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ABSTRACT
The nature of state governance in consolidated liberal democracies has important implications for the ideal theory debate. The states of these societies are polycentric. Decision-making power within them is disaggregated across multiple sites. This rules out one major justification for ideal theory. On this influential view, the ideal furnishes a blueprint of the morally perfect society that we should strive to realise. This justification is not viable in consolidated liberal democracies because their states lack an Archimedean point from which the institutional structure as a whole can be designed to accord with the true ideal – whichever it might be. However, knowledge of the ideal can still aid agents in those societies to determine the worth of more modest political objectives other than the ideal itself.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Jonathan Benson, Brookes Brown, Billy Christmas, James Goddard, Selina Hofstetter, Temi Ogunye, Mark Pennington, Cain Shelley and Laura Valentini for comments on earlier versions of this paper. I would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers at CRISPP for very helpful feedback and suggestions during the review process.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. I should stress at the outset that I offer not a critique of the target justification tout court but rather a critique of its application to this particular institutional setting.
2. Some have also held that knowledge of the ideal can be valuable even if it has no practical application (E.g. Swift, Citation2008, pp. 366–367). Call this the intrinsic value justification. I offer no objection to this but mention it only in an endnote because it is not an action-guiding justification for ideal theorising.
3. Though Simmons’ formulation here is implausibly strong. Instead of ‘all injustices,’ I read: ‘a very wide range of injustices.’
4. I intend the notion of the ‘institutional structure’ to correspond with the Rawlsian notion of the ‘basic structure.’ Note that systemic reform need not be pursued all at once. We could break down a systemic outcome into a long list of discrete outcomes to be pursued by many corresponding discrete reforms.
5. Some might be surprised by the claim that the libertarian minimal state (Nozick, Citation1974) also constitutes a systemic outcome. Consider that, at the very least, the attainment of the libertarian ideal would require the reform of an extensive array of institutional rules in the sense of abolishing many of those rules. More positively, however, it would also require the specification of extensive property rights across many domains.
6. Valentini (Citation2017), Meckled-Garcia (Citation2008) and Nagel (Citation1991, Chapter 6) might be characterised as defending this kind of view.
7. Though as Cohen (Citation2002, pp. 136–137) himself notes, whether Rawls actually limits the basic institutional structure solely to legally coercive rules is a matter of interpretive ambiguity.
8. I also emphasise that I distinguish between the state-centric view and Rawls’ substantive conception of ideal justice. For example, a libertarian ideal is state-centric for my purposes since it is concerned only with how coercive state rules are arranged and not private choices within those rules.
9. I thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this term.
10. I borrow the concept of monocentricity from Vincent V. Ostrom (Citation1972).
11. The critical assumption here is sufficient democratic legitimacy such that the electoral losers would still comply with the law, even if ‘grudgingly,’ to use Waldron’s language.
12. It is worth noting that an electoral majority need not even be composed of, and in many democracies typically is not, a numerical majority of the population.
13. North et al. (Citation2009, p. 10) find that subnational government spending as a proportion of total government spending is 53% for the most consolidated liberal democracies. A more recent OECD study (OECD, Citation2019, pp. 44–45) finds that it accounts for 40.4% of total government spending in OECD countries. According to the same study, in 2018 OECD subnational governments were on average responsible for 72% of housing expenditure, 65% of environmental expenditure, 47% of education expenditure, 24% of health expenditure and in 2016 for 60% of public investment. Another OECD study finds that subnational governments have a great deal of control over this spending. On average, state and regional governments control fully 70% of their tax receipts while control of 15% is shared with national governments. Local governments control fully only 13% of their receipts but subject to some limitations exercise substantial discretion over 62% (Dougherty et al., Citation2019, p. 14).
14. A listing of UK government bodies contains quite literally hundreds of distinct administrative agencies (UK Government website, Citation2021).
15. The importance of this policy area becomes apparent when we note that many believe lax lending regulations contributed to the 2008 financial crisis.
16. To take just two examples: EU directives constrain national governments from nationalising key economic assets as might be favoured by adherents of egalitarian ideals while regulatory administrative agencies rarely issue rules that advocates of libertarian ideals find congenial.
17. I appreciate that in reality, international decision-making agencies are very often unelected – or, at least, not directly elected – but here I set aside that complication.
