in a vain quest for consensus, so long as they respect the right of their fellow citizens to refrain from endorsing either the quest or its supposed fruits unless they are freely persuaded to do so. The insight that a public end can be “freestanding” with respect to the various nonpublic beliefs that citizens hold without avoiding all points of disagreement between them has a deeper significance than its role in resolving an intramural dispute over the question of how we might best account for our fundamental disagreements. It also suggests that we can admit a looser relationship between public and nonpublic 25. He calls this the “norm of rational dialogue”: Morals of Modernity, p. 135 (my emphasis). A similar view is defended by Bruce Ackerman: see, for example, his “Why Dialogue?” Journal of Philosophy 86 (1989):5–22.

The Fact of Reasonable Pluralism • 233

reasons more generally speaking. That is, if a reason is public not because it supports a public end that all citizens endorse but because all citizens accept it as a reasonable candidate for public inquiry, then it may be possible for a course of action to be publicly justified even when citizens disagree, perhaps fundamentally, about its likely effects or its merits relative to the available alternatives. In the limit, a public end might be accepted as reasonable by parties who have diametrically opposed expectations (or hopes) about what its consequences are likely to be in practice: for example, we might agree to pursue a given course of action because we believe that this is the most efficient way of exposing its shortcomings.26 To be sure, we will (or should) be less willing to grant our provisional consent to a controversial course of public action when we believe that its consequences are likely to be especially grave. Indeed, this consideration ultimately clears the way for a pragmatic endorsement of a distinction between constitutional and ordinary decisions, although the degree of judgment required in applying such a distinction suggests that we should regard it as being one of degree rather than kind. Rawls, in spite of his more flexible understanding of what the norm of public justifiability requires, does not use this flexibility to broaden his conception of the outcomes that political liberalism might admit: he continues, as we have seen, to defend a narrow set of “constitutional” principles whose boundaries are defined by what he sees as the boundaries of reasonable agreement under modern conditions. Political liberalism, so understood, accounts for the fact of reasonable pluralism by defining away the alternative. The view that I have defended uses the greater flexibility implicit in Rawls’s view to tie the defense of political liberalism to a capacity rather than an incapacity of human understanding: the capacity for discovering the truth, broadly conceived. On this 26. This line of argument roughly parallels the one put forward by Cass R. Sunstein in his “Incompletely Theorized Agreements,” Harvard Law Review 108 (1995):17331772. Sunstein notes that “participants in liberal political culture often seek agreement on what to do rather than exactly how to think,” in part because they “hope that the reasons that have been offered are compatible with an array of deeper possible reasons, and [thus] refuse to make a choice among those deeper reasons if it is not necessary to do so”: ibid., pp. 1736n, 1737-1738. He adds that such “incompletely theorized agreements may be valuable when what is sought is moral evolution over time” because “[a] completely theorized judgment . . . would be unable to accommodate changes in facts or values”: ibid., p. 1749.

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account, we can attribute our disagreements to imperfections in understanding, but we need make no larger claim as to whether those imperfections can be overcome. It would be foolish to deny that the idea of a plurality of freely chosen human goods is especially congenial to the modern temperament. Nevertheless, we should be willing to show respect for those who do not share this view by admitting for political purposes the possibility that consensus might someday be achieved on matters of fundamental concern. Whether citizens pursue this possibility is left to their own judgment; whether it can ultimately be realized must be left to the tribunal of experience. In the meantime, we should treat others’ beliefs on these matters, to the extent that they differ from our own, as partial products of human understanding, and show respect for those who disagree with us by refraining from imposing our own beliefs by force. Political liberals seek to refine the narrative self-understandings of modern democratic societies in such a way that they can serve as a useful guide for thinking about the legitimate ordering of public life. In this spirit I have offered a pragmatic reconstruction of political liberal principles that has, I think, a firmer basis in the narrative commitments of modern democracies than the going alternatives and that does not depend for its motivational force upon an appeal to a particular set of public ends. I have been guided throughout by the conviction that the idea of a political liberalism is an especially fertile one, that its force extends well beyond its origins in Kant’s practical philosophy, and that its implications extend well beyond the role it has come to play in the defense of Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness. As we have seen, this pragmatic reconstruction of political liberalism requires that we leave the boundaries and content of public reason, as well as the scope of application of the norm of public justifiability, to be worked out through a process of collective inquiry over time. Political liberalism so understood is by its nature an unfinished (and perhaps unfinishable) project. Nevertheless, as halting and imperfect as our efforts are bound to be, an ongoing commitment to the task of public justification offers the best hope for establishing a political order that can accommodate our differences while preserving our ability to take intelligent action on the many pressing challenges that we face. In this respect it does justice not only to our moral commitments but also to the practical demands of the world in which we live.

