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Feasibility and Stability in Normative Political Philosophy: The Case of Liberal Nationalism

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Abstract

Arguments from stability for liberal nationalism rely on considerations about conditions for the feasibility or stability of liberal political ideals and factual claims about the circumstances under which these conditions are fulfilled in order to argue for nationalist conclusions. Such reliance on factual claims has been criticised by among others G. A. Cohen in other contexts as ideological reifications of social reality. In order to assess whether arguments from stability within liberal nationalism, especially as formulated by David Miller, are vulnerable to a comparable critique, the rationale for their reliance on factual claims is discussed on the basis of a number of concerns in John Rawls’s political liberalism. The concern with stability in liberal nationalism differs from stability in Rawls’s work, mainly because of the stronger non-ideal or ‘realist’ focus of the former. In so far as the ‘realism’ of arguments from stability for liberal nationalism is recognized, they are not vulnerable to the reification charge. But if the arguments are construed as realist, this at the same time makes for other tensions within liberal nationalism.

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Notes

  1. See e.g., Mason 2000, pp. 115–120; Kymlicka 2002, pp. 261–268, 346; Vincent 2002, chap. 4, on liberal nationalism.

  2. Miller 1988–1989; 1989, pp. 236–245; 1995, pp. 90–96; 1999, pp. 17ff; 2000; 2003b, pp. 99f, 2004a, 2006, p. 7. I state the premises more explicitly than Miller himself does, in line with the discussion in Mason 2000, chap. 5. See also Abizadeh 2002, p. 499. I am not concerned with the different argument in Miller 1988 and 1995, chap. 3, for what might be termed ‘ethical nationalism’ based on a distinction between “ethical universalism” and “particularism.” Because I leave this and other aspects out, the statement does not capture Miller’s position in its entirety.

  3. The present discussion will not be concerned with the exact specification or justification of the ideal of social justice, since (a) it is concerned with the general type of reasoning rather than the specific premises of the argument, and (b) Miller anyhow advances the argument both in relation to socialist need based and Rawlsian equality based conceptions of justice, cf. Miller 1989, p. 236 and 1995, p. 93, respectively. One aspect that is hereby ignored is that Miller’s view of social justice is “contextualist,” see Miller 1999, chap. 2; 2000, pp. 168–171; 2002; 2003a, pp. 350f.

  4. Where Miller speaks about “trust” and “solidarity,” Mason 2000, pp. 117ff, 127–135 introduces a more general concept of “a sense of belonging together.” What matters is some kind of psychological disposition or social ethos, cf. Cohen 1992, 1997, that can effectively motivate citizens to act in accordance with a conception of justice. One might also consider Rawls’s idea of a “sense of justice” here, but this leads to complications to which I turn in Section 5.

  5. See, e.g., Miller 1988–1989, pp. 59, 68; 1989, pp. 237f, 245; 1995, pp. 92f; 1999, p. 18; 2000, p. 32; 2004a, p. 29.

  6. The conclusion is stated in a more minimal way than Miller, who wants to argue for national self-determination, does. More premises are needed to get from the stated conclusion to national self-determination. Caney 2005, pp. 173f lists a number of reasons for being critical of this further move.

  7. They must, e.g., be produced and continuously debated through an inclusive deliberative process, cf. 1995, chap. 5. See also Miller 2006, on immigration and deliberative reworking of social standards in such cases.

  8. See Miller 1995, chap. 2; 2000: 27–31.

  9. This assumes an egalitarian understanding of “liberal.” Miller 1988–1989, 1989 and 2003b are concerned with socialism, but by this he means egalitarianism coupled with respect for individual rights, which is why I term his views “liberal.”

  10. E.g., Vincent 2002, chap. 4; Moore 2001, chap. 4; Mason 2000, chap. 5; Føllesdal 2000, pp. 506–510.

  11. These conditions concerning the plausible strength of the claims in the intermediate premises and the barring of equivocation are far from always respected in liberal nationalist writings, even in those of Miller, but since the purpose of this paper is to address the general kind of reasoning rather than other possible failings of specific instances of this argument, the latter are ignored for the remainder of the discussion.

  12. The argument that I will discuss is Cohen’s internal critique of his interpretation of Rawls. The internal critique in Cohen 1992, 1995, 1997 and 2000 takes Rawls’s principles as given for the purpose of argument, and is thus distinct from the more general external critique in Cohen 2003 of Rawls’s more general mode of arguing for his principles. I do not take a stand on whether Cohen’s internal critique is accurate as directed against Rawls, e.g., whether he is correct in taking the difference principle to apply to not just public institutions but also private choices. For rejoinders to Cohen, see e.g., Estlund 1998 and Williams 1998. Rawls’s theory is furthermore only used as an example. The paper does not take a stand on whether the theory is correct.

