FEASIBILITY FOUR WAYS

¹ See, for example, Räikkä, Juha, “The Feasibility Condition in Political Theory,” Journal of Political Philosophy 6, no. 1 (1998): 27–40; Geoffrey Brennan and Philip Pettit, “The Feasibility Issue,” in The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy, ed. Frank Jackson and Michael Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Geoffrey Brennan and Nicholas Southwood, “Feasibility in Action and Attitude,” in Hommage à Wlodek. Philosophical Papers Dedicated to Wlodek Rabinowicz (http://www.fil.lu.se/hommageawlodek/site/paper/Brennan&Southwood.pdf: 2007); Cowen, Tyler, “The Importance of Defining the Feasible Set,” Economics and Philosophy 23, no. 1 (2007): 1–14; Gilabert, Pablo and Lawford Smith, Holly, “Political Feasibility: A Conceptual Exploration,” Political Studies (2012): 809–25; Brennan, Geoffrey, “Feasibilty in Optimizing Ethics,” Social Philosophy and Policy 30, nos. 1–2 (2013): 314–29; Lawford-Smith, Holly, “Understanding Political Feasibility,” Journal of Political Philosophy 21, no. 3 (2013): 243–59; Pablo Gilabert, “Justice and Feasibility: A Dynamic Approach,” in Political Utopias: Contemporary Debates, ed. Kevin Vallier and Michael Weber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Wiens, David, “Political Ideals and the Feasibility Frontier,” Economics and Philosophy 31, no. 3 (2015): 447–77.

² Particularly, Brennan and Southwood, “Feasibility in Action and Attitude”; Gilabert and Lawford Smith, “Political Feasibility: A Conceptual Exploration”; Lawford-Smith, “Understanding Political Feasibility”; Gilabert, “Justice and Feasibility: A Dynamic Approach.”

³ Gilabert and Lawford-Smith, “Political Feasibility,” 809.

⁴ Ibid., 815.

⁵ Wiens, “Political Ideals and the Feasibility Frontier.”

⁶ In this section, resources are interpreted as nonhuman resources — I consider human resources and motivations in Section IV below.

⁷ Gilabert, “Justice and Feasibility: A Dynamic Approach” focuses attention on dynamic feasibility and the “dynamic duties” that arise.

⁸ Wiens, “Political Ideals and the Feasibility Frontier.” “Everything” here includes all those issues that I include under human and institutional factors in addition to nonhuman resources and technology.

⁹ See, for example, Michael Stocker, Plural and Conflicting Values (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990); William Galston, Liberal Pluralism: The Implications of Value Pluralism for Political Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). The idea of value feasibility is employed in Alan Hamlin and Zofia Stemplowska, “Theory, Ideal Theory and the Theory of Ideals,” Political Studies Review 10, no. 1 (2012): 48–62.

¹⁰ Gilabert and Lawford-Smith, “Political Feasibility,” 813.

¹¹ Estlund, David, “Human Nature and the Limits (If Any) of Political Philosophy,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 39, no. 3 (2011): 207–37; Wiens, David, “Motivational Limitations on the Demands of Justice,” European Journal of Political Theory 15, no. 3 (2016): 333–52; Estlund, David, “Reply to Wiens,” European Journal of Political Theory 15, no. 3 (2016): 353–62.

¹² Estlund’s discussion is explicitly concerned with motivational capacities rather than motivational feasibility, but his question concerns whether any motivational incapacity should count as a (feasibility) constraint on morality.

¹³ See Gilabert and Lawford Smith, “Political Feasibility,” 812.

¹⁴ For detailed accounts of current approaches to group agency see Christian List and Philip Pettit, Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents (Oxford University Press Oxford, 2011); Raimo Tuomela, Social Ontology: Collective Intentionality and Group Agents (Oxford University Press, 2013). List and Pettit identify three conditions for a group to be an agent, the group must: (1) hold “beliefs” or “representational states” relating to the environment in which it operates, (2) hold “desires” or “motivational states” relating to features of its environment, and (3) have a capacity to “act” in the environment in pursuit of its desires.

¹⁵ Tomlin, Patrick, “Should We Be Utopophobes About Democracy in Particular?” Political Studies Review 10, no. 1 (2012): 36–47, especially 43–44.

¹⁶ Although Wiens criticizes Gilabert and Lawford-Smith in relation to their position, I suggest that his position — as evidenced in the discussion with Estlund — is quite similar.

¹⁷ For a simple account of the fundamental welfare theorem see Francis M. Bator, “The Simple Analytics of Welfare Maximization,” The American Economic Review 47, no. 1 (1957): 22–59.

¹⁸ Ludwig Von Mises, Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth (Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1990). Friedrich August von Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review XXXV, no. 4 (1945): 519–30.

¹⁹ Mark Pennington, “Robust Political Economy and the Priority of Markets,” in this volume of Social Philosophy and Policy.

²⁰ A similar point is made by Räikkä, “The Feasibility Condition in Political Theory.”

²¹ I focus here on the role of electoral commitments in democratic politics; other forms of politics may require other forms of commitment and may also generate political impasses.

²² For a discussion of incentive effects see Uri Gneezy, Stephan Meier, and Pedro Rey-Biel, “When and Why Incentives (Don’t) Work to Modify Behavior,” The Journal of Economic Perspectives (2011): 191–209. For discussion of “nudge”-based strategies see Peter John et al., Nudge, Nudge, Think, Think: Experimenting with Ways to Change Civic Behaviour (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011).

²³ This sketch owes much to conversations with Jerry Gaus. See Gerald F. Gaus, “The Evolution, Evaluation and Reform of Social Morality: A Hayekian Analysis,” in Hayek and the Modern Economy, ed. David M. Levy, Peart, Sandra (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Gerald F. Gaus, “The Role of Conservatism in Securing and Maintaining Just Moral Constitutions: Toward a Theory of Complex Normative Systems,” in Nomos LVI: American Conservative Thought, ed. Sanford V. Levinson, Joel Parker, and Melissa S. Williams (New York: New York University Press, 2016).

²⁴ For the purposes of this illustrative discussion I abstract from any issues relating to the distribution of the relevant knowledge within society and its impact on individual and collective decision making.

²⁵ Note that I assume that the definition and measurement of value are constant throughout. If moving around the surface causes us to redefine value or reevaluate all potential points in the landscape, so that morality is endogenous with respect to features, the model becomes more complex and may become chaotic.

²⁶ For a critical discussion of the precautionary principle see Cass R. Sunstein, Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

²⁷ See Brennan, Geoffrey and Hamlin, Alan, “Analytic Conservatism,” British Journal of Political Science 34 (2004): 675–91; Brennan, Geoffrey and Hamlin, Alan, “Conservatism, Idealism and Cardinality,” Analysis 66, no. 4 (2006): 286–95; Brennan, Geoffrey and Hamlin, Alan, “Conservatism and Radicalism,” Constitutional Political Economy 24, no. 2 (2013): 173–76.

²⁸ Wiens, “Political Ideals and the Feasibility Frontier,” 451–52.