CONCLUSION

Liberalism after Minimalism

In the end, the measure of a work of political philosophy (or, indeed, of any work of philosophy) lies not so much in the answers that it provides as in the questions that it raises and to which it gives a particular salience. As I said at the outset, my intention in this book has not been to offer a solution to what I see as the leading dilemma facing modern societies: that of balancing a commitment to accommodate the various kinds of diversity that we find in those societies with the pressing need to articulate and pursue alternatives to the emerging social and political order. Nor, indeed, do I mean to imply that such a “solution” is necessarily available—that attractive alternatives exist or that we will find ourselves able to articulate and pursue them. A wide range of responses to the current state of affairs, from optimism to stoicism to deep anxiety, are compatible with the position that I have defended. I do, of course, have my own (partial and tentative) views on these matters, but, as I have emphasized, we do not and cannot know which of these responses (if any) is most appropriate until we have carried out the course of action that each of them implies—though it is nevertheless the case that our existing beliefs and expectations will at least to some extent determine the range of possibilities that we choose to explore. Rather than try to spell out a concrete strategy for political action, or even to suggest a definite attitude that we should adopt toward the emerging order, my aim instead has been to reorient the terms of debate in contemporary discourses of justification so that our attention can be directed more fruitfully toward this particular set of concerns. 235

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Some readers will no doubt be disappointed to find that a book that began by criticizing the abstract character of much contemporary political thought has itself remained at a fairly high level of abstraction. In part this disappointment misunderstands my intentions, and in part it misunderstands (I think) the nature and aims of political theory itself. To begin with the latter point, it is by no means clear that there is any necessary link between the level of abstraction at which a work of political theory operates and the extent to which it is effectively engaged with practical concerns. Indeed, the more basic our concerns, the more likely it is that our response to them will have to be expressed at a high level of generality. Much of the contemporary handwringing about the “relevance” of political theory seems to me to miss this essential point. This is not to say of course that works of “applied” political theory cannot be of great value or that they are in general less significant or important than their more abstract counterparts. In the end, all a pragmatist need say is that different modes of theorizing are suited for different sets of purposes and that we should therefore tailor our theoretical approach to the problem at hand. To rule out or devalue certain approaches ahead of time is to imply that certain kinds of problems are not important, and this is an extravagant and probably foolish claim to make: it is to say, on the one hand, that political theorists should not seek to engage the beliefs and practices of their own time and place, and on the other, that they should not be concerned to rethink those beliefs and practices in any fundamental way. There is, however, a kind of abstraction to which I do mean to object: one that arises not from an indifference to or a disregard of practical political concerns but rather from a particular set of views about the nature and aims of political justification. That is, I believe that a misguided preoccupation with identifying transparently valid premises from which discourses of political justification can safely proceed, coupled with an (appropriately) heightened appreciation of the extent to which modern democracies are characterized by deep moral, philosophical, and cultural differences, has given rise to a growing reluctance on the part of political theorists to say anything very definite at all about the public ends that we ought to pursue. As we have seen, this tendency is to be found not only in those theoretical approaches that leave controversial matters of public concern to be resolved through a favored set of political procedures but also, and to an even greater extent, in