  13. Rawls 1971, pp. 75–78 [1999a, pp. 65–68]; 1996, pp. 6f.

  14. Rawls 1971, pp. 151, 78, 158 [slightly altered formulations in 1999a, pp. 130f, 68, 136].

  15. Cohen 1995, pp. 169–172, cf. 1992; 1997, Section II; 2000, chap. 5.

  16. Cohen 1992, Section 7; 1995, p. 172; 1997, p. 9.

  17. Assuming that the talented ought to act on the basis of the difference principle in their private dealings on the market, cf. Cohen 1997 and the critique of this assumption in Williams 1998. One might consider whether there is a difference between the justification of social institutions and individual behaviour, so that even though individuals ought not to demand incentives, social institutions that permit incentives might still be justifiable. This raises the issue of non-ideal theory, discussed in Section 6.

  18. Cf. Cohen 1992, p. 311 on intention-relative and intention-independent necessities.

  19. Abizadeh 2002, pp. 506f; 2004a, pp. 240–245; 2005.

  20. Abizadeh 2004a, pp. 242, 245; 2004b, pp. 311f, cf. Brubaker 2004 for a critique of reification of categories like “nation” and “ethnic group” in social theory.

  21. Rawls 1996, p. xlii. Similar requirements are common to all Kantian theories.

  22. The motivational requirement is in Rawls’s case formulated in terms of a “sense of justice” rather than “solidarity.” For further discussion, see Section 5.

  23. Miller 1988–1989, pp. 57f.

  24. Miller 1999, pp. 53–56; 2003a, p. 352, including note 4, 2004a, pp. 13f.

  25. Miller 2004a, pp. 14f, 30 acknowledges that the concern for social trust as secured by common nationality has to do with the feasibility of the ideal of social justice and that this is a “sociological,” hence non-normative, question. See Miller 2003c, p. 263, on the role of such sociological facts in his conception of liberalism.

  26. This goes for the relationship between social justice and democracy or legitimacy, but also for Miller’s “contextualist” conception of justice, which is both controversial and logically distinct from the argument under consideration. Note that Miller’s contextualism concerns the scope of principles as opposed to, e.g., Carens’ contextualism, which rather consists in a certain approach to or method of discussing principles, cf. Carens 2004.

  27. This distinction is found in Cohen 2000, pp. 131f in connection with a discussion of the role of a social ethos. Miller 1999, pp. 15f similarly notes that “social justice” doesn’t encompass everything that makes a society just.

  28. Räikkä 1998. Hirschman’s (1991) three kinds of “reactionary rhetoric,” perversity, futility and jeopardy, might be understood as invocations of different feasibility constraints. Weak constraints correspond to “moral accessibility” in Buchanan 2004, p. 61.

  29. Stability can furthermore be understood in two senses: (1) As constancy, i.e., that implementation of the ideal, once realized, does not change, and (2) that the implementation is resilient to disturbances, i.e., that if the state specified by the ideal changes due to disturbances, the system in question returns to this state. See Hansson and Helgesson 2003.

  30. In this section and the next, Rawls’s theory is merely used as a source of concepts and distinctions that might illuminate the liberal nationalist argument. An additional reason for drawing on Rawls’s theory, however, is that aspects of his position indicate a kind of liberal nationalist outlook, e.g., the restriction of the subject matter of justice to the basic structure of a society considered as closed, cf. Rawls 1971, pp. 8, 457 [1999a, p. 7, 401]; 1996, p. 12, the assumption that the citizens of such societies are united by “common sympathies,” which Rawls glosses with explicit reference to the cultural conception of nationality in Mill’s classic statement of liberal nationalism, cf. Rawls 1999b, p. 23, including note 17, the rejection of cosmopolitanism, cf. Rawls 1999b, pp. 82f, 119f, and the endorsement of Yael Tamir’s brand of liberal nationalism, cf. Rawls 1996, p. lx, note 37; 1999b, p. 25, note 20. Note that even though Rawls rejects cosmopolitan readings of the difference principle, his reliance on Millian nationality is as a source of motivation and cooperation, not as a source of associative duties, just as in the liberal nationalist argument considered here.

