A reply to Robeyns, Peter and Davis

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Notes

1. The Idea of Justice (2009), p. 415.

2. The Idea of Justice, p. 115.

3. I should mention here, however, that the existence of the ability to reason and interact does not entail that people will invariably undertake these activities. I have discussed this distinction in my response to Appiah (2009) and my comments on this in The Idea of Justice, pp. xvii–xix. The claim is not that everyone will always apply reasoning in general and public reasoning in particular to the social issues they face, but, rather, that certain understandings may emerge if they were to undertake public reasoning seriously, which they have the ability to do.

4. There is, I believe, a serious ambiguity in Robeyns's statement about ‘ideal theory’. I am concerned with disputing the viability and necessity of a ‘theory of an ideal state’ (or more precisely, of a ‘theory of a perfectly just state’). But an ‘ideal theory’ is not the same thing as ‘the theory of an ideal state’. We could have an ‘ideal theory’ of ‘non-ideal states’ that could be normatively compared – usefully, nicely and hopefully even ideally – with each other.

5. There is another ambiguity when Robeyns says that ‘judgments about the comparison of complex cases of injustice implicitly or explicitly do refer to ideals of justice’. There is a difference between ‘ideals of justice’ that motivate us (even in making comparisons between non-ideal states) and ‘identification of ideal states’, which a transcendental theory demands, and which Robeyns is engaged in defending.

6. The numerical example that Robeyns presents to buttress this argument deals with the importance of knowing feasible ‘paths’ when the future feasibilities are path dependent. That, of course, is a perfectly fine – but altogether different – issue, namely that the feasibility of different routes has to be taken into account to assess what is to be done at any point of time. The natural conclusion to emerge from this is that the relevant comparisons are between different paths (not what happens at a point of time only), and we have to assess comparatively the time streams of realizations stretching over periods of time. This is a classic issue in investment planning (it makes me feel very nostalgic since my PhD thesis on ‘the choice of techniques’ written in the 1950s was on that subject), but it is not at all clear why the need for path-based judgments is seen as yielding the conclusion that Robeyns draws. There would seem to be something of a non-sequitur here.