Ethics, morality and the case for realist political theory

Abstract

A common trait of all realistic political theories is the rejection of a conception of political theory as applied moral philosophy and an attempt to preserve some form of distinctively political thinking. Yet the reasons for favouring such an account of political theory can vary, a point that has often been overlooked in recent discussions by realism’s friends and critics alike. While a picture of realism as first-and-foremost an attempt to develop a more practical political theory which does not reduce morality to politics is often cited, in this paper we present an alternative understanding in which the motivation to embrace realism is grounded in a set of critiques of or attitudes towards moral philosophy which then feed into a series of political positions. Political realism, on this account, is driven by a set of philosophical concerns about the nature of ethics and the place of ethical thinking in our lives. This impulse is precisely what motivated Bernard Williams and Raymond Geuss to their versions of distinctively realist political thought and is important to emphasise because it demonstrates that realism does not set politics against ethics (a misunderstanding typically endorsed by realism’s critics) but is rather an attempt to philosophise about politics without relying on understandings of morality which we have little reason to endorse.

Keywords:

• Bernard Williams
• Raymond Geuss
• realism
• moralism
• ethics

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Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the ‘Realisms and Moralisms’ workshop at UCL and the ‘What is Realism?’ conference at the National University of Singapore. We are very grateful to all participants for their comments. Robert Jubb, Nakul Krishna, Andrew Sabl and Paul Sagar also kindly read and commented on a written draft and we benefited a lot from their advice. We would also like to thank an anonymous reader for CRISPP.

Notes

1. For such a reading see Valentini (2012). For scepticism that such ‘non-ideal’ theory ought to be understood as a form of realism see Sleat (2016).

2. Some recent work engages in this endeavour of making explicit the ethical commitments or motivations behind realist political thought. See Hall (2014), Owen (in press), Nye (2015), and Sagar (2016).

3. We are not attributing this intellectual impulse to all realists (either those who have been attributed the label or freely self-identify).

4. See Baderin (2014), Freeden (2012), Philp (2012), Rossi and Sleat (2014), Runciman (2012), and Scheuerman (2013).

5. The differences between Williams and Geuss are often significant but this paper seeks to paint a big picture in little space, and we think that the commonalities are worth noting in order to elucidate our point that realism is not necessarily best understood in the terms in which it is often presented.

6. See in particular, Geuss, 2010b; 2005c and Williams, 1993b, 1973.

7. Williams, for example, writing in 1981, declared that ‘It is certain, even if not everyone has yet come to see it, that Nietzsche was the greatest moral philosopher of the past century. This was, above all, because he saw how totally problematical morality, as understood over many centuries, has become, and how complex a reaction that fact, when fully understood, requires’ (2014b, p. 183). Geuss has written a large number of well-received essays on Nietzsche’s thought: see especially 1994, 1997, 2005c, 2014c. For Williams’s key discussions see (2002, 2007a, 2007b, 2007c, 2007d) which is deeply indebted to Nietzsche in a number of ways.

8. Insofar as Ancient Greek tragedy was 'realistic' in the sense that ‘it is about people (eventually) facing up to the dire situations in which they actually find themselves without flinching and making difficult choices’, Geuss insists that ‘Philosophy is not the “natural” successor of tragedy but, if anything, of comedy. It is a kind of comedy without the humour’ (2014f, p. 207).

9. Williams, 1985; Chapter 4 and 1981. See also Geuss (2010b).

10. Williams, 1985; chapter 2 and 1993a; Chapter 1.

11. This is why Williams is adamant that ‘one’s initial responsibilities [when approaching moral philosophy] should be to moral phenomena, as grasped in one’s own experience and imagination’, (1993a, p. xxi).

12. For Williams the most important ramification being an unmasking of the alienating moral perspectives the morality system favours which encourage us to experience ethical life in terms of fulfilling obligations (Williams, 1985; Chapter 10). The other key implication of Williams’s view is wonderfully put by Nakul Krishna in the following terms: ‘the world, Williams thought, is full of temptations to take simple moral views – everything from “bomb Iraq” to “maximise the good” – because the longer route of self-understanding and critique is hard, uncertain and risky. If philosophy can help us with any of this, it won’t be because it discovers a formula to replace the traditional sources of moral understanding … but because it helps to improve the reflective self-understanding of those who have more, much more, to their lives than philosophy’ (Krishna, 2016). Geuss thinks that loosening the hold of such a view of ethics matters precisely because it forms the ‘tacit background of thinking and debate’ in the modern world. Hence his insistence that getting outside ethics is ‘an exceptionally good way to contribute to further human enlightenment’ (2005a, 4 + 10).

13. Williams, 2002; passim. The basic problem Williams has with Rorty’s ironism lies in his insistence that the ironist posture is ‘itself still under the shadow of universalism’ because it suggests that you cannot really believe in anything unless you endorse the kind of universalist moral grounding we cannot have: (2005, p. 67). For discussion of this see Hall (2014) and Sagar (2016). Geuss on the other hand rejects Rorty’s ironism because he sees it as the philosophy of bookish intellectuals who ‘do not pressingly have to act’. In this regard, he insists that ‘irony will not allow the right kind of theoretically reflective, engaged political practice’ (2005b, p. 27).

14. Like Geuss, Williams denies that Aristotle’s approach can help us to make sense of our ethical lives in modernity. However, while Williams is sceptical of the attempt to ground ethical life in considerations about human nature – he notes that ‘it is hard to believe that an account of human nature … will adequately determine one kind of ethical life among others’ (1985, p. 52), precisely because the pervasively reflective nature of modernity has shown that ‘there are various forms of human excellence which do not fit together in one harmonious whole (p. 153) – he is equally adamant that Aristotle’s project ‘at least makes sense; that it operates, so to speak, in the right corner of the field’ (1996, p. 213).

15. Hence Geuss’s (deeply controversial) contention) that Rawls’ work is ideological insofar as it ‘draws our attention away from the phenomenon of power and the way in which it influences our lives and the way we see the world’ by getting us to focus instead on our intuitions on what is ‘just’ (2008, p. 90).

16. Geuss claims that philosophers inspired by Nietzsche and Wittgenstein acknowledge that ‘at a certain point inquiry into the relevant context of human thought and action simply stops … [this means] that at some point we will simply encounter facta bruta, either expressions of human volition (will), natural phenomena, or human practices embedded in historically … contingent assumptions’ (Geuss, 2010a, p. 182).

17. This informs Williams more general complaint that moralistic liberalism ‘has a poor account, or in many cases no account, of the cognitive status of its own history’ and no answer ‘to the question of why what it takes to be the true moral solution to the questions of politics, liberalism, should for the first time (roughly) become evident in European society from the late seventeenth century onward’ (2005, p. 9). This claim is obviously more problematic when thinking about Rawls’ later work than the approaches favoured by thinkers like Nagel and Dworkin.

18. For further discussion see Hall (2015), Sagar (2016), and Sleat (2014).