Conclusion • 237

those that are reluctant to make substantive claims either about the nature of our disagreements or about the means by which they might be adjudicated. We cannot of course do without substantive ends any more than we can ignore the challenge of arriving at norms of public action that can be justified to citizens holding a wide variety of beliefs and commitments. Rather than seek a minimal starting point from which uncontroversial conclusions can be drawn, then, we must admit that any public end worth pursuing will be substantive in a way that makes it potentially controversial. My aim has been to construct a theory of political justification that takes account of this basic insight. I began in Part I by emphasizing that, from a pragmatic standpoint, the meaning and import of any belief lies in its implications for practice and that we therefore cannot assess the validity of a doubtful belief until it has been acted upon. Because there are always an indefinite number of uncertain beliefs upon which we may be tempted to act, this means that discourses of justification must seek to motivate a commitment to test one set of beliefs rather than another. For the pragmatist, justification is not a matter of determining which of our beliefs is justified but, rather, which of our beliefs we should seek to justify, and we cannot answer that question without appealing, directly or indirectly, to the desires and inclinations of those to whom it is posed. This requires, among other things, that we construct a narrative that shows that a given course of action is consistent with the beliefs and commitments of the individual or group that is to carry it out. It follows that for discourses of political justification to get under way we must first identify a set of narrative self-understandings that the citizens of a given society can be expected to share and that therefore provides a motivational basis for public action as well as a common standpoint from which public disagreements can be adjudicated. Of course, given the diversity of beliefs and commitments that we find in modern societies, this narrative is bound to be fragmentary and inchoate at best. It therefore requires as its complement a moral commitment to explore the possibilities of political association in a way that respects the variety of beliefs and commitments that we hold as individuals. The pragmatic response to the first challenge has been, as we saw in Part II, to appeal to a historical narrative within which the enormous success of scientific modes of inquiry in achieving human ends sheds light on the proper aims of a democratic society. This narrative suggests

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that we should give particular weight to the development of the human capacity for experimental intelligence and seek to create or extend opportunities for this faculty to be applied in public life. Because this narrative appeals to the authority of a set of practices to which the citizens of modern societies are all in some sense committed, it provides a point of orientation for discourses of political justification that we can reasonably expect them to share. And because this point of orientation places the burden of proof on those who wish to deny that the experimental capacities of certain people should be developed or applied in a given case, it provides a principled basis for defending an egalitarian politics. Nevertheless, it is important to emphasize that this narrative focuses our attention on the problem of bringing our experimental intelligence to bear in public life without picking out any particular solution to that problem. Given our collective uncertainty with regard to whether and how the experimental ideal might be realized, this approach leaves the prospective possibilities of public life largely undetermined, despite the efforts of some pragmatists to derive more substantive implications from it. This indeterminacy brings us to the second component of a pragmatic theory of political justification: the articulation and defense of a moral commitment to explore these possibilities in a respectful manner. As we saw in Part III, the political liberal conception of legitimacy holds that we should show respect for our fellow citizens by seeking to justify political decisions in terms that they can accept. We have taken this to mean in pragmatic terms that a public end is legitimate to the extent that all citizens are willing to accept it as a reasonable candidate for experimental inquiry. Because inquiry is by nature an uncertain endeavor, and because it often results in the transformation of our beliefs and commitments, it follows from this pragmatic understanding of political liberal principles that a public end can be publicly justifiable even if we do not agree on its merits relative to the available alternatives. What gives this standard its teeth is the likelihood that certain public ends that seem reasonable today will not seem reasonable ten, fifty, or a hundred years from now (and vice versa). The legitimacy of existing social and political arrangements, as well as our ability to consider and pursue alternatives to them, therefore depends upon our willingness to tolerate the existence of a range of controversial but publicly justifiable policies and upon our ongoing commitment to interrogate