  31. I will come back to some of the complications omitted here below.

  32. Rawls 1971, pp. 138, 145, 177, 454ff [1999a, pp. 119, 125f, 154f, 398f]; 1999b, pp. 15f, 45; 2001, pp. 181, 192–195. This definition of stability is concerned with the question whether a conception “generates its own support.” This is discussed by Rawls in a comparative manner, which is why he often speaks about “relative stability” (usually as compared with utilitarianism). There are other concepts of stability in Rawls’s work. One is the “congruence” of conceptions of justice with citizens’ conceptions of the good, i.e., the question of whether it would be rational, according to “the thin theory of the good,” for persons to maintain and act in accordance with a sense of justice (1971, pp. 398f, 513ff, 567f [1999a, pp. 350, 450ff, 496f]). The other sense is the idea of an “overlapping consensus” between reasonable comprehensive doctrines that replaces the idea of “congruence” in political liberalism (1996, p. 141).

  33. Rawls 1971, pp. 46, 312, 505 [1999a, pp. 41, 274f, 442]; 1996, pp. 19, 35, 141; 1999b, p. 15.

  34. Understood thus, arguments from stability “reconcile us with our world,” cf. Rawls 1999b, pp. 6, 11, 124–128. Such an argument would still imply a conditional, instrumental and prima facie commitment to bringing the circumstances necessary for the stability of the ideal about, but this would be an unintended side effect, so to speak.

  35. Rawls 1971, p. 455 [1999a, p. 398].

  36. Rawls 1971, pp. 4f, 453f [1999a, pp. 4f, 397f]; 1996, pp. 35f; 2001, pp. 8f, 199.

  37. Williams 1998, p. 244, cf. Rawls 1996, pp. 35–40, 66–71, 140–44.

  38. Rawls 1996, pp. 146f; 1999b, pp. 44f.

  39. Compliance conditional on common nationality must be distinguished from compliance conditional on the compliance of others as discussed by Føllesdal 2000, pp. 506f, which is quite properly a part of Rawlsian theory.

  40. Unless the restriction of the scope of the principles to co-nationals is written into the normative ideal in the first place, which Miller actually does in some places, e.g., Miller 1999, pp. 17ff. But in that case the issue is shifted from the question of the present paper of whether it is possible to justify a nationalist conclusion instrumentally on the basis of a concern with the stability of normative ideals that do not, as such, make reference to or presuppose common nationality, to the different question of whether principles of justice, as such, should be construed as relying on or presupposing common nationality. Miller argues for a contextualist view that supports the latter view in Miller 1999, chap. 2, and 2002.

  41. Rawls 1971, pp. 8f, 145, 244f [1999a, pp. 8, 125f, 215f]; 2001, pp. 13, 64f.

  42. This is purely due to the fact that motivation and hence compliance cannot be taken for granted, and has nothing to do with how the principles are understood, e.g., whether they are construed in a cosmopolitan or associative way. The proposed interpretation of liberal nationalism as a part of non-ideal theory is therefore different from the issue addressed by Couture and Nielsen 2005, who are concerned with the compatibility of priority for compatriots and cosmopolitanism as normative principles. I thank an anonymous referee for this reference.

  43. Rawls 1971, pp. 8f, 245f [1999a, pp. 8, 216f]; 1999b, pp. 4f, 89f. Rawls also assigns questions about the transition from unjust to just conditions, i.e., questions of realisability in the sense discussed in Section 4, to non-ideal theory, cf. Rawls 1996, pp. 17f, 1999b, p. 90.

  44. Cf. Føllesdal 2000, p. 506.

  45. Rawls 1971, p. 351 [1999a, p. 309].

  46. Rawls 1971, pp. 314f [1999a, p. 277].

  47. See Mason 2004, pp. 255, 267, Goodin 1992.

  48. E.g., Rawls 1999b, pp. 90, 106.

  49. The interpretation is offered as a “diagnosis” of what goes on in the argument, not as an evaluation of it. Even if liberal nationalists do not find limited solidarity “regrettable,” true liberals perhaps should. In evaluating the argument, recall the difference between the empirical question about what the facts are, and the philosophical question about whether the feasibility of normative ideals should be assessed on the basis of non-ideal and contingent empirical facts.

  50. Rawls 1999b, pp. 6f, 11ff, 124. To what extent Rawls’s realism departs from “objective feasibility” in the sense of Cohen 1992, Section 7; 1995, pp. 172; 1997, p. 9 and “feasibility” in Buchanan 2004, p. 61 depends on how much is part of “persons’ moral and psychological natures.” In addition to “the laws of human psychology,” Rawls furthermore presupposes “general facts about human society,” including economic and political principles, cf. Rawls 1971, pp. 137f, 200 [1999a, pp. 119, 175]. Miller 2004b, Section III, offers a valuable discussion of the dependence on contingent facts and the sense of “realistic utopia” in Rawls’s theory, and argues that Rawls’s notion of practical possibility has “an inescapable normative element” set by “assumptions about what, for us, would count as a tolerable or intolerable outcome” (Miller 2004b, p. 16). This may very well be true for Rawls’s theory, but such a normative notion of realism goes beyond the kind of reasoning addressed in this paper, since arguments based on such assumptions in effect appeal to normative constraints rather than feasibility constraints, cf. Section 4.

