Over the past decade, political philosophers and political theorists have had a common purpose: to reflect on the merits of realism and idealism when theorizing about the human condition and the nature of justice. We have settled that no one is against being realistic or against being idealistic per se. The contributions to this volume represent a conversation about what would make one attempt to articulate ideals better than another.

Rawls ignited a debate in political theory when he introduced a division between the ideal and nonideal parts of a theory of justice. In the ideal part of the theory, one presents a positive conception of justice in a setting that assumes perfect compliance with the rules of justice. In the nonideal part, one addresses the question of what happens under departures from compliance. Critics of Rawls have attacked his focus on ideal theory as a form of utopianism, and have argued that political theory should be focused instead on providing solutions to the manifest injustices of the real world. In this essay, I offer a defense of the ideal/nonideal theory distinction according to which it amounts to nothing more than a division of labor, and explore some scientific analogies. Rawls’s own focus on the ideal part of the theory, I argue, stems from a felt need to clarify the foundations of justice, rather than a utopian neglect of real world problems.

A qualified pluralism is defended that recognizes value in a variety of forms of political theory and resists arguments that purport to show that one particular approach should occupy a privileged position. Against realists, it is argued that abstract analyses of political values that bracket a wide range of facts about people and their circumstances can be both coherent and important, whereas against those who think “ideal theory” or the identification of ultimate principles should come first, it is argued that the case for always giving priority to either one of these is weak.

The essay agues that there is little scope for ideal theory in political philosophy, even under Rawls’s conception of its aims. It begins by identifying features of a standard example of ideal theory in physics — the ideal gas law, PV=NRT and draws attention to the lack of these features in Rawls’s derivation of the principles of justice from the original position. A. John Simmons’s defense of ideal theory against criticisms of Amartya Sen is examined, as are further criticisms of both by David Schmidtz. The essay goes on to develop a conception of the domain of social relations to be characterized by justice that suggests that as a moving target it makes ideal theory otiose. Examination of Rawls’s later views substantiate the conclusion that ideal theory as propounded in A Theory of Justice is a mistaken starting point in the enterprise of political philosophy. Differences between the domains of ideal theory in mathematics, physics, and economics on the one hand, and political philosophy on the other, reinforce this conclusion.

In this essay, I critically engage with a methodological approach in contemporary political theory — unconstrained utopianism — which holds that we can only determine how we should live by first giving an account of the principles that would govern society if people were perfectly morally motivated. I provide reasons for being skeptical of this claim. To begin with I query the robustness of the principles unconstrained utopianism purportedly delivers. While the method can be understood as offering existence proofs, because we can devise other situations in which morally flawless decision making would unearth alternative sets of principles, I argue that such proofs tell us surprisingly little about how we should live in general. Drawing on this point, I contend that normative models that wish away certain phenomena that are uncontroversially central to any account of politics cannot plausibly claim to tell us how we should live in political society. I conclude by offering a more positive sketch of why avoiding this brand of utopianism might not represent a problematic capitulation to the morally nonideal and suggest that theorizing in light of certain constraints may be a precondition of good normative theorizing itself.

Some understand utopia as an ideal society in which everyone would be thoroughly informed by a moral ethos: all would always act on their pure conscientious judgments about justice, and so it would never be necessary to provide incentives for them to act as justice requires. In this essay I argue that such a society is impossible. A society of purely conscientiously just agents would be unable to achieve real justice. This is the Paradox of Pure Conscientiousness. This paradox, I argue, can only be overcome when individuals are prepared to depart from their own pure, conscientious, judgments of justice.

This essay discusses and criticizes the claim that normative political theory can be (justifiably and fruitfully) divided into two parts—a part having to do with ideal theory which assumes full compliance and abstracts away from issues having to do with implementation and, contrasting with this, a nonideal part having to do with implementation and with rules and institutions appropriate for conditions of partial compliance. On this conception of ideal theory, empirical facts about human behavior and motivation, connected to issues surrounding compliance and implementation, are irrelevant to ideal theory, although such facts can be relevant to the nonideal part of normative theory. I argue against this conception, holding instead that such empirical facts are relevant to most or all of normative political theory, including “fundamental” normative principles.