Conclusion • 239

the beliefs and expectations upon which those policies rest. Only in this way can we ensure, at least in principle, that substantive alternatives to the emerging order can be tested in practice and to ensure that such testing is done in a way that shows respect for the experimental intelligence of each citizen. Political liberalism, so understood, accommodates our disagreements in such a way that the limits of consensus, and thus of political community itself, can be explored fairly and intelligently over time. Needless to say, this way of describing the aims of political justification raises difficulties of its own: as I have indicated, this study does more to define a particular set of problems than to suggest a solution to them. To begin with, it is not clear that we can be confident that modern conditions will reliably generate the kind of dissatisfaction and doubt that are necessary if significant inquiry into the possibilities of social and political life is to be undertaken. As we have seen, the experience of doubt becomes possible only within a narrative framework that specifies the conditions under which we might be persuaded to revise our existing beliefs. These frameworks are, under the best of circumstances, quite resilient in the face of countervailing evidence, and this is especially likely to be true when the relationships among a given course of action, its consequences, and the expectations under which it was undertaken are very complex, as is usually the case in public life. These difficulties are amplified by the fact that we generally have a strong affective attachment to the narrative self-understandings that we happen to hold, however fragmentary or even incoherent they might be. Because these narrative frameworks define our very sense of self, they often lead even the most conscientious inquirers to seek out sources of information that reinforce rather than challenge their existing beliefs and commitments. Given the formidable internal obstacles to the exercise of experimental intelligence, it is by no means clear that we will be able to create or sustain a commitment to engage in collective inquiry in a way that challenges the terms of the emerging order. The external obstacles to the effective application of experimental intelligence are no less formidable, and it is in some respects more difficult to see how they might be surmounted. To take only the most obvious example, the amount of diversity in the world has declined dramatically on the dimension of economic organization over the last twenty-five years or so, and one does not have to be a Marxian

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reductionist to believe that few factors shape our moral and ethical horizons as profoundly as the economic order under which we live and our position within that order. This fact poses particular difficulties for the position that I have defended here, because it is not obvious how we can test the merits of competing courses of action in an area such as this, in which a high degree of interdependence makes it difficult if not impossible for substantially different policies to be implemented simultaneously. This task becomes all the more difficult when the prevailing set of practices has not only been tested more thoroughly than its competitors but has in many respects succeeded in its own terms, so that a certain degree of caution in deviating from it would seem to be warranted. These considerations encourage us to examine more closely the relationship between the liberal ideal of inclusion and the constraints imposed by economic “knowledge” and, in particular, the extent to which economic homogeneity threatens to overwhelm all other forms of difference. Political theorists are often ill equipped to address these issues, in part because they tend to treat diversity as a fundamental fact about, rather than a fragile achievement of, modern societies. As I have suggested, I am not entirely confident that these difficulties can be overcome. Certainly, any effort to overcome them will in the nature of the case be of uncertain promise. Perhaps it is their very intractability that has tended to deflect the attention of political theorists in a minimalist direction. Nevertheless, I believe that these are the kinds of problems that we are vocationally committed to addressing, and the aim of this book has been to articulate a theory of political justification that might allow us to address them more fruitfully. By shifting our attention away from a concern with identifying transparent premises and toward a concern with rendering uncertain beliefs and commitments susceptible to practical verification, I hope to have shown that the debates surrounding issues of justification are neither as sterile nor as immutable as some are inclined to believe. Indeed, it is only when we stop searching for a “safe” starting point from which discourses of justification can proceed, and commit ourselves instead to the project of testing controversial but publicly justifiable beliefs in practice, that we can create the conditions under which genuine alternatives to the emerging order might be identified. If we are willing to attend to the challenge of sustaining a commitment to articulate and pursue alterna-

Conclusion • 241

tives to prevailing beliefs and practices in public life, then we must also be willing to see ourselves not as arbitrators but rather as principled partisans in this enterprise. Only then can the task of reconstructing public reason contribute to the larger and more significant task of reconstructing the social world along genuinely human lines.

INDEX

Ackerman, Bruce, 3n, 154n, 190n, 232n agonistic democracy. See democracy, agonistic Aristotle, 78 Ayer, A. J., 57–59

