The varieties of idealization and the politics of economic growth: a case study on modality and the methodology of normative political philosophy

ABSTRACT

Are societies required to pursue continual economic growth as a matter of justice? In “The Value of Economic Growth”, Julie Rose considers three arguments in favor of the need for continual economic growth, each of which revolves around the instrumental value of economic growth for promoting an important good that is needed for a just society. In each case, Rose argues that there are mechanisms other than economic growth that could allow a society to deliver the relevant goods, and thus meet the demands of justice with respect to those goods. I raise a set of issues for Rose’s argument that put pressure on the normative significance of her discussion. At the heart of these issues are ones about which possibilities Rose considers and which idealizations she makes. These issues tie into more general questions about the aims and methodology of normative work in social/political philosophy. Thus, in addition to being a contribution to the debate over the politics of economic growth, this paper can be understood partly as a case study in how reflection on these kinds of issues – ones about modality, idealization, and methodology – can matter to how we evaluate specific arguments in social/political philosophy.

KEYWORDS:

• Economic growth
• methodology of political philosophy
• Julie Rose
• idealization
• modality

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Sonu Bedi, Mark Budolfson, Herman Cappelen, John Cho, Jorah Dannenberg, David Enoch, Jesse Ferraioli, Jonah Hirsch, Nithya Kasarla, Zachary Lang, Amanda Li, Barry Maguire, Matt McKeever, Tristram McPherson, Yascha Mounk, Russ Muirhead, Jonathan Phillips, Adam Plunkett, Julie Rose, Becca Rothfeld, Adrian Russian, Wendy Salkin, Lucas Stanczyk, Jeff Weintraub, and anonymous referees for helpful discussion and feedback. This paper grew out of comments I presented (on a draft of Julie Rose’s paper “The Value of Economic Growth”) at a workshop on economic justice at Dartmouth College in 2017, which was organized by Julie Rose. Thanks to all the participants in that workshop for helpful discussion, and to Julie Rose for inviting me to comment on her paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Rawls characterizes the “basic structure” of a society as follows: “the way in which the major social institutions fit together into one system, and how they assign fundamental rights and duties and shape the division of advantages that arises through social cooperation.” (Rawls 1996, 258).

2 In this paper, I use smallcaps to designate concepts (e.g., justice), single quotes (e.g., ‘justice’) to mention words, and double quotes (e.g., “justice”) for a mix of uses, including quoting passages from other people’s work, mixes of use and mention, and scare quotes.

3 (Rawls 1999, 107, n.33).

4 For connected sentiment, see (Freeman 2007a, 106) and (Freeman 2007b, 112).

5 (Rawls 1971/1999, 175).

6 (Rose 2020). It should be noted that my set up of the intellectual context in the last paragraph, including my discussion of Rawls (and the citations and quotes I use in that discussion), draws from Rose’s own presentation of the intellectual context of her paper, which she uses to motivate her project. See (Rose 2020, 129).

7 Rose discusses Rawls’s position in further detail in (Rose Forthcoming).

8 (Rose 2020, 129).

9 (Rose 2020, 129).

10 For more on the kind of “authoritative” ought I mean to invoke here, see (McPherson and Plunkett 2017), (McPherson 2018), (Plunkett 2019), (Wodak 2019), and (Enoch 2019). Roughly, the idea is meant to get across the kind of normative “ought” we invoke when we talk about what someone “really and truly” should do, or what they should do “full stop”. I discuss this idea in more detail toward the end of this paper.

11 (Rose 2020, 138).

12 I say “promote (or realize)” with a nod to the idea the relationship here between the good in question, and the mechanism(s) at hand, might be one of constitution (hence, “realization”), rather than promotion.

13 (Rose 2020, 129).

14 (Rose 2020, 129).

15 (Rose 2020, 144).

16 (Rose 2020, 131–133).

17 This idea is also reinforced by Rose’s brief discussion of Rawls at (Rose 2020, 129), as well as her brief discussion of the criticisms of continued economic growth she cites at (Rose 2020, 129). Furthermore, it is also reflected in Rose’s choice to use the label of “challenges” to refer to the three lines of argument she reconstructs in favor of the thesis that justice requires economic growth. For if there weren’t independently plausible lines of argument for the idea that justice doesn’t require continual economic growth, why call them “challenges”?

18 (Rose 2020, 130).

19 (Rose 2020, 130).

20 (Rose 2020, 130).

21 (Rose 2020, 130).

22 (Rose 2020, 129).