Political philosophy appears to have recovered from its alleged death in the middle of the last century, but now faces the realist charge that in the work of John Rawls and those influenced by him it fails to be political in the right way; it is merely “applied moral philosophy.” I dismiss the hyper-realist position of authors such as Raymond Geuss for taking an implausibly narrow view of politics. There is more merit in Bernard Williams’s claim that legitimacy, not justice, is the central problem of political philosophy. Yet we cannot understand the significance of legitimation without referring to the moral values that are realized when it succeeds. Thus, Williams fails to show that political normativity can be detached entirely from ethics. Moreover the legitimacy requirements of a liberal state, according to Williams, are substantively close to the requirements of justice according to Rawls. In light of the latter’s turn to “political liberalism,” they appear also to hold convergent views about the status of the theories they are advancing. I conclude by suggesting that the “applied moral philosophy” charge would apply only to philosophers who believe that general moral principles, like utility or rights, can do all the work of political evaluation. Politics does indeed have special features that impose distinctive justificatory requirements on its procedures and the outcomes they produce.

The debate between proponents of ideal and nonideal approaches to political philosophy has thus far been framed as a meta-level debate about normative theory. The argument of this essay will be that the ideal/nonideal debate can be helpfully reframed as a ground-level debate within normative theory. Specifically, it can be understood as a debate within the applied normative field of professional ethics, with the profession being examined that of political philosophy itself. If the community of academic political theorists and philosophers cannot help us navigate the problems we face in actual political life, they have not lived up to the moral demands of their vocation. A moderate form of what David Estlund decries as “utopophobia” is therefore an integral element of a proper professional ethic for political philosophers. The moderate utopophobe maintains that while devoting scarce time and resources to constructing utopias may sometimes be justifiable, it is never self-justifying. Utopianism is defensible only insofar as it can reasonably be expected to help inform or improve non-utopian political thinking.

Contra John Rawls, G. A. Cohen argues that the fundamental principles of justice are not constrained by the limits of our nature or the nature of society, even at its historical best. Justice is what it is, even if it will never be realized, fully or at all. Likewise, David Estlund argues that since our innate motivations can be justice-tainting, they cannot be a constraint on the right conception of justice. Cohen and Estlund agree that if the attempt to implement a certain conception of justice is likely to result in widespread harm or injustice, then it should not be implemented, but that this does not entail that the conception itself is false. I argue that (i) there is no way to judge the soundness of a principle of justice independently of all psychological facts, and the effects that the principle is likely to have if it is implemented; (ii) a principle of justice that, if implemented, makes it hard or impossible for individuals committed to justice to lead happy and worthwhile lives, even if the circumstances are favorable to living justly, cannot be sound; (iii) without the constraints noted in (i) and (ii), there can be no reason to reject racist, sexist, or other wrongheaded principles of justice that have been advanced as sound over the years, principles that even Cohen and Estlund would reject. In short, justice is justice only if kept within the limits of human nature.

Ideal theorists in political philosophy seek to describe a perfect political society, and to evaluate political principles by reference to their consequences in a world where everyone complies with the principles. I argue that ideal theory is not needed to set goals for practical inquiries, nor to define justice, nor to enable rankings of injustices. Nor is it useful to theorize about very different kinds of society that might occur in the far future. Ideal theory tempts us to make each of three kinds of error: it tempts us to propose norms that no specific agent can act on, to posit crazy exaggerations of moral virtues, and to place too much trust in abstract philosophical reasoning. A better approach to normative questions is to rely on analogical arguments starting from uncontroversial intuitions about concrete scenarios.

Political theory is not a purely theoretical enterprise; it is intended to be practical and action-guiding. To perform this role, the requirements of political theory must be possible, and the standard of possibility it employs must be appropriate to the political domain. Because human beings vary in their capacity for morality and justice, a reasonably just society, as Rawls understands it, must not be expected. Despite his concerns to the contrary, the possibility of a just polity is not needed to ward off resignation and cynicism. There is a principled path between a politics of complacency that thwarts feasible progress and a politics of utopian aspiration that ends by inflicting harm in the name of doing good.

This essay seeks to defend the claim that political philosophy ought to be appropriately guided by the phenomenon of politics that it seeks to both offer a theory of and, especially in its normative guise, offer a theory for. It does this primarily through the question of political values. It begins by arguing that for any value to qualify as a value for the political domain, it must be intelligible in relation to the constitutive features of politics as a human activity. It then examines the extent to which the preconditions for the realization of values in practice ought to figure in our considerations as to whether they are values that fit or belong to our social world. We can understand these parts of the essay as responding to two related questions, respectively: (i) Is this a political value at all? — which is to ask, is it a value that is appropriate for the political realm?; and then (ii) Is this a political value for us? The final section responds to the often-made complaint that political philosophy ought not to make any concessions to the actual world of politics as it really is, arguing that attending to the realities of politics, and in particular the constitutive conditions of political activity, gives meaning to the enterprise as the theorization of politics (and not something else). Furthermore those same conditions provide the limits of intelligibility beyond which ideals and values can no longer be, in any meaningful sense, ideals and values for the political sphere.