18. I thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting I include this.
19. Recall also that with respect to those matters where the national government has direct authority over administrative agencies, the latter can retain significant de facto authority because of cognitive and epistemic constraints facing elected officials.
20. There is empirical evidence corroborating this claim. For an interesting account of how climate change adaptation policies in England have emerged through multi-level governance, see Bauer and Steurer (Citation2014). Additionally, surveying local Welsh government officials, Entwistle et al. (Citation2014) find that local services in Wales are governed simultaneously by multiple levels of government.
21. If a UK national government reversed devolution with the aim of realising an ideal, the most likely outcome would be the break-up of the Union and perhaps the resumption of civil unrest in Northern Ireland. This is unlikely to be seen as an increase in justice from the perspective of the ideal in question. I thank an anonymous reviewer for this observation.
22. The Meidner plan aimed to create a worker-controlled economy in Sweden by requiring large firms to gradually transfer equity rights to funds controlled by trade unions. The proposal was formulated by the Swedish trade union congress in the 1970s. The version actually implemented in 1984 was greatly watered down due to resistance by organised business interests and non-socialist political parties. See Meidner (Citation1993, pp. 224–225).
23. I thank an anonymous referee for pressing me on this issue.
24. This is just an illustrative simplification. I do not mean to imply that in reality just a handful of discrete reforms would add up to systemic reform.
25. It is worth taking a moment to address Amartya Sen’s famous criticism of the evaluative justification. On Sen’s view (Sen, Citation2009), knowledge of the justness of a third state-of-affairs, say I, is neither necessary nor sufficient to make a pairwise comparison between the justness of two other states-of-affairs, say in b and d. I believe Rob Jubb’s (Citation2012, p 246) response to Sen is correct:
Sen is right that ideal theory is not necessary or sufficient for judgements about justice in the here-and-now. Plenty of things that are not necessary or sufficient for some x contribute to that x though: a loving sexual relationship may not be a necessary or sufficient condition of a good life, but it would be foolish to deny that lives are generally made better by such relationships.
26. See Goodin (Citation1995, pp. 52–55) for discussion of further examples.
27. Libertarians may point to state regulations restricting private home-building as a restriction on freedom of contract favouring the wealthy at others’ expense. These rules artificially drive-up home prices, benefitting already wealthy homeowners but making it much more expensive for others to purchase property. For more on this and other examples of market-restrictions favouring the wealthy drawn from the US contest, see Lindsey and Teles (Citation2017).
28. She might reason as follows: in a counterfactual libertarian world without contractual restrictions, the currently wealthy would be less wealthy and the currently poor better off. If the contractual restrictions cannot be removed, redistribution to bring the actual world’s distribution closer to what would have occurred in the counterfactual libertarian one is justified. I here draw upon Hillel Steiner’s (Citation2013) libertarian account of an ‘exploitative price.’
29. To be sure, our libertarians could acquire control of some institutional rules currently out of their hands. But political contestation and polycentricity entail that just as they gain control of some rules, they will likely lose control of others, with the thorough control of the institutional structure necessary to attaining the ideal proving elusive.
30. One might object: why can’t they do the best they can in the short-run but still aim in the long-run to remove the polycentricity constraint and hit the target? I will turn to this objection shortly.
31. Wiens (Citation2015, p. 467) stresses similarly our epistemic ignorance of the ‘feasibility frontier.’ Particularly with respect to radical ideals, we simply lack the cognitive capacity to determine whether there is a plausible path of institutional reform from the status quo to their realisation. My claim can be distinguished from his in much the same way that it can be distinguished from that of Gaus. Even if advocates of the true ideal knew which reforms would take us to the ideal world, they would lack sufficient control of the institutional structure to instigate those reforms.
32. I thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting I make these points.
33. Gaus speaks in general terms of how ‘communities of inquiry’ or discrete ‘social networks’ may learn from one another in an open democratic society but does not describe more concrete mechanisms.
34. Admittedly, libertarians and advocates of antinomian ideals would hardly be moved by this particular reason to keep polycentricity but they should nonetheless be able to endorse some of the others.
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Kaveh Pourvand
Kaveh Pourvand is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Center for the Philosophy of Freedom, The University of Arizona. His main research interests are liberalism, collective agency and distributive justice.