Facts, principles, and global justice: does the ‘real world’ matter?

ABSTRACT

The world is undeniably full of injustice. Many feel that much political philosophy is practically impotent and engaged instead in overly abstract theorising insufficiently sensitive to the realities of the world. One response to this concern is David Miller’s influential model of evidence-based political philosophy, which claims to be sensitive to empirical evidence from the social sciences, takes seriously people’s opinions, and defends the role of facts in grounding normative principles. Using various examples from the field of global justice, one of Miller’s key areas of work, I show that Miller’s method is unconvincing on two-levels. His theoretical argument for fact-dependence is flawed, and his practical argument for an opinion-sensitive political theory is either guilty of status quo bias or, in an attempt to escape it, becomes self-defeating. While the paper is primarily critical, I endeavour also to draw out the implications of my critiques for the role of the ‘real world’ in theorising.

KEYWORDS:

• Fact-principles debate
• David Miller
• G. A. Cohen
• realism
• ideal and non-ideal theory
• global justice

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Daniel Butt, Zofia Stemplowska, Martin Wilkinson, and the anonymous reviewers from this journal for their helpful comments on the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. We have only to think of rampant global injustices that persist; for example, in terms of severe poverty and the global burden of disease.

2. See, for instance, a recent issue of the European Journal of Political Theory (Volume 19, Issue 2, April 2020) dedicated to debates about political realism, and a recent special issue of Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy devoted to the fact-principles debate (‘Facts and Norms,’ Volume 22, special issue 1 (2019) edited by Theresa Scavenius and Kasper Lippert- Rasmussen).

3. However, given Miller’s reliance on his EBPP methodology to support many of his views on global justice, if I am successful in my endeavour against EBPP, it may cast doubt on these views. Equally, by way of a caveat, it remains a logical possibility that his views of global justice may be correct even if his method is flawed.

4. For a critique of Cohen’s response to the problem of infinite regress, see Ypi (2012).

5. Though I will not pursue the point, notice that Miller here seems to overlook his slide from ‘justify’ to ‘support’ and presenting the contrast as though it is between ‘conclusively justify’ and ‘non-conclusively justify’.

6. See, for instance, Mills (2005), Stemplowska (2008), Stemplowska and Swift (2012), and Valentini (2012).

7. See, for instance, Estlund (2017), Leader-Maynard and Worsnip (2018), Rossi and Sleat (2014), and Williams (2007).

8. See, for instance, Erman and Moller (2019), and Sangiovanni (2008, 2016)).

9. See, for instance, Estlund (2011), Gheaus (2013), and Lawford-Smith and Gilabert (2012).

10. A similarity between Sen and Miller here is their resistance to what Miller calls ‘lamentation’. Instead of issuing practical, action-guiding that will improve our current situation, the focus becomes on lamenting the infeasibility of achieving the ideal.

11. Farrelly focuses primarily on criticising the endeavour of ideal theory prevalent within liberal egalitarian political philosophy, which he sees as ignoring the realities of costs, human misfortune, and the trade-offs necessary.

12. While Cohen highlights a plausible intuition, he does not provide a general argument for his claim of fact-independence – a point picked up by Pogge and a claim Cohen readily admits. My account builds upon this intuition to construct a clearer argument against Miller’s account, in favour of Cohen’s.

13. For Miller’s view on immigration and borders, see Miller (1997, 2016c).

14. For Carens’ view on immigration and borders, see Carens (1987, 2013).

15. My claim that judgements of salience and relevance are normative judgements (or principles) is consistent with Cohen’s (narrow) definition of principles as prescriptive ‘ought’ statements or directives. This is because normative salience or relevance can be interpreted as ‘ought statements’ in an important sense: the fact that A is more morally salient than B means, on balance, that one ought to prefer, or ought to do, A instead of B. See Cohen (2003, p. 211).

16. C, in this variant, is equivalent to a fact (F).

17. Miller could, hypothetically, insist that the relevant context is a single, complex context (such as ‘Earth’). However, defining ‘context’ in this way trivialises his claim about being attuned to the realities, here and now. Such a broad, single context would not provide much guidance at all.

18. Again, we can set aside the issue of F_A requiring further normative justification. Let us make it easier for Miller and grant him this as a pre-suppositional grounding fact for the sake of illustrating this objection.

19. A related way of articulating this distinction, suggested to me by an anonymous reviewer for this journal, is between (a) the ‘fact that P (or F)’ and (b) the ‘fact that people believe P (or F)’. It is fair to claim that Miller believes in the relevance of both these kinds of ‘facts’ for EBPP, hence the rise of what I am calling the fact-opinion problem.

20. This was Miller’s initial response when I initially put this objection to him. The case of gender inequality was the same example he used in his initial response.

21. Miller himself is alive to these possibilities when he mentions the danger of adaptive preference formation if we rely too much on current feasibility constraints. See Miller (2019).

22. Even if Miller were to drop his meta-theoretical claim, however, the fact-opinion problem against EBPP would still stand. A different kind of coherentist dilemma would remain; namely, he would either have to override opinions and move towards ‘transcendental’ style theorising or bite the bullet and accept status quo bias/adaptive preference formation. Neither solution seems acceptable to EBPP.

23. This kind of case-by-case reasoning has some similarities to Zofia Stemplowska and Adam Swift’s balancing view approach to weighing justice and legitimacy. In some contexts, justice ought to prevail, while in other cases, legitimacy ought to. See Stemplowska and Swift (2018).

24. This is hinted at in Fine’s critique. See Fine (2017).

25. Philosophers should also be cautious about their interpretation and application of science and empirical data, including being cognisant of biases. See, for instance, Kingsbury and Dare (2017).

26. For instance, Tom Parr has recently defended the envy test on the grounds that it respects people’s views about justice in a specific way. See Parr (2018).

27. None of this, however, needs to be taken as support of Dworkin’s particular conception of justice.

28. While Miller, in his latest work on this topic, acknowledges that more abstract philosophy may have a role to play alongside practical philosophy, he does not explicitly consider the conjunction of practising abstract theorising and having practical effects. See Miller (2019).

29. See, also, Swift (2008).

30. The original quote is from The Importance of Being Ernest: ‘The truth is rarely pure and never simple.’

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Johann Go

Johann Go is a Rhodes Scholar and Master of Philosophy candidate in Political Theory at the University of Oxford. His primary research interests are in social and distributive justice (especially theories of egalitarianism), global justice, public health ethics, and methodological debates in philosophy. Recent work has appeared in the International Journal of Applied Philosophy, the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, and the Journal of Value Inquiry.