Cohen, Joshua, 25n, 29n, 30, 158n, 199, 200n Connolly, William E., 32–33, 35, 37n Dahl, Robert A., 111n, 142n Damico, Alfonso J., 124n, 134n, 147n Davis, Stephen T., 59n deliberative democracy. See democracy, deliberative democracy, 15, 101, 118, 120, 153, 156; agonistic, 22, 24–25, 31–38, 41–42; deliberative, 22, 26–31, 32, 36, 37, 41–42, 157, 158n, 193, 194n (See also “directly-deliberative polyarchy”); Dewey on, 98, 101, 119, 122–130, 132–135, 137, 140–148; elite, 111–113, 115, 119, 135; participatory, 98, 111, 112, 117, 119, 121, 128; Rorty on agonistic democracy, 35n; and science, 92, 98, 112–115, 137, 236–237 Dennett, Daniel, 73n Dewey, John, 19, 72n, 95, 151; criticism of, 100, 102, 107, 119; on democracy, 92n, 98, 101, 119, 122–130, 132–135, 137, 140–148; on experimental intelligence, 141, 144, 147–148; Hegelianism of, 15, 122, 125, 126–133, 142, 144, 148; and James, 10n, 68–69, 126, 128; on liberalism, 126, 147–149; pluralism of, 126, 133, 142; political thought of,

Bacon, Francis, 105 Bain, Alexander, 54, 62 Barber, Benjamin R., 101n Barry, Brian, 170n, 211n, 226–229 Benhabib, Seyla, 27, 30, 159n, 194n Benn, Stanley I., 228 Bentley, Arthur F., 184n Berlin, Isaiah, 209n Bernstein, Richard J., 5n, 101n, 124n Bohman, James, 203n Bourne, Randolph, 99, 107–108, 111, 140 Brodsky, Garry M., 12n Brooks, Van Wyck, 99 Bruner, Jerome, 73n, 74, 81–82 Caspary, William R., 124n Clifford, W. K., 47, 50–51, 52–53, 57, 60n, 69, 86, 89 coercion: central feature of public life, 40, 43, 115; importance of justifying publicly, 81, 157–162, 170, 178, 180, 189, 192, 202, 210, 215, 221–223, 228; means of securing consensus, 209, 219–220 243

244 • Index

Dewey, John (continued) 15, 21n, 101, 110, 119, 122–149; on pragmatism, 6–8, 10, 82n, 104n, 105; Rorty on, 122–125, 140; theory of valuation of, 138–139; on the “will to believe,” 68–69 Diggins, John Patrick, 102n “directly-deliberative polyarchy,” 199–201 disagreement: distinguishing feature of modern societies, 16, 41, 97, 146, 158, 160, 171, 183, 208, 210–211, 213, 236; permanent, 160, 179, 211–212, 218, 230; reasonable, 160–161, 163–167, 176, 209n, 211, 215, 217–220, 222–223. See also diversity; pluralism diversity: accommodation of, 3–5, 14–15, 25, 42, 92–93, 148, 153, 167, 230, 235; distinguishing feature of modern societies, 3, 5, 14, 21, 25, 44, 237, 240. See also disagreement; pluralism Dorf, Michael C., 199, 200n Downs, Anthony, 111n Dworkin, Ronald, 3n, 154n, 164n Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 101 empiricism, 53–54, 59, 61, 105, 126n, 165n Estlund, David, 170n experimental intelligence: development of, 15, 101, 109–111, 113–119, 121, 129, 137, 155–156, 177, 179–180, 231, 238–239; Dewey on, 141, 144, 147–148; respect for, 15, 177, 203, 215, 222, 224, 229, 239 fallibilism, 16, 164, 212–213, 221–229, 232 Festenstein, Matthew, 6n, 124n Fish, Stanley, 99n Fott, David, 124n Frank, Waldo, 99, 100n Gale, Richard M., 51n Galston, William, 183n Greenawalt, Kent, 162n Green, T. H., 131n

