Political theorists as dangerous social actors

Abstract

What is the appropriate degree of abstraction from existing social facts when engaging in normative political theory? Through a focus on American Indian and other indigenous claims over historically expropriated lands, this essay argues that highly abstracted forms of normative analysis can often misunderstand the core moral problems at stake in real cases, and that they can pose moral dangers when they do so. As argued, the hard moral issues involved in indigenous land claims within countries such as Canada and the United States often have far more to do with questions about competing uses for public lands than with abstract property theory as such. The essay argues that normative theorists will often do more social good, and pose fewer dangers, when they pay close attention to the real moral challenges that social actors face on the ground than when they become captured by abstract questions with ambiguous practical importance.

Keywords:

• Ideal theory
• power
• discourse
• social context
• indigenous peoples
• land rights

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Avery Kolers, Alison McQueen, Douglas Sanderson, Cricket Keating, Luis Cabrera, Claire Rasmussen, David Kahane, Melissa Williams, Joe Carens, Chris Lebron, Bill Gorton, Larry Dodd, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Notes

1. Marx’s predictions about the character of social order after a workers’ revolution surely constitute one of the most horrifying historical examples.

2. Simply because this danger is familiar does not mean that theorists reliably avoid it. My own view is that a large proportion of ideal theory fails on this score, including much in Rawls.

3. Although this conception of discourse has been outlined by a wide range of theorists including Foucault (e.g. 1980), my portrayal is especially influenced by the concise treatment in Jakobson (1998, pp. 522–524).

4. I do not intend to suggest that powerful social parties fall primarily into the ‘opportunistic’ camp; indeed, my own expectation is that they are caught up in patterns of discourse most of the time themselves.

5. An extended version of the argument was published as Waldron (1992b); more recently, it has been restated in Waldron (2002).

6. See, for example, the grounds for evaluating indigenous claims offered in Waldron (2003, pp. 81–82).

7. For example, the social privileges that come packaged with Whiteness in many societies. Of course, one could plausibly describe these patterns as ‘inheritance’ in a broader sense.

8. Waldron does voice some concerns about the potential misuses of his arguments (e.g. Waldron (1992a, p. 27) but they show little awareness of the depth of the challenge involved.

9. In this way at least, Waldron’s argument is far more protective of the economic status quo than that of Nozick (1974).

10. Why focus on one set of social actors rather than another? If we are egalitarians of an especially trusting kind, we might feel drawn to focus on the options available to courts or legislatures. Yet, such bodies seem unlikely to be agents of justice within an unjust society, and they also constitute a profound temptation to be captured by our imaginations – although courts and legislatures are quite limited in their possibilities, they often seem far less so where any particular decision is concerned. Both might make a range of decisions in any given case, and these decisions might add up to significant social change if they occurred in just the right way; the truth that they will not is easy to forget. Thus we do best to begin analyses from a perspective closer to ground level. For an extended exploration of the grounds for this reorientation, see Kolers (2005).

11. For an indigenous view on how these discursive fields might be navigated, see, for example, Turner (2006).

12. There may be questions about whether the strategy is worth pursuing where the odds of success are low, given the opportunity costs of foregoing other strategies and goals, but I assume that any indigenous group will have to consider these issues and judge relative viability for themselves.

13. Those who know Waldron’s work are likely to protest that he rejects this assumption about the legitimacy of cultural rights (e.g. Waldron 1995b, 2000). While this is true, a detailed contextual investigation would demonstrate difficulties like those outlined here: once again, he has implausibly hopeful visions for what self‐professed liberal states might achieve in practice (e.g. Denis 1997, esp. p. 152).

14. Sometimes indigenous actors demand this as a strategy for increasing their political leverage, but even this is much less common than Waldron’s framing would suggest. For a more common indigenous view of land use see e.g. Borrows 2002, pp. 35–46.

15. States are generally far more willing to displace people to satisfy the wishes of commercial and other concerns than they are to provide additional properties to poor groups, indigenous or otherwise. Justice Clarence Thomas was surely correct when he noted that urban renewal in the United States was often code for ‘Negro removal’ (Kelo v. City of New London 2005).

16. In other words, it is to help us learn the skill of moral judgment (e.g. Thiele 2006).