This essay offers an account of feasible actions. It criticizes the conditional account of feasibility and offers instead what I call the constrained account of feasibility. The constrained account is superior, I argue, on account of how it deals with the problem of motivational failure to act and with collective action. According to the constrained account, roughly put, an action is feasible when the agent or agents performing it know how to perform it and are appropriately responsive to incentives. The essay shows that some collective requirements for action that appear feasible are not in fact feasible.

Does social justice lose all application in the (imaginary, of course) condition in which people are morally flawless? The answer, I will argue, is that it does not — justice might still have application. This is one lesson of my broader thesis in this paper, that there is a variety of conditions we would all regard as highly idealistic and unrealistic which are, nevertheless, not beyond justice. The idea of “circumstances of justice” developed especially by Hume and Rawls may seem to point in a more realistic direction, but we can see that this is not so once we distinguish between conditions of need for norms of justice, conditions of their emergence, and conditions of applicability of the standard of justice. Justice, I argue, can have application even in conditions where no mechanism of justice is present or needed, such as the case of internalized motives of justice.

In this essay, I argue against the bright-line distinction between ideal and nonideal normative political theory, a distinction used to distinguish “stages” of theorizing such that ideal political principles can be deduced and examined before compromises with the flawed political world are made. The distinction took on its familiar form in Rawls and has enjoyed a resurgence of interest in the past few years. I argue that the idea of a categorical distinction — the kind that could allow for a sequencing of stages of theorizing — is misconceived, because wholly “ideal” normative political theory is a conceptual mistake, the equivalent of taking the simplifying models of introductory physics (“frictionless movement in a vacuum”) and trying to develop an ideal theory of aerodynamics. Political organization and justice are about moral friction in the first instance. I examine both logical and epistemological arguments for the position that we need the uniquely idealizing assumptions of ideal theory in order to arrive at, or to know, a genuine theory of justice or political morality; and I find them wanting. Such assumptions as full compliance, consensus, and the publicity principle of universal knowledge about consensus can sometimes be useful, if used carefully and with justification; but they are not categorically different from other idealizing and abstracting assumptions in generating normative theory. What is referred to as “nonideal” theory is all that there is, and it is many kinds of theory, not one — the many ways in which we learn about justice and injustice, and seek to answer questions of practical reason about what ought to be done in our political world.

In The Law of Peoples, John Rawls introduces a framework for realistic utopia, within which the limits of practicable political possibility are probed through the further development of his international theory. This essay addresses the apparent paradox of realistic utopianism within the context of, and in relation to, ideal theory, in an attempt to explore the scope and limits of Rawls’s theory. The ideas behind Rawls’s realistic utopia are discussed in detail, the concept is contrasted with ideal theory in order to assess to what extent Rawls’s framework for realistic utopia introduced in The Law of Peoples differs from other forms of ideal theory, and the limits of realistic utopianism are identified.

I argue first, that, in an attempt to address the potential feasibility constraint, Rawls tries to distinguish his framework of realistic utopia from that of more traditional ideal theory. I then proceed to examine the differences between realistic utopianism in The Law of Peoples and ideal theory in A Theory of Justice. I then conclude that Rawls only partially meets the challenge of establishing practicable political possibility. In actuality, Rawls’s focus on ideal agents in ideal as well as nonideal theory, together with his emphasis on societies as closed and self-sufficient, ignores the potential for noncompliance by liberal and decent societies, as well as interdependencies between societies that can cause or lead to injustice, conflict, and instability. I argue that despite these flaws, Rawls’s approach nevertheless provokes new insights into the function of the principles of the ideal theory framework as guidelines for real-world policies striving toward peace, stability, and justice.

The ideal theory debate rests on two conflicting claims: that justice is “the first virtue of social systems” (justice first), and that a just society is one in which “everyone accepts and knows that the others accept the same principles of justice” (universal consent). Justice first holds that questions about the meaning of justice — and thus about what an ideally just society would look like — must be settled before we can effectively pursue justice. However, universal consent entails a project of justification that can only take place over time. I propose that we avoid this impasse by treating freedom rather than justice as the “first virtue” of a liberal society. Liberal freedom has two distinct and complementary dimensions, which give rise to two distinct and complementary moral aims: on the one hand, to create the social conditions that make responsible agency possible (republican freedom), and on the other hand to carve out a social space within which the demands of responsible agency are relaxed or absent (market freedom). Striking the appropriate balance between these two dimensions of liberal freedom is irreducibly a matter of judgment. A freedom-centered liberalism therefore requires that we treat justice as the endpoint rather than the starting point of political action, thus severing the link between legitimacy and consent.