Habermas, Jürgen, 21n, 26–31, 36n, 158n Hare, Peter H., 59n Hegel, G. W. F., 15, 122, 125, 126–133, 142, 144, 146n, 148 Hick, John, 48 Hobbes, Thomas, 101, 105 Hobhouse, L. T., 52n Holmes, Stephen, 29n Honig, Bonnie, 33–34 Honneth, Axel, 134n Hume, David, 53–54, 105 idealism, 122, 126–128, 130, 142 James, William: criticism of, 48–50, 64; and Dewey, 10n, 68–69, 126, 128; and Lippmann, 110; on metaphysics, 7–8, 145n; and Peirce, 10n, 68–70; pluralism of, 55, 69–70; on pragmatism, 11n, 13n, 82n, 102, 104n, 109; on truth, 10n, 14, 49–51, 56, 58, 63, 65–67, 69; on the “will to believe,” 6, 15, 43, 47–71, 75, 80–81, 86, 89 Johnson, James, 101n, 108n justification, 3, 6, 44, 79, 82; motivational nature of, 40, 44, 90, 155, 237; pragmatic theory of, 8–13, 14, 17, 23, 39–45, 51, 61, 67, 70, 73, 76, 81, 82n, 84n, 89, 90, 92, 104, 116, 121, 125, 146, 157, 162, 164, 166, 180, 204–206, 231, 237–238; prospective nature of, 14, 30, 39–40, 42–44, 68, 70–71, 72, 75, 81, 86, 89, 93, 97, 155, 176, 195, 206. See also norm of public justifiability Kallen, Horace M., 133n Kant, Immanuel, 22, 27n, 34n, 36, 77, 146n, 164, 214; Peirce’s debt to, 126n; and political liberalism, 154, 158, 221, 234; and public reason, 154, 159; and reasonable pluralism, 210–212 Kaufman-Osborn, Timothy V., 138n Kendall, Willmoore, 226 Kennedy, Gail, 50n, 139 Kerby, Anthony Paul, 73n Kloppenberg, James T., 124n Knight, Jack, 101n, 108n

Index • 245 Kuhn, Thomas S., 84n, 113n Kymlicka, Will, 224n Lakatos, Imre, 84n Larmore, Charles; on political liberalism, 3n, 154n, 160n, 161n, 166n, 210n; on public reason, 158n, 164n, 176n, 231–232; on reasonable pluralism, 29n, 146n, 183n, 209, 211, 218, 227 liberalism, 219, 221; Dewey’s, 126, 147–149; ideological, 204; perfectionist, 22, 230; Rorty’s, 123–125; tradition of, 3–4, 34, 131n, 146, 158, 163, 167, 208, 214–215, 223–224. See also political liberalism Lippmann, Walter, 110, 112–113, 119, 135 Locke, John, 105, 164, 214 Lovejoy, Arthur O., 12n, 50, 51n MacIntyre, Alasdair, 73–74, 77–79, 85 Madden, Edward H., 59n Madison, James, 184n Manicas, Peter T., 130n Marcuse, Herbert, 100n Marxism, 87, 239 Miller, Dickinson S., 48, 50, 56n, 62 Mill, John Stuart, 3, 16, 164, 200n, 212, 214, 221, 226, 230 minimalism, in political thought, 24–25, 31–32, 97, 153–154, 237, 240 Mink, Louis, 73n, 81–82 Montaigne, Michel de, 218 Moon, J. Donald, 194n Mouffe, Chantal, 36n, 93n Mumford, Lewis, 99–100, 103, 107 Murdoch, Iris, 55n Murphy, Arthur E., 140 Nagel, Thomas, 3n, 154n, 156n narrative, 15, 36–37, 44, 72–94; conflicts within and among, 82–83, 87–89; and context, 74, 78–79, 86–87, 104; fallibilist, 221–229, 232; pluralist, 179, 185, 211–229, 232; political liberal, 168, 179, 180, 185, 203, 210, 215, 217, 219, 234; pragmatic, 98, 101, 104, 106, 117, 155, 166, 177, 231, 237–238; in public discourse, 84–85, 90–93,

97–98, 116, 155–156, 196, 214, 237, 239; Rorty on, 72n, 78–79; and teleology, 77–80; and the “will to believe,” 75–76, 81–82, 89 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 136n Nietzsche, Friedrich, 22, 34, 36 norm of public justifiability, 156, 157, 159–162, 165, 167, 169–172, 175, 178–179, 182–194, 201, 203–204, 207, 212, 214–217, 219–220, 222–224, 226–229, 231, 233–234. See also political liberalism; public reason O’Neill, Onora, 159n Pascal, Blaise, 66 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 126, 128; on belief and doubt, 22, 39, 62, 81; and James, 10n, 68–70; Kant, debt to, 126n; on metaphysics, 7; on pragmatism, 8–13, 82n, 99n, 104n, 105n, 130, 196n; on the “will to believe,” 68–70 Perry, Ralph Barton, 56n, 59n Plato, 9, 143n pluralism: Dewey’s, 126, 133, 142; distinguishing feature of modern societies, 43–44, 94, 116, 145, 165; James’s, 55, 69–70; Kant and reasonable pluralism, 210–212; Larmore on reasonable pluralism, 29n, 146n, 183n, 209, 211, 218, 227; moral, 209n, 227; permanent, 29, 31–32, 147–148, 161; and political liberalism, 146–148, 161, 183, 209–233; in public life, 42, 91, 155, 163, 165; Rawls on reasonable pluralism, 29n, 147n, 160, 183n, 209–211, 217–218, 227, 229; reasonable, 146n, 147, 161n, 169, 183, 209–222, 224, 230–233; theory of political power, 142. See also disagreement; diversity; narrative, pluralist political liberalism, 22, 92–93, 155, 181; conception of legitimacy, 16, 118, 154, 156–157, 158, 159–160, 162, 164, 166–167, 170–171, 175–180, 183–185, 186–189, 191, 201, 203, 215, 216–217, 219, 224, 238; and “constitutional essentials,” 16, 154, 156–157, 161–162, 169–171, 177–178, 185, 189, 190–193,

246 • Index

political liberalism (continued) 202, 212, 220, 222, 233; and fallibilism, 16, 164, 212–213, 221–229, 232; and “justice as fairness,” 4n, 168–171, 177, 234; Kantian roots of, 154, 158, 221, 234; Larmore on, 3n, 154n, 160n, 161n, 166n, 210n; narrative basis of, 168, 179, 180, 185, 203, 210, 215, 217, 219, 234; and pluralism, 29n, 146–148, 161–162, 171–172, 183, 208–233; and pragmatism, 2, 154, 156–157, 162–163, 164–167, 172, 175, 176–177, 178, 180, 185, 189, 194, 203, 208, 219–220, 229, 231, 234, 238; Rawls on, 3n, 4n, 146n, 154n, 159n, 161n, 164n, 168–170, 177, 213–214; role of respect in, 160n, 163, 177, 179, 182, 185, 186–189, 191–194, 198, 201, 203, 206–207, 215, 221–222, 224–225, 228–229, 234, 238–239; and skepticism, 163, 211, 213, 227–230. See also liberalism; norm of public justifiability; public reason Posner, Richard A., 99n, 108 “pragmatic acquiescence,” 99, 101, 119, 145 pragmatic maxim, 8, 9, 99n, 130, 196n pragmatism: contextualism of, 5, 6, 11, 13, 41, 99, 103–106, 116–117, 119, 140–141; Dewey on, 6–8, 10, 82n, 104n, 105; James on, 11n, 13n, 82n, 102, 104n, 109; and metaphysics, 7–8, 23, 104, 121–125, 137, 142, 144–145; and moral inquiry, 10–13; Peirce on, 8–13, 82n, 99n, 104n, 105n, 130, 196n; and political liberalism, 2, 154, 156–157, 162–163, 164–167, 172, 175, 176–177, 178, 180, 185, 189, 194, 203, 208, 219–220, 229, 231, 234, 238; Rorty on, 5n, 11n, 99n, 100, 103–104, 106, 122–125; Russell on, 9–10, 68n, 102–104, 106; and science, 9–10, 92, 98, 101, 105, 112–116, 117, 119, 137, 155, 237; theory of inquiry, 6, 15, 22–23, 100, 104, 105–106, 108–110, 124, 133, 137, 145, 155–156, 164; theory of justification, 8–13, 14, 17, 23, 39–45, 51, 61, 67, 70, 73, 76, 81, 82n, 84n, 89, 90, 92, 104, 116, 121, 125,