23 It should be underscored that this point is fully compatible with the idea that in certain contexts – e.g. when government officials make certain public policy decisions – they should use a model that treats economic growth as valuable, without keeping in mind the values that it is instrumentally valuable for. The use of such a model might, for example, help people make the right decisions, even if it doesn’t track the underlying normative facts that make their decisions the right ones. (This idea draws on Peter Railton’s discussion of decision procedures vs. “criterion of rightness” in (Railton 1984)). This is not to say that there aren’t issues with the use of such models. For example, the use of such models runs the risk of people fetishizing the value of economic growth as if it was intrinsically valuable. This can lead to people not only making an intellectual mistake but also to their making practical mistakes based on this false view. In the context of thinking about Rose’s argument, however, it’s important that Rose isn’t focused on the relative merits of certain decision procedures used by government officials, in certain social/historical contexts. Rather, given the way Rose sets things up in “The Value of Economic Growth”, I take it that she is focused on whether justice does or does not in fact require societies to pursue continued economic growth (regardless of what decision procedures they might or might not adopt in pursuit of that goal). In any case, that is the issue I focus on in this paper, given that reading of Rose.

24 (Rose 2020, 129).

25 (Rose 2020, 135).

26 (Rose 2020, 129).

27 (Rose 2020, 129).

28 (Rose 2020, 129–130).

29 (Rose 2020, 141), discussing the work of (Friedman 2005).

30 (Rose 2020, 144).

31 Rose discusses the value of free time – and how it relates to justice – in detail in (Rose 2016).

32 (Rose 2020, 134–138).

33 (Rose 2020, 138). Rose echoes this point later in the paper, when she writes that, on her view, the conditions for meeting the “better off challenge” involve the following: a society must “make its worst-off members better off, as compared to under alternative arrangements, by ceasing to pursue economic growth”. (Rose 2020, 143, fn. 28). The relevant “alternative arrangements” that need to be considered include ones where the society in question pursues continual economic growth in addition to pursuing whatever other resources are tied to well-being. When making that comparison, a lot will hang on what the “full weighted index” of resources that are tied to well-being consists in. As Rose puts it, the better off challenge can be met when “a society’s members would in fact be better off, with reference to a full weighted index, than they would be in a society that continued to arrange its institutions and policies to pursue ever-greater levels of income and wealth.” (Rose 2020, 143).

34 (Rose 2020, 140).

35 (Rose 2020, 140, fn. 24).

36 (Rose 2020, 140, fn. 24).

37 (Rose 2020, 141).

38 (Rose 2020, 141).

39 (Rose 2020, 141).

40 (Rose 2020, 140).

41 (Rose 2020, 140–141).

42 (Rose 2020, 141).

43 (Rose 2020, 142).

44 (Rose 2020, 143).

45 It is worth underscoring here the following clarification Rose makes about this response to the “social conflict challenge”. She writes: “While a condition of meeting the better off challenge is that a society make its worst-off members better off, as compared to under alternative arrangements, by ceasing to pursue economic growth, the conditions of meeting the social conflict challenge itself are not similarly comparative. Rather, the challenge requires only that a society’s members are continuously better off to the extent necessary to foster the relevant attitudes and to the extent essential to the functioning of a liberal democratic society.” (Rose 2020, 143, fn. 28).

46 Thanks to Lucas Stanczyk for helpful discussion about this issue about national security, and for helping me appreciate some of the key reasons why it matters for Rose’s arguments.

47 (Rose 2020, 133).

48 It should be noted that instead of making the assumption that “international security agreements or other means” could provide the relevant kind of national security, another route for Rose to take here (which she doesn’t do) would be to insist that her guiding normative questions about economic growth are, from the start, restricted in such a way that questions about other societies aren’t part of the topic. One might take this approach, for example, by drawing on the sorts of idealizations Rawls does (and doesn’t) go in for in (Rawls 1971/1999). If one took this path, one would need to give a principled philosophical rationale for why these idealizations are good ones to make, given the normative questions on the table. I discuss this kind of issue about idealization at greater length later in the paper.

49 (Rose 2020, 133).

50 I take my wording of “every value that is needed for a just society” to leave open a range of important issues here, including, among other things, whether there can be tradeoffs between different values and what they can look like. I should also note that I am here (for the purposes of argument) taking it for granted that the relevant values could in theory be promoted (or realized) by a society pursuing continued economic growth (in the relevant range of possible worlds that matter in the discussion at hand). If they could not, and then neither could they be by a society not pursuing continued economic growth, then it is not clear what justice would permit. (That issue would depend, among other things, on the details of the correct theory of justice).

51 These characterizations draw on fairly standard ways of thinking about conceptual and metaphysical possibility. But if one prefers any number of other leading characterizations, that’s fine too. The details aren’t crucial here, so much as the main idea of these kinds of possibility. I should also note that, by the term ‘possible world’, I just mean something fairly standard in contemporary philosophy, along the lines of a “complete description of the way things might be”. It is obviously a further (and contentious) question of what the metaphysics of possible worlds consists in, which I remain neutral on here.

52 See (Friedman 2005), (Galston 2014), (Mounk 2018), and (Cowen 2018).

53 (Pinker 2018).

54 (Deaton 2013).

55 For a helpful overview of some of the recent discussion about the nature of feasibility, and what role it should (or should not) have in various normative arguments in political philosophy, see (Southwood 2018).