  51. Brown 2002, pp. 20f. Cohen 2003 and Mason 2004 argue that there are more fundamental kinds of normative theorizing that are not fact-sensitive in this way – or at all, in Cohen’s case.

  52. Miller tends, for instance, to say that common nationality is necessary “in modern societies” (Miller 1989, p. 245), which implicitly acknowledges that there might be conditions under which it is not necessary, and that “Social justice will always be easier to achieve in states with strong national identities” (Miller 1995, p. 96), implying that it is a facilitating rather than necessary condition, which means that non-national social justice might be achieved under actual circumstances.

  53. Rawls 1999b, pp. 90, 106, 108 includes social and even political, cultural, economic and technological contingencies in the circumstances addressed by non-ideal theory. Miller 2004b, p. 12 also stresses that the “real” issue of fact dependence concerns whether to take contingent facts as given.

  54. Rawls 1999b, pp. 7, 13.

  55. Carens 1996, pp. 156, 166; cf. Carens 1999, pp. 1084f. Idealist principles might resemble the fact-insensitive “ultimate” principles argued for Cohen 2003, or they might just be relatively more fact-insensitive than realist principles.

  56. Carens 1996, pp. 156f; cf. Carens 1999, p. 1086. See also Miller 2004b, p. 18, Buchanan 2004, p. 61 on accessibility, Gibney 2004, pp. 15ff, 196 and Brown 2002, pp. 20f on non-ideal theory, Cohen 2003 on regulative principles, i.e., principles reflecting facts, and Bader and Engelen 2003, pp. 381–385 on moral and realist senses of ‘ought.’

  57. Carens 1996, pp. 158–164.

  58. See e.g., Beitz 1998, Section 2, and Hendrickson 1992 for different senses of political realism.

  59. See also Gibney 2004, pp. 15f, Bader and Engelen 2003, p. 393, Brown 2002, pp. 20f.

  60. Carens 1996, p. 168; cf. Carens 1999, p. 1087. See also Räikkä 1998 on “the desirability and the feasibility approach.”

  61. Carens 1999, p. 1084. The relationship between this methodological difference and the “contextualist” approach to political theory argued for in Carens 2004, which might also be termed “methodological,” is unclear.

  62. I am not saying that this is how proponents of the incentives argument have actually understood it, only that this is a possible way of construing it that provides a kind of answer to Cohen’s critique.

  63. This reading squares well with the critique of fact sensitivity in Cohen 2003, which is explicitly directed at the way Rawls takes facts as given for the purpose of constructing normative principles. See also Mason 2004. The limitation of most issues of justice to “peoples” conceived as what are effectively quasi-sovereign states is another concession to realism on Rawls’s part; cf. Kelly 2004, pp. 148f.

  64. This is the implication if the feasibility constraint on which the argument relies is a weak constraint, cf. Räikkä 1998.

  65. Miller appeals to the argument as one reason for rejecting the idea of global justice in Miller 1999, pp. 17ff, contextualism about justice being another. His rejection of cosmopolitan distributive justice in Miller 1995, pp. 107f is premised on respect for national self-determination, but this is itself justified on basis of the liberal nationalist argument. Caney 2005, pp. 131ff, 175, considers other, more substantive, responses to the stability argument as a critique of cosmopolitanism.

  66. I.e., a factual rather than normative justification as discussed in Cohen 2000, p. 118. This distinction is reminiscent of the one between realist justifications and excuses in Goodin 1992.

  67. Cf. Miller 1988 and 1995, chap. 3, and 2005 on the special obligations of nationality.

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Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of the paper were presented at the annual meeting of the Danish Philosophical Society at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense, February 2003, the graduate conference in political theory at the University of Warwick, May 2004, a workshop in political philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, August 2004, and at the “Oxford–Scandinavia Ethics Summit,” St. Anne’s College, June 2005. Thanks to Paula Casal, Matthew Clayton, Roger Crisp, Klemens Kappel, Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, Andrew Mason, Søren Flinch Midtgaard, David Miller, Thomas Petersen, Daniel Star, Torbjörn Tännsjö and Andrew Williams, as well as two anonymous referees for this journal, for comments.

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    Sune Lægaard

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Lægaard, S. Feasibility and Stability in Normative Political Philosophy: The Case of Liberal Nationalism. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 9, 399–416 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-006-9048-0

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