146, 157, 162, 164, 166, 180, 204–206, 231, 237–238; theory of meaning, 8, 11, 104, 125, 126n, 146, 164, 196; theory of truth, 10n; tradition of political thought, 11, 15, 44, 92, 98–101, 106–108, 110–111, 112, 118–119, 121–125, 129, 137, 140, 142, 145, 149; via media, 6–7, 16; and the “will to believe,” 51, 67–70. See also narrative, pragmatic; “pragmatic acquiescence”; pragmatic maxim Price, H. H., 52, 53n, 57n priority of right over good, 154, 168–171 proceduralism, 14, 24–27, 30–32, 36–38, 164n, 169–170, 190–192, 236 public justifiability. See norm of public justifiability public reason, 93, 158, 215, 241; contextual basis of, 159, 171; disagreement regarding, 157, 160–162, 169–170, 172–177, 181, 183, 185–189, 190–191, 195, 200–201, 203; experimental basis of, 157, 164–166, 172, 194–195, 203, 211, 229, 238–239; federal model of, 199–202; flexibility of, 157, 167, 172, 176–177, 187, 193–194, 197, 202, 203, 213, 221, 222, 224–225, 233–234; judicial model of, 190–194, 202; Kantian roots of, 154, 159; Larmore on, 158n, 164n, 176n, 231–232; manipulation and deceit in the use of, 16, 179, 181–185, 187, 191–192, 194, 196, 198; Rawls on, 93n, 156n, 158n, 171n, 173, 174n, 176n, 182n, 186, 188n, 190n, 193–194, 231–233; sincerity in the use of, 185–190, 195–198, 201, 203. See also norm of public justifiability; political liberalism Purcell, Edward A., 111n Putnam, Hilary, 49n, 60n Quine, W. V. O., 12n Rawls, John: on “justice as fairness,” 4n, 168–170, 177, 234; on political liberalism, 3n, 4n, 146n, 154n, 159n, 161n, 164n, 168–170, 177, 213–214; on public reason, 93n, 156n, 158n, 171n, 173, 174n, 176n, 182n, 186, 188n, 190n,

Index • 247 193–194, 231–233; on reasonable pluralism, 29n, 147n, 160, 183n, 209–211, 217–218, 227, 229 Rockefeller, Steven C., 126n Rorty, Richard, 145; on agonistic democracy, 35n; on Dewey, 122–125, 140; on liberalism, 123–125; on narrative, 72n, 78–79; on pragmatism, 5n, 11n, 99n, 100, 103–104, 106, 122–125 Royce, Josiah, 138n Russell, Bertrand: evidentialism of, 47, 50–51, 69, 86, 89; on pragmatism, 9–10, 68n, 102–104, 106; on the “will to believe,” 47, 64–65, 68n Ryan, Alan, 148n Sabel, Charles F., 199, 200n Sacks, Oliver, 73n Sandel, Michael, 159n, 161n Santayana, George, 102–104, 106 Scanlon, T. M., 156n, 182 Schumpeter, Joseph A., 111n science: and democracy, 92, 98, 112–115, 137; and pragmatism, 9–10, 92, 98, 101, 105, 112, 115–116, 117, 119, 155, 237 Shapiro, Ian, 111n, 190n Shusterman, Richard, 124n Singer, Edgar A., 48n Singer, Marcus G., 51n skepticism, 163, 211, 213, 227–230

Sleeper, R. W., 125n, 126n Smiley, Marion, 149n Sunstein, Cass R., 233n Taylor, Charles, 49n, 73, 77–79 Thayer, H. S., 11n Truman, David, 142n, 184n Waldron, Jeremy, 3n, 158n, 165n, 192n, 216n, 221 Wallas, Graham, 138n Walzer, Michael, 87n, 91n Weber, Max, 58n Wenar, Leif, 213n Wernham, C. S., 66n Westbrook, Robert B., 100n, 107n, 124n White, Hayden, 73n White, Morton, 58n White, Stephen K., 32, 33n “will to believe,” 6, 15, 43, 47–71, 75, 80–81, 89; defined, 47; Dewey on, 68–69; “economics” of belief, 52–53; “foolish-not-to-believe” doctrine, 66; narrative and, 75–76, 81–82, 89; Peirce on, 68–70; pragmatism and, 51, 67–70; “right to believe” and, 50n, 52; Russell on, 47, 64–65, 68n Williams, Bernard, 53, 62 Wolin, Sheldon S., 4n, 93n Young, Iris Marion, 170n