56 It should be noted that critics of the pursuit of continued economic growth might well use this same line of argument I am pressing here against Rose to criticize some arguments in favor of continued economic growth. This is because, in short, one might well worry that (at least some) of those arguments involve idealizations (e.g. ones about continued environmental sustainability) that fail to connect to the idealizations (or lack thereof) involved in the best versions of the best arguments against continued economic growth, and, thus, which fail to address the relevant kinds of possibilities at issue. I think that it is well worth investigating further how effective this line of criticism is against those (such as (Friedman 2005), (Galston 2014), (Mounk 2018), and (Cowen 2018)) who argue in favor of continued economic growth. So too do I think it is worth investigating how other lines of argument I develop in this paper might be used in criticizing arguments in favor of continued economic growth. Doing that work might well help us better engage in normative arguments about continued economic growth. It is, however, well beyond the scope of this paper to pursue these potential extensions of my arguments in any detail.

57 See, for example, (Rawls 1971/1999) and (Rawls 1996).

58 The kind of question I am bringing up here isn’t about a given specific society, but rather a broader issue about how generally effective the relevant mechanisms are, in certain kinds of circumstances. This is different than a question about whether these mechanisms can effectively deliver the relevant goods in a given specific society. (That’s the kind of question that Rose brings up at the end of her paper in (Rose 2020, 144) as a “further question” that goes beyond the scope of her paper).

59 For some of the relevant discussion here, across a range of different fields of inquiry, see (Appiah 2017), (Yalcin 2018), (Godfrey-Smith 2006), (Weisberg 2013), and (Valentini 2012).

60 For connected discussion, see (Enoch 2018) and (Enoch 2005).

61 (Rose 2020, 129).

62 See, for example, (McKibben 2007).

63 Though it should be noted that, depending on what kind of collapse it is, certain non-human animals (e.g., certain kinds of insects) might both thrive and increase in number, even when others (e.g., humans and many mammals) do not. For discussion, see (Sebo 2021).

64 See, for example, the summary in (Wallace-Wells 2019) of various scenarios described by current climate science.

65 See, for example, (Turner 1996) and (McKibben 1989).

66 See (Rousseau 1755/1997).

67 See (Diamond 1999) and (Scott 2017). For connected discussion, see (Anderson 2017). See also (Piketty 2013) and (Scheidel 2017), both of which emphasize (in different ways, citing different mechanisms) how difficult it is to counter growing inequality while also continuing to pursue economic growth.

68 For example, it might well be that the only normatively acceptable way forward on climate change that is feasible requires continued economic growth. To see how this might go, consider arguments that stress the instrumental role of economic growth in spurring the relevant technological innovations needed to find alternative energy sources to displace fossil fuels (in the relevant time frame), or to spur technological development in plant-based proteins that could displace the global reliance on (the environmentally costly) animal-based proteins in human diets.

69 (Rose 2020, 134).

70 (Rose 2020, 133).

71 (Rose 2020, 129).

72 For discussion of what those “default” possibilities are that we consider in such deliberation (and in related contexts), see (Phillips and Knobe 2018) and (Phillips, Morris, and Cushman 2019).

73 For discussion of some of the different key idealizations made in “ideal theory” in political philosophy, see (Valentini 2012), (Stemplowska and Swift 2012), and (Enoch 2018).

74 For connected discussion, see (Enoch 2018), (Enoch 2015), and (Enoch 2005).

75 A quick (though certainly not conclusive) argument for the general idea behind this is as follows. At least prima facie, it is plausible that if a society has weighty normative reasons to ϕ, but lacks weighty normative reasons against ϕ-ing, it’s far from clear why it should be permitted not to ϕ. If the normative reasons at issue are ones that are closely tied to the promotion of goods that matter for the promotion of justice, then there is at least some pressure to think that that there is reason to doubt that justice permits not ϕ-ing.

76 It should be noted that, at this juncture, one might of course appeal to a specific theory of justice to help motivate the line under consideration. For example, suppose one thinks that justice just involves setting certain kinds of deontological constraints on what a society can’t do, or that (in general) justice doesn’t involve any norms instructing societies to maximize any goods and just requires them to promote them to a certain level. Such a theory might well support the line of argument I am putting pressure on. To make this line of argument, however, one would need to depart from Rose’s relative neutrality on which theory of justice she is working with (among a range of ones she takes to be relatively plausible), and instead embrace a relatively specific theory of justice. How the arguments go from there will then obviously depend on the details of which theory of justice one embraces, and on whether it is correct.

77 See (McPherson and Plunkett 2017) and (McPherson 2018).

78 For connected discussion about justice, tied to issues about the moral status of non-human animals and what that means for normative theorizing in social/political philosophy, see (Plunkett 2016).

79 This is one way of taking (at least a core part of) what Rawls is getting at in his famous statement (from the start of A Theory of Justice) that “Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust.” (Rawls 1971